Sir Michael Palin

Writing is one of the best jobs in the world and one of the easiest to resist. Why should something so rewarding be so difficult to get down to?

Here are my top tips:

1. Just get started. Don’t be frightened by a blank sheet of paper or an empty screen. The moment you begin to put words together – any words – your journey’s begun.
2. Never be frightened to start again. Crossing out is not a weakness, just an acknowledgement that you can do even better.
3. Good writing is not a tap you can turn on or off. Some days it happens. Some days it doesn’t. Don’t worry about it. Wait for next morning.
4. Don’t try and be clever. Be yourself when you write. Find your own voice, not someone else’s.
5. When you think you’ve finished, the hard work has just begun. A good editor can be like a fairy godmother.
6. Writing is about quality not quantity. Cutting might hurt, but it’s almost always an improvement.
7. The Paris Review series ‘Writers At Work’ is a fascinating series of glimpses into how the best writers confront all these sorts of problems.

Esther Freud

1. Decide on a start, and a stop time, and even if it’s going well, stick to it. You’ll be hungry to get to your desk the next day.
2. Include two elements in your book. Something you don’t know enough about – enjoy the challenge; and something about which you know a lot – to give yourself a break.
3. Don’t research too much. You are the reader as well as the writer of your book. It can be intriguing to find out what’s going to happen.

Paul Theroux

1. Writing my first draft in long-hand has served me well.
2. Regarding every chapter of a novel as a short story, as well as a continuation, has been my aim.
3. Most of ‘writing’ is being at a desk, not writing, but thinking hard, doodling – the act of writing is much of the time sitting.

Justin Marozzi 

1. Make the time to write. It sounds obvious, it is obvious, but it’s the most important thing. You’ll never write anything unless you give yourself the time to do it. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have said to me over the years they were going to write a book and never did. They never made the time.
2. Get into a routine. Why do you think a dog is a man’s best friend? It is because we are both craven slaves to routine. Sit in the same seat in the library, start at the same time in the morning, have a walk in the afternoon, preferably with a slavishly adoring dog, drink wine in the evening, whatever it is. Writing a book is a long haul. I regard it as a war of attrition. Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. You only get there by refusing to give in. Stick with it and take comfort from the routine – and the progress it helps you make. I always start the writing day by reviewing the work of yesterday and see if it’s any good or is so lousy it needs a complete rewrite.
3. A new rule I have found works wonders in our Age of Distraction. No emails, Internet, social media, WhatsApp or ANYTHING DISTRACTING before lunch.

You’re writing a book, so write the damn thing!

Barnaby Rogerson

I write because writers are my heroes and I want to join this group who listen so carefully – both to what is being said and to what cannot be spoken about, manage to winnow out all the boring bits, and both capture this passing world and through stories help point it to a better direction.

I sell books, I help make them, I buy them, I publicize them, I review them and I even write them – but the most satisfying thing I ever do with them is read them. I have never met a writer whom I admire who is not an enchanted reader. If I would give any advice to a young writer wanting to establish a good first impression with a publisher, it would be to also reveal yourself as a passionate reader. Conversely I am discouraged if I meet a writer who wants an audience but is not prepared to be one.

I have noticed that there are very real personal problems with being a writer. So often the desire to write is connected with their failure in the real world. Books can often feel like the act of an unhappy loner trying to assert themselves. So historians can reveal themselves as frustrated monarchs, novelists create the love and adventure story that never quite happened to them, diarists remake the world with themselves at the centre, biographers often want to gut an individual of their mysterious charisma. Be careful of your real life, treasure your family, try and make friendships independent of use to your glittering literary career, learn to do something immediately useful with your hands other than writing, like cooking or making useful things like gardens, children or bookshelves.

As the Lord Apollo taught us: as a child learn manners, as a youth control your passion, be just in middle age, in old age give good advice, and then die without regret.

