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What advice has helped you the most as a writer?

For me it was advice from Dan Harmon: "Don't try to prove you're a good writer, you'll never write anything. Try to prove you're a bad writer and you'll write everything." Not perfect advice but it really does help me write when I'm being overly critical of my ideas.

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  • I reached the stage of a (non-fiction) writing project where I had tons of notes, but no sense of what an eventual manuscript might look like. I discovered Zettelkasten and it was a revelation, not because I think it's the only way to write, but because it was an answer to my precise problem of how to turn a ton of notes into a manuscript. I'm still a long way from being finished with my project, but I can get my pen moving every day and that in itself has been an enormous relief.

  • For me it was something along the lines of "you can't edit a blank page". And I know, it's a meme, but "just write, edit later". I used to get lost in planning and world building and then I discovered that I'm more of a pantser than a planner and voilá, here I am, actually finishing stuff.

    Also, I came to like editing and revising now. I used to dislike it but now I enjoy it!

  • To be consistent, sit down and write something, anything, every single day.

    Even on the days you don't want to. Hell, especially on the days you don't want to.

    Do it for long enough and you'll have written your novel, screenplay or story.

  • Now this isn't an advice, but I'm gonna share it anyway.

    One of my family members knew that I wrote a lot of stories and poems and told me to stop wasting time writing them.

    And when I think about it this way, I stop overthinking my stories and poems because at the end of the day, nobody is reading them except me.

  • Similar to the OP (and other comments), the one thing I like to remember was a tumblr post from way back that boiled down to "write shit." It doesn't have to be good the first (or even third) time around. Allow yourself to write garbage. Look back at your drafts and half-baked stories sometime, see how far you've come. Work with the parts you like, acknowledge the mistakes and most of all, be able to laugh at the shit you've written. Can't get any writing done if you set unreasonable standards for yourself.

  • I am actually just writing an essay on this, I'm gonna nonchalantly past a couple of paragraphs relevant to the question.

    Would it be proper advice if it wasn't the always present: "Just start"?

    It's one of those simple but hard-to-follow rules that almost every aspect of everyday life things we try to get better at has. Just start is such a good piece of advice, because once you have written something down, you give yourself different reference points to think about under the shower, on the run, or at the store, and all of a sudden you come up with something new that further enriches your text. Its a collection of ideas that come at you randomly. The more often you think about a certain problem you want to write about, the deper you will go. Repeat this over a couple of iterations and you get a well-written collection of words.

    What it also gives you is the space to think about these words, to think about the flow, narration, and intention. For the longest time I had a misperception that when you sit down to do something, it has to be done straight away. Some people are just such masterminds that they have a constant flow of good ideas. But then I heard someone famous say that "here's a song that I worked on for a couple of months" and all of a sudden it made sense, that writing is a process, a chain of iterations.

    This first iteration usually won't be good because each paragraph is still an isolated piece on its own. Imagine the writing as being a color painting. The paragraphs don't yet have a common color board, each is its own flavor and next to each other they don't yet taste good. There is no color overflow from one idea to the next one. But when you reread it in a day or two, you can feel the flow of words without having to think too much about it. You are able to see different paragraphs carrying the same idea that can in different order have a much better sound or narration.

    Don't be afraid of bad writing because it is inevitable. But have a process that will improve it as the iterations happen. What I'm looking for when I am creating something is the unique aspect of my idea, something that makes the piece original & interesting. How to turn something boring, that has been said a million times into something interesting. It can be playfulness between sentences, the interlinking between seemingly different paragraphs, or a small ongoing joke through the text that makes it relatable.

    Even this pasting over for this comment made the draft of the essay now completely different. I see the unnecessary sentences, and as I had to rephrase a couple of sentences, I see what narration might look better. Hope it makes sense!

    • Would it be proper advice if it wasn’t the always present: “Just start”?

      This is how I did it. I didn't even do a proper outline. I had been reading on Royal Road for a few months, and had a couple of ideas burbling in the back of my head. I eventually pulled some together and just started writing. 2k-ish word chapters, initially posting at three times a week (I've actually slowed down on the main story, but that's so I can add additional material and work on other ideas too).

      I had a sketch of a campaign setting that I realized this story would attach to very well, which gave me half a dozen deities for my world and a reason to keep expanding.

      I'm now past 200k words/over 100 chapters, and no reason to stop. I am enjoying everything about this process. I'd never have been able to do it if I had spent too much timing planning and prepping and outlining. But my story is very character-driven, instead of plot-driven.

  • Got many advices along the years that have helped me plenty, most have been posted already though. One advice I got along the way that I'm fond of is that your writing should always try to say something. Your truth, your message, your feelings. This one is more aimed at fiction, of course.

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