Tag: Writing Tips

Haruki Murakami’s Writing Philosophy

Arshan Dhillon

Haruki Murakami has written 15 novels and many short stories over his nearly 45-year long writing career. His debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing, came out in 1979, while his most recent work, The City and Its Uncertain Walls was released in 2023. Murakami has produced several classic, genre-defying novels and stories in his writing career, but it’s his book on running that provides the most insights into his writing philosophy.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was published in 2007 in which Murakami unpacks his love and need for running. He takes a few detours to address his thoughts on writing, but more often than not, it’s the lessons he learned through his various running training and marathon and ultramarathon races he applied to his writing ventures to get the most out of his talent. 

The following 8 pieces are a mix of advice, perspective, and mindset which has helped Murakami in his writing adventures and also improved his habits.

Importance of Writing To Murakami 

Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn’t agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act. As a writer, then, and as a runner, I don’t find that writing and publishing a book of my own personal thoughts about running makes me stray too far off my usual path. Perhaps I’m just too painstaking a type of person, but I can’t grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise, I’d never know what running means to me.

Writing is more than a job. It’s a way to understand life and one’s own experiences, emotions, and beliefs. When our thoughts are roaming freely in our heads, it’s difficult to pinpoint which ones are impactful and which ones you can discard. But when we pluck those thoughts from our heads and write them down on paper, they become something we can dissect, edit, question, and even challenge.

Through such processes, we can come to understand our own thought processes on a deeper level and discover what we really believe. Hence, writing is a kin to philosophy as philosophy at its core means a love for wisdom and through writing, we become wiser about ourselves.

Technique To Build Writing Rhythm

I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow.

Hemingway in fact did say something similar.

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next.

Murakami used running as an example, so I’ll stay in the realm of physical exercise and draw upon weightlifting. With lifting weights, there is a thing called going to failure. It’s when you push yourself so hard during a set that you can even perform one more repetition of the movement. Although this technique has its use in building strength and muscles, it’s universally agreed upon that you shouldn’t go to failure every session and in fact, failure training should be selective during your entire program. The reason is, that type of training can take a toll on your body and it takes a while for your nervous system and your muscles to recuperate. 

Similarly, writing until you’re all out of words every day is akin to going to failure. Again, this could be helpful if you want to know how much endurance or focus you can produce. Something Murakami believes is essential for writing success. But in the long term, you will quickly fall out of the rhythm of writing because you will have more days where you have nothing to write. Instead, we should focus on building consistency.

I’m following one of my basic rules for training: I never take two days off in a row. Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it.

Once again, in the weightlifting world, there is a technique called greasing the groove. This is essentially when you do a set that stops at the halfway point to your failure. Meaning, if 10 pulls are your maximum, then you do just 4 or 5 pull-ups but you would do numerous sets. The point is to work on the technique of the exercise, garnering volume so that you can perform the exercise more often in a week.  

I have to maintain a certain tension by being unsparing, but not to the point where I burn out. These are tactics that all experienced runners learn over time.

Similarly, it’s better to write more often than it is to write more intensely. 

The main thing was not the speed or distance so much as running every day, without taking a break.

Have A Personal Standard

What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can’t fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn’t seek validation in the outwardly visible.

Seeking validation from others is a slippery slope. This means you are putting your sense of fulfilment and happiness in other people’s hands. This will no doubt result in a turbulent emotional state as you receive both positive and negative feedback. Instead, it’s important to have a personal standard because it puts you in control.

There are three reasons I failed. Not enough training. Not enough training. And not enough training.

There aren’t many things in life we can control. The majority of it happens to us and it’s up to us to react properly. But there are a few things we have control over like our attitude and judgement. So, it’s important to exert this control and create a standard for ourselves. This way, the satisfaction of achieving or surpassing the standard is our own and failing to meet it is also our own. For the latter, the responsibility for the failure is key to making the right adjustments, so that when we try again, we can meet the standard.

