Are you one of the new writers looking for advice on how to start writing?

Have you decided you want to write a fantasy novel with wizards and ghouls? Or do you want your debut book to be a memoir about your time fishing in Alaska. Maybe you don’t even have an idea, you just know you want to start avant-garde writing.

Whatever dilemma you’re facing as a new writer, this article is filled with advice that will help you start and keep you going. You’ll find both inspiration and practical tools for your creative writing needs, all compiled from advice given by the masters.

This article shares five irreplaceable pieces of advice from the masters to help you start writing—and keep going!

Every Writer Starts Somewhere

I often get one of two answers when I tell people I write.

One is: “That’s a really hard career to pursue,” which it is.

The second is: “I’ve always wanted to write,” or “I have this one idea; I just never sat down to write it.”

To the second, I respond, “If you want to write, the tools are at your disposal. Pen and paper (or Microsoft Word or Scrivener if that’s your speed).”

The reason I respond in a way that might be deemed cheeky or off-putting, is that, before I began my written career, I was there myself. I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the sky to tell me to write. It never happened. What I soon learned, and what I realized from studying writers that I admired and loved, was that the tools are there.

All that was needed was pen and paper (or Microsoft Word or Scrivener).

So, in lieu of that, I’d love to share some of the advice that inspired me to finally write my ideas and flesh them out.

5 Pieces of Irreplaceable Writing Advice from Writing Masters

The authors below span past and present, genre and medium, novels and films.

What’s the common denominator? They’re great writers. If you've been part of a worthwhile book club, one or more of their books should have appeared. Thus, what better way to jumpstart your writing session than to begin with advice from five master writers.

1. STEPHEN KING: CLOSE THE DOOR

Stephen King‘s first piece of advice in his book On Writing is “close the door.” In other words, a distraction-free environment is essential for writing. Yes—the most abhorred state of being today, “boredom,” is your greatest asset as a writer.

This is an incredibly helpful tip. It is also a good habit to establish at the outset of your writing career.

It took me a whole year to eliminate distractions completely from my writing sessions. As a result, they are much more productive and fulfilling. With nothing to distract you, your mind has no choice but to create.

Fair warning—it will be difficult at first; often you’ll find yourself doodling or writing nonsense. But stick with it long enough and you'll likely fall in love with that distraction-free time dedicated to writing; it becomes your own personal writing lab.

How to Use This Advice

1. Find a room with a lock for your writing session. This ensures there will be no physical distractions, whether it’s your dog, your loved one, a mouse or your cat.
2. Set a timer for your session. This outlines expectations for yourself and helps your mind focus on the task at hand—writing. When I started, I did an hour of writing every day. Now I write for two hours. I hope to eventually reach three hours. You might even find that your most productive time writing is when you engage in a writing sprint.
3. Eliminate technology from your locked room. Phone, TV, Apple Watch or VR headset. The farther they are from you, the better your mind will focus and forget about the dopamine-inducing distractions that invade your every day.

2. FLANNERY O’CONNOR: WRITING IS IMMERSION INTO REALITY

Flannery O'Connor, the great twentieth-century American writer, posits that writing, whether it's fantasy or a more character-driven drama, is immersion into reality. It's not the “escape” most expect.

How do stories move us to cry or laugh? Typically, it’s an experience grounded in the real. Even in worlds created outside of our own, in Middle Earth or in Harry Potter, there are elements of humanity that allow us to unlock characters and connect with them.

What’s O’Connor’s piece of advice, then? “Never be afraid to stare at people.” In her eyes, that’s exactly the writer’s job, to stare and be inspired by reality.

By the way, if “stare” feels too intrusive, try “observe.” Observe others, listen to conversations and hear how people talk.

Your written characters will be more authentic.

How to Use This Advice

1. During your writing session, close your eyes and reflect on the day before. Who’d you talk to? What people did you see or meet? Who frustrated you? You may remember experiences otherwise unobserved or forgotten; they could be kernels of ideas.
2. Make a conscious effort to be more engaged with your surroundings. Instead of scrolling through Instagram on your fifteen-minute break, be present with where you are. It could be engaging more with your coworkers. It could be observing others or simply sitting silently. You’d be surprised at how much you miss when not engaged.
3. Accept an invitation to a party or event. Often, as writers, we are more reclusive; introverts that have social anxiety and despise gatherings. But, if you expect a story to resonate, you must engage in some way, or else, you haven’t properly observed reality.

3. LARRY DAVID: CARRY A NOTEPAD

Always carry a notepad wherever you go. Ideas sometimes hit in strange places, and the impulse should always be to write them down immediately. Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld, carries a notepad everywhere. I use “notes” on my phone, and it works wonderfully.

What this does, besides help you remember ideas, is create an openness to creativity throughout your daily routine. Once it becomes a habit to write down a funny thought, or something you observed at the dog park, you’ll start getting inspiration from unlikely places.

And if that sounds like a contradiction to the first piece of advice, which is “close the door,” it’s not.

When I write, I’ll go back to an idea that hit me during the day, one that I quickly jotted down. I write it down without much thought, knowing I’ll return to it and reflect on it more in my inevitable distraction-free writing session.

