1) “If you’re only going to write when you’re inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you will never be a novelist — because you’re going to have to make your word count today, and those words aren’t going to wait for you, whether you’re inspired or not.”

Novel writing is a long and arduous process and if you’re constantly waiting for inspiration to strike, you’ll never finish your book. Gaiman encourages writers to write even when they aren’t inspired- set a daily word count goal and make sure you meet it every day. Eventually, you’ll stumble your way into inspiration.

2) “Tell your story. Don’t try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Because [as a] starting writer, you always start out with other people’s voices—you’ve been reading other people for years… But, as quickly as you can, start telling the stories that only you can tell—because there will always be better writers than you, there will always be smarter writers than you… but you are the only you.”

Although you should absolutely read other writers that you look up to or admire, it can be easy to accidentally take on their voices instead of your own- especially when you’re a new writer. Try your best to learn to distinguish your own voice and figure out what’s unique about it. Because that’s a large part of why people will read your books.

3) “Write more. And remember that everyone who writes anything good wrote a lot of bad stuff first. You are learning, be kind to yourself, just as you would be kind to anyone learning to do something hard, like juggling or ballroom dancing or surgery.

Learn from your mistakes, and get better, and one day you’ll write something you won’t loathe. (Also, it’s fine to dislike something you’ve written. But don’t dislike yourself for having made it.)”

This last line here is especially important for writers to keep in mind. Writing can be a constant uphill battle with your own self-esteem. It’s extremely difficult to critique your writing without also critiquing yourself since they’re so closely attached. Don’t hate on yourself just because you wrote a bad line- every great writer has written plenty of them.

4) “On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing. If you find your writer’s group stopping you from writing, then drop it.”

If you find yourself in a writing slump, try to identify what’s causing it. Eliminate the cause as best as you can because the writing should come first. You may think that writer’s group you joined will help you stay on task, but if it’s only making you more nervous since you have to share your writing with others then it needs to go.

5) “Show [your story] to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that it is. 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.”

Unless your friends are editors, they have no business ‘playing editor’ with your manuscript. What Gaiman is saying here is that, when you’re having friends examine your work, you want them to be doing so from a reader’s POV. If they identify an area where they feel something is ‘off’ or didn’t quite make sense, you should reexamine that area. If they were confused, other readers likely will be as well. But once they step over the line and start bossing you around about your work without the expertise of an editor- simply tune them out.

6) “If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies – Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.”

Although we’d still advocate for brushing up on authors you want to emulate, Gaiman makes an excellent point here. Most great fantasy/sci-fi authors found inspiration for their world-building from mythology or something outside of that genre. It could jump-start some inspiration if you branch out and study some history, philosophy, or anything outside of the genre you’re working within.

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Stop when you’re still going

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

Whereas most people will advise you to continue writing when you get into the zone, Hemingway actually advises the opposite. His trick for avoiding the dreaded writer’s block is to stop writing when he is in a groove and already knows where the story will continue to go next. This way, when you sit down to write next, it’s not as hard to get back into the story.

Read, read, read

[A writer] should have read everything so that he knows what he has to beat… The only people for a serious writer to compete with are the dead that he knows are good. It is like a miler running against the clock rather than simply trying to beat whoever is in the race with him. Unless he runs against time he will never know what he is capable of attaining.

Though we would advise against the idea of feeling like you have to compare your work with others, we definitely agree with Hemingway here. Reading work from authors that emulate the type of writing you aspire to will help you learn different techniques on how to achieve those goals.

Be a professional observer

Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exact it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you that emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped.

…Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had.

Hemingway encourages writers to abide by the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule. Through this example, he is helping readers learn how to connect an action with a visible response in a way that shows clearly that the two are connected. You don’t have to say ‘catching a fish was exciting’ or ‘I found it funny watching the fish flip around’ in order for readers to connect the action with a character’s response- all you have to do is show them.

Be positive

Once you are into the novel it is as cowardly to worry about whether you can go on to the next day as to worry about having to go into inevitable action. You have to go on. So there is no sense to worry… As soon as you start to think about it stop it. Think about something else. You have to learn that to write a novel. The hard part about a novel is to finish it.

