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Writing Tips

Writing Tips from Richard Cohen, author of How to Write Like Tolstoy

We know readers tend to be writers too, so we feature writing tips from our authors. Who better to offer advice, insight, and inspiration than the authors you admire? They’ll answer several questions about their work, share their go-to techniques and more. Now, get writing! 

What writing techniques have you found most important or memorable?

In a memorable cri du coeur, the wonderful Turkish-American essayist Elif Batuman declared:

‘I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: “Show, don’t tell”; “Murder your darlings”; “Omit needless words.” As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words.’ 

One other piece of advice, though: if an editor, or friend, makes a comment about something you have written and you strongly disagree, don’t dismiss the fact that something in what you have written disturbed them. Their suggestion may not be helpful, or the right one, but look again at the passage in question, just in case there is something there you can improve.

How would you recommend creating and getting to know your characters?

Start with the name. Many novelists can’t imagine their characters until they feel they have named them in a way that chimes in with their personalities. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird has the following general advice:

‘You may only know your characters’ externals instead of their essences. Don’t worry about it. More will be revealed over time. In the meantime, can you see what your people look like? What sort of first impression do they make? What does each one care most about, want more than anything in the world? What are their secrets? How do they move, how do they smell? Everyone is walking around as an advertisement for who he or she is—so who is this person? Show us. . . .

‘You also want to ask yourself how they stand, what they carry in their pockets or purses, what happens in their faces and to their posture when they are thinking, or bored, or afraid. Whom would they have voted for last time? Why should we care about them anyway? What would be the first thing they stopped doing if they found out they had six months to live? Would they start smoking again? Would they keep flossing?’

After developing an idea, what is the first action you take when beginning to write?

Well, in truth I try the idea out on my wife. She’s also my literary agent and best friend, and will always find the best way of letting me down if my idea is a truly bad one. But what is meant by ‘developing an idea’? It’s too broad a phrase. If one means a whole notion for a book, I advise writing the story down in the manner of a book blurb, no more than 250 words (about the amount of words a book salesman has to interest a customer). If a book project is still unclear, or doesn’t compel attraction within that wordage, something is amiss. 

Is there something you do to get into a writing mood? Somewhere you go or something you do to get thinking?

Hemingway is meant to have said, ‘I write drunk and revise sober,’ although some people say it was the other way round. Woody Allen takes lots of showers to get his creative juices going. Scott Fitzgerald used to strip off his clothes — completely — before writing. Gertrude Stein would get her companion to drive her into the countryside so she could gaze on the cows there before going back to her writing table.

Did you always want to write? How did you start your career as an author?

I produced a school magazine whenI was twelve; and continued as the main schoolboy editor when I was at high school. But for years I though I was an editor of other peoples’ work, not someone who could produce his own books. In 1999 I left my job in British publishing; left Britain; and settled down in a new marriage, in New York. I tried to get a job as an editor at Knopf, but its MD, Sonny Mehta, said I should write a book about my main hobby of 45 years, fencing — so I went off and produced a 520-page book on swordplay over 3,000 years, and suddenly I was a writer. 

What’s the best piece of advice you have received?

I have no idea. I always forget advice. Maybe, remember to turn the lights off. Say Yes rather than No. Or, for writers, One can always revise more. 

What clichés or bad habits would you tell aspiring writers to avoid? Do you still experience them yourself?

We all fall into hackneyed ways of writing. My current bugbear is people saying ‘incredible,’ when all they mean is ‘very.’ I recall revising a chapter so often that only on a last read-through did I realise I’d started seven consecutive paragraphs with the word ‘Then.’ 

Describe your writing style in 5 words or less.

Anecdotal, story-led, humorous, inquiring, addictive.

Do you ever base characters off people you know? Why or why not?

So far I have published only non-fiction. I have started a novel, set in France in 1946, but my wife (see above) says I’m not allowed to write any more into it until I have finished my current commissioned book, titled ‘The History of Historians.’ But I think about the novel every single day.

What are three or four books that influenced your writing, or had a profound affect on you?

