Tips For Writers

Write because you have something to say.

Write because you’ve always wanted to.

Write because you only just realized that you might die next week, or tomorrow, or five minutes from now, and you want to leave something behind for posterity.

Write because you have a secret fire burning inside of you and the only way that you can fan the flames is by sharing your thoughts with someone else.

Write because you’re bored and don’t have anything better to do.

Write for yourself.

Write for other someone else, or maybe everyone else.

Write because you love seeing your stats counter surge every time you post something. Write because nothing satisfies you quite so much as seeing others share what you’ve written. Write because you like the attention; there’s nothing wrong with liking the attention.

Write because it fills the emptiness in your heart or your soul or your pancreas or wherever your particular emptiness happens to be.

Write because nothing will ever fill that emptiness, and you want to find a way to connect with someone, anyone who might understand.

Write because your tenth grade English teacher told you that you had potential.

Write because your ex told you that your characters were dull and your dialogue stilted, as it’s a well-known fact that there’s nothing better in life than proving someone else wrong.

Write because you have a calling for it, you were born for it, because it’s the only thing you’ve ever wanted to do for your entire life.

Write because you only just decided yesterday that it might be neat to try to stringing a few pretty words together.

Write because even though your imagery might be clichéd and your metaphors weak and your reasoning best described as childish and unsound, you still have a noted talent fur cussing and it’s a scientifically-proven fact that a well-placed f bomb can make or break a paragraph.

Write a thousand words every day.

Write ten words every day, even if those words are nothing more than, “I hope you have a good at school, honey.”

Write one word every day. Today’s word is perigee; tomorrow’s will be sesquipedalian.

Write a book so strange and obscure that no major publisher will ever touch it.

Write something because you know that it will be commercially-viable.

Write serious fiction.

Write romance novels.

Write an epic fantasy series that’s actually a thinly-disguised takedown of your toxic workplace, starring your awful cubicle mate as vile R’hakhnae, the Insect Queen.

Write a review of the movie you saw last night.

Write a grocery list.

Write anything and everything, if writing is what you want to do. Don’t listen to people who want to peddle some kind of elite ideal of what it means to write; don’t buy into the idea that you can only refer to yourself as a writer if you’ve been published in the New Yorker or you have a stack of rejection letters a foot deep or you frequently stay up all night weeping softly into a glass of scotch because you can’t arrange exactly the right words in exactly the right order to say exactly whatever it is you want to stay. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you’re only a writer if you’ve spent a decade or more suffering for your art, starving in a garret in London or maybe Paris. Try to steer clear of the folks who will want to tell you that only one particular genre or style is real writing.

Write.

Just write.

In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say please write, because I promise you that there’s someone out there who’s dying to hear what you have to say, someone whose life might be changed by whatever sentiment you’re about to commit to paper or screen or cardboard-back-of-the-cereal-box. Write because you are the only person who has lived your particular life, and this has shaped your thoughts in such a way that you are the only one on this planet capable of expressing a thought in your own particular way.

Write because no other person who came before you or who will come after to you will ever, ever be able to do it in quite the same way that you can.

Write  because if you don’t tell that story, the one that’s been slowly burning inside of you for the past year, the one that sits like a lump in your throat that never goes away or plays incessantly in the back of your head like a bad song with a good hook, will never be told if you don’t tell it.

Write because you’re the only one who can do this and we’re all counting on you.

Write because.

Tags: literary pretentions, tips, writers, writing