21 Great Writers and Their Great Writing Tips

I am always a sucker for writing tips, so here are some of the world’s greatest authors and what they recommend.

Of course, never forget the most important meta-rule: rules are made to be broken.

Stephen King - 20 Rules For Writing

Favorite Rule - “Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

Ernest Hemingway - Hemingway’s 4 Rules for Writing Well

Favorite Rule - “Use Vigorous English.”

George Orwell - Orwell's 6 Rules for Writing

Favorite Rule - “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

William Faulkner - 20 Pieces of Writing Advice from William Faulkner

Favorite Rule - “The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell, and you have trouble with it. It’s—what’s the saying—leave them while you’re looking good.” 

J.K. Rowling - 10 Writing Tips From JK Rowling

Favorite Rule - “Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave into endless requests to have ‘essential’ and ‘long overdue’ meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it.”

Ray Bradbury - Ray Bradbury’s Top 13 Writing Tips

Favorite Rule - “I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull. The lists ran something like this:

THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.”

Mark Twain - Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

Favorite Rule - “Use the right word, not its second cousin.”

Anne Lamott - Anne Lamott’s Top 13 Writing Tips

Favorite Rule - “I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part.”

Robert Heinlein - Heinlein’s Rules: Introduction

Favorite Rule - “You must finish what you start.”

David Mamet - David Mamet’s Top 9 Tips For Writing Dialogue

Favorite Rule - “You have to write dialogue in a rhythmic way because human speech is rhythmic. And if you listen to people having a conversation, what they're doing is they're creating rhythmic poetry. They're filling in the pauses and capping each other's speech and so forth in a way which is rhythmic.”

Kurt Vonnegut - 8 Rules For Writing

Favorite Rule - “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

Gustave Flaubert - Gustave Flaubert on Writing

Favorite Rule - “It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly – to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.”

Margaret Atwood - Margaret Atwood’s Top 13 Writing Tips

Favorite Rule - “Nobody knows where ideas come from, but let us say, if you immerse yourself in something, whether it be music, painting, or writing…you are going to get ideas about it. But you have to do the immersing first. You’re not just sitting there, waiting for lightning to strike.”

Tennessee Williams - Writing Tips From Tennessee Williams

Favorite Rule - “It is never as bad as you think.”

Ursula Le Guin - 10 Writing Tips from Ursula Le Guin

Favorite Rule - “Thanks to “show don’t tell,” I find writers in my workshops who think exposition is wicked. They’re afraid to describe the world they’ve invented. This dread of writing a sentence that isn’t crammed with “gutwrenching action” leads fiction writers to rely far too much on dialogue, to restrict voice to limited third person and tense to the present.”

John Steinbeck - 6 Writing Tips From John Steinbeck

Favorite Rule - “If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.”

Vladimir Nabokov - Vladimir Nabokov’s Best Writing Advice

Favorite Rule - “A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world. Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child’s scrawl on the fence, and the crank’s message in the market place. Art is never simple.”

Lorrie Moore - 5 Writing Tips from Lorrie Moore

Favorite Rule - “There are ways of taking pivotal central moments that are actually earlier on chronologically and sticking them at the end. The end of a story is really everything. It gives the whole meaning to the story. So the end of the story may not be the chronological one. It may be something that the author has to pull from earlier on and end with.”

Neil Gaiman - Neil Gaiman: 8 Good Writing Practices

Favorite Rule - “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.”

Zadie Smith - Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules of Writing

Favorite Rule - “Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.”

Philip Roth - Philip Roth, The Art of Fiction No. 84

Favorite Rule - “I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.”

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Appendix

Short Story Substack Winners (Paid Subscription Unlocks All 33 Stories)

Anomaly - Healing the world.

Seasons Change - Reverse chronology on the choices of life.

Less - Only keep things that spark joy.

A Gentleman of Sterling Character - Character can’t be bought.

Exit Duty - Old teaches young and young teaches old.

Becoming Cheyenne - Identity, friendship, and human nature.

The Imposter Carla Cluckins - Not all stakes must be huge.

Epilogue - It is only through evil that good can be known.

The Magnifying Tongue - Cult and subtext.

SIDESHOW - How many choices do we really have?

It’s Just a Rattlesnake - Magical realism in the desert.

Smiley’s Tavern - On listening and understanding what we hear.

Sweeter Than Honey - Love and magic and art.

One Brief Shining Moment - Conspiracy theory or conspiracy fact?

Ten Seconds - The Devil only wants ten seconds of your life. Do you take the deal?

Bear - Simple and beautiful love between a father, his daughter, and a stuffed bear.

Mr. Harold’s Gift - Not all gifts that are given are well received.

The Mummer’s Parade - Love that is real and true is often messy.

The Garden Club - The power of rumor to destroy. A story that is both fictional and educational.

Depression Séance - Magic is real in the eyes of a child.

Abrama’s Endgame - Sci-Fi look at artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and the struggle to survive.

Do-Over - What happens when you get to re-do your life? What does that answer say about the life that was lived?

Goodbye, Debbie Sue - Freedom on your own terms.

The Pawnshop of Intangible Things - The most valuable things aren’t physical.

Make It a Double - Comparison is the thief of joy.

Worms - Creeping horror.

Do Not Resuscitate - Life’s complex choices in end-of-life care.

I Hate Killing People in Kansas City - An action-packed story better than most movies in the past 20 years.

Sometimes, People Just Have Things They Have To Do - Getting the band back together.

There’s Not Much I Don’t Know - Fatherhood and the instinct to protect.

No Greater Love - Sacrifice in the face of slavery.

Oil On Canvas - The future, and regret, always come.

Blues For Rashid - Music turned into story.

Tools

Webster's 1913 Dictionary - Inspirational dictionary that appreciates the art and beauty of words.

Hemingway App - Online tool that will tighten your writing.

One Look Thesaurus - Wide-ranging thesaurus that goes beyond simple synonyms.

Free Online Short Stories

How To Tell A True War Story - Tale of violence and what it means to know the truth.

Good Old Neon - A look at life and death from a different perspective.

Hills Like White Elephants - One of the best uses of subtext ever.

The Egg - Mind-bending sci-fi look at the reason for humanity.

I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream - Sci-Fi horror about a malevolent AI.

Flowers For Algernon - Looking at the limits of intelligence and love.

To Build A Fire - Tale of survival in the bitter cold.

The Cask of Amontillado - Revenge.

The Garden Of Forking Paths - Spy thriller set in WW2.

Rikki Tikki Tavi - On courage in the face of danger.