Shakespeare (sorry, but it’s true), Tolstoy’s main novels, Samuel Johnson‘s works, Alice in Wonderland

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Writing Tips

Writing Tips from Allison Amend, author of Enchanted Islands

We know readers tend to be writers too, so we feature writing tips from our authors. Who better to offer advice, insight, and inspiration than the authors you admire? They’ll answer several questions about their work, share their go-to techniques and more. Now, get writing! 

What’s the best piece of advice you have received?

My graduate professor Frank Conroy said that we only get three exclamations points in our whole career! And I just used one. He meant, of course, that the prose itself should convey emphasis. He also stressed that habit is a writer’s best weapon. I’m still working on that one.

What clichés or bad habits would you tell aspiring writers to avoid? Do you still experience them yourself?

I am terribly guilty of what I call “three adjective syndrome” wherein I describe something with no fewer than three adjectives. Usually, that means the third adjective is the one I want, and the first two are just approximations until I get there, but I still have to go back and cull the first two adjectives from the pack. Relatedly, my first drafts have so many clichĂ©s it’s like they are going out of style (get it?). I think that’s fine for a first draft. They’re just marking places where I need to go back and think of better comparisons, so I try not to judge myself too harshly.

 Do you ever base characters off people you know? Why or why not?

 All characters and no characters are based on people I know. If fiction comes from imagination, then all people contribute to the pool from which I draw.  I like to borrow traits and sayings from everyone, but I have never attempted to reproduce on the page a person I know in real life. Even when I do “heavily borrow” from a person, quoting something he or she actually said, he/she never recognizes herself. That said, my father thinks he’s every character in my books.

What are three or four books that influenced your writing, or had a profound affect on you?

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Madame Bovary

A Visit From the Goon Squad

The Handmaid’s Tale

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Writing Tips

Writing Tips from Karan Bajaj, author of The Yoga of Max’s Discontent

We know readers tend to be writers too, so we feature writing tips from our authors. Who better to offer advice, insight, and inspiration than the authors you admire? They’ll answer several questions about their work, share their go-to techniques and more. Now, get writing!  How would you recommend creating and getting to know your characters? I construct my writing on two pillars—ENTERTAINMENT and MEANING. The meaning comes from a deep, personal question I’m wrestling with and my novels help me articulate the answer to myself. That’s why I recommend creating characters that are asking your deepest questions. If you start from that foundation, you’ll know the back-story that led to the question and the journey the character has to embark on to answer the question in a very personal, visceral way. My best advice to get to know your characters is to push them from the ordinary world into the extraordinary world quickly! Their reactions to the extraordinary world will help you both unpeel the character and give the story the propulsive entertainment it needs to keep the reader glued. Did you always want to write? How did you start your career as an author? I’m an engineer-MBA and hadn’t written a single non-technical word until the age of 28! Yet my first novel was published in India at age 29. What happened in that year? I took a sabbatical from my job at Procter & Gamble and backpacked and lived in places I’d always fantasized about like Bhutan and Mongolia. Both the adventures that came from the journey and the sudden space and silence in my life compelled me to write. I wrote without a goal but ended up completing a novel that did quite well in India. Since then, I’ve constructed my life around what I call a 4/1/4 principle: -4 years of goal-directed working in a corporate environment while writing with discipline on the side. -1 year of complete slack where I travel, meditate, work in an orphanage, live in an ashram, write a little, basically do whatever I feel like without goals. -4 years of goal-directed living again. 
and so on. I think this tight-slack model is allowing enough adventures to inspire new ideas while ensuring the discipline to commit them to paper. What clichĂ©s or bad habits would you tell aspiring writers to avoid? Do you still experience them yourself? I tell aspiring writers to never have a single coincidence in their story. Nothing should happen by chance or destiny to your protagonist. The moment destiny plays a role in a story, the reader senses the presence of an author writing the story and the fictive dream breaks. Indeed, I still experience it myself because I like my novels to be fast-paced and often make things “happen” to my characters in the early drafts so that the story moves along quickly. I have to weed those incidents out in the subsequent drafts to make every incident organic to the story. Let me give you an example from my new novel, The Yoga of Max’s Discontent, which is about a Wall Street banker who becomes a yogi in the Himalayas. I wrote and re-wrote the beginning thirty or forty times to make his decision to leave his job and go to the top of the Himalayas extremely authentic to his past rather than a result of a chance encounter as I’d originally written it. Describe your writing style in 5 words or less. Pacy and unpretentious yet layered. What are three or four books that influenced your writing, or had a profound affect on you? This will probably be a surprising answer but the one book that had a profound impact on me was Forrest Gump (the book not the movie). I grew up in a small town in the Himalayas in India that people rarely left. My aunt who was visiting from the US left a copy of the book by accident in our house. I remember reading the book when I was fifteen and feeling deeply transformed by the idea of a life that has no limits and a world that knows no boundaries. Soon after, I left my town for New Delhi, then moved out of India and lived in Philippines, Singapore, then Europe and the US, and have been traveling since without any permanent notion of home or a fixed sense of my own abilities and limitations. I think Forrest Gump may have something to do with it! Other than that, the books I keep re-visiting again and again and shape my writing are perennial Eastern philosophical text like The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Dhammapada and the Upanishads, since they always deepen me as a person and a writer no matter how many times I read them. Learn more about the book below:
Writing Tips

