10 top tips for aspiring writers
10. Join your local writing organisation. These are a brilliant source of practical assistance and writing community. Two great Australian examples are Writers Victoria and Writing NSW.
9. Join an informal writing group (or form your own) comprising half a dozen writers who are keen to meet regularly to workshop short excerpts from each other’s works. It’s often best if you all write in the same genre: all non-fiction writers, for example, or all crime writers. But there are no rules and if you find a group that works for you, stick with it.
8. Apply for grants, fellowships, residencies. Many are available for emerging writers with great ideas but little or no publication history. Your local writing association (which you’ve already joined because of point 10, right?) can help you to find them.
7. Enter writing competitions. Having a deadline works wonders. And each piece you enter will be an improvement on the last one. You might even win, or be shortlisted – bonus!
6. Build up your writing CV in the same way you would your day-job CV. Aim for publication in obscure or specialist little magazines. List your grants, fellowships, residencies, competition wins. Even if you only get shortlisted, you can still list them on your CV. Because getting small runs on the board makes it easier to get the big ones. Publishers and agents are risk averse: they’ll be much more willing to read your work if they can see that someone else has read and liked it first.
5. Back up your work. Hard drive, cloud, email, photos on your phone. Choose your own tech adventure but always BACK UP YOUR WORK.
4. Learn, learn, learn. Attend as many workshops and seminars and courses as you can afford. Learn how to write. Learn about the pathways to publication. Learn how to improve your words on the page.
3. Read. The best writers read widely and often. Read for enjoyment; read to expand your horizons; and read to see how they’ve done it – how they achieved that voice, that atmosphere, that narrative tension.
2. Don’t feel obliged to only write about what you know. Irish/New York writer Colum McCann puts it best. “Don’t write about what you know, but towards what you want to know.”
1. Write. Doesn’t matter when. Doesn’t matter where. Just apply your arse to the ergonomic chair and get on with it.
If you found this post helpful, please like and share it. And if you have more tips of your own, feel free to add them in the comments.
I’m afraid, re #2, that I much prefer to read fiction writers who are writing from their own experience, of life, of geography. But hey, I also read Regency romance and science fiction.
Writers’ own experience can be important, of course. But even then some write because they are seeking to know more about themselves. Those are the ‘own voices’ that probably interest me the most.