After more than a decade of devouring countless internet articles and how-to blog posts, I have discovered no shortage of advice for aspiring authors. Meanwhile, among that content, there exists a staggering abundance of poor or misguided advice. Often, such material focuses on grammar or style, or literary minutia, such as easily confused words and how to structure dialogue. Please don’t misunderstand, that type information is highly useful and should be consumed, but it is not advice regarding how to tell a good story. The difference is that even a mediocre editor can fix bad grammar or clunky dialogue, but the best editor in the world still can’t easily transform a bad story into a good story. That falls on the author. Thus, I have compiled what I consider to be the best advice ever given to aspiring authors, from other authors.

Stephen King

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”

Kurt Vonnegut

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Taken from his collection of short stories, Bagombo Snuff Box.

The Martyrs

The last piece of advice comes not from a single author, but from the collective experiences of several extremely famous writers (all excerpts taken from Wikipedia).

• Edgar Allen Poe. Throughout his attempts to live as a writer, Poe repeatedly had to resort to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.
• Emily Dickenson. While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.
• Franz Kafka. Few of Kafka’s works were published during his lifetime: the story collections Betrachtung (Contemplation) and Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor), and individual stories (such as “Die Verwandlung“) were published in literary magazines but received little public attention. His work went on to influence a vast range of writers, critics, artists, and philosophers during the 20th century.
• Herman Melville. His best known works include Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851). His work was almost forgotten during his last thirty years.
• H. P. Lovecraft. During his lifetime, Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor…partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty.
• John Keats. Keats was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work’s having been in publication for only four years before his death.
• John Kennedy Toole. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole’s novels were rejected during his lifetime. After suffering from paranoia and depression due in part to these failures, he committed suicide at the age of 31. His posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The unfortunate truth is that this list is far from complete. So this is where I find myself, writing sometimes thousands of words a day for an unsuccessful career that has yet to reward me with anything more than the encouragement of my friends and family. In spite of that, I do not regret a single second spent writing. I work hard and I write for myself, because I love it, because it’s part of who I am, and because I recognize that recognition is not a measure of that which makes a story great.

So, here is my best writing advice: don’t give up. Keep writing, and perhaps you will pen the next great classic. Perhaps you have already written it. Just don’t give up.

Bonus: Theodore Roosevelt

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”