Writing Tips from Shawn Vestal, author of Daredevils

We know readers tend to be writers too, so we feature writing tips from our authors. Who better to offer advice, insight, and inspiration than the authors you admire? They’ll answer several questions about their work, share their go-to techniques and more. Now, get writing!  After developing an idea, what is the first action you take when beginning to write? I don’t usually develop an idea, and often when I do start with an idea, it falls apart in the writing. I typically have something much less than an idea that gives me the itch to write – a line, an image, an object (objects are compelling; I think of them as little pieces of grit that might accrue narrative mother-of-pearl). Lately, I have found myself writing stories inspired by titles – I get excited about something that sounds like an interesting title, and start to write a story off that excitement, and the stories often have only the loosest connection to the words in the title. I don’t quite get it, honestly. I end up in places I didn’t foresee. A couple of months ago, I stopped at a Seven-11 that had a huge sign in the window advertising a combo meal of a hot dog and soda. Built around the smaller text in the sign were two huge phrases – “Super Hot” and “Extra Large.” At a distance, they seemed to be combined into one phrase: Super Hot Extra Large. This is now the title of a story I am working on that I had no plans to write and no idea of before these magical words arrived in my mind and gave me an itch. Is there something you do to get into a writing mood? Somewhere you go or something you do to get thinking? I try to write regularly and steadily, whether or not I’m in the mood, and – like a lot of writers – I think it’s a mistake to wait for or rely upon inspiration. Inspiration often arrives after I’ve started working. But I am also not rigorous about a writing schedule. I write every day, but I don’t write fiction every day. My week is divided between writing newspaper columns at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, and writing fiction and other work on the other days. I have come to feel that the time away from the current work in progress is crucial – time to think, to imagine myself more deeply into the characters and situations, and to begin to develop ideas for the next pages. This time away, thinking about the writing, is what energizes me most for the return, and so I cultivate it a little bit, and try to build that eagerness so I’m impatient to get started. What clichĂ©s or bad habits would you tell aspiring writers to avoid? Do you still experience them yourself? My worst habit is the desire to be done. I do enjoy writing, and I would even say I need to write on some compulsive level, but the sorry truth is that I am probably most motivated by the desire to have written, to have composed something worthy that I can try to swap for attention or vanity fuel. This has made me a reluctant reviser, and far too eager to consider a story or novel done when it still needs work. I try to overcome this in a few ways. The main one is by relying upon a couple of key friends as readers/editors who help push me. It’s also important for me to go through a kind of hot-cold cycle – a period of intense attention and effort to complete a draft (which will feel utterly complete and polished to me) followed by a stretch of ignoring the work until I can look at it again with fresh eyes and see some of the problems, so I am no longer reluctant to get in there and muck it up in an effort to fix it. Describe your writing style in 5 words or less. I often write a little long. What are three or four books that influenced your writing, or had a profound effect on you? So, so many. Here are a random few: Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, which I read in my teens, gave me the idea that boundaries of what could be a book were much wider – and weirder – than I had realized. DeLillo’s White Noise, which I read as a young adult, impressed upon me a sense of the way both prose and ideas within a work could operate at slightly canted, surprising angles. I love the way his sentences move, the odd rhythms and combinations, and I love the way he incorporates bigger themes and ideas, in rhythms and combinations that are similarly unexpected. McCarthy’s Blood Meridian horrified me as it engrossed and captivated me, and while some of the book’s philosophizing is less interesting to me than it once was, there remains something unique in the energy of that experience that draws me back – the grotesqueries of westward expansion cast in language that draws beautifully upon venerable old verbal rhythms. It’s like a scripture telling the ugliest truth about Manifest Destiny. Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, which I read as a 40-something grad student, changed my attitude toward the literary possibilities of fantasy, science fiction, the surreal, magic, etc., and opened up a new and hopefully not-too-imitative strain in my writing. And then, when I had strayed perhaps too far from the here and now, Alice Munro’s “Runaway,” which I also read as a 40-something grad student, reminded once again of the possibilities for magic in lives that only seem routine. Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters is probably the book that’s in my head the most now. Reading his feverish, run-on rants makes me want to produce prose that can do that – lift readers and carry them with such force that they can no longer get hold of the riverbank. Learn more about Daredevils below.      
Writing Tips

