10 Best Writing Tips I’ve Ever Heard

A Weird Circular Guest Post by Alex Kingsley

I made it my summer project to curate a creative writing class for myself. Now that I’ve done all the work, I decided it was time to assign myself a “term paper” of sorts. I’ve got all this juicy writing advice bouncing around in my head, it seems like a shame not to boil it down to the best bits and share it with anyone who could make use of it. I put all my notes from the summer alongside my running document of writing advice I have received over the years, and picked my top ten. This is not my advice so much as it is a collection of pieces of wisdom I heard from other writers that made me say, like the Dog of Wisdom, “that’s good wisdom.”

Note: If you look at some of these without reading the description, you may think I’m just messing with you. I’m not. This is 100% serious. It just turns out a lot of writers give super weird advice.

1. Follow the white rabbit.

My dad told me this years ago. I once repeated it to someone and they told me it was a Neil Gaiman quote. Can you believe it? Neil Gaiman plagiarized my dad! The idea of this one is simple: Alice follows the rabbit down the rabbit hole because it excites her. Write what excites you. Let your creativity lead, and you just follow. Brandon Sanderson says something similar. In “Sanderson’s Laws of Writing Magic,” the zero-eth rule is this: don’t forget what makes your story awesome. (Or, as the Vlog brothers of early 2000s YouTube would say, DTBA) Sanderson talks about how in Kung Fu Panda, the eponymous Kung Fu Panda always gets super excited every time the gang does some cool martial arts moves. You have to be your own Kung Fu Panda.

2. If a scene doesn’t take place in a hot air balloon, ask yourself, could it take place in a hot air balloon?

This is a quote from a ClickHole article jokingly attributed to Haruki Murakami. (If you haven’t read the article, please do, it makes me laugh out loud every time) It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, but it actually got me thinking. When I read that article, I was writing a novel that had some pretty lackluster fight scenes. This is partially because I was, for some reason, writing military science fiction despite the fact that I know nothing about the military and don’t even like it very much. But it was also because I’d never given much thought to setting and how it affects characters. Sol Stein discusses something he calls “the crucible.” A crucible, literally, is a container for heating things up until they melt together. That is what you should do with your characters, because, as a writer, your job is to be very, very cruel (“If you’re a nice person and you want to be a writer, that’s already two strikes against you” — Brandon Mull) As the tension ramps up and things start to heat up in your story, your character are stuck together until they can figure out a solution. And if your characters are actually stuck in a physical place, this can help! Imagine a novel about a tense divorce, and the climactic argument takes place in a hot air balloon as Not!Murakami suggests. Personally, I think that’s way more interesting since they can’t get away from each other, and you probably also have the guy steering the balloon watching like, “Whoa, okay, guys, I did not sign up for this.”

After reading that article, I took Not!Murakami’s advice to heart. The next fight scene I wrote took place in the kitchen of a gourmet chef as he was hosting a tea party, and the weapons included boiled tea, a silver platter, a cake knife, and a dish towel. The fight ended when one of the characters found a gun in the toaster.* That novel will never see the light of day, but the exercise taught me how important location to a) making an interesting scene and b) amping up the tension.

3. Your story needs Hot Wheel gas stations.

George Saunders talks about how when he was a kid, he had a Hot Wheels toy set where you could put these little gas stations on the tracks, and they would propel the car forward. If you placed them right, every time the car slowed down, it would roll into a gas station and get more speed. You could arrange them so that the car was moving indefinitely (did George Saunders discover the secret of perpetual motion? Possibly.) This is what you’re doing with the reader in your story. You have moments of high action and excitement that propel the reader forward, and then you give them a moment to slow down and catch a breath before you throw them into the next gas station. That way they never lose momentum, but they’re not so overwhelmed with the speed that they didn’t get a moment to chill.

4. Have ninjas attack.

This is a direct quote from Brandon Sanderson, which you may think odd, considering the marked lack of ninjas in his books. That’s because this isn’t actually advice for the story itself — it’s advice for how to get past writer’s block. Writer’s block often happens because you’re scared of messing up (this video discusses “resistance” and how to deal with it, and I highly recommend it). Sanderson recommends throwing some random, unexpected event into the mix. You may not end up using the actual scene, but it’ll get you motivated to keep writing, and you might discover some important things about the characters. And who knows! Maybe you WILL keep the ninjas.

