Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Image by Austin Kleon

Here’s one way to become a bet­ter writer. Lis­ten to the advice of writ­ers who earn their dai­ly bread with their pens. Dur­ing the past week, lists of writ­ing com­mand­ments by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard (above) and William Safire have buzzed around Twit­ter. (Find our Twit­ter stream here.) So we decid­ed to col­lect them and add tips from a few oth­er vet­er­ans — name­ly, George Orwell, Mar­garet Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. Here we go:

Hen­ry Miller (from Hen­ry Miller on Writ­ing)

1. Work on one thing at a time until fin­ished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new mate­r­i­al to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be ner­vous. Work calm­ly, joy­ous­ly, reck­less­ly on what­ev­er is in hand.
4. Work accord­ing to the pro­gram and not accord­ing to mood. Stop at the appoint­ed time!
5. When you can’t cre­ate you can work.
6. Cement a lit­tle every day, rather than add new fer­til­iz­ers.
7. Keep human! See peo­ple; go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with plea­sure only.
9. Dis­card the Pro­gram when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Con­cen­trate. Nar­row down. Exclude.
10. For­get the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writ­ing.
11. Write first and always. Paint­ing, music, friends, cin­e­ma, all these come after­wards.

George Orwell (From Why I Write)

1. Nev­er use a metaphor, sim­i­le, or oth­er fig­ure of speech which you are used to see­ing in print.
2. Nev­er use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is pos­si­ble to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Nev­er use the pas­sive where you can use the active.
5. Nev­er use a for­eign phrase, a sci­en­tif­ic word, or a jar­gon word if you can think of an every­day Eng­lish equiv­a­lent.
6. Break any of these rules soon­er than say any­thing out­right bar­barous.

Mar­garet Atwood (orig­i­nal­ly appeared in The Guardian)

1. Take a pen­cil to write with on aero­planes. Pens leak. But if the pen­cil breaks, you can’t sharp­en it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. There­fore: take two pen­cils.
2. If both pen­cils break, you can do a rough sharp­en­ing job with a nail file of the met­al or glass type.
3. Take some­thing to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4. If you’re using a com­put­er, always safe­guard new text with a ­mem­o­ry stick.
5. Do back exer­cis­es. Pain is dis­tract­ing.
6. Hold the read­er’s atten­tion. (This is like­ly to work bet­ter if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the read­er is, so it’s like shoot­ing fish with a sling­shot in the dark. What ­fas­ci­nates A will bore the pants off B.
7. You most like­ly need a the­saurus, a rudi­men­ta­ry gram­mar book, and a grip on real­i­ty. This lat­ter means: there’s no free lunch. Writ­ing is work. It’s also gam­bling. You don’t get a pen­sion plan. Oth­er peo­ple can help you a bit, but ­essen­tial­ly you’re on your own. ­Nobody is mak­ing you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
8. You can nev­er read your own book with the inno­cent antic­i­pa­tion that comes with that first deli­cious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been back­stage. You’ve seen how the rab­bits were smug­gled into the hat. There­fore ask a read­ing friend or two to look at it before you give it to any­one in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness. This friend should not be some­one with whom you have a ­roman­tic rela­tion­ship, unless you want to break up.
9. Don’t sit down in the mid­dle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the oth­er road. And/or change the per­son. Change the tense. Change the open­ing page.
10. Prayer might work. Or read­ing ­some­thing else. Or a con­stant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the fin­ished, pub­lished ver­sion of your resplen­dent book.

Neil Gaiman (read his free short sto­ries here)

1. Write.
2. Put one word after anoth­er. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Fin­ish what you’re writ­ing. What­ev­er you have to do to fin­ish it, fin­ish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pre­tend­ing you’ve nev­er read it before. Show it to friends whose opin­ion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remem­ber: when peo­ple tell you some­thing’s wrong or does­n’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exact­ly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remem­ber that, soon­er or lat­er, before it ever reach­es per­fec­tion, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Per­fec­tion is like chas­ing the hori­zon. Keep mov­ing.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writ­ing is that if you do it with enough assur­ance and con­fi­dence, you’re allowed to do what­ev­er you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writ­ing. But it’s def­i­nite­ly true for writ­ing.) So write your sto­ry as it needs to be writ­ten. Write it ­hon­est­ly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any oth­er rules. Not ones that mat­ter.

William Safire (the author of the New York Times Mag­a­zine col­umn “On Lan­guage”)

1. Remem­ber to nev­er split an infini­tive.
2. The pas­sive voice should nev­er be used.
3. Do not put state­ments in the neg­a­tive form.
4. Verbs have to agree with their sub­jects.
5. Proof­read care­ful­ly to see if you words out.
6. If you reread your work, you can find on reread­ing a great deal of rep­e­ti­tion can be by reread­ing and edit­ing.
7. A writer must not shift your point of view.
8. And don’t start a sen­tence with a con­junc­tion. (Remem­ber, too, a prepo­si­tion is a ter­ri­ble word to end a sen­tence with.)
9. Don’t overuse excla­ma­tion marks!!
10. Place pro­nouns as close as pos­si­ble, espe­cial­ly in long sen­tences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
11. Writ­ing care­ful­ly, dan­gling par­tici­ples must be avoid­ed.
12. If any word is improp­er at the end of a sen­tence, a link­ing verb is.
13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mix­ing metaphors.
14. Avoid trendy locu­tions that sound flaky.
15. Every­one should be care­ful to use a sin­gu­lar pro­noun with sin­gu­lar nouns in their writ­ing.
16. Always pick on the cor­rect idiom.
17. The adverb always fol­lows the verb.
18. Last but not least, avoid clich­es like the plague; seek viable alter­na­tives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

Elmore Leonard’s Ulti­mate Guide for Would-Be Writ­ers