by Alycia W. Morales @AlyciaMorales

If you’ve been a writer for any length of time, you are fully aware there is a lot of writing advice out there. We share a lot of it here at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers blog. So, I thought it would be fun to pull fifty tips for writers into one post and bless you with this gift as I approach my 50^th birthday.

1. Inspire your readers to attempt and achieve great things. Fiction is truth. Jesus spoke in parables and through His stories, people gleaned meaning and purpose for their lives. Don’t preach your message. (DiAnn Mills)

2. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. (Herman Melville)

3. The depth that suffering adds to our writing is good. And we won’t get through life without suffering, so we might as well look at the good it brings with the pain. (Edie Melson)

4. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. (Anais Nin)

5. To succeed we must fail. It’s failure that forces us to practice, learn, and improve. Improvement leads to success. (Cindy Sproles)

6. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. (Ray Bradbury)

7. Be faithful with commitment and integrity. If you believe that God gave you this talent then you need to be sober and be a good steward of it. When you have the opportunity to write for someone, follow through to the end and do it well. (Brad Bloom)

8. Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up. (Jane Yolen)

9. Every time you stop it’s harder to get going again, but when you keep pushing forward, you find your rhythm. (Lynn Blackburn)

10. Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don’t always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive…. Virtually every page is a cliffhanger—you’ve got to force them to turn it. (Dr. Seuss)

11. To reach readers in “Samaria”, Christian authors need to spend more time at the well in the heat of the day and less time judging those outside the temple walls. A great writer can shape the story to move the reader without relying on “Christian” words. (Eddie Jones)

12. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing. (E. B. White)

13. Don’t let your insecurities or someone else’s opinions keep you in a box, limiting your vision and outreach. He has a plan for your life, and you’re going to love it! (Michelle Medlock Adams)

14. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. (Barbara Kingsolver)

15. Anybody can write a story. They can throw words on a page and wave them in the air. There is a difference in writing a story and writing your best. If you don’t do your best every time, learn more, and write your best again, then you are doing yourself and your readers a grave injustice. (Yvonne Lehman)

16. I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour – write, write, write. (Madeleine L’Engle)

17. Write from consequence, rather than standing on your soapbox, wagging your finger in the readers face. Show them the consequence of the action. You’re approaching them from a different side of their brain and hopefully then, they hear what you say. (Steven James)

18. I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character driven. (Stephen King)

19. If you want to write for God, you must understand your words may never be bound in a cover and placed on a bookstore shelf. They may only be meant for the person sitting next to you. (Alton Gansky)

20. We do not need magic to change the world; we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better. (J.K. Rowling)

21. To write about life, you must live life with your eyes and ears open. The language of your fiction is directly proportionate to the power of observation. Do not be content to simply waddle through life. We must all, as Thoreau said, “Live life deliberately.” And then we must write deliberately. (Aaron Gansky)

22. Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any. (Orson Scott Card)

23. When our Father places words on your heart, write them, dear ones. Do not be discouraged by the voices in your head or in your circle of influence telling you it’s all a waste of time or that you have nothing to say. Listen to your Father’s voice. Walk in the good works He prepared in advance for you. (Sarah Van Diest)

24. Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass! (Anton Chekhov)

25. A limp word fights against your purposes, acting as a weak soldier in your ranks. Not every word needs to wear shiny armor, but your army of paragraphs and sentences should be filled with vivid nouns and verbs that relay your message and fight against the evils and lies of this world. They should engrave truth, strength, and hope onto the souls of your readers. (Katy Kauffman)

26. Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” (Mary Anne Radmacher)

27. Pick anyone in Scripture that God called to do something great for Him. They either messed up before, during, after or all three in fulfilling their calling, so let’s get that out of the way first. But in addition, He had to get them completely emptied of themselves before they could be of any use to Him. He had to get their motives pure and joyfully surrendered to the point that they only had one answer to their why. And it was the same answer: to glorify God. That’s it. (Jenny Cote)

28. I’m a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world. (Mother Teresa)

29. Have a servant’s heart. It’s not all about you. Have a generous spirit that helps other writers along their writing journey, too. Writing is a collaborative partnership—you, God and others. (Lisa Carter)

30. I’d delight if none of my words fell to the ground — if none were useless, excessive, dispensable, easily dismissed… But that’s God’s business. He might use the means of cyber technology, savvy marketing, good publicity. But either God, God alone, keeps our words from falling and scatters them wide, or else there is nothing in them worth keeping and scattering in the first place. Our concern, our responsibility, is simply to hear and heed God. It is always and everywhere to say, ‘Speak, Lord, for Your servant is listening.’ (Mark Buchanan)

31. Following established rules is how most authors fulfill the reader’s expectations. The majority of successful authors write within the rules while maintaining creativity. (Tamela Hancock Murray)

32. As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them. (Ursula K. Le Guin)

33. Begin to see yourself as a scribe for God whenever you experience writers block, discouragement, a computer crash, a rejection letter, sickness during a deadline etc. We are in a war zone and those challenges are fiery darts to distract you from completing your assignment designed to build the Kingdom of God. (Karynthia Glasper-Phillips)

34. I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. (Pearl S. Buck)

35. The best authors are those who cheer on those behind them and put their hands on the backs of those in front of them. (Blythe Daniel)

36. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

37. While courageously facing something new may be a journey of obedience God is calling us to, the perpetual pursuit of something new is unlikely to be so. That may simply be procrastination dressed up as professional development. (Penny Reeve)

38. It’s what we writers do. We instill hope over and over again. (from Walt Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks)

39. You want to start your manuscript with a bang and draw the editor immediately into your writing. Don’t bury your best material over in a later chapter because the editor may not read that far. (Terry Whalin)

40. If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. (Toni Morrison)

41. If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter. (Dan Poynter)

42. Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. (Meg Rosoff)

43. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. (Ernest Hemingway)

44. 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. (John Steinbeck)

45. The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. (Mark Twain)

46. You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one. (John Wooden)

47. Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. (David Foster Wallace)

48. It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly. (C.J. Cherryh)

49. Creativity is a combination of discipline and childlike spirit. (Robert Greene)

50. There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about. (Raymond Carver)

Alycia Morales is a freelance editor and writer. Her work has been featured in numerous magazines and several compilation books. Thanks to her mad editing skills, her clients have won multiple awards in several national contests. She’s also a sought-after ghostwriter. In addition, she’s the prior Conference Assistant for the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference. Alycia is currently working on a nonfiction project while characters are running around in her mind waiting to be released into children’s books and YA fantasy novels.

When she isn’t busy writing, editing, and reading, Alycia enjoys spending time with her husband taking hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Carolinas or running off to the beach with friends. She loves coffee, sweet tea, crafting, and watching crime shows.

Alycia can be found at alywmorales.com. She hangs out on Facebook and Instagram.