1. Write Every Day. The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. Write every day.

Its best to set aside a particular time of the day (or night) for your writing time. Find the time that is best for you, and then write during that time every day. Let nothing interfere with your writing time. It may be as little as one single hour. You may produce only a page or two. But if you stick with it every day, week after week, your output of pages will mount up inevitably. Dont worry if you have an occasional day when you cant produce even one decent page. Stay at it! Try your best every day. The words will come. It is so easy to find a reason for not writing. Writing is hard work. Its much easier to do something else. Especially if you have a real job that demands eight hours a day or more, it is difficult to make time for writing. Yet that is precisely what you must do. Make the time. Writers dont find time for writing; they make the time for their writing and they do so every day. Family, friends, job, all the other pleasures and obligations of your life must take second place to your writing. If you are going to be a successful writer you must write. Every day. Preferably at the same time every day. 2. Read Widely. The most important thing a writer can do, aside of writing, is reading. Books are the memory of the human race. Thanks to our invention of writing you can share the thoughts of the greatest minds that ever lived. Not that you should restrict yourself to someone elses idea of what the Great Books are. Read what you enjoy. But make certain that you dont confine yourself to one narrow type of book. Read as widely as you can: fiction, history, biographies, travel tales, books about science, religion, philosophy read everything and anything that interests you. Your imagination will be enriched. Your curiosity will be excited. Your knowledge will grow. Once youve read a book and particularly enjoyed it, go back and read it again. This time, though, try to discover how the author tackled the problems of telling his or her story. Whether the work is fiction or fact, the author had to make hundreds of choices about constructing that story. Read carefully and see where

you might have made a different choice, emphasized a different facet of the tale, shaded things a bit brighter or darker, moved a segment closer to the beginning or farther back toward the end. You can learn a lot by reading and then analyzing what youve read. 3. Write About WHO You Know. Beginning writers are always told, Writer about what you know. This is good advice. Its difficult to make a believable story about trekking across the Sahara if youve never been on a desert journey, although to some extent you can acquire knowledge from reading. Knowledge not first-hand experience. It is equally important more important, in fact to write about who you know. After all, characters are the heart of fiction. Without strong, believable characters you cannot build a strong, believable story. Even if you actually have trekked across the Sahara and can write with first-hand experience, unless your story is built around interesting characters you will end with a travelogue, not a salable piece of fiction. Characters are all around you. Just as a painter or a sculptor uses models, a writer can and should develop story characters from real, living men and women. Most likely you will find yourself blending individuals you know into a composite character, using several different models to serve as the basis for a character in your story. After all, youre not trying to draw a portrait, youre trying to create a fictional character. (Of course, if you are trying to draw a word portrait, then stick to your model as closely as you can.) You will find that, inevitably, your chief model will be yourself. The protagonists of your stories the main characters will have a large dose of your own personality in them. Thats quite natural. Who do you know better than yourself? But keep on studying all those wonderful, diverse people around you. They are a rich and endless bounty of models for the characters you will write about. Their problems, their loves and hates, joys and sorrows, hopes and fears are the raw material for your stories. 4. Character + Problem = Story. A fictional story consists of a character struggling to solve a problem. Nothing more. And nothing less.

It constantly surprises me how few fledgling writers understand this simple fact. If you do not have a character struggling to solve a problem, you do not have a story. No matter how beautifully the sentences are constructed, no matter how lovely the background or how fascinating the character you are describing, unless that character is struggling to solve a problem your story will be rejected by any commercial editor. The main character in a story is called the protagonist. Create a strong protagonist. Remember that the reader wants to be the protagonist. If your protagonist is really memorable, the reader will bleed when he bleeds, laughs when she laughs, shudder when hes frightened and exult when she triumphs. Make your protagonist as wonderful as you can, but give him a powerful weakness, a potentially fatal flaw. Your protagonist should have an internal problem, a crisis within her soul. This not only makes the protagonist believable, it makes him sympathetic. Nobody can feel very much for a person who has no weaknesses. Superhuman heroes belong in comic strips, not in serious fiction. Take your protagonists internal problem and externalize it by putting her into conflict with another character, the antagonist. Make that conflict amplify the protagonists internal problem. Let your protagonist struggle as hard as he can to resolve his conflict with the antagonist. By resolving this conflict, the protagonist will also resolve her internal problem. Thats what a story is all about. Its that simple. But, as Clauswitz said about war, even the simplest things can be very difficult. 5. No Villains. Notice that I used the term antagonist, above. Not villain. Not bad guy. Not black hat. In the real world there are no villains. No one actually sets out to do evil. Yes, there are madmen and murderers and rapists and crooked politicians and greedy land developers and all sorts of villainous behaviors. But each of those people believes that he is doing what is necessary, and maybe even good. Every tyrant in history was convinced that he had to do the things he did for his own good and for the good of the people around him. Fiction mirrors life. Or, more accurately, fiction serves as a lens to focus what we know of life and bring its realities into sharper, clearer understanding for us.

