Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck

• Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
  Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
• Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
• If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
• Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
• If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

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David Ogilvy’s Advice on Writing

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

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Henry Miller Commandments for writing

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

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Jack Kerouac’s List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Writing and Life

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

1. Submissive to everything, open, listening
2. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
   Be in love with yr life
   Something that you feel will find its own form
   Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
3.  Blow as deep as you want to blow
4. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
5. The unspeakable visions of the individual
6. No time for poetry but exactly what is
7. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
8. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
9. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
10. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
11. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
12. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
13. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
14. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
15. Accept loss forever
16. Believe in the holy contour of life
17. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
18. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
19. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
20. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
21. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
22. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
23. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
24. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
25. You’re a Genius all the time
26. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

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Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story

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,
9. that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Also

• If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that make a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

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Jeanette Winterson’s 10 Tips on Writing

1. Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
2. Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
3. Love what you do.
4. Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are ­doing is no good, accept it.
5. Don’t hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.
6. Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect.
7. Take no notice of anyone with a ­gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
8. Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
9. Trust your creativity.
10. Enjoy this work!