TIPS FOR WRITERS 
Ben Bova 

   
 1. Write Every Day.
The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. Write every day. It’s best to set aside a particular time of the day (or night) for your writing time. Find the time that is best for you, and then write during that time every day. Let nothing interfere with your writing time. 
 It may be as little as one single hour. You may produce only a page or two. But if you stick with it every day, week after week, your output of pages will mount up inevitably. 
 Don’t worry if you have an occasional day when you can’t produce even one decent page. Stay at it! Try your best every day. The words will come. 
 It is so easy to find a reason for not writing. Writing is hard work. It’s much easier to do something else. Especially if you have a “real” job that demands eight hours a day or more, it is difficult to make time for writing. Yet that is precisely what you must do. Make the time. Writers don’t “find” time for writing; they make the time for their writing and they do so every day. 
 Family, friends, job, all the other pleasures and obligations of your life must take second place to your writing. If you are going to be a successful writer you must write. Every day. Preferably at the same time every day. 
 
 2. Read Widely.
The most important thing a writer can do, aside of writing, is reading. Books are the memory of the human race. Thanks to our invention of writing you can share the thoughts of the greatest minds that ever lived. 
 Not that you should restrict yourself to someone else’s idea of what the Great Books are.
Read what you enjoy. But make certain that you don’t confine yourself to one narrow type of book. Read as widely as you can: fiction, history, biographies, travel tales, books about science, religion, philosophy – read everything and anything that interests you. Your imagination will be enriched. Your curiosity will be excited. Your knowledge will grow. 
 Once you’ve read a book and particularly enjoyed it, go back and read it again. This time, though, try to discover how the author tackled the problems of telling his or her story. Whether the work is fiction or fact, the author had to make hundreds of choices about constructing that story. Read carefully and see where you might have made a different choice, emphasized a different facet of the tale, shaded things a bit brighter or darker, moved a segment closer to the beginning or farther back toward the end. 
 You can learn a lot by reading and then analyzing what you’ve read. 
 
 3. Write About WHO You Know.
Beginning writers are always told, “Writer about what you know.” This is good advice. It’s difficult to make a believable story about trekking across the Sahara if you’ve never been on a desert journey, although to some extent you can acquire knowledge from reading. Knowledge – not first-hand experience. 
 It is equally important – more important, in fact – to write about who you know. After all, characters are the heart of fiction. Without strong, believable characters you cannot build a strong, believable story. Even if you actually have trekked across the Sahara and can write with first-hand experience, unless your story is built around interesting characters you will end with a travelogue, not a salable piece of fiction. 
 Characters are all around you. Just as a painter or a sculptor uses models, a writer can and should develop story characters from real, living men and women. 
 Most likely you will find yourself blending individuals you know into a composite character, using several different models to serve as the basis for a character in your story. After all, you’re not trying to draw a portrait, you’re trying to create a fictional character. (Of course, if you are trying to draw a word portrait, then stick to your model as closely as you can.) 
 You will find that, inevitably, your chief model will be yourself. The protagonists of your stories – the main characters – will have a large dose of your own personality in them. That’s quite natural. Who do you know better than yourself? 
 But keep on studying all those wonderful, diverse people around you. They are a rich and endless bounty of models for the characters you will write about. Their problems, their loves and hates, joys and sorrows, hopes and fears are the raw material for your stories. 
 
 

(In reply to an emailed question)
The question, "Am I writer?" is irrelevant.
The real question is, do you want to write?
Writers write. You get up every morning and hit that keyboard.
You get the words down and build stories.
You might have to do other things to keep groceries in the pantry, but above and beyond everything else, you write.
Every day. Despite all the disappointments, despite all the obstacles, you write.
Every day.
As you write, you learn.
You create characters and give them problems and make them work to solve their problems.
You send your stories out to market and keep sending them until somebody starts to publish them.
But the stark fact is that no one can know if you're a writer - you won't know it yourself - until you have written well enough to be published...
Frankly, most people give up.
Writing is hard, lonely work and they get tired of it.
But every successful writer starts exactly where you are now, and succeeds by writing and writing and writing until they get published regularly.

Do the work.

Write.  Learn.  Write every day.
Read and learn from published writers.
Work at it every day.
There's no other way to become a writer.

Good luck,
--Ben Bova

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