Dame Marina Warner

1. Carry a pencil, notebook – and a pencil sharpener! – with you and make notes of scraps of conversation, sounds, scents and thoughts that strike you. A camera can act as a very useful recorder, too, but is limited to the visual and is not verbal.
2. If possible go and see places, buildings, objects that have shaped the setting and surroundings in the story you’re writing – scale, position, texture, all the properties of things can be very different in reality (this applies to settings of fantastic literature, too – Dante’s Hell is mapped out in every detail so richly that you could build it).
3. Read… and read… and read… widely and deeply in our forebears. Listen to their word music, get the rhythms in your muscle memory and the hum of the language in your ear (translations can give us this, too).

Nigel Cawthorne

I am with Dr Johnson, who said: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.’

1. Always get the money first. Never write a word until you see their cash. Publishers always like what you have written when you already have their dosh.
2. Get a big mortgage, you never get writer’s block.
3. Get a chair with arms. It makes it harder to flee from the keyboard.

Steven Nightingale

1. Work so that love and learning come to be words that mean the same thing.
2. See how everything that is, is enveloped in what it means.
3. Remember that there is only one thing in all the world that will not be taken away from you: what you have given away.

Nigel Hinton

I remember what I like in other people’s storytelling, especially the books I read when I was growing up, although films made a big impact on me, too. I remember the excitement of the sudden unexpected plot revelation, the cliff-hanger chapter endings, the suspense created, the laughter evoked and the way I was made to be moved by an event. I want – really want – to do that to the reader. I think creativity starts with intensity of intention.

It’s a game of ‘let’s pretend’ – let’s pretend and let’s see intensely. It’s about living it in your mind. Rather like the ‘zone’ sportsmen talk about, I think concentrating to the point of forgetting all else takes you to a place where things happen beyond the vague idea you start with. When that detail of description – the passing shadow of a bird, say, or the way someone tugs a stray strand on a fabric plaster on their finger – gives a scene something unexpected and memorable. The more real it is in your head, the more real it will be in the reader’s one – even to the point that if you have seen the scene intensely enough, what you haven’t put down in words will be mysteriously carried by the words you have put down.

I read out loud what I have written, especially to hear the rhythm of the sentences. I want simplicity and clarity and directness.

Cut, cut, cut. Often the bits you thought were great while you were writing them are the phoney bits.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith

To paraphrase the famous quotation attributed to Somerset Maugham (‘There are three rules for the writing of a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are’): There are three thousand rules for writing a book. Unfortunately, if you try to learn them you’ll never get down to writing it.

That said, plenty of creative writing courses claim to be able to teach you those rules. I don’t; but my own top three might be as follows:

Start each writing session with a blank mind. I don’t mean an empty head: you obviously have to have the info there, or some idea of where the plot or characters might take you. But some higher stratum of the mind must be utterly free – of social media, shopping lists, spouses, kids, lovers. You don’t need to be in an ivory tower. But you must have a sanctum to retreat to, a sort of virtual panic room, even if it’s a favourite chair in a corner. Once in it, you can free that higher layer, as you might do when meditating. Then the inspiration can drip in, if it’s ever going to; whether from inside or outside I don’t know.

Yes, writing is 90 per cent perspiration and only 10 per cent inspiration, as they say. But the magic, if there is any, will be in that 10 per cent.

Pace is crucial. Unless you are compiling a dictionary or writing on the genomes of turnips, you have to keep your readers on their mental toes. Lull them for a bit, by all means, but always wake them up. Writing is performance, conjuring – both hocus-pocus, and the conjuring, in the old shamanic sense, of spirits. It is oratory on paper: you must hear in your head how it sounds. Better still, read it out loud. You are the direct descendant of the fireside storyteller in the cave, and you must capture your audience, heart, mind, soul and guts. And if you can make turnips captivating too… what more could you want?

Read lots. Not just what is selling now, but the time-proof writing going back through Golding and Conrad and Goethe to Homer, to Gilgamesh. See yourself as the new-honed cutting edge of an immensely long worldwide tradition, not as a chaser after trends that will be blunted in a season or two. Homer and Conrad got it right: that’s why their work has lasted.

Don’t do it for publishers – they live off trends, and as often as not are enemies of talent. Don’t do it for money: Samuel Johnson was right when he said, ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’ – with a few lucky exceptions, writers are born blockheads. No: do it for posterity (‘But what,’ you might ask with Lytton Strachey, ‘has posterity done for me?’).

