Tips
Tips for beginning writers:
- Get the story going from the first sentence. If you'd like to set a mood, do it with dialogue rather than descriptions of the scenery or the weather.
- Write in the morning before breakfast.
- Successful writers share one common quality: tenacity. Faulkner captured that quality best when he said that success, for him, was largely a matter of hanging on after others had quit.
- Be generous to your readers.
- Understand the difference between commercial and artistic success and accept that one doesn't guarantee the other.
- Read absolutely everything. You should spend at least as much time reading as you do writing.
- Never say in 10 pages what can be said with a single interesting sentence.
- Remember that every villain has a mother somewhere who loves him.
- Suspense is almost always better than surprise.
- Get a job that has nothing to do with writing.
- If chapter 2 feels like it's not working, chances are the problem isn't with chapter 2, it's with the mistake you made in chapter 1.
- Never tell the reader anything. Instead, show him a scene in which the thing you want to tell him is dramatized.
- If you're serious about getting published, finish your book first and then submit the book to a literary agent.