My Top 5 Writing Tips

Hello writers!

I have a lot of ideas for this blog, and it was hard to figure out where to start. Should I make a post about the equipment I use that makes me more productive? Should I start with a post about the software and apps that help me organize my ideas and store them for later use? While mulling over those ideas, I realized none of those things really matter at all without a foundation of trust in me, so you know if you want to listen to my recommendations. So in this post, I’d like to kick things off by sharing some of the absolute biggest tips I’ve learned so far in my writing journey. And in editing I realized that I had written about five tips, so yay for catchy blog titles!

1. “The first draft of anything is sh*t.” - Ernest Hemingway

This is a family-friendly blog where you won’t usually find any swearing, but this quote is too influential for me to leave off this list. If you’re like me, I’m sure you’ve felt this feeling before: sitting down at a desk or table, staring at the blank page, terrified of putting words on that page for fear that those words won’t be any good. And if you’ve never experienced that, then congratulations! You probably will, as most creatives feel this pressure at some point in their lives. In this quote, Hemingway gives us permission to write bad drafts. If one of the most well-known American authors felt this way, then who am I to think my first draft should be perfect? This quote is probably the single biggest tip I’ve received in my writing life, and really helps with the Imposter Syndrome many authors feel. Give yourself permission to write crap. Most good books are revised heavily before they are published, but to reach the revision stage you need to have something to revise. There’s a freedom in knowing that even the worst prose you’ve ever written is still useful.

2. “A story is a series of events involving worthy characters who are changed as a result of those events.” - Ted Dekker

This definition of “story” is really useful to me in my initial planning process, while I’m figuring out what my story is about and where I want it to go. A good story isn’t just a series of events: if I describe a normal day where a character gets up, grabs a cup of coffee, pets his dogs, sits down at his desk, and so on without anything interesting happening, that’s not really a story. But if the character’s phone rings and on the other end is his best friend Gandalf telling him he needs to book a flight to Hawai’i to toss a piece of jewelry into Mauna Loa, that might be a story. I also like the emphasis on “worthy characters.” Dekker goes on to explain that worthiness doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but they’re someone we want to see grow who the reader sees as deserving of the plot arc. Finally, the characters should be changed somehow by their experiences. Of course this isn’t a 100% hard rule for every story, for example Hercule Poirot doesn’t change much as a character in Agatha Christie novels, but as a general rule of thumb it’s satisfying to see people conquer a flaw, learn truth, or otherwise change in some way.

3. “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” - Brandon Sanderson

This quote comes from a character in Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, but after watching many hours on YouTube of Sanderson teaching a writing class at BYU, I think his own opinion aligns with this quote as well. I love this quote because it reminds me not to be heavy-handed with my own opinions on religion, politics, or anything else in the stories I write. Instead, my job is to make the reader consider the story and come to their own conclusions.

4. “Make writing as convenient as possible. Make not writing as difficult as possible.”

I can’t recall where I heard this quote, and I didn’t write the name down. I think I got it from either Struthless or Ali Abdaal, both of whom are fantastic YouTube creators who have a lot of helpful videos on productivity and writing. The idea is simple: think about the excuses you make for why you don’t write as much as you want to, then take steps to remove those excuses. For example, I can’t write while I’m in the car, so instead I bring a voice recorder with me so I can brainstorm out loud and listen back to it later. I am easily distracted, so I try to remove as many distractions as I can before I sit down to write. Making time to write can be hard, and I’ll have a whole post about that in the very near future, but keeping this tip in mind can go a long way toward becoming the author you want to be.

5. “Always err on the side of what’s awesome.” - Brandon Sanderson

I am a huge Tolkien fan. I have a Tree of Gondor tattoo. I literally learned to read with The Hobbit. So it should be no surprise that I love worldbuilding. However, I tend to get caught up in the tiny details, to the detriment of actually getting work done. In his writing lectures on YouTube, Brandon Sanderson talks a lot about magic systems, and has his “Sanderson’s Three Laws of Magic” but this is what he calls his “zeroeth law,” the one that supersedes all the rest. Doing what’s awesome for your story is better than sticking to particular rules, both in magic systems and more broadly in writing. I can spend ages crafting the perfect world with detailed magic and interesting ecosystems, but none of that matters if I don’t actually write the book. So if you’re stuck on worldbuilding and details to the point that it becomes a distraction from your work, write something awesome and figure out the rules of this world later.

These have been just a few of my favorite tips and quotes about writing, and I hope you find some of them useful. I like to have Post-It notes at my desk with some of these quotes to inspire me while I write. Of course, everything here is just my opinion based on how I interpret the quotes or apply the tips to my life, so if there’s anything you don’t agree with that’s perfectly fine. Do what works for you. In one of Brandon Sanderson’s lectures on writing, he says there’s no wrong way to write a book. There may be a bunch of wrong ways for you, and there may be a bunch of right ways for you too. The right way to write a book is the way that gets you to the final page.

Hope you’re having a great day!

- Michael Wolfe Price