Jane Johnson 

1. Because I still work four days a week, I need to be very focused on the three days I have to myself. It’s so easy to get distracted away from my task down social media’s infinite rabbit holes, so I have to physically take myself away from an internet signal. What I like to do is to find a quiet place away from home – on a day of poor weather, a corner table in a café; on a good day on a rock down by the sea – and write longhand in a notebook. I find – probably because I am a terrible typist who spends as much time correcting her typing errors as creating – that writing by hand frees my mind and stops me worrying at sentence structures and imperfect wording. I can write faster and looser in a notebook and know that I can tighten and hone the text when I type it into the laptop.
2. Finding time to write is difficult for most of us: there are so many pressing issues and people requiring our time; and for those of us still working, free time is always a rarity. Because I only ever have a long weekend in which to write, I have to find a quick route into the book again after days away from it (my job requires long hours of email and editing other writers’ work – it’s impossible to switch easily between my editorial head and my creative head, so I cannot write during my working week). Two tips I find help are firstly, leaving my handwritten draft to type up at the weekend, which eases me back into the story; and secondly, a tip given to me by science fiction maestro Robert Silverberg, whose work I used to publish, I always leave a writing stint mid-scene, and sometimes even mid-sentence, so I am never faced by a standing start when I come back to the book.
3. Reading. Reading, reading, reading. When I’m writing, I can find reading almost anything becomes relevant to what I am writing – it could just be a sentence structure that strikes me, or the use of voice; a turn of phrase, or an entire narrative shape – even if I’m reading non-fiction. You learn so much from other writers. We all face similar problems in wrangling the elusive thoughts in our heads out into hard and fast words on a page; seeing how other people do it is always enlightening. What I will not do, though, is read anything that is too close to what I’m writing. It’s not a matter of plagiarism or even influence, but weird unconscious echoes that creep in, ways of approaching the subject – and with historical fiction, ways of interpreting the past. You need your angles and approaches to be your own: but other than that very specific corner of the book world, I regard everything else as a wonderful, nourishing fertilizer for the ideas burgeoning in my brain.

Pico Iyer

The important thing for any writer is to be as focused and precise as possible and to find what you can see in any subject that few others could – and to capture that in words that no more high-tech medium could evoke more powerfully. Your voice, in other words, is nothing more – and nothing less – than the special set of eyes you have, born of passion and experience and upbringing, that the rest of the world might envy.

The longer I’ve been doing this – and I’ve been a full-time, freelance writer for almost thirty-four years now – the more I find that writing is the best way I know to make a life and one of the worst ways to make a living. By which I mean that writing has taught me how to process experience, to see past my own thoughts, to try to understand others and to look for the larger picture in everything around me; it’s enriched my life immeasurably and given every day an intimacy and sense of space it would never have had otherwise. When it comes to paying the bills, however, it more and more resembles a very expensive hobby.

All the joy and adventure of writing comes in the process of being at your desk; publication is the sales tax we have to pay for the privilege of sitting still and taking off into the unknown. I’ve never found any experience so transporting, so surprising, so endlessly opulent as writing – even when it forces you to look into the dark places in the world (or the self) that you’d much rather overlook or look past. When it goes out into the world, though, you find yourself watching your fourteen-year-old daughter take off on a blind date with a distractible stranger, and even the happy faces and compliments you may receive will seldom be a source of comfort or delight.

Jason Webster

1. In order to write you need to know what you believe, what you know, and what you are. The only way to know these things, though, may be through writing.
2. Writing that feels like writing isn’t writing.
3. Get out of your own way.

Simon Singh

1. No such thing as ‘writer’s block’ (is that where the apostrophe goes?). Just write any old rubbish, push ahead and rewrite ‘blockages’ when you revise the entire draft.
2. Ask for feedback from multiple readers with differing (and trusted) perspectives (agent, partner, expert, target reader). The skill is collating and acting on feedback.
3. You’re not making a movie or producing a play, so there is no cost, except your time. And you can write in your spare time, so you don’t need to quit your job or take any major risk. So, if you’re starting out, there is not much to lose, and in the worst case scenarios (eg, you don’t finish the book, or nobody wants to read it) then, at the very least, you should have stretched your brain in new and interesting ways.

