A question we like to ask the Pulitzer Prize winners, #1 New York Times bestselling authors, brilliant novelists, talented journalists, and expert communicators we’re fortunate enough to interview here at Writing Routines is: any advice for aspiring writers? With the overwhelming amount of advice out there, knowing whose advice to listen to can be a challenge. Let’s take it from some of the best writers on the planet. Here are 15 bestselling authors with their best advice to aspiring writers.
“The more comfortable you are concentrating intensely for long periods of time the more successful and productive you’ll be as a writer.
An important point about deep work that is often overlooked is that it’s a skill that must be trained. Many aspiring writers overlook this reality and find their first forays into the written word frustrating and unproductive. My advice is always to start with training your cognitive fitness before diving into your first big writing project just like you’d train your cardiovascular fitness before trying to run a marathon. In other words, National Novel Writing Month would be a lot more successful if it was preceded by National Don’t Use Social Media Month.”
— Cal Newport, author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Deep Work
“Shawn [Coyne] said something a few weeks ago on the [Story Grid] Podcast that has stuck in my head. He said, “People think they’re ready to be published, but not to be edited.”
What he means is, there are all these writers out pitching their manuscripts to agents and publishers and getting turned down, and they keep blaming the system or the people or whatever, when the truth is, they need to get better at their craft.
If you’re an aspiring writer reading this, you aren’t good enough yet. You need to keep getting better. Even if you have several New York Times Bestsellers under your belt, you still need to get better.
Always push yourself to get better at your craft.”
— Tim Grahl, has launched multiple New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestsellers for his clients, and author of Your First 1000 Copies, a hit #1 in all of its categories.
“That’s a trap aspiring authors often fall into. They want to write what they want to write, which is fine, but if you want to be read, and especially if you want to be paid, you need to write what an audience wants to read.
So if you find yourself complaining that no one ever reads what you write, or no one will pay you to write, stop thinking they’re the problem. You are the problem. Change your approach. Change your perspective. Serve your audience first and foremost. Work hard to do that, and with time and effort you’ll find that, almost without knowing when it happened, that you enjoy writing what your audience wants to read.
And that’s a very cool place to be.”
— Jeff Haden, Inc.com’s most popular columnist, one of LinkedIn’s most widely-followed Influencers, and the author of The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win.
“Most authors never learn marketing. And they don’t have what I believe to be the 3 keys to good non-fiction writing:
1. You must be a good communicator
2. You must know your subject matter really, really well (head knowledge)
3. You must have deep emotional conviction about your subject matter (heart knowledge)
You combine these 3 things and that makes for good writing. Without the emotional side, the writing feels academic and not compelling. With only the emotion, it feels purely opinionated. But when you can write in an emotional and persuasive way, and then back up what you’re saying with credible sources, then it’s very believable and convincing.”
— Benjamin Hardy, the #1 writer on Medium and author of Willpower Doesn’t Work
“JUST START WRITING, THEN KEEP WRITING. That’s the only advice any aspiring author needs. Ignore the unsure voices in your head, the negative voices of naysayers, the 10-step plans from magazines, and even the advice of “experts.” They were all exactly where you are now…and the reason they succeeded is that they started writing and kept writing. Success isn’t guaranteed, or course. But the first step toward success is always—simply—to start writing.”
— Asha Dornfest, the creator of Parent Hacks, a place for parenting tips, workarounds, and bits of wisdom. She’s also the author of Parent Hacks and Minimalist Parenting
“Here’s the trap: Calling yourself a writer.
I am thirty-eight years old. I have been writing for thirty years. I have been calling myself a writer for two years. Why? Because I don’t think writing should ever be about “being a writer.” It should be about creativity, passion for storytelling, clarifying thoughts, spreading a message, and expressing yourself.
Do it because you love it. I did it because I loved it. And love was what powered me.
I think calling yourself a writer before you feel compelled to write full-time is like a giant invisible cinder block on your shoulders. What do writers do? They write. They wake up and write and write and write and write. They wrote yesterday, they’re writing today, they’re writing tomorrow. Do you do that? I doubt it. Not many people do! So why pressure yourself by telling everyone you do?”