At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

The Most Personal Is The Most Creative 

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves. Take me as an example. It’s precisely my ability to detect some aspects of a scene that other people can’t, to feel differently than others and choose words that differ from theirs, that’s allowed me to write stories that are mine alone. And because of this we have the extraordinary situation in which quite a few people read what I’ve written. So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

Oscar-winning director, Bong Joon-ho also shared this sentiment, as well. As he accepted his Oscar, Bong Joon-ho mentioned Martin Scorsese’s saying ‘The most personal is the most creative’ has always guided his work. The reason the most personal is the most creative is because that’s where vulnerability lies. We cherish the things that are most personal to us or we keep them close to us, so no one can find out. Sometimes, what is the most personal to us is tragic and traumatic. Things we don’t want anyone to know about us. But it’s precisely that which makes us creative and stand apart from others. 

It’s when we are able to be vulnerable and share the deepest parts of our hearts that we can achieve something truly unique and whole us. 

Fully Commit Yourself

But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn’t work out, I’d always have regrets.

One of the worst feelings is to get rejected and know perfectly well that you deserved it because you didn’t give it your all. That you wasted the opportunity that presented itself to you. Often we act as if our dreams don’t come with an expiration date, but in reality, everything in life is temporary, including our goals and abilities to reach them. So, wasting opportunity leaves behind the worst type of regret. 

One way to nullify this is to fully commit to the project or task. Once again, vulnerability peaks its challenging head. You have to be vulnerable to commit yourself fully because if you get rejected, that means your efforts and skills weren’t good enough. We don’t have an out. We can’t fall back on the safety net of not trying hard enough. But not being good enough is decisive. We can work to get better or put our energy into something else. But the pain of regret chains us to our previous attempts and leaves us living in the past. 

Have A Structure In Place

I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers.

Life is full of distractions. Every day new apps come out that tug at our attention, which feeds off of how much time we spend watching, scrolling, and reading. And these apps are damn good at their job too. So, Murakami’s advice is even more important now than ever before because if you live a distracted life, it will be immensely difficult to achieve your goals, let alone any sense of excellence. 

It’s important to nip the trouble in the bud and see what actions in your life as leading you toward your goals and which ones are taking you away from them. Go all-in on the actions that are bringing you towards where you want to go and at least you will give yourself a fighting chance to get there. 

At the end of the day, you will get what you put in.

I haven’t spotted any springs nearby. I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity. To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort.

Three Requirements For Writing

In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car won’t run.

Murakami believes that there are three important factors. The most important is talent and below it are focus and endurance. Talent is innate, it is something you have or you don’t have.

If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you’ll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it. I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning.

Focus and endurance are what you can build and grow with time and effort. These two factors are in your control.

After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work. What’s needed for a writer of fiction—at least one who hopes to write a novel—is the energy to focus every day for half a year, or a year, two years.

Naturally, in order to increase your focus and endurance, you have to be patient. It takes time and effort to develop these two qualities. Murakami relates these factors to running. You may have a goal to run a marathon but first, you must be able to run a mile. Your muscles and cardiovascular system need to adjust to the 1-mile mark before you can run 2 miles, 3 miles and so on. As your cardio improves and muscles get stronger, your running technique also gets better through repetition.

Similarly, you have to slowly work the focus, and endurance muscles for writing. Perhaps you may have to start with 30 minutes of pure focus where all you think about is writing and then after a week of that, you increase it to 45 minutes and once your body adjusts to that speed, you increase your focus time to an hour. Endurance works the same way. Three days out of the week for writing and then four days and then five days and you may keep the five days for a few months until your body and mind have adjusted to this new level and then you increase it to six days.

It is in the practice of your routine that you get better as a writer and also as a runner. Murakami shares a funny story about the writer Raymond Chandler who seemed to share Murakami’s belief in endurance and focus.

In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated. I understand the purpose behind his doing this. This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional writer needs, quietly strengthening his willpower. This sort of daily training was indispensable to him.

In doing so, writing then becomes a form of manual labor and not some creative output that seeps out of your pores and that you just need to write it all down and that’s it. It may be through the gruelling task of focusing every single day for weeks on end that you may discover that you have some talent. Your talent may not be known to you until you start your work. Murakami himself is an example of this. It was not until he was in his late 20s that he even got the idea to write and it would not be for a few more years until he discovered his own writing style and understood what novels he wished to write.

This discovery was simply aided by writing. The more effort he put into his work the better he understood it and the clearer his vision became. He had an understanding that his talent was not enough and that he needed to supplement the talent he did have by building up his focus and endurance. Murakami gives credit to running for building these two qualities.

Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.

Talent may be out of your control but focus and endurance are not. You can set yourself up for success if you build up those two qualities. The action that aids in this growth will help your understanding of writing, what you wish to say, what you wish not to say, your own do’s and don’ts and perhaps even discover that talent that is within. In fact, such an action will benefit you in all aspects of life and not just writing.

Follow Your Intuition

What I mean is, I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run—simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.

Life is short. Follow your interests, follow your inner voice, and follow your dreams and see if you can try and make something beautiful happen in your life before it’s all said and done. 

Lessons From Books: Bird By Bird

Arshan Dhillon

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott is exactly as the title suggests, a book that has valuable pieces of information about both writing and about life. The writing tips are practical, but in reality, they are common and not wholly unique. The book will not transform you into a New York Times bestseller. Lamott isn’t trying to sell you some get-rich-quick scheme. Instead, she talks about patience, creating writing routines, working hard, doing tons and tons of revisions, subverting expectations, and enjoying the process. Like I said, not unique, but practical.

However, the real gem of this book was the connection Lamott makes with writing and life. How the interpersonal relationship of the two nurtures each other. The lessons she draws upon from writing help you understand life better and, through the awareness of life and yourself, your writing becomes genuine and vulnerable. This is where I fell in love with this book. The following are a few of the main points that stuck with me from Bird by Bird.

Why Pursue Writing?

A commitment to writing goes beyond telling stories. It is an exploration of life. You are committing to observing the life around you. You pay attention to everything from the macro like politics, societal trends, cultural changes, to the micro such as the encroaching yellowish tint on leaves as fall approaches or the faint smell of peppermint as you pass by a cafe or the thin, practiced smiles of strangers you see during the day. Keeping tabs on both the small and large details of life becomes part of the job.

You are also committing to observing yourself. Your own internal state. You come to dissect memories, unpack different thoughts, question your own opinions because that’s where your scenes lie and your characters dwell. You become aware of your feelings and emotions and what triggers them and how deeply you feel or perhaps the lack of feelings which can be equally important. As you understand yourself, you come to understand others because of the commonalities we all share as human beings. You develop empathy, patience, respect because these are the things you need to understand yourself and the extension of these qualities benefits the people around you. This then helps you create stories that connect with others.

In the same vein, the commitment to writing also improves your habits and character. The aim may be to write a story or to finish a novel or to publish a collection of poems, but in order to do that, you need to practice your skill set. You have to find a way to measure progress which, in writing terms, maybe keeping tabs on daily word count or pages written or, as Neil Gaiman suggests, the number of hours you spent at your writing station. You need to develop a routine that helps you balance your life and also maximize your writing. You need to develop discipline and focus so the time spent writing is productive. The rejection letters help you create a thick skin towards criticism and feedback, but also you need a sense of detachment from your work so you can apply the necessary feedback. All these qualities not only help you towards your writing goal but mold you into a capable individual.

A Perspective Towards Restarting

One of the hardest decisions you can make in writing is to start over after you have committed many hours of your time and written dozens and maybe hundreds of pages. But sometimes finding out what you don’t want to write is as important as knowing what you do. Often, what you have in your head doesn’t translate well on paper. But you can only know that by putting it on paper. This is still a type of progress. Slow, painful progress, but progress nonetheless.

The idea of restarting is present in life as well and it is equally as difficult, but also important. You can only know if a relationship will work out by actually being in one, similar to how you have to put words on paper to know if they work. And it may be painstaking to end the relationship and restart again, but it must be done so you can step closer to a relationship that you actually need. Or you might come to dislike your dream job, towards which you have committed years of your life. But if you’re able to restart again, go back into the job market, learn a new skill, change career paths, the years to follow could potentially have greater rewards than you could have imagined. In this process of elimination, you get closer to what you actually want in life and, in writing terms, what you actually want to write about.

Short Assignments

Short assignments is the idea that you need to focus on the task at hand and do that as well as you can before you move on to the next short assignment. The title of the book, Bird by Bird, comes from this idea. Lamott shares an anecdote of when she was a kid and her brother was stressed out about a school assignment relating to birds and her father’s advice was simple, take it bird by bird. Write about one bird and then move to the next one. One small thing at a time. One short assignment at a time.

