Writing Masterclass from the Legends

How and Where They Find Their Words by Ogilvy, Leonard, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Orwell, Gaiman, Atwood, Morrison, Fitzgerald, Zinsser, King, Bradbury, Poe, Miller, Steinbeck.

You can listen instead of reading to get the gist…

Writers share their very best practices for writing well.

David Ogilvy

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning - and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.9. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

Elmore Leonard

1. Do not open with weather. Atmosphere alone bores readers. Start with people. Weather only matters through character reaction.

2. Skip prologues. They are backstory in disguise. Fold needed history into the story, not before it.

3. Use “said” for dialogue. Fancy dialogue verbs distract. “Said” disappears and lets characters own their words.

4. Never modify “said” with adverbs. Adverbs expose the writer. They break rhythm and weaken sharp dialogue.

5. Limit exclamation points. Use almost none. Too many signal insecurity unless you truly know what you are doing.

6. Avoid “suddenly” and clichés. They replace control with noise. Strong writing makes action felt without warning labels.

7. Use dialect sparingly. Phonetic spelling overwhelms fast. Suggest accent with rhythm, not apostrophes.

8. Minimize character description. Let voice and behavior reveal people. Readers imagine better than you describe.

9. Keep setting descriptions light. Detail should serve motion. Do not stop the story to admire scenery.

10. Cut what readers skip. Trim thick prose, inner monologues, and filler. Dialogue almost never gets skipped.

Kurt Vonnegut

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Ernest Hemingway

1. Write one true sentence. Start simple. One honest sentence breaks the block. Truth creates momentum. Decoration can come later or be cut.

2. Stop while you still know what comes next.End each session mid-flow. Leave fuel in the tank so tomorrow starts easy.

3. Do not think about the story off - hours.Let your subconscious work. Worry kills energy. Rest, live, read, then return fresh.

4. Restart by rereading everything. Read from the start. Edit lightly. It keeps tone, voice, and continuity tight.

5. Make the emotion happen. Show the action that caused the feeling. If done right, readers feel it without explanation.

6. Draft in pencil. Pencil keeps writing flexible. It gives more chances to improve before the words harden.

7. Be brief. Short writing lasts. Clear prose follows laws like physics. Cut what does not earn its place.

George Orwell

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Neil Gaiman

1. Write.

2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7. Laugh at your own jokes.

8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like.

Margaret Atwood

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes, and take two. Pens can leak.

2. Take something to write on. Paper is good.

3. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.

4. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

5. Hold the reader’s attention. This is likely to work best if you can hold your own.

6. You most likely need a thesaurus, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling on yourself. You choose to write.

7. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business.

8. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

Toni Morrison

1. Write at your best time. Work when your mind is sharp. For Morrison, early mornings worked best. Know your peak hours and protect them.

2. Know when revising becomes fretting. Editing helps. Obsessing hurts. If it fails after honest revision, scrap it and move on.

3. Choose editors carefully. A good editor challenges you. Praise is useless. The wrong editor is worse than none.

4. Write for characters, not readers. Let characters judge the truth of the work. Distance yourself and read like a tough, honest reader.

5. Stay in control of characters. Do not steal lives. Do not let characters run the book. You decide, not them.

6. Keep plot simple, like melody. Strong plots are clear early. Power comes from variation and echo, not clever twists.

7. Practice hard, restrain more. Style looks effortless only after discipline. Like jazz, mastery comes from repetition and knowing when to hold back.

8. Be original within tradition. Write work that sounds only like you, while still belonging to literary and cultural tradition.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1. Take notes constantly.Write down thoughts right away. Sort them. Ideas fade fast. Notes capture life before memory smooths it out.

2. Outline deeply before writing. Build a big, messy plan first. Find the climax. Work backward and forward. Structure saves time later.

3. Keep drafts private. Do not explain unfinished work. Talking about it drains energy and ownership before the story is fully formed.

4. Create individuals, not stereotypes. Start with real people you know. Types emerge naturally. Begin with types and you get cardboard, not characters.

5. Use familiar words. Simple words work best. Use rare words only when necessary for precision, rhythm, or avoiding dull repetition.

6. Let verbs do the work. Strong verbs create motion. They carry meaning and energy. Adjectives should support, not slow, the sentence.

7. Edit without mercy. Detach emotionally. Cut scenes, ideas, even favorite characters if they weaken the whole. Professionals know when to kill darlings.