— Neil Parischa, the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Awesome, The Happiness Equation, and three other books. His books have sold over a million copies worldwide. Neil also has one of the most popular TED Talks of all time with “The 3 A’s of Awesome.”
“I would tell my younger self: Be patient. Get ready to suffer, and if you get lucky, maybe something will work out. But there’s no guarantee. You have to love what you do because if the material things don’t work out in the world of writing, you still have to love the writing process itself, no matter how challenging and even miserable it might be.”
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, winner f the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, and the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction
“The biggest mistake I see aspiring authors make is trying to sound like authors, instead of trying to sound like themselves. There are a lot of reasons this happens: inexperience, insecurity, but the main reason I’ve seen is that these aspiring authors don’t yet know what it is they have to say to the world because they don’t yet know what they think about any of it. That isn’t to say they haven’t lived life, but they certainly haven’t sit with their experiences long enough to know what they meant. Authors who have done that don’t sound like anyone other than themselves. That is the goal. Everything else—structure, grammar, character construction—you can learn.”
— Nils Parker, editor, ghostwriter and story consultant for creatives of all stripes. The books he’s edited and ghostwritten have more than 4 million copies in print. As an editor, Nils has been behind multiple New York Times & Wall Street Journal bestsellers.
“Recognize that success comes in layers. There will be moments when you think, “This is it—the big break!” and you’ll realize that you’ve really only rolled up to a new starting line. You. Must. Be. Committed. To. The. Craft. If you are writing for the ancillary benefits, or to be called a—writer, or just to point to a book with your name on it, then seriously re-consider. There are a ton of easier ways to get your name on something. However, if you are truly committed to the craft, you’ll discover deep passion, meaning, and long-term purpose through going clickety-clack on the keys, and you’ll change a lot of lives in the process. Mostly, your own.”
— Todd Henry, author of The Accidental Creative, Die Empty, Louder Than Words and Herding Tigers and is the creator and host of The Accidental Creative Podcast.
“I think aspiring writers try too hard to write like other people, perhaps their idols. You have to find your own voice, create your own clever phrases. Readers can see right through a fraud.”
— Kate Winkler Dawson, author of Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City. She’s also a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and a seasoned documentary producer, news writer, and TV news producer.
“Most important for a writer to read widely, enthusiastically. Writing is a consequence of reading & writing well is a consequence of reading well.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, author who has published over 70 books, including bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde
“Dedicate yourself to keeping a journal. When I look into my own journals, what fascinates me most about what was going on in my life 30 years ago are the things that we would consider the most mundane. What was I reading, who was I talking to, what were the main subjects of conversation.
Where you’re living, what’s on your desk, who do you love, even what you had for breakfast, it doesn’t matter. The banalities actually begin to shine after many years have passed. You don’t have to write in it every day. Once a week would be fine. 500 words a week doesn’t sound much, but it really mounts up. That’s 25,000 words a year.
The terrible thing about life is that most of it is forgotten. A lot of it is rich. And a lot of that richness can be retained for future use by an occasional excursion into a notebook.”
— Ian McEwan, author of more than 20 books, including his novel Atonement, which received the WH Smith Literary Award, National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award, and the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction
“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.”
— Neil Gaiman, award-winning author of the comic book series The Sandman and novels including Coraline and The Graveyard Book
“There are two types of writers, Schopenhauer once observed, those who write because they have something they have to say and those who write for the sake of writing.
If you’re young and you think you want to be a writer, chances are you are already in the second camp. And all the advice you’ll get from other people about writing only compounds this terrible impulse.
Write all the time, they’ll tell you. Write for your college newspaper. Get an MFA. Go to writer’s groups. Send query letters to agents.
What do they never say? Go do interesting things.
I was lucky enough to actually get this advice. Combine this with the fact that I was too self-conscious to tell people that I wanted to be a writer, I became one in secret.”
— Ryan Holiday, bestselling author of The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, Perennial Seller, and Conspiracy
“Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.”
― Cheryl Strayed, author of the number #1 New York Times bestseller Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things
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