8 Rules for Writing Fiction: Tips to Guide Your Writing Process

Good writing is a strange, alchemical process that blends style and personality with substance. There are no roadmaps or writing tips that lead to original, bestselling greatness. Successful writing advice is defined by what works for individual writers—what they all share in principle is an acknowledgment of the hard work and persistence it requires, and a respect for the ritual.

1. 1. Protect your writing process. Every single writer will tell you how important it is to stay organized and devoted to your daily work—this will help you get through the rough patches you’re likely to encounter. It can be extremely difficult to get published, and rejection is the norm for most writers. Coping with it will require a balance. You’ll need humility to accept that your work can improve, but you’ll also need a blazing confidence that will allow your creative inspiration to continue flowing.
2. 2. Find your space. Some authors like to carve out intensely personal space. Authors need to write, no matter the distractions: Jane Austen wrote in a busy family parlor, E.B. White wrote in his crowded living room. Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegu all worked in the early mornings to limit distractions. Maya Angelou famously rented hotel rooms to get away from daily nuisances. Try to find a space that works for you. It should be free of distractions (a definition that will depend upon your tolerance level) and provide a source of inspiration to you.
3. 3. Make your writing flow. Some authors are sticklers for the placement of apostrophes, others swear by modern, free-form structure. Regardless of which you align with, your writing should still flow well and be easy to understand. Cut out any superfluous adjectives and adverbs (a likely result of an overly enthusiastic dive into the thesaurus in search of just the right word) and try to eliminate passive voice in favor of active voice. Make your writing more active by looking carefully at your word choices, getting rid of generic words and clichés, and choosing concise phrasing. Our guide to using active voice can be found here.
   
4. 4. Experiment with narrative point of view. Point of view is the “eye” through which you’re telling a story. Most novels are written in one of two styles: First person, which involves a narrator who tells their story. (“I ran toward the gate.”) Or third person, which is the author telling a story about a character. (“He woke up that morning.”) While first person narration can provide intimacy, it is also limited by the perceptive abilities of the character. This can be useful when creating an unreliable narrator or when creating red herrings. Third person narration is a more flexible choice. It allows you to switch between characters’ points of view. You can even zoom in and out from complete omniscience (a narrative voice that has access to all information in the novel) to what’s called a limited or “close” third point of view (a narrative that adheres to a single character).
5. 5. Believe there’s no such thing as writer’s block. Writer’s block is often an overwhelming feeling of being stuck. You’ve written part of a novel, maybe you’ve even finished an outline, but you just can’t move forward. Every time you sit down at your desk, your mind goes blank, or you can’t decide what to do next. This experience is common among writers, and there are ample tools for working through it. Take a break from the work, do something else for a while, and return a few days (or week, or months) later to view your draft with a fresh eye. The most important rule is to keep moving, whatever that means for you.
6. 6. Focus on character development. Character and event are inseparable—a person is defined by the series of events that happen to them. In a novel, a character interacts with events over time. Your job as a writer is to learn about your main character by observing how they interact with the world around them. Characters—like real people—have hobbies, pets, histories, ruminations, and obsessions. They have a backstory. It’s essential to whatever you’re writing that you understand these aspects of your character so that you are equipped to understand how they may react under the pressures of events they encounter. Ideally, your characters will be distinct enough to be memorable, but for all those minor characters who are emerging in your novel, it’s good practice to provide hints that will help the reader distinguish who each character is, so they can remember their various story arcs.
7. 7. Find balance in the types of sentences you use. In all writing, there are two types of narration: scene and dramatic narration. In scene, you show the characters performing an action or having a conversation. This tends to speed up the pacing. In dramatic narration, you simply tell the reader what the characters did, but the event remains “offstage.” This type of narration can slow the story down. To keep pacing from feeling monotonous, it’s a good idea to vary the two modes of writing. For some writers, that means breaking up long flowing sentences with sentence fragments on a paragraph-to-paragraph level, while others switch tones between chapters.
8. 8. Get your story down on paper. Focus on getting through your first draft from start to finish, and remember that you can always go back and change things later. If novel-writing feels too intimidating, try writing a short story instead. (Though short stories can be deceivingly more difficult to write than novels since they require a concise and extremely economical narrative containing all the elements of a novel—in a fraction of the space.) You can begin with the first chapter, or you can use an outline—you can choose to approach your story in any order that feels right for you. You will inevitably make changes to your original plan along the way, and this is a good thing. If tracking your word count feels empowering, set up daily goals. If you prefer to let your words of prose flow in a self-determined fashion, be kind to yourself and respect whatever output comes.

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