Mark Salzman

Before I reveal my tip, I feel I should put it into context: I am an oddball. I didn’t start writing because I wanted to become a writer, or because I loved books, or because I had stories inside me that simply had to be told. I started writing because telling stories had always come easily to me, and I loved doing it, so I assumed that writing stories would come easily to me and I would love doing that, too. I thought that if writing became my job, I would never hate my work. Who wouldn’t want to build a career around an activity he or she enjoys? My father spent his life working at a job he hated, and I saw what it did to him, so I had reason to fear that outcome.

I soon discovered that telling stories and writing them down require different skill sets, and alas, writing did not come easily to me. I built a career around it anyway and ended up hating it for a while, but that’s a long story and this isn’t the place for it. All you need to know is: the approach to writing that I follow now, and that I will reduce to a single tip in a moment, is not designed to motivate anyone to work harder or aim higher or be more productive. If better results and higher output are what you want, I recommend The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, a writer and ex-Marine who all but screams at you through the pages of his book that writing is war, and if you aren’t prepared to be miserable while doing it then you should be doing something else. I know people who swear by his approach, so keep it in mind.

But if you’re an oddball like me and are hoping that the very act of writing itself – rather than its products, whatever they might be – will help make life seem worth living, then hail fellow well met, and may this tip ease your journey.

My tip: give acceptance a chance.

There it is – that’s all I’ve learned since turning pro in 1985. If art is indeed war, then save yourself a lot of time and trouble and raise the white flag now. You were raised to believe – we all were – that your destiny is in your hands. It is up to you to decide whether to write a novel or story or poem, and it is up to you to decide how hard to work at it and how good to make it. No excuses! If you succeed, credit goes to you; if you fail, you can only blame yourself. This is a way of looking at art and life that is clearly designed to act as a stimulant, and many people claim that it works. But at what cost? And what if it is an illusion to begin with? What if creativity, aspiration, and even determination are as determined by circumstance as eye colour, fast-to-slow-twitch muscle fibre ratio, and the ability to digest lactose? That would mean that the relentless self-scrutiny and self-flagellation we do as artists is gratuitous, and ultimately meaningless. Without all of that destiny-shaping business hanging over your head, what would writing be like for you? What would you write? Would you write at all, or take up something else?

Let me approach this from another angle. I’m a mediocre writer, and I’m pretty sure you are, too. We’re all mediocre writers. (Yes, there are a few real geniuses out there, but they are anomalies, we needn’t concern ourselves with them). For us, the main enemy of writing isn’t lack of talent or self-discipline or access to MFA programmes – it’s discouragement. We feed this enemy with the stories we tell ourselves about how we should be writing better, or more often, or with more enthusiasm or originality or seriousness than we are right now. Or how underappreciated we are, or how stupid or corrupt the publishing industry is, or how unfair life is that we can’t devote ourselves full-time to writing yet, etc. We make ourselves sick with all of this blaming and worrying and comparing and browbeating, and who has energy left to write after going fifteen rounds every day with Reality, which doesn’t give a shit about us and our dreams? Stop feeding the enemy. Give yourself a target you can’t miss, drop the idea of aiming at it, and instead, put all of your attention into what it feels like to release your arrow, or your words, or whatever it is that is coming out of you.

One more angle. Have you been trying to write a story for months, or years, but you’re stuck and now it is painful to even think about sitting down and opening that notebook or laptop? Do you feel like a failure because you haven’t gotten published yet, or because your second (or third, or fourth) novel was a flop? If so, have a look at this, my favourite quote of all time, from Iris Murdoch:

‘Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting, agonising preoccupation with self.’

If writing hurts, consider the possibility that this is not a writing problem at all. Could it be that you’re trying to prove something to yourself or the world, life is not cooperating, and you’re upset about it in a way that will do no good at all? You’ve tried everything positive you can think of and none of it has worked, so now you’re punishing yourself with the negative stuff. Is this really the role you want writing to play in your life? Would you want your children to do this to themselves when they grow up? Is this what art is for?