5. The Rule of R.U.E.

This one comes from Self-editing For Fiction Writers by Dave King and Renni Brown, and it stands for: Resist the Urge to Explain. They discuss how beginning writers often don’t trust themselves, so they add unnecessary explanations to ensure that readers understand what they’re going for. This not only adds unnecessary words, it also weakens when you already have on the page. Unnecessary explanations come in a lot of forms — character descriptions, speaker attributions, narrative summary, etc. You don’t need to describe how a character acts if we already have evidence on the page. You don’t need to tell us how someone said something if it’s pretty clear from the dialogue how they said it. You don’t need to describe an event if you’re going to show us the event. If you catch yourself wanting to explain something, just don’t. This especially applies to adjectives and adverbs, which are rarely necessary. In the words of Mark Twain: “If you find an adjective, kill it!”

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6. Your story is made of dolphins.

This one comes from my college Honors examiner, screenwriter, and director, Charlotte Glynn. She told me that the themes in a story should be like dolphins all jumping out of the water in unison. Everything in a story should feel cohesive, and every detail should support the overarching feeling that you want the reader to come away with at the end. If this framing is confusing, I’ll word it a different way: what is the purpose of each element in the story? How does it serve the story as a whole? George Saunders discusses this as well. He has something called the “ruthless efficiency principle,” which essentially states that if a certain element of a story doesn’t do something to “earn its keep,” then it shouldn’t be there. He also has something he dubs the “Cornfeld Principle” (named of the screenwriter he got it from) that states that every scene must a) be entertaining in its own right and b) move the story forward in a non-trivial way. Which brings us back to the dolphins — every element of the story is a dolphin, and they all need a reason to be there, jumping out of the water in the same way at the same time. That way, when we get to the final splash at the end, we go, “Wow! Look at this dolphins!”

7. You’re writing when you don’t realize it.

This one came from playwright Gary Garrison. We often think of “writing” as the time that we are sitting in front of the keyboard, but in actuality, we are always writing — we’re just not recording it. He used the example of sitting on the subway and seeing a woman across from you. You may see the haggard expression on her face and draw the conclusion that she is tired. You may note her blazer and heels and think that she must work at some fancy job. You may hear half of the argument she’s having over the phone and assume she is going through a divorce. Automatically, you are making observations. That’s all writing is — making observations. The key difference is that when you’re writing fiction, you’re making observations about something that exists only in your head. You use specific details to draw conclusions about the woman on the subway — what specific details can you give about the scene in your head so that readers may draw their own conclusion? Brandon Sanderson uses this example: it’s much more interesting to see the bullet holes in the shutters than to simply be told “the house was in a dangerous neighborhood.”

There’s another benefit to this observation-writing — it helps you hone your voice. When you’re bored at work, and your mind starts naturally describing the scene as if you were writing it in a novel, you’re getting writing practice in without even writing anything down.

8. Touch grass.

Charlotte Glynn again. She gave me a ton of advice on how to improve my screenplay, and by the end of the session, I admitted that I was very overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to do, and I felt like I was out of ideas. She said, “Take a walk.” And now it honestly feels like I do most of my writing not sitting at the keyboard, but daydreaming about it while I’m outside. Hell, I wrote most of this article in my head while sitting on a swing set. All I had to do when I got home was write it down. (My personal advice to anyone who’s feeling stuck: sit on a swing for an hour. You will be full of Juicy Thoughts by the end.) But this is not to say that when you go for your writing-walk, you HAVE to be thinking about your work. In fact, it’s often better if you think about something else. The human brain does an incredible job working on problems in the background. It’s like how sometimes I’ll spend hours stuck on a puzzle in a video game, so I go to bed all in a huff. When I wake up the next morning, I suddenly know how to solve it. It’s not because the Video Game Gods have graced me with the answer in my dreams. It’s that my brain was working on it in the background, even if I wasn’t consciously. Sometimes you take a walk and you spend the whole time thinking about something totally different, then when you sit back at the keyboard you know exactly where the story needs to go.