Here, Hemingway compares writing to being a soldier on a battlefield. He’s essentially saying there’s no point in worrying about if you’ll make it through because you’ll have to keep moving forward regardless. So don’t let yourself get in your own head about your worth as a writer or where your novel is going- just push through.

You need to have empathy

Then get in somebody elseʼs head for a change. If I bawl you out try to figure out what Iʼm thinking about as well as how you feel about it. If Carlos curses Juan think what both their sides of it are. Donʼt just think who is right… As a man you know who is right and who is wrong… As a writer, you should not judge. You should understand…Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Donʼt be thinking what youʼre going to say. Most people never listen.

Hemingway is stating that one of the most important parts of good writing is having empathy. Being able to understand people, their motivations, their strengths/weaknesses is key to writing people in a realistic way. If a conflict arises in your story, it’s not about who is right and who is wrong- that’s for your readers to decide. It’s about making sure there are good reasons behind both sides, reasons informed by who they are, what they’ve gone through, and how they think.

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1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

As Vonnegut points out, reading is a really intimate experience happening between your imagination and a complete stranger. A person you’ve never met (and likely never will meet) is taking precious moments of their life to dive into your work. Don’t waste a single moment of that engagement and make sure they walk away from your work with things to think about. Whether that be about morality, history, self-help or love, try to teach them something new so they walk away feeling they gained something positive from your book.

2) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

This doesn’t mean every character has to be perfect. Heck, it doesn’t even mean that a single one of them has to be perfect…perfect is boring. It just means at least one of them has to be likable in some capacity. This could mean a super sweet character, but it could also mean a damaged or jaded character who is trying to get their life together. Imperfections don’t make people unlikeable (in fact, they often do the opposite). But if your book is filled to the brim with incredibly harsh, evil, or frustrating characters, your reader isn’t going to care what happens to them.

We can’t overstate how crucial this one is to any and all writing. The character is the main driving force of any novel and character desire is what drives the character. A book where a character is just wandering about and events just fall into their lap isn’t an interesting read because they don’t have any stake in the events of the story. For example, a story about a character who gets rejected from a college isn’t interesting unless that character desperately wanted to get in. Perhaps it’s been their dream since they were a child and now we get to see how they react and cope with losing that dream. That’s far more interesting than a character getting a rejection letter, shrugging, and walking away.

4) Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

This goes along with the first rule, this is just more specifically what needs to happen to make your book worth your readers time. Make every sentence matter in the arc of your book. As we’ve said before, even setting and character descriptors should reveal character in some capacity.

5) Start as close to the end as possible.

Novice writers have the tendency to start their book in the wrong place. The first chapter of their book gets bogged down with exposition and backstory or even pages of build-up before the real action/arc of the story begins. You should start your book immediately in the action of the story, cutting out as much exposition and build-up as possible.

6) Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

We love our characters, it can be hard to make bad things befall them. But, as Vonnegut says, it’s in those times that we really see someone’s true self. That’s one of the key parts of any good story, revealing your characters (faults and all) to your readers.

7) 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.

Write for you and for your characters- that’s it. If you’re constantly worrying about pleasing everyone your story is either going to be super jumbled and confusing or so general that it feels unrealistic and boring. Don’t be afraid to create characters with very specific quirks and personality traits instead of writing a protagonist that everyone could see themselves in. Trust us: your readers will thank you for it.

8) Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Very comically put, but also very true. Never convey suspense in a way that readers don’t understand what is happening to your protagonist. The story is driven by character and the choices your character makes is what defines them. Those choices should be very clear to the reader or the weight behind them will be lost. For example: let’s say you’re writing a suspense novel where your protagonist decides to seek revenge on the person he believes killed his father. Even if later it will be revealed that it wasn’t who our protagonist thinks it is, the reader needs to know that they had their mind made up. It says a lot about who they are and also will inform the guilt they’ll feel later upon realizing they’d been mistaken.

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