Writing Tips from Matt Marinovich, author of The Winter Girl

We know readers tend to be writers too, so we feature writing tips from our authors. Who better to offer advice, insight, and inspiration than the authors you admire? They’ll answer several questions about their work, share their go-to techniques and more. Now, get writing!  What writing techniques have you found most important or memorable? I write really fast, not worrying about making mistakes when I’m working on a first draft. I think novice writers make a mistake when they worry too much about where their novel is going, or get buried in too much outline. Surprise yourself, sentence by sentence; don’t worry about the next chapter. In reality, the first page of your novel is the most important of all. It’s where you define the pace and mood of your story. What’s the best piece of advice you have received? I was fortunate enough to study with the late Grace Paley. I remember showing her a story and she told me there was no conflict in it. I gave her this blank face, so she suddenly slapped her hands together, so that I could hear what conflict was. It was the simplest writing lesson I’ve ever had, but one that I’ve never forgotten. What are three or four books that influenced your writing, or had a profound affect on you? Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry is fantastic. These are connected short stories based on the civil war in Russia and he has this enviable minimalistic style. He doesn’t waste a single word. Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver. Carver is the American version of Babel to me. These were the stories that blew me away in graduate school, especially the way the morality of each piece ends up being thrown upon the reader. I love writers who don’t tie things up neatly for the reader. Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky was one of those books I read as a kid that put me in a trance. Movies never had the same levitating effect on me as a novel like that. Describe your writing style in five words or less. An endless sense of dread. Learn more about The Winter Girl below: 
Writing Tips

Writing Tips from Renee Rosen, author of White Collar Girl

We know readers tend to be writers too, so we feature writing tips from our authors. Who better to offer advice, insight, and inspiration than the authors you admire? They’ll answer several questions about their work, share their go-to techniques and more. Now, get writing!  renee 2RenĂ©e Rosen’s newest historical fiction novel is called White Collar Girl, and takes place in 1950’s Chicago. What writing techniques have you found most important or memorable? For me the most important part of writing is editing. But within the world of editing I’ve come to truly value the importance of the paper edit. Before I turn my books in I always do a paper edits, and if time permits, I’ll do more than one. I’ve found that my work reads very differently on paper than it does on the screen. The paper edit stage is where I’ll catch things like word echoes, continuity errors, something like a three- page chapter following a thirty-page chapter and other problematic issues. Sometimes I’ll even print the manuscript out using a different font, which helps me see it with fresh eyes. How would you recommend creating and getting to know your characters? Creating characters that come to life on the page is really one of my greatest challenges. Just like with real people you meet, some characters come to you and you feel like you’ve known them all your life while others take time to reveal themselves. When I come across the latter type, I usually start by trying to find out as much about them as possible. For every one detail I use in the book, I’ll have ten or so others floating around in my head. I might begin with something as simple as their physical description and then I’ll drill all the way down to what the inside of their closet looks like. When all those little details come together the story generally starts to write itself. The characters take over and I become the vehicle that merely delivers their tale. What’s the best piece of advice you have received? I was fortunate enough to have studied with Carol Anshaw and I’ll never forget that she used to tell us that the first draft is you telling yourself the story. Don’t worry about how sloppy or full of holes it is, just get a beginning, middle and end down on paper. Once you have that foundation you might very well go back and change every word on every page but before you can do any fine tuning, you have to first tell yourself the story. What are three or four books that influenced your writing, or had a profound affect on you? Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser –I think my love of Chicago history started with my first reading of this book. It made me fall in love with the city. Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters—totally original and filled with wisdom in ever monologue. Each time I read it, I discover something new. Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux—80 of the most powerful and brutally honest pages you’ll ever read. This slender book is one I treasure. Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson. This is such an amazing character-driven novel and when I first read it, I realized what was possible to do on the page.   Check out Rosen’s book below.
Further Afield

