Advice From Great Writers: 36 Lessons on How to Become a Writer

36 Quotes by Great Writers on How to Become a Writer

If you want to become a writer, the advice of great authors comes down to a handful of habits: read widely, write regularly, cut what is weak, write about what you truly understand, and keep going when the work feels hard. The 36 lessons below gather what celebrated writers, from Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway to Maya Angelou and Virginia Woolf, said about the craft, explained in plain language with a note on where each idea comes from.

Very few of these authors were overnight successes. Most describe writing as something learned slowly, through drafts, failures and a lot of reading. Their own experiences, fears and memories were their raw material. If you are starting out, that should be encouraging: talent helps, but practice and honesty matter more.

A note on accuracy: quotations about writing are among the most frequently misattributed lines online. Where a famous saying probably did not come from the person usually named, we say so below.

Stephen King, Hemingway and Vonnegut on the basics

1. Stephen King: treat writing like a kind of dreaming. King compares the stillness of writing to the stillness of sleep: in both, the body rests while the mind is allowed to slip past ordinary, practical thinking. A regular time and place help that happen.

2. Stephen King: be suspicious of adverbs. His most famous line, from On Writing (2000), is blunt: "I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops." A strong verb usually does the job better than a weak verb propped up by "-ly."

3. Ernest Hemingway: skip the grand epic. Hemingway warned that weak writers tend to fall for sweeping, heroic scale. Start with something small and true and render it well.

4. Ernest Hemingway: understand your characters. In a 1935 piece for Esquire, he advised: "As a writer you should not judge. You should understand." Even your villains need to make sense from the inside.

5. Kurt Vonnegut: write for one reader. Among his rules for fiction, Vonnegut suggested picturing a single person you want to please. Try to charm the whole world at once, he joked, and the story catches a cold.

6. Kurt Vonnegut: know what is interesting. He argued that the worst thing a writer can reveal is not knowing which details matter. Cut the parts you would skip as a reader.

7. Henry Miller: finish things. One of Miller's work rules was to stay with a single project until it is done, instead of hopping between half-written pieces.

Grace, perfectionism and the love of the work

8. Annie Dillard: inspiration rewards effort. In The Writing Life (1989), Dillard describes good writing as feeling like an undeserved gift, one that only arrives after you have searched for it until it hurts.

9. Anne Lamott: let go of perfectionism. In Bird by Bird (1994), Lamott calls perfectionism the voice of an oppressor that keeps you cramped for life. Her cure is to allow yourself bad first drafts.

10. Susan Orlean: keep loving it. The New Yorker writer says you have to genuinely love writing and remind yourself of that love often, because the work itself will test it.

11. William Faulkner: never quite satisfied. Faulkner called writing the most satisfying job there is precisely because you can never do it as well as you want, so there is always tomorrow's attempt.

12. Leonard Cohen: finish before you judge. Cohen compared a poem to cutting a gem: only when the cutting is complete can you see whether it shines. Do not abandon a draft halfway because it looks dull.

13. Helen Dunmore: take a walk. The British novelist and poet noticed that a stubborn problem in a manuscript often sorts itself out during a long walk. Stepping away is part of the work.

E. B. White, Orwell and the discipline of style

14. E. B. White: essayists are a little self-centred. The author of Charlotte's Web admitted, with humour, that writing essays takes the nerve and stamina of someone comfortably absorbed in their own views.

15. E. B. White: never write down to children. He believed that writing for young readers means writing up to them, not simplifying or talking down.

16. E. B. White: listen to your sentences. Editing, for White, was not only cutting words; it was about how prose sounds. Read your work aloud.

17. E. B. White: writers shape life. He argued that writers do more than mirror the world; they help form how people see it. That is a responsibility as well as a privilege.

18. George Orwell: admit your ego. In his 1946 essay "Why I Write," Orwell listed sheer egoism as the first motive of writers, a trait he said they share with ambitious people in every field.