Thinking too much about the bigger picture causes you to lose focus and get lost in the grand scheme of things. But when you can focus on what’s right in front of you and work on that, you make progress. Narrow your focus from the macro to the micro. Focus on the next step and that’s it. The next dialogue or description or narration or action piece. That’s how you complete a story.

Similarly, life itself can be daunting if you constantly focus on the end goals. A four-year degree can seem like a lifetime away, but the assignment or exam in a week’s time is right in front of you. Knock that out of the park and you step closer to the degree. When you only look at the end, you might not recognize the small progress you have made and this can leave you disheartened and even result in negative thoughts and feelings. But if you turn your focus to the short assignments and work on doing that the best you can, then you come to recognize progress and movement. And this is revitalizing. The end goal may still be a long way away, but you have achieved something towards that goal. In the same way, writing one good descriptive passage is an achievement towards writing a 300-page novel, get an A+ on an assignment is an achievement towards your degree. 

Child’s Draft Or The Shitty 1st Draft

This means that when you write your first draft, just write whatever comes to your mind. Whatever images, phrases, dialogue that come without censor. You can even write bullet point notes. It doesn’t matter. No one is going to read the 1st draft except you and all you need to do is get the story out of your head and on the paper so you can edit and make it better. This is the process. Trust it. Write a shitty 1st draft and then edit it relentlessly until it is good. This may require you to overcome your perfectionist/self-critical inner voice, which can’t stand the shitty 1st draft.

This is a lesson for life. Often your first action is wrong or not as good as you hoped. But that first action is required so that your 2nd, 3rd, 4th actions can move you towards where you want to go. But you can be stuck in the perfectionist mindset, which delays your 1st action so you never fail or stumble and never get to correct that mistake either so your proceeding actions can be better. In reality, perfectionism is an excuse for inaction.  A resistive force to stop yourself from doing the hard, uncomfortable work which, in writing terms, is revision, and with life, is self-reflection and ownership. 

Two more writing-related lessons:

Understand your characters

Find out as much as possible about the interior life of your characters. Let it come naturally through writing. Not all of it has to go into the story, but you should know as much as possible. A way to familiarize yourself with the characters is by asking practical everyday questions which peel back the layers of your characters and humanizes them. Some examples Lammot provides are: What kind of impression do they leave behind? What do they carry in their purse? How do they move? Who did they vote for? What would they do if they had six months to live? Questions that reveal the character’s traits, faults, emotional baggage, positives, and negatives.

Another way to familiarize your character is by partially basing them on someone you know. This way, you have a base structure to work with. Or, by sharing your own flaws through the character, which also makes them more vulnerable and genuine. 

Also, understanding who your character isn’t is a good way to understand who your character is. Similarly, how a form of self-discovery is knowing what you don’t want, need, or like, understanding what your character doesn’t want, need, or like will bring you closer to knowing what the character wants, needs, or likes.

Short Story Formula

ABDCE: Action (start), Background (Who/what/why), Development (the characters build drama/action/tension), Climax and Ending (What happened, What did it mean, and What our sense of the characters is now).

Reflections: Practical Reminders When Editing Your Fiction

Arshan Dhillon

The book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers has plenty of practical advice and exercises for editing fiction. The following are the reminders that stuck with me after reading the book. It should be noted that these aren’t as black or white as they may seem. Ultimately, the right balance is required in a story.