Here’s my bottom-line message: when practised in a spirit of acceptance and release, writing allows us to explore conflict (among other things) without the writing becoming an unhealthy source of conflict in itself. It becomes a way of rehearsing trust rather than dissatisfaction. In that sense, it qualifies as an act of faith. It’s not hard to write this way, but it is hard to give yourself permission to do so, because it requires that you be willing to view literary success as a by-product, not as something that can be expected or demanded from your work. Good luck to you, fellow writer!

Lisa Alther

1. When I was starting out, I asked an older author for career advice. He said the most important thing is to keep your overhead low. I’ve come to recognize the wisdom of this tip: the lower your expenses, the less time you have to spend at outside jobs, or at writing for pay things you aren’t interested in – and the more time and energy you have for your own work.
2. Don’t write hoping for money or fame because most writers receive very little of either. Write instead for the enjoyment of the writing process, for the discovery of truths about yourself and your world, and for the pleasure of watching yourself improve at your craft.
3. Experiment with the conditions under which you write to find out which work best for you and your situation. Some writers write so many hours per day, or turn out so many words per day. Others (such as I) prefer to sacrifice vacations in order to only write, sleep, and eat for a week or two at a time. I write with a pencil on a legal pad. Others prefer a computer. There is no silver bullet, only what is most possible and productive for each writer.
4. Finally, don’t get discouraged by rejection. Almost every writer I know experienced numerous rejections before getting published, as well as after publication. I wrote for fourteen years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published. But if you’re writing for the rewards of the writing process itself, you can endure these rejections for as long as you have to. It also helps to be a masochist!

Hugh Thomson

1. Know yourself and be totally ruthless about writing when you actually have a fit of inspiration, which in my case is rare. Gabriel García Márquez was taking his entire family on holiday to the coast in Mexico when he had the idea that became One Hundred Years of Solitude. He turned round halfway and drove them all back home and refused to go anywhere till he had started the book…

I can’t claim anything quite as dramatic but do cancel all other engagements or displacement activities if you feel the muse has come calling.

2. Slow and steady is better than short bursts. Graham Greene claimed just to write 500 words every day, which he reviewed the next morning before repeating the process. But he did it every day. Having a couple of days and nights of intense work and then being exhausted for a week is less productive.
3. For reportage and travel writing, get it down as fresh as you can while on the move, even if that means recording as you go. No you won’t remember it that evening back in the hotel. Or at least you will only remember the generic, not the particular.

Robert Twigger

1. Go where the fun and energy is in your writing.
2. Everything that keeps you writing is good, everything that stops you is bad.
3. Always write from the position of a surfeit of material. If you feel the cupboard is bare, look at the material from a slightly different angle. You may only need a twenty-degree shift in viewpoint. You may want to write a ‘serious’ book about the history of cheese but maybe you have not enough good material. So change to a ‘personal’ book which includes all your own cheese-eating experiences etc. Another great way to increase material is to GET CLOSER. So your story of being lost in Waitrose aged six may seem a bit thin – but if you GET CLOSER you will have far more material.

Jason Elliot

I can’t remember who it was… but in that book called something like The Little Book of Author’s Quotes, the one I always remember (apart from that scathing comment from Doris Lessing about publishers) was whoever said: ‘Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank piece of paper until the drops of blood begin to form on your forehead…’

So the humane thing, really, is to advise others not to write, if they can possibly avoid doing so.

But if that doesn’t work:

Distinguish, firstly, between wanting and wishing. Many people want to write; fewer wish it deeply enough to overcome the obstacles that will rise up in every direction once the decision is made. These are both practical as well as psychological, and greater than you might think.

It is tempting to believe that you can improve your writing by attending courses, seminars, or ‘practising’ journalism. But your writing comes from your life; if you want to improve your writing, improve your life. Not materially, but qualitatively.

Whether you like it or not, you have a particular voice, which represents a set of unique (and possibly painful) limitations. Detach from it, and your writing will be liberated.