William Zinsser

1. Choose words with care. Respect language. Hunt for precise words. Strong writing comes from curiosity about meaning and nuance.

2. Avoid jargon and big words. Clear thinking leads to clear writing. Muddy ideas create muddy sentences.

3. Accept that writing is hard. Good sentences take work. Difficulty means you are doing it right.

4. Write in the first person. Writing is personal. First person keeps the human connection alive.

5. Be yourself to find your style. Trust your voice. Your confidence attracts readers more than polish.

6. You are the audience. Write to please yourself first. The right readers will follow.

7. Learn by reading others. Study great writers and peers. Imitation teaches craft faster than theory.

8. Use a thesaurus wisely. It expands choices. Pair it with a dictionary for accuracy.

9. Read your work aloud. Listen for rhythm and sound. Prose should have music.

10. Do not aim to say everything. Cover one clear angle well. Stop before the writing gets bloated.

Stephen King

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend.”

4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.”

5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.”

6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

7. Read, read, read. ”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

9. Turn off the TV. “TV - while working out or anywhere else really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book, even a long one, should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

11. There are two secrets to success. “I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married.”

12. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”

13. Eliminate distraction. “There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem.”

15. Dig. “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre - existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.”

16. Take a break. “You’ll find reading your book over after a six - week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience.”

17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “(kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “Remember that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it.”

19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

20. Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”

Ray Bradbury

1. Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”

2. You may love ’em, but you can’t be ’em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as he imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.

3. Examine “quality” short stories. He suggests Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, and the lesser-known Nigel Kneale and John Collier. Anything in the New Yorker today doesn’t make his cut, since he finds that their stories have “no metaphor.”

4. Stuff your head. To accumulate the intellectual building blocks of these metaphors, he suggests a course of bedtime reading: one short story, one poem (but Pope, Shakespeare, and Frost, not modern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diversity of fields, including archaeology, zoology, biology, philosophy, politics, and literature. “At the end of a thousand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”

5. Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writerly ambitions? He suggests calling them up to “fire them” without delay.

6. Live in the library. Don’t live in your “goddamn computers.” He may not have gone to college, but his insatiable reading habits allowed him to “graduate from the library” at age 28.

7. Fall in love with movies. Preferably old ones.

8. Write with joy. In his mind, “writing is not a serious business.” If a story starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that doesn’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audience.

9. Don’t plan on making money. He and his wife, who “took a vow of poverty” to marry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still never got around to picking up a license).

10. List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the former, and “kill” the latter - also by writing about them. Do the same with your fears.

11. Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He recommends “word association” to break down any creative blockages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”

12. Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” Or, failing that, you’re looking for someone to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like people say.”

Edgar Allan Poe

1. Know the ending first. Plan the final moment before writing. Keep it in view so every part feels inevitable and meaningful.

2. Keep it short enough for one sitting. Unity matters. Long breaks weaken impact. Short works hold the reader inside one uninterrupted spell.

3. Decide the effect in advance. Choose the emotion you want to leave behind. Design every choice to produce that single impression.

4. Choose and sustain a tone. Pick a mood early. Reinforce it with repetition. A refrain or image keeps the feeling alive throughout.

5. Define theme through characters. Start with ideas, then choose characters to embody them. People become voices for the theme.

6. Build toward a clear climax. Design the peak first. Let it shape rhythm, structure, and pacing of everything before it.

7. Choose setting last, on purpose. Place characters only after knowing why they are there. Setting should serve the effect, not distract.

Henry Miller

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”

3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can’t create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

John Steinbeck

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person–a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it - bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue - say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

TL;DR by John Weiss

Great post. If we strip away the duplicate advice from all these fine writers, here are ten takeaways:

1. Write. One word after another. Finish what you start.

2. Be clear and simple. Short words. Short sentences. No jargon.

3. Cut ruthlessly. Kill clichés, adverbs, filler, and anything readers skip.

4. Start close to the action. Skip prologues, weather, and throat-clearing.

5. Make every sentence work. Reveal character or advance the story.

6. Give characters desire and trouble. Wanting + conflict = story.

7. Write for one true reader—often yourself. Not the crowd.

8. Revise with distance. Read aloud. Put it away. Seek honest feedback.

9. Read constantly. Great writing grows from great reading.

10. Protect the joy and discipline. Show up daily. Trust your voice.

There you are. A great way to practice, if you are a new and aspiring writer, would be to use this page for “Copy Work“:

Thoughts?