  1. Look out for over narration. Scenes can be harder to write which is why people slip into narrating a story rather than unpacking it. By merely summarizing some instance you can take away from the engagement of your story. Scenes are generally more engaging and they do a better job of bringing a story to life because you have to include specific details, dialogues, and characters in a scene. Good way to go about implementing this is by identifying those blocks/pages of texts and seeing if they can be broken up into smaller scenes or dialogue.
  2. Remember to Resist the Urge to Explain (R.U.E.). When it comes to your character’s emotions, make sure you aren’t just explaining them to the reader. The reader should be able to understand the emotions through action and dialogue. So, if you do your job correctly, you can simply cut away any explanation of a character’s emotions and not lose anything.
  3. Show the character. Unpack the characters’ personality through his actions, reactions, interior monologue, and dialogue. Or, if you have to describe the personality, let it come from the point of view or dialogue of another character who tells us his/her opinion of the character. Or let the personality come through the attitude of the character by describing something from the viewpoint of the character.
  4. Speaking of viewpoint, keep in mind what the character will notice and what will go unacknowledged. An 80-year-old man notices different things than an 8-year-old girl. For the 80-year-old, the falling snow may be a nuisance but for an 8-year-old it might be pleasant and fun. However, if there is no emotion attached to what the character is seeing, then your writing is emotionally detached, which only works if you’re aiming for an emotionally detached story.
  5. Well written dialogue should erase a lot of explanation. The dialogue itself should let the reader know that a character is astonished or scared. The reader shouldn’t need to read the descriptive tag. In fact, the best thing you can do for your dialogue is to never explain it.
  6. Be conscious of the beats in your text. For a tense dialogue scene, fewer beats the better. However, beats also allow you to ground your story. They can unpack setting and character traits/habits which allows the reader to use their imagination.
  7. Read your story out loud. By reading out loud you get the sense of the rhythm of your story, especially your dialogue. You can hear where the pauses should be, where some action is required, where there is too much talking and so on.
  8. Be aware of repetition. You don’t want your sentences to convey the same info or your paragraphs to establish the same traits or have multiple characters fulfilling the same role. Repetition can take away from your story.

Two Things That Have Made My Fiction Writing Easier

Stephen King Writing Tip: Build Your Toolbox

Writing/Life Advice: Don’t Get Overwhelmed

Vladimir Nabakov On What Makes A Great Writer

Tell Your Truth Through Writing

Vladimir Nabokov & Storytelling Techniques

Neil Gaiman & Generating Story Ideas

Writing Advice From William Faulkner

Haruki Murakami On Writing

Charles Bukowski & The Use Of Conflict In Storytelling

Ernest Hemingway On What To Write About

Simple Writing Advice From Stephen King

Youtube: Learned Living

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/learned_living/

Poem: The Many Yous

Article: Indirect Battle Strategy and How It Can Help Us Overcome Our Own Obstacles

Short Story: Everything Work’s Itself Out

Stephen King Writing Tip: Build Your Toolbox

Arshan Dhillon

I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work.

What Stephen King means when he talks about constructing your own toolbox is that writing like any other job has much to do with problem-solving. An organized worker has his tools, screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches, batteries, tape measurer, different nuts and bolts and so on, in their toolbox so that when they need to fix something, all they have to do is pick up that toolbox and approach the problem. At which point they can assess the issue and see what tools would resolve it quickly. Certain problems require a screwdriver with a flat head, another might require a Phillips head or something may just need hammering, another might require loosening the bolts with a wrench or measuring the exact diameters and so it’s the simple process of finding what tool fits right.

In this manner, a writer also requires his own toolbox. So, instead of helplessly and blindly attacking a problem that arises in your writing, you can find the proper tool and aim it at fixing your problem.

The next question is then, what tools does a writer require?

The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.

The way this tool works is that when you are reading markdown passages that you really enjoy reading. This is a good practice because right away you will notice how it’s not the vocabulary that is important but rather how the words are used. James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway are both praised for their prose. Additionally, as you read, write down any word that you aren’t familiar with it. You don’t have to make a conscious effort to learn it and use it in your own writing but knowing that you have it in your toolbox, it can naturally come of use if you ever need it. Otherwise, it can just take up space like those random bolts that are never used but it’s better to have them there just in case.

After vocabulary comes grammar.

Vocabulary used in speech or writing organizes itself in seven parts of speech. Communication composed of these parts of speech must be organized by rules of grammar upon which we agree. When these rules break down, confusion and misunderstanding result. Bad grammar produces bad sentences. My favorite example from Strunk and White is this one: “as a mother of five, with another one on the way, my ironing board is always up.”

Grammar can be a complicated subject and also a boring one, however, it is essential to understand the basics because as Stephen King said “bad grammar produces bad sentences.” The last thing a writer wants is to write bad sentences. But at the same time getting bogged down by all the grammatical do’s and don’ts can be difficult. Which is why at the very least you have to understand how nouns and verbs work and interact with each other. Additionally, before you adopt the idea of “breaking the rules”, understand what the rules are and what you’re breaking.

Simple sentences are another way to ease the headache of grammar. So, if the sentence or paragraph starts to become overwhelming, just remember to simplify, return to your nouns and verbs.

