Four Acclaimed Authors Offer Tips for Improving Your Writing

Iconic novelist Joyce Carol Oates notes how in sports, they say you should always compete with someone more skilled than you are because it forces you to rise to a higher level of competency. Similarly, reading the writing of authors who have shaped the canon will expose you to excellent craftsmanship and challenge you to up your game.

1. 1. Read voraciously: Writers are shaped by other writers. The books we read as children influence our tastes and can often have an impact on our writing style as adults. The writers who shape us are almost like unofficial mentors: By reading widely and closely, young writers can learn at the feet of history’s most famed and beloved authors.
2. 2. Read with purpose: Don’t just read for pleasure. As you work your way through a novel, study the ways different writers tackle different subjects, how they craft their sentences and story structures, and how they handle dialogue.
3. 3. Build your vocabulary. If you read Ulysses by James Joyce, for example, chances are your vocabulary will improve. Your work won’t necessarily come out sounding like his, but your process will be informed and elevated by his style, and you’ll likely come out on the other side familiar with new words.
4. 4. Recognize what other authors do best. Other authors can teach you different lessons in craft: J.K. Rowling can teach you how to build fictional worlds; Nicole Krauss can teach you how to layer multiple narrators and perspectives; Rebecca Curtis can teach you how to use patterns and repetition for humor. All you have to do is study their work.

As an author of nonfiction, Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t invent characters from scratch. Rather, he writes about real people and presents them in an engaging and compelling way—much as the author of a novel would present their characters in fiction writing. Here are six techniques that Gladwell uses to create compelling nonfiction characters that apply equally well to fictional characters:

1. 1. Show, don’t tell. In 2002, Gladwell wrote a piece for the New Yorker on an investor named Nassim Taleb. Nassim was magnificent—unusual, delightful, brilliant, fun. Yet rather than describe the man himself using a string of adjectives, Gladwell described a scene that featured banter and dialogue between Nassim and his colleagues. He shared funny details—for example, Nassim affectionately calls a subordinate “lazy” several times—letting the characters’ contrasting personalities define Gladwell’s subject.
2. 2. Situate your characters within a context. You can write pages and pages of physical description of a person, but your subject comes to life when you offer context about why they might look the way they do, what they’re doing when they look this way, and how the way they look corresponds to how they act.
3. 3. Reveal your character’s passions. When Gladwell wrote about the Nobel-winning scientist Howard Temin, he had to paint a distinct portrait of his subject, who was not a typical scientist. He described Temin, who had “crazy hair and dancing eyes,” by detailing Temin’s love of literature and philosophy. He was raised by activist parents. He gave his bar mitzvah money to a refugee camp. You quickly, by the third sentence, understand that Temin is a very different kind of scientist.
4. 4. Describe your character’s world. There is as much value in describing the physical world a person inhabits as there is in describing the person themselves. If you could choose to describe one of your siblings by the way your sibling looks, or by what your sibling keeps in their bedroom, Gladwell says to choose the bedroom.
5. 5. Use juxtaposition and contrast. Imagery and environment offer opportunities for juxtaposition. In one 1999 story of Gladwell’s, which discusses the 1960s advertising firm Tinker, he finds several ways to set the scene—a stark-white penthouse with modern art on the walls—in contrast with his subject, the Viennese psychoanalyst Herta Herzog. That contrast, Gladwell says, is what’s arresting about the image.
6. 6. Practice, practice, practice. Knowing Gladwell’s techniques does not imbue an individual with the ability to sit down and write like Gladwell. This skill of scene-setting and world-building comes with practice. Think of yourself the way an athlete thinks of themselves. Athletes practice much more than they play, and so should you. Find new ways of describing characters by focusing on what’s happening around them.

