Joss Whedon's Top Writing Tips

My best advice would be to read a really good novel while you're writing, because there's something about seeing a novel unfold whilst you're writing one that seems to help the process along. You'll likely get through 3-4 books (if you read like me) when writing a novel and this can really help in the beginning because you see something started in the beginning really unfold at the end and it's like 'holy crap, thats the best thing in the entire book', then you have a moment thinking 'well why the fuck aren't I doing something like that!', then you do.

The other advantage in reading while you write is that I think it reassures you when you get blocked, because 99% of the time you'll think the story is going too slowly, however that's because it takes like 10-100 times longer to write something creative than it does to read it. I think it was Richard Curtis (Notting Hill/Bridget Jones/Love Actually) who made this point; he was asked why there's such a large gap between all his great award winning movies and he said quite simply, 'because it takes a lot of time to write something important to me'. This is quite well illustrated by his writing credits, he switches between writing a blockbuster movie and TV comedy (Mr Bean) with his friend from university.

Yet when I got into high school they really tried hammering in Essays to the point where no one knew how to write a real story. You'd get people screwing up, bunching 5 lines of different characters speech into 1 paragraph because it was dealing with one point. People didn't seem to understand that in a piece of creative writing you don't need to have a point to every line as long as every line helps make a point.

I'm working on a novel right now, which coincidentally illustrates this point. My chapters are actually titled as the point of the entire chapter at the moment, here are a few: Casual Subterfuge, The Truth Unveiled and The Advent of (important character). The chapter titles will possibly change, but right now they're as useful as any writing plan I could make because if it isn't setting up later plots and it isn't advancing the plot arc of the chapter, then it gets ripped out.

The biggest thing I noticed in novels when in school was that some people butchered it with a preface. Most SF/F/H writers it's sometimes just a page saying thank you (normally to their spouse, agent and publisher - in that order) however a significant amount do this in the afterword. Yet when I picked up books I was assigned in school the preface took 5 pages describing the purpose of the book and I just thought that was cheap and lazy.