Learn all about Sabaa Tahir, author of An Ember in the Ashes

Sabaa Tahir wrote the popular new Young Adult novel, An Ember in the Ashes last year. On Word and Film, she shared some of her inspiration and background as a writer.
“I grew up feeling voiceless and powerless as a kid. I turned to books – fantasy books, in particular – to give me comfort. As I grew up I realized I could find that sense of power and voice if I simply started writing.”
Read more about Sabaa here and listen to her fantastic interview on Beaks and Geeks!  
Writing Tips

Writing Tips from Caroline Zancan, author of Local Girls

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We know readers tend to be writers too, so we feature writing tips from our authors. Who better to offer advice, insight, and inspiration than the authors you admire? They’ll answer several questions about their work, share their go-to techniques and more. Now, get writing!  What writing techniques have you found most important or memorable? The trick that probably has served me more than any other is to always stop and write down a promising idea or line when I think of it no matter what else I’m doing. If I’m on my way out the door or even falling asleep and something good pops into my head—some missing piece of information or crucial development in the story I’m working on, or perhaps an idea for a new story—I’ll stop and take the time to write it down even if it makes me late or means I’ll be tired in the morning. So many times in the past I’ve thought, Oh, I’ll remember that, or, Oh, I’ll sleep on it and write it down in the morning, but then when I return to it it’s gone. So now I always make a note of any idea, even if it’s just an indirect reference or a half-baked thought. So many projects that I’ve gone on to develop or see all the way through came from a scribble in a margin of a book or a text I sent myself at two in the morning. Is there something you do to get into a writing mood? Somewhere you go or something you do to get thinking? Reading great books always inspires me. There’s nothing like turning the last page of an incredibly satisfying story and just kind of letting the feeling it left you with soak in. Once I’m done processing that feeling, I’m almost always, like, I want to do that. I want to leave someone feeling that way. Even if the book is very different than my own work. What’s the best piece of advice you have received? At Bennington College, where I studied for my MFA, professors often encouraged us to focus not on publishing our work but on getting it as good as it could possibly be. To focus on what was on the page and not who was going to read it or in what format. At the time, I was frustrated by that. I thought, I didn’t come here to journal—I want to write for readers, but now I see the wisdom in that advice. Once something is published, it’s out there forever and your name will always be attached to it. I look back at stories I wrote in college, and even in my twenties, and I thank God no one is going to read them. There’s no rush to get published. And the reading public has no expiration date. Just write, and polish what you have written until it’s as good as it can be, and then worry about everything else. What clichĂ©s or bad habits would you tell aspiring writers to avoid? Do you still experience them yourself? I have a list of things I try to avoid, but clichĂ©s, verbs of utterance, and exclamation points are right up there. A few of each inevitably sneak into my work, especially in the first draft, but I do try to troll for them in the revisions that follow. I’ll give myself a few exclamation points for every hundred pages or so, but verbs of utterance I try to keep out altogether. As one professor at Bennington told me, “‘F*** you!’ he shouted angrily,” is redundant. It’s clear from what the speaker is saying that he’s angry. Let the words speak for themselves. If the line is really strong, “he said” should suffice. Do you ever base characters off people you know? Why or why not? I definitely pull individual characteristics—sayings, speech patterns, mannerisms, quirks—from people I know, but it’s rare that any given person is the perfect complex combination of factors for the story I want to tell. And there just aren’t that many people I know as well as I know my characters. To write convincing characters, you need to know things about them that aren’t even on the page. You need to be keyed into how they would react to a given situation, what motivates them in that context, and the gap between what they say about it and how they actually feel—even if they’re not aware of the disparity. You need to get inside their heads in a way I don’t think we often do with people in our own lives. We approach people we know from our own perspectives, not theirs. Of course, by borrowing an isolated characteristic from someone you know and endowing your character with it, there’s the danger that the person you borrowed it from thinking the entire character is based on her. It’s, like, yes, you both wear yellow nail polish, but, no, I don’t think you secretly hate your mother! Read more about Local Girls here.
Writing Tips