How to Use This Advice

1. Integrate the notepad into your daily routine. Maybe it’s lunchtime and you spend five minutes writing in your notepad. Maybe it’s directly after work. Or while your child is taking a nap. Regardless, integrate the notepad into your daily tasks.
2. Find a good pen. Everybody has their favorite. Find yours and be comfortable and excited to jot down those thoughts.
3. Organize your notepad. You’d be surprised at how confusing it can get going back to words quickly scribbled. Mark the date and the project the idea best suits. The goal is to provide enough details so that you’ll remember what you were thinking at that time.

4. RICKY GERVAIS: WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

Eight-year old Ricky Gervais wrote short stories for English class on a weekly basis. And Gervais could never get a good grade.

Even though he thought his stories were fantastical and wonderful with adventure throughout, he’d always get Bs or Cs. Angry with his teacher, Gervais decided to teach him and the whole department of English a lesson—by writing a boring story.

In painstaking detail, he wrote about his mom caring for an elderly lady, thinking this was the perfect revenge. He described the smell of the house, the paint on the wall, the feeling of the floor; everything he thought was boring. To his absolute surprise, the teacher gave him an A that week.

What's the lesson? Simply put, write what you know.

The literary community might roll their eyes at the cliché, but, as Gervais points out, and what he eventually learned, is “being honest is what counts. Trying to make the ordinary extraordinary.” This is essential to the art of writing.

How to Use This Advice

1. Practice the writing exercise Gervais employed. Write about an experience you know well from your day-to-day life that you otherwise think is boring. Describe it in painstaking detail and observe the result.
2. Ask your friends or family to remind you of stories from childhood. Often ideas will abound, and you’ll have a whole collection of stories from which to draw inspiration. Your debut book could very well become an epic family saga.
3. Start journaling. This provides a simple reflective tool on the busy day-to-day. Imagine you’re writing a character who’s going through a certain situation. You remember you went through that same situation last year and wrote about it in your journal. Work just became easy. Return to your journal and write what you know.

5. OSCAR WILDE: AVOID STARTING WITH A MESSAGE

Avoid starting with meaning or wanting to push a message when writing. Oscar Wilde, praised and exalted for the depth in his collection of stories, says, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”

Surprised? Don’t be. For the writer, it’s often more about what’s interesting, exciting, and surprising; it’s about what will be true to the characters and most enjoyable for the reader.

This of course does not portend that your work carries no meaning. Neither does it say that there can’t be discussion, when crafting your work, of what meaning it does carry. Your beautiful, sun-drenched road story could still be the moving piece you always imagined.

But if you, the writer, start with meaning, you’ll likely end up overly dramatic, or even shallow. Start with the particular, as Gervais did above, and you might find something impactful and moving.

Think of it this way—the writer, you, isn’t the viewer. For the writer, the focus is the quality of the plot, the complexity of the characters and the moments those both reveal.  Let the meaning work itself out.

How to Use This Advice

1. Focus on your specific genre. In other words, don’t concern yourself with the impact of your story. Focus on what will illicit surprise in your respective genre. If you’re writing comedy, make it more funny. If you’re writing horror, make it scarier. If you’re writing drama, make yourself cry.
2. Read a book that moves and inspires you deeply. Observe whether you were moved by the “message” of that work, or moved by scenes, moments and characters.
3. Consider your characters. What are their wants? What are their needs? What messages do they want to push? These are fruitful questions for your storytelling and evade the trappings of pushing a “message.”

BONUS: Writing Isn't for the Faint of Heart

Edwige Danticat wrote an autobiography titled Creating Dangerously. The gist? I’ll let her words speak.

“Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically . . . Take on your demons, take on your fears.”

As the writer, your duty is to be true to the characters and the story, not to create situations and characters comfortable for you. You must be willing to follow a character to his end, even if it hurts. Often, Danticat posits, here lies some of the most compelling stories.

What’s unexpected? Where are the emotional or physical places most do not want to go? Or where you don't want to go? What do people think and not say?

Answers to these questions are great starting points. And if you’re okay doing the work to get there and dealing with the dark places that might entail, so be it and enjoy.

How to Use This Advice

1. Join a film or book club. There, other people who have different tastes can encourage you to watch movies or read books that offend you, or at least aren’t your cup of tea. Whether it's horror movies, rom-coms, or books of poetry, strive to challenge your preconceptions about certain genres and appreciate storytelling you otherwise do not enjoy.
2. Revisit an ending for a story you’ve written. Question whether the ending the story reached followed the character itself or your own desires for the character.
3. When sitting down to write, reflect on your own personal stories locked away. Consider if they would work as inspirations for your creative project. Often these can be the most powerful.

Look to the Masters, Then Start Writing!

It’s true—the list above is not exhaustive; there are other great writers out there, some with differing advice.

What the above writers provide though, is proof that, with the correct perspective and self-agency, you can write.

You can write about your mom taking care of an elderly lady and it will be interesting. You can observe others and be inspired to write characters from life into your stories. You can write every day, in a room, with the door locked and survive, and eventually enjoy your new writing lab.

Finally, you can write for the sake of the story, without worrying about how much that story will impact or change the world.

Practice all this and you, new writer, are off to a great start.

What writing advice influenced you when you were a new writer? Let us know in the comments.