As an author of thrillers and mysteries, David Baldacci prides himself on effective writing of pithy dialogue that gets to the point while mimicking the rhythms of real life conversation. Here’s how he does it:

1. 1. Know the emotional context. Before writing dialogue, make sure you know your character’s current emotional situation. Imagine you are that character, and try to feel what they have just been through. What are they thinking? Planning? What will their response be to the next obstacle in the story?
2. 2. Know your specific plot goals for the scene. Are you trying to convey some information or have your character recover from a brush with danger? Whatever it is, write it down as a bullet point, and make sure you keep that the focus of your scene.
3. 3. Compress your dialogue. You should keep dialogue economical in the same way you do with your prose. Unless your character is naturally verbose, tighten up their language, conveying only the information that will deepen the character or move the story forward.
4. 4. Study people. Go into the world and consciously listening to the way people talk in various circumstances, then practice duplicating what you’ve heard by writing it on the page.
5. 5. Read your dialogue on the page. Practice reading your dialogue out loud. Most importantly, be sure that it sounds like your characters. Ask yourself: Is this really how they speak? Would they really say these things in this moment?
6. 6. Avoid info dumping. Beginning writers tend to drop large chunks of information onto the page all at once. This is called info dumping, and not only does it bore readers, but it stops the momentum cold. You want to make your information feel natural and interesting.

Legendary children’s book author Judy Blume believes in the slow process of honing your writing over the course of multiple drafts. These are some of her tips for improving the process of working through your first and second drafts:

1. 1. Don’t stress your first draft. Generating the first draft is an exercise in getting everything down that you can get down. There’s always time later to reassess and comb through what you’ve generated.
2. 2. Don’t edit as you go. When you are drafting, don’t edit yourself or criticize your choices. You’ll have time for that later.
3. 3. Review your notes. If you hit roadblocks in the murky middle, go back to your notebooks and see if you have ideas for what could happen to your characters. What inspired you to write the story in the first place?
4. 4. Write out of order. Figure out your own way as you write. You can write straight through a draft, jump around, reread the previous day’s pages, or any combination of these methods.
5. 5. Seek out surprises in the second draft. The second draft is all about finding surprises along the way and starting to tease out the shape of your story. What unexpected themes or motifs have cropped up in your writing? If you like them, find a way to reinforce them throughout your writing.
6. 6. Use the second draft to go deeper into character. Don’t worry too much about the plot yet.
7. 7. Be careful of falling in love with your story. That will make seeing it objectively difficult, and may get in the way when it’s time to cut or tighten.

Remember that a piece of writing advice from a famous author is just that—a piece of advice—no matter how many bestsellers that author may have to their name. When you’re staring at a blank page and trying to summon your best writing, you’ll ultimately have to trust your own instincts.

1. 1. Start small. If the hard work of writing feels overwhelming, start small. Write a first paragraph, stock it with short sentences, and stop right there. Don’t worry about proofreading or flagging typos; just focus on the writing process itself. If that first paragraph is all you generate in a single day, that’s okay. The idea is to develop a writing habit where you’ll want to come back to your text and work through it little by little. The craft of writing takes dedication, self-confidence, and perhaps a prudently apportioned dose of self-delusion to make yourself think you’d be a good writer in the first place.
2. 2. Ask for help. Fortunately, there are many resources available to today’s writers. Online courses covering everything from creative writing techniques to grammar rules are available for aspiring authors looking to improve their own writing skills. If you aren’t quite ready to enroll in a writing course, embark on your own course of study. Put yourself in the shoes of a reader and ask what you’d be looking for in a book. Are you a fan of Stephen King? Ernest Hemingway? Dan Brown? Ask yourself what it is you like about their best work and how you can use those same elements in a piece of writing composed by you personally.

Succeeding at any type of writing can produce some of the most gratifying feelings you’ll ever know. So whether you aspire to be a professional writer or a weekend hobbyist, keep at it and give yourself the freedom to truly enjoy the process.

Become a better writer with the MasterClass Annual Membership. Gain access to exclusive video lessons taught by literary masters, including Joyce Carol Oates, Malcolm Gladwell, Judy Blume, David Baldacci, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and more.