Advice for Beginning Authors

Writing is full of hard lessons. All of us who write can attest to this fact. And while hard lessons are good—indeed, sometimes learning things the hard way is the best way—it’s also good to share our experiences for the benefit of new writers. While it is neither possible nor desirable to avoid the School of Hard Knocks, there are certain things that every beginning writer should know from the outset. My goal here is not to help you avoid suffering and hard work—that would be authorial malpractice. No, my goal is to prepare you for the harshness of real-life writing, so that when difficulty comes, you will be prepared to overcome it. The following points are essential to that journey.

1) Make Time to Write

This is the most important piece of advice I can give. You must make time for writing. This is what separates professionals and serious amateurs from mere dilettantes. It’s a harsh truth, but no one ever became good at anything just by doing it in their spare time. Very few people have life situations that are not conducive to even a single hobby. Hell, how many people spend hours each day watching television, playing video games, or socializing with friends, and then complain that they don’t have time to write? You have time to write. Being serious about writing requires sacrifice, and that will necessarily require taking time away from things you enjoy.

2) Be a Consistent Writer

To build on the previous point, you must not only make time for writing, you must also write consistently. Don’t focus on hitting a specific word count just yet. In the beginning, the amount of words you produce in each session is irrelevant. The important part is that you sit down each day and put in the effort to produce something. If you slave for an hour or two just to produce a single paragraph, that’s fine. Speed and volume will come with practice. As far as how frequent your writing sessions should be, that’s your call. I recommend daily writing, because it’s regular and predictable. If you commit to doing something every day, you don’t have to remember on which days you have to do it, and it eliminates the “I forgot” excuses we sometimes tell ourselves.

3) Your Voice Will Come with Time

When I started my writing journey, I was obsessed with how my writing sounded. I wanted to come across a certain way, whether that was authoritative, playful, witty, and so on. Ultimately, I wanted to sound like me. That was a fruitless worry. No one is born with a writer’s voice—you have to develop it with sustained practice. And, to give you a glimpse into the future, once you find your voice, you will be able to develop different voices for different styles of writing. But none of that happens overnight. It took me a good one to two years before I felt that I had found my writing voice.

4) You Cannot Fake Passion

The best writing comes from a place of true love. Whether that’s love for the craft of writing, love for the subject matter, or love for storytelling, readers can tell when a writer is deeply invested in their craft. If you aren’t interested in your subject matter, readers will notice. If you don’t care about your characters, readers will notice. If you don’t care about the quality of your output, readers will definitely notice. Don’t try to write about something because you feel like you “have to.” No one is obligated to write about anything. Writing about something because “it’s important,” or because of some other lofty rationale is guaranteed to produce boring writing. Write about what genuinely interests you, not about what other people tell you to be interested in.

5) The Well of Creativity is Filled by Life Experience

One of the worst handicaps that can afflict a writer is a paucity of life experience. It’s another harsh reality, but no one ever became a great writer by living in their mom’s basement and avoiding contact with other humans. “Ah, but what about Emily Dickinson?” you might ask. Emily Dickinson did indeed live a reclusive life. But the power of her imagination was so immeasurable that it allowed her to overcome the obstacles such reclusiveness would erect. Most of us don’t have that kind of imagination. Even if all you want to do is sit in your room and write fanfiction (and there’s nothing wrong with that), your fanfics will be better if you get out and meet people. You can’t create compelling characters if you’ve never met any compelling characters. Overcoming adversity is another great source of life experience. You can’t give your characters realistic struggles and arcs if you’ve never experienced an arc yourself.

6) Write What You Know

Before I elaborate on this, I want to make something clear. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you are not allowed to write about. Your choice of subjects is not a moral issue. The other side of this coin, however, is that the best writing comes from a place of deep knowledge. Let me give an example: a thirtysomething computer programmer who has lived in the middle class his entire life is probably not well-situated to write stories about poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. True, he could devote significant resources to learning about it, but wouldn’t that time and effort be better spent on writing something that requires less investment? If your goal is to write, start by choosing topics you are already intimately familiar with. For creative writers especially, save projects requiring major research for later in your career.

7) Acknowledge Your Influences

Every writer has influences. No one’s voice or style is 100% unique, so don’t spend even the smallest iota of effort on trying to be unique. You should be aware of who your favorite authors are and what elements of their style you want to incorporate into your own. Don’t start out trying to copy them, but understand what makes their writing resonate with you, and adapt those things into your own projects.

8) Manage Your Expectations

When you are starting your writing journey, don’t expect the first project you ever write to get published. Hell, don’t expect any of your beginning projects to get published. They won’t ever be good enough. However, it is in doing these projects that you become capable of writing professionally. It’s the same as learning an instrument. The process of learning to play involves far more wrong notes than right notes. Over time, the balance changes, and you begin hitting the right notes consistently. Eventually, you advance to the point where you can learn songs, and even compose your own.

9) Start Small

Don’t start your writing journey by trying to write something on the scale of War and Peace. Try instead writing some short stories, short poems, short films, or a short version of whatever medium you want to write in. This has two advantages. First, you are far more likely to finish them, giving you a sense of satisfaction and the self-knowledge that you are indeed capable of finishing a writing project. Second, it teaches you the importance of concision and economy of words, which are necessarily skills to develop for projects of any length. Also, set reasonable goals for yourself. Don’t begin your writing habit by setting a 1,000-word goal for each session. You will fail and become discouraged. I would recommend starting at no more than 100 words per session. You can write more if you want, but only hold yourself accountable for those first 100 words.

10) Don’t Stop Reading

You cannot be a good writer if you are not also a regular reader. Reading opens you to new things, helping you overcome deficits in your life experience. Reading also teaches you how to write in different styles; in this way, it expands your writer’s toolkit. You can’t use the right tool for the job if you don’t even know what the right tool is.