Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
HENRY WATSON FOWLER
Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don’t accept things for their face value; you don’t have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never be able to write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people, you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn.
THOMAS MERTON
Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. The quality of writing—which is crucial in almost every other form of literature—is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn’t anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don’t want to begin with “Once upon a time,” because the audience gets antsy.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN
Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
ELMORE LEONARD
I think voice is the music of the story's intelligence, that the voice of a novel, the voice of a story, is not the speaking voice of Frank Bascombe but it is something a good bit more complex. It is how a novel sounds when it is doing its most important business on you, when it is, as novels do, as poems do. Novels lean on us. They are artifice. They are rhetorical. They are trying to affect us and change us. And that's what I hear, what I understand, when I use the word “voice.”
RICHARD FORD
I like commas. I detest semicolons. I don't think they belong in a story. I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page. If you're doing it right, the reader will know who's talking.
E.L. DOCTOROW
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never get stuck.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.
C.S. LEWIS
If you really want your poem to work, the usage of adjectives should be minimal; but you should stuff it as much as you can with nouns—even the verbs should suffer. If you cast over a poem a certain magic veil that removes adjectives and verbs, when you remove the veil the paper still should be dark with nouns.
EVGENY REIN
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
Copyright © Jon Winokur 2019-2026. All rights reserved. Website by Wei-Haas Creative.
The trademark AdviceToWriters® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.