19. George Orwell: avoid stale phrases. In "Politics and the English Language" (1946), he warned that ready-made metaphors and idioms save effort but blur your meaning, for the reader and for you.

20. H. P. Lovecraft: learn from great pages. Lovecraft thought that reading Joseph Addison, Washington Irving or Edgar Allan Poe teaches more about style and description than any dry textbook.

21. Arthur Schopenhauer: say it simply. The philosopher argued that plain truth needs no decoration; the simpler the expression, the deeper it lands.

22. Friedrich Nietzsche: style shows conviction. Nietzsche held that a writer's style should prove they not only think an idea but feel it.

23. "Damn" instead of "very." The joke that you should write "damn" wherever you want to write "very," so an editor deletes it, is almost always credited to Mark Twain. Quote Investigator found no evidence that Twain said it; the earliest version, from 1935, credits the Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White. The advice still stands: "very" rarely strengthens a sentence.

Emotion, crisis and the raw material of writing

24. Anaïs Nin: excess creates art. Nin believed great art grows out of fear, loneliness and instability, and that the work in turn helps balance them.

25. Anaïs Nin: crisis reveals character. She also noted that people show who they really are most clearly in moments of emotional crisis, a useful principle for building scenes.

26. Roald Dahl: small tragedies matter. Dahl wondered whether he would have written anything at all if some minor misfortune had not knocked his mind out of its usual groove.

27. Maya Angelou: tell the story you carry. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Angelou wrote: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

28. Sylvia Plath: courage beats self-doubt. In her journals, published as The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Plath reminded herself that nearly anything can be written about if you have the nerve and imagination, and that self-doubt is creativity's worst enemy.

Freedom, solitude and the writing life

29. William Faulkner: protect your peace. In his 1956 Paris Review interview, Faulkner said an artist mostly needs peace, solitude and some pleasure that does not cost too much.

30. William Faulkner: lift the reader. In his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, he described the writer's duty as helping people endure by lifting their hearts.

31. Susan Sontag: you are your own boss and servant. Sontag described the writing life as a kind of self-imposed slavery, in which you play both slave and taskmaster.

32. William Styron: college has limits. As a young man, Styron felt that for someone burning to write, university stopped being useful after the second year. Many writers disagree; the real point is that writing is learned by writing.

33. Virginia Woolf: no one can lock your mind. In A Room of One's Own (1929), Woolf argued that libraries can be closed to you, but no gate or bolt can shut down the freedom of your thought.

34. C. S. Lewis: morals must be natural. Lewis believed the only moral worth having in a story is one that grows naturally out of the author's whole outlook, not one bolted on at the end.

Wilde and Huxley on what words can do

35. Oscar Wilde: books are well or badly written. In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Wilde insisted that a book is not moral or immoral, only well or badly written, and that people who find ugly meanings in beautiful things reveal more about themselves.

36. Aldous Huxley: words can pierce. In Brave New World (1932), a character compares well-used words to X-rays that pass through anything, so that the reader is pierced by them.

Putting the advice to work

Read together, these lessons point to a practical routine:

Read a lot, and read well. King, Lovecraft and Woolf all treat reading as the main school for writers.
Write regularly and finish drafts. Miller, Faulkner and Cohen all stress completion over perfection.
Cut ruthlessly. Adverbs, "very," stale metaphors and anything you would skip as a reader.
Write from experience and empathy. Angelou, Nin, Dahl and Hemingway all locate the best material in lived feeling and understanding.
Protect your time and calm. Faulkner's peace and solitude, Dunmore's walk.

If you want to go further, the craft books mentioned here, especially King's On Writing, Lamott's Bird by Bird and Orwell's two essays, are short, practical and worth rereading.

Great writers often learned from philosophers too. If you enjoy thinking about how to think, start with the ideas of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, or the lighter wisdom of Mark Twain and Albert Camus.

Sources: Quote Investigator: Substitute "Damn" Every Time You're Inclined to Write "Very"; On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Wikipedia); header image via virginiawoolfblog.com.

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COMMENTS

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