Advice For New Writers

This is the best advice for new writers I've read:

Believe in yourself, because nobody else will, at least not in the beginning. Not at the level necessary to keep you going through rejections, bad advice, job loss, illness, grief and everything else life lobs at us. There is something about you as an individual that nobody else has. It takes work to articulate this, to show it off and to make it interesting to others. The world needs new voices, so believe in that if this is all you can do in the beginning. Keep music, quotes, movies, pictures, anything you can around you to remind you what you are working towards.

Here's some more:

 Read, absorb what you read, read more, question what you read. Read for fun, decide what pulls you in and try to make your reader’s experience with your work the same.

Read poetry and study the images, word choices, and any other aspects of the work that grab you. Poets are masters of making huge statements or painting vivid images with just a few words. This is an important skill.

Write often. Write daily. Write up your experiences in the most detailed way possible. Include all the senses, even what it feels like to have an intuition or worry.

Be honest.

Be specific.

Be detailed.

Those quotations are from Sarah Martinez's post, Practical Advice for Beginning Fiction Writers. I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Thanks to +Jack Remick for the link.

Question: What was the most valuable piece of writing advice you received?

Other articles you might like:

- Donald Maass On Why Books Don't Sell
- Creating The Perfect Ending
- 7 Basic Plot Types

Photo credit: "Kitten" by Kenichi Nobusue under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.