9. Writing is collaborative.

When I was in college, I went to the writing tutors with every single essay I wrote. I felt guilty about it, since I considered myself to be a writer. How could I possibly be a real writer if I couldn’t write one stupid essay on my own? But the benefits were undeniable. After a conference about my paper, I’d always come away with a clearer understanding of what I needed to do with it to make my writing shine. One day, I told my mother about the guilt I experienced relying so much on the writing tutors for help. She’s an English professor — a doctor, no less — so I figured she could diagnose what was wrong with me. It turns out, nothing. “Writing is collaborative,” she told me. “Everyone needs an outside opinion to see things they never would have on their own.” In retrospect, this makes total sense. This is why writers groups and beta readers exist. Still, it’s reassuring to remember that we’re not expected to do this alone — in fact, we shouldn’t do this alone. Writers need each other’s support to be the best that they can be.

10. Your words are clay.

This one comes from my dad. It’s the first writing advice I ever received, and it’s also the best. I wanted to be a novelist ever since I was a little kid, and when I was in third grade, I started my first novel, “Garbage Man,” the story of a dumpster cat (named Garbage Man.) As a third grader, I naturally assumed that my nascent literary work was destined for fame, and multiple film adaptations. One night I was up late crying because my novel wasn’t everything I wanted it to be (which, of course it wasn’t. I was in third grade.) My father sat down next to me and told me about pottery wheels. Both my parents worked at a community college with a big ceramics department, so our house was full of beautiful student pieces my parents bought at art sales. He told me that every piece of pottery in the house had once been a lump of clay, and the student in the pottery class had to learn how to slowly shape it before it was ready to bake and paint and glaze. And that’s what writing is.

George Saunders (whom I love, if you couldn’t tell from this point in the article) has a different, but equally useful metaphor. He says that your first draft is like an apartment that came pre-decorated. Imagine that every day, you take one decoration and remove it, and replace it with something that is more you. By the end of this iterative process, you will have an apartment that is uniquely you, even more so than if you’d decorated it all in one go from the beginning — because you and your taste have both evolved over time. Redecorating takes time, but you at least need the apartment first. Pottery takes time, but you at least need some clay.

These, of course, are just the top ten nuggets of a huge list I’ve been adding to over the years. It turns out, however, that a lot of writers say roughly the same thing, so I tried to fuse it all together in the most succinct and interesting way. Perhaps if people find this helpful, I’ll do a sequel with the other weirdest pieces of advice I’ve gathered over the years.

If you’re interested in doing this “self-taught creative writing class” for yourself, these are the books I read:

• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Dave King and Renni Browne

• Stein on Writing by Sol Stein

• A Swim In the Pond in The Rain by George Saunders

And other resources I used/ones I didn’t use but that I call upon frequently:

Brandon Sanderson’s 2016 Lecture series

How To Be Creative: How an Artist Turns Pro

Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories

*There was a running gag in this novel where characters always hid guns in toasters. Can a gun fit in a toaster? Probably not. It was not a very good novel and I do not plan on letting anyone see it.

About the Author

Alex Kingsley (they/them) is a writer, comedian, and game designer. They are a cofounder of Strong Branch Productions, where they write and direct the Audioverse-Finalist sci-fi comedy podcast The Stench of Adventure. They’ve been a voice actor for various other podcasts, including Whisperling and Spirit Box Radio. Their writing has been published in Radon Journal, Translunar Travelers Lounge, Interstellar Flights Press, Orion’s Beau, Ancillary Review of Books, Tales From The Radiator, Among the Stacks, Ensemble Arts Exchange, Sci-Fi Lampoon, ASPEC Journal, The Storage Papers by Rusty Quill and Strangely Funny IX by Mystery and Horror LLC. You can find their tabletop games at alexyquest.itch.io and you can follow them on Twitter and TikTok @alexyquest. If you like their work, don’t hesitate to say hi. You can find more information about their writing, stand up, and more at alexkingsley.org, or at strongbranchproductions.com.

About Empress of Dust

There are monsters outside the city walls.

Harvard is small, anxious, and plagued by a constant tremor, which is not an ideal combination for a desert scavenger. He and his crew are under constant threat of desertwalker attacks, and Harvard is nearly useless against them.

When the biggest mistake of Harvard’s life separates him from his crew, he must learn the secrets of the desert beasts in order to survive the dangers of the dusts. Returning to Bastion with a surprising ally, Harvard is forced to choose between saving his crew or allying with the “monsters” who rescued him.