The third tool comes in two parts: The verb and the adverb

Verbs themselves can be split into two.

With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense.

If you re-read the passages that you love you’ll quickly see how almost all of them are written in the active tense. What’s compelling to read is a character attempting things rather than constantly reacting. What goes with passive is timid and that’s how the writing ends up if you use passive tense.

This is why compiling writings that you enjoy is so important. You need something to compare your writing with when an issue arises. This way, you can spot the differences between your own writing and someone else’s and use their structure to resolve your problem.

Think of other prose as how-to videos, things to learn from and apply to your own writing. Speaking of which, the other part of this tool is adverbs.

The adverb is not your friend.

Often times the overuse of adverbs robs the writing of its emotions. We end up telling more and showing less which is reason alone to be sparse with your adverbs.

The last aspect your toolbox should have is an understanding of how paragraphs are written. However, this is just the base of a toolbox, your foundation, after this you can add whatever it is that you find useful or informative that can help you be a better writer.

The ideal expository graf contains a topic sentence followed by others which explain or amplify the first.

This pattern of a topic sentence followed by explanation and description of this topic sentence forces the writer to organize their thoughts, according to Stephen King.

However, that’s just one way of writing paragraphs. Once more, the more you read, the more examples you come across different ways of formulating what you’re trying to say.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you’ll find your paragraphs forming on their own. And that’s what you want.

Often, the flow of the story narrates the form of the paragraphs. Stephen King believes that it’s this natural flow that you should stick with.

My main takeaway from this exercise is simple: writing is a skill and it needs work. You’re not going to come out the gates writing perfect sentences, possessing the exact vocabulary you need to vocalize what you want, in proper grammar and creating beautiful flowing paragraphs and stories. Rather, all of this takes dedication and discipline.

To deconstruct writing to its rawest form and build something that is your own. That’s the goal and with the understanding of the basics, we can get close to this. The toolbox itself is a tool in improving as a writer.

Simple Writing Advice From Stephen King

Arshan Dhillon

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

This is from Stephen King’s memoir On Writing.

The advice is straightforward and simple. A writer writes. You can spend all your time researching writing tips, habits, routines, reading lists and things of that nature but that is not writing. You can find writing exercises that make you describe some lake from four different perspectives but that is not writing. You can even spend weeks reading books on how to write and by doing all of this, give yourself this false notion that you are writing but you are not writing.

It may seem like you are working on your craft and improving your understanding as you try a new way of writing and learn through the habits of other writers, however, all of this can trick you into thinking that you are getting better as a writer but you really may not be. After all the hours spent on such activities, you may still be exactly where you started.

The reason being all of that is supplementary. Additional work to your core work. The core is the actual writing, your writing, no matter if it is good or bad, you must write your own writing. The easiest way to do this is either set a block of time which is dedicated to writing and nothing else or assign yourself X number of words that need to be written each day to consider that day a win. This makes up your core. After this is when all the supplementary work like reading books on writing, grammar, editing, biographies/memoirs, and writing exercises can be added to the routine.

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book.

Along with writing, comes reading. Just as with writing, you have to assign yourself a certain number of pages to read or a block of time dedicated to just reading. You don’t have to read with the purpose of studying fiction but you must read.

Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.

What does a character do when he is in a heated argument? What will the landscape look like from the view of someone who does not know who they are? What creates an emotional connection with a character? How do you write a good battle scene? A good love scene? How can inner monologue flow? How do you incorporate symbolic meanings into the text? Questions like these and many others have all been answered. You just have to pick up a book and see.

A useful way to read is to read with attention. Take notes, understand what the writer has included and what he or she has omitted. Pay attention to the words used and how they differ depending on the character. See how an emotional scene was set up or a violent one. Take note of the details that bring a scene to life and the lack of detail that makes it mundane. Watch how the character struggles internally or how the character acts externally.

All books can be seen as textbooks for writing.

One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose […] good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling.

Although the advice is simple, write a lot and read a lot, the application of it must be done with commitment and attention. In that way, the simple advice is all you need to become a better writer for the rest of the writing journey you will learn innately and those lessons are hard to forget while no matter how many writing tips and lists you read, the lessons will eventually fade from your mind.