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Amazing Writing Tips Just for You

33 tips to inspire you to write more powerful Medium stories, blog posts, social media posts, and books

Here are 33 insights and tips on writing by famous novelists and other writers. These tips might inspire you to write more Medium stories, social media posts, books, blog posts, and more. They’ve inspired me to do that!

Be Different

If they give you lined paper, write the other way. — William Carlos Williams, poet

Bleed

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar. — Stephen King, novelist

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. — Gene Fowler, author

Don’t Give Up

If you write a hundred short stories and they’re all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only when you stop writing. — Ray Bradbury, science fiction author

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. — Robert Benchley, critic

Don’t Procrastinate

I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. — Pearl S. Buck, novelist

Be a little bit ruthless. No one else in the world cares if you get your writing done, so you have to make room for it yourself. — Rachel Pastan, author

Doubt Is Okay

The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel global doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don’t have any doubt. — Richard Bausch, author

Everything in life is worth writing about if you have the guts to do it and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath, poet

Edit Later

It is easier to edit than it is to create. Create now and edit later, and your writing will continually improve. — Dan Poynter, self-publishing expert

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done. — Stephen King, novelist

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryl, science fiction novelist

Enliven Your Writing

The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects — nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs — ball them together and make them bounce. — Maya Angelou, poet

Get Scared But Be Courageous

Be courageous and try to write in a way that scares you a little. — Holley Gerth

Grow Your Soul

Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever. OK? Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr., novelist

Have a Clear Idea

If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea. — David Belasco

In my experience, anyone can write well. They just have to be clear what they want to say. — John Kremer, author

Lie, Prevaricate

Writers lie. Performers lie. People lie. The act of creation is always to some degree an act of reinvention: of selecting the desired strands of infinite reality and weaving them together. — Evelyn McDonnell, book critic

Love What You Write

Write the book you love, not the one you think you should write. If you’re creating something you aren’t head-over-heels in love with, you’ll peter out before page 50. Make something you’ll be proud of for a lifetime. — Nathan Bransford, author

The people who are the most beautiful are those who do what they love to do — who have love in their lives, and laugh a lot, go to good movies, read good books, and have great sex. — Carla Gugino, actress

If you make something you love, people are going to fall in love with it. — Brown Johnson, creative director, Sesame Workshop

Make It Up

What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it? — Toni Morrison, novelist, Jazz

Need the Money

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings. — Quentin Crisp, humorist

Never Grow Up

Never grow up. If you’re writing or directing, give yourself enough time to play. Play the fool. Goad. Shock. Laugh. Trip over something that isn’t there. Try something. And never be afraid to fail. That failure is useful too. It’s just another building block. — Ricky Gervais, actor, writer, director, producer, comedian

Observe People

Southern writers get their start on porches. You sit on one and watch the town go by. From a porch, other people’s lives look interesting. — Josephine Humphreys

A good author is very observant. If you are near a good author, you will inevitably end up in one of her books in some way. Perhaps as a simple bystander in a story. Perhaps as an example. Perhaps as window dressing. Perhaps as the heroine or hero. Perhaps as the menace. — John Kremer, author and publisher

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. — Walker Evans, photographer

Practice, Practice, Practice

Writing is like making love. You have to practice to be good at it. — Morris West, novelist

Read Other Writers

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write. — Stephen King, novelist

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you. — Natalie Goldberg, author, Writing Down the Bones

When not writing, read. Read from writers better than you. Read and perceive. — Ajay Ohri

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. — P. J. O’Rourke, humorist

Reveal Yourself

Writing means revealing oneself to excess. — Franz Kafka, novelist

Say Something

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. — Sholem Asch

Shake Things Up

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. — Albert Einstein, physicist

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. — Stephen Spender, poet

Remember: The most effective books tell stories of transformation! — John Kremer, author and publisher

Speak the Unspeakable

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. — Anais Nin, novelist

A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing. — Orham Pamuk, novelist

Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder. — E.B. White, short story writer

Start Now

50% of writing is putting the first words on a blank piece of paper. — Woody Allen, actor, producer, and director

You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. — Stephen King on writing books

Tell a Good Story

I firmly believe that the art of storytelling will never change. If you tell a good story, people will hang on your words. — David Attenborough, naturalist and TV producer

Try Something New

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. — Ernest Hemingway, novelist

Work at Writing

Easy reading is damn hard writing. — Nathaniel Hawthorne, novelist

Write Every Day

I have learned that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles and yelling for a clean pair of spats. — Ray Bradbury, science fiction novelist

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything. — John Irving, novelist

Write Simply

A writer achieves greatness and immortality by being totally ignored by the media and academia whilst being enjoyed by ordinary people. — Michael Levy

To write simply is as difficult as to be good. — William Somerset Maugham, dramatist and novelist

Write the Truest Sentence

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. — Ernest Hemingway, novelist

Write What You Know

By default I became a writer. The first lesson in Creative Writing 101 is to write about what you know, and I knew about crime and cops and killers. — Ann Rule, novelist

I’ve learned something about myself. I think you’ve got to paint — like you have to write — what you know. — Grant Wood, artist

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet and novelist

Write with Passion

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he, alone among creatures, has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit, capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props to help him endure and prevail. — William Faulkner, novelist

Writing Is Therapeutic

I like writing. It’s therapeutic in the same way a patient in an institution is given finger paints. — Woody Allen, actor, producer, and director

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. — E. L. Doctorow, novelist

You Don’t Choose to Write

People don’t choose to be writers. It’s more like an addiction, and I’ve been addicted since the day I learned to read. — Connie Willis, novelist

You write the book you’re driven to write, and you really can’t do more than that. It’s a leap of faith, the entire book is a leap of faith, and not everybody is going to take it with me. — Alice Sebold, novelist

And remember this:

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals. God help the world if writers ever took control. — John Steinbeck, novelist

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