There are no villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds. There are only people with problems, struggling to solve them. Just as your protagonist is struggling to solve her problems, your antagonist is struggling to solve his. Its all a matter of viewpoint. You could write Hamlet, for example, from the viewpoint of Claudius, the king who murdered Hamlets father (his own brother) and married his widow. You might even make a truly powerful story about a man who loved his brothers wife too much, and dared to what he did to win her. But he wouldnt be a villain. 6. Start in the Middle. It is vitally important to capture the readers interest on the first page of your story. On the first line, preferably. This is called the narrative hook. Its like fishing. You want to hook that reader so thoroughly that she cant let go of your story until its ended. The best way to do this is by starting your story in the midst of brisk, exciting action. Start in the middle! Dont waste time telling the reader how your protagonist got into the pickle hes in. Show the protagonist struggling to get free. You can always fill in the background details later. Particularly in a novel, its tempting to set the scene, explain the protagonists background, describe how she got to where she is. Cut all that out. Or at least save it for later. Start in the midst of action. Hook the reader right away or you wont hook him at all. In a short story there simply isnt time for static explanations. All the background details have to be worked in through action or dialogue. Show what they are doing, dont tell what they did. 7. The Chain of Promises. Once you have the reader hooked with your opening, how do you keep her turning pages. The answer is simple. The narrative hook of your opening is an implicit promise to your reader. Something exciting is happening to your protagonist; the reader wants to find out who this fascinating character is and why hes in such desperate trouble. In other words, you start out with a problem for the protagonist to solve. Do not

solve that opening problem until you have created at least two more. Your story should be a chain of promises, a series of interlinked problems that the protagonist must solve. Each problem you present to the protagonist is a promise to the reader that there will be suspense, intrigue, excitement, adventure in the solving of that problem. If you give your protagonist a problem on page one and then solve it on page two without other problems immediately on hand, the reader will stop reading. But if you make certain that there are always more problems propelling the protagonist (and the reader) deeper into the story, you can put in all the background details your story needs and the reader will keep reading, keep turning pages, eager to see how your protagonist solves her latest set of problems. At the climax of the story all the problems must be resolved. All the major problems, that is. You may still leave a few minor problems unsolved. In fact, that gives the reader the impression that your characters go on living even after the last page of the story. That is a good feeling to impart to your readers. Make them want to come back for more. 8. Use All Five Senses. One of the best ways to make your writing come alive is to use all your characters five sense in the storys scenes: vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. I dont mean that you should have your characters sniffing and nibbling and fondling the scenery on every page. But too often a writer will describe only what the characters see, or what they hear. It adds to the depth of the scene if the other senses are used, too. Try this simple exercise. Read a few pages of your story and note in the margin which of the five senses are being used by your characters in each paragraph. If you have paragraph after paragraph of nothing but vision, try to work in a line here or there about what the character is feeling: cold, warm, the rough bark of a tree, the silky folds of an evening gown. How does the forest smell? Or a garage, for that matter. Does the morning air have a special tang to it? Is the coffee your protagonist is drinking hot and bitter, or cold and overly sweetened? Use all five senses in your stories, and your scenes will be much more alive.

9. Point of View. Every story is about someone. Every story has to be told from someones point of view. Often, the viewpoint character is the protagonist. After all, shes the one the story is about; why not tell it through her eyes? (And ears, and her other senses, too.) Should you tell your story from a first-person point of view? I woke up precisely thirty seconds before the alarm was set to go off. Or should you use the third-person P.O.V.? George woke up precisely thirty seconds There are strengths and drawbacks to each. A third-person P.O.V. allows you, the author, to assume an almost godlike power. You can show whats going on inside characters minds, you can shift across time and space to show things happening even when your protagonist isnt present to witness them. The first-person P.O.V. is more immediate, and often more dramatic. But writing in the first person limits you to scenes in which your P.O.V. character is present. You cant flit across the world or backward in time because the P.O.V. character has to be there in every scene. I have found a way to combine the strengths of both techniques. Write each scene from one characters viewpoint. Make certain, though, that the entire scene is shown only through the senses of that scenes chosen viewpoint character. This way you can have the immediacy and dramatic impact of a first-person P.O.V. but you can leave that P.O.V. if and when you must. Be very careful about shifting from one viewpoint character to another, though. In a short story, it is usually best to stick with one single viewpoint character, whether its the protagonist or someone else. In a novel it is possible to shift from one viewpoint character to another, but you must take great care to make certain that the reader understands these shifts in P.O.V. and is not confused by them.

10. Make Your Manuscript Readable. Once youve finished your story you will send it to an editor of script-reader. Think about that person who will read your manuscript. She reads dozens per day, most likely, hundreds per month. Her eyes are weary from reading. You want your manuscript to be as easy as possible for her to read. You do not want to challenge her patience with fancy type faces or faded print on colored paper. So make certain that your manuscript is: Printed in strong black letters on clean white paper. Double-spaced. Identified with your name, address, phone number and e-mail address in the upper left corner of the front page. Each subsequent page should be numbered and slugged with the storys title and your last name, together with the page number. Generous margins on the left and right, top and bottom. Do not cover the whole page with print. That makes the pages difficult to read. It is the mark of an unknowing amateur. Be plain, not fancy. Computers allow you to use many different type faces. Stick to a simple Roman font. You can use italics where they are called for in the story, or underline words that should be italicized. Make your manuscript as easy and pleasant to read as possible. Remember, it has to compete with hundreds of others. 11. Study the Markets. When you sit down to write a story, think about where you want it to be published. Is it a mystery? A romance? Science fiction? Publishers think in categories. Magazines are specialized for specific audiences of readers. The first thing an editor asks himself when he picks up a manuscript is: Will this story be in the category that my readers are