Writing Tips from Jude Deveraux, author of Ever After

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We know readers tend to be writers too, so we feature writing tips from our authors. Who better to offer advice, insight, and inspiration than the authors you admire? They’ll answer several questions about their work, share their go-to techniques and more. Now, get writing!  What writing techniques have you found most important or memorable? I write everything by hand, then type it all. I can’t think with a keyboard. I stop to make corrections, the cursor flies around, idiot things pop up. All of these break my concentration. With a pen, I just let my mind go. I see and hear the characters and record what’s there. How would you recommend creating and getting to know your characters? For every page that is published I have as many pages in outlines and charts about people, places, plot. I try to get photos of the major characters so I can look at them when I’m writing. I also use a lot of floorplans. I go to Savills UK website and find houses and use them. With everything I do beforehand, I’m thinking about the characters and the plot. After developing an idea, what is the first action you take when beginning to write? The first sentence is important to me so I work on that. Mainly, I want to set the tone with the first chapter, so I do a lot of pre-work on that. And no matter how much work I do beforehand, until I actually hear the characters talking, I don’t know what I have. Is there something you do to get into a writing mood? Somewhere you go or something you do to get thinking? I spend my life trying to get out of things other than writing. Errands, appointments, emails, calls, etc, make me crazy. In the last few years I have done two around-the-world cruises. I have four wonderful months of internet so bad it might as well not exist. I get to tell people I can’t do whatever because I’m on a ship docked outside Tahiti. It is glorious! I write and write, then write some more. On my last cruise I wrote 102,000 words and outlined my next novel — and I saw some great places. Heaven! Did you always want to write? How did you start your career as an author? I never in my life thought about being a writer. I thought they were people who lived on pink clouds, not real. But I had a story in my head that wouldn’t go away, so I thought maybe if I wrote it down it would stop pestering me. When it was done, I paid my next door neighbor’s daughter to type it and sent it to a publishing house that had pretty covers. They wrote back asking if they could send me a bunch of money and would I please write some more books. I haven’t stopped since then. What’s the best piece of advice you have received? After I turned in my second book, I spent three months waiting for my editor to read it. During that time I was eaten up with stories I wanted to write, but I thought I had to wait to get the okay to go ahead. I vowed to never again wait for a publishing person for anything. I go ahead and write at my pace and let them move at theirs. It’s a decision that has helped me stay sane. What clichés or bad habits would you tell aspiring writers to avoid? Do you still experience them yourself? Not to fall in love with your own writing. Over my many years in publishing, what I’ve seen kill more careers than anything else is ego. “How dare they do that to my work?!” That attitude has no place in publishing. In this business you need to have a thick skin and be ready to take criticism that would cripple most people. Describe your writing style in 5 words or less. Good stories. Do you ever base characters off people you know? Why or why not? Yes and no. Fiction characters are never as complex as real people. In real life, you might have a mild mannered friend and one day receive a call saying he/she killed someone. But you canNOT do that in a novel. You have to lead up to it, hint at it. Sometimes I see a character trait in a person and I blow that up to be one entire person. As for villains, I have relatives. ’Nuff said. Read about Jude Deveraux’s newest book, Ever After.