Between my blogs and my fiction and my actual work, I write a lot of words, so from time to time people ask me for advice about writing.

I’m very qualified to speak on the subject as far as professional writing is concerned. I was an editor of several B2B publications for many years, and I have a fair amount of experience writing marketing copy. But when it comes to blogging, social media, fiction and other things, while I have a lot of experience, I’m an amateur. So you can judge for yourself how to value what I’m about to say.

And feel free to chime in with your own ideas.

When it comes to writing fiction, a lot of what it takes to be a writer starts well before you set finger to keyboard. You have to develop a habit of thinking about things. Weird things.

If you want to write, you need to observe the world around you, you need to have some sense of what’s going on and why, and you need to make up crazy stuff about it.

A fiction writer who takes a walk through the woods will come up with three story ideas before he gets back to his car.

To write fiction, you have to have ideas about people and their motivations. You might look at somebody and wonder if he’s an alien, or if he just killed his wife, or …. You get the idea. You have to be willing to let your brain go a little crazy and follow where it leads.

You also have to read articles about space and technology and history and psychology and sex and philosophy and sports and whatnot so you have a constant source of both nutty ideas and background themes running through your head.

I don’t think those things shouldn’t be the main inspiration of your stories. All that material will provide little nuggets here and there to give your story depth. The nutty ideas should flow out of you as a normal part of your daily life. You have to consider five impossible things before breakfast.

To learn to write you have to write. A lot. Some people make rules and goals for themselves, such as writing a page a day. I don’t follow any rules like that. I write when I feel like it. I just feel like it pretty often.

A writer also has to get feedback on his writing from real people, because the point of writing is to engage and to communicate.

The best writing advice I ever heard boils down to “don’t try to be clever,” but it went something like this.

Every once in a while you’ll write something that you’re very proud of. You’ll think it’s a beautiful piece of work — that it flows well and uses just the right words and paints a lovely picture.

When you write something like that you should print it out, show it to your spouse, frame it if you want to, but then throw it away.

You have to learn to write simply and give up the idea of being clever. If the reader doesn’t understand what you wrote, it’s your fault.

My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant for a service on natural gas regulation. I had to write the most hideously boring stuff about pipelines and their rates and rules for transporting gas. The point was to take their government-speak, legalistic tariff filings and rewrite them so people could understand them. It was pretty awful, but I learned a lot about writing from the exercise.

Forcing yourself to write to a particular style can be very useful.

The hardest thing for me to learn was rewriting. My boss would make me go back and rewrite things over and over again. I resented him for it, but it was good training, because rewriting is about a hundred times more important than writing. Now, I rewrite constantly.

You also have to lose the “my darling baby” attachment to your writing and be willing to mercilessly cut and change things.

I think it can be helpful to take part in online discussions, because people will misunderstand you all the time. It doesn’t matter that you understand what you wrote. Other people — including autistic ADD morons on the internet — need to understand what you’re saying.

People on the internet take offense very easily. Learning to write to be clear — to minimize that offense (you can’t eliminate it) — is good practice.

I also wonder if having musical training helps with writing, because a lot of writing is having an ear for it. You have to be able to feel that a sentence scans — or doesn’t. You need to sense the rhythm and flow of the words.

It’s good to listen to the way people speak in real life. I don’t think you should imitate that in your writing, because the way people actually speak is dreadful, and if you wrote it down it would be painful. But by listening you can get a sense for things, and you have to be able to incorporate different voices into your characters. They can’t all sound like you.

One thing I’ve tried (less than I should) is to skip through something I’m writing and only read the lines by a particular character. That character should give a consistent impression.

Doing that also helps you pick out “verbal” ticks — which are both good and bad. A character should have a voice, but it can’t be annoying. If he uses a word or phrase too much, you have to change that. But it is good to have a character sound a certain way.

Finally, everyone picks up bad habits, overuses certain words, etc. Once upon a time I found a website that analyzes your word choice and tells you if you use a word more often than average. I can’t remember where that was, but if you find something like that, hold on to it (and send me the link!). It’s also good to ask a professional to look at your work — but don’t feel obligated to take their suggestions. Professional editors are very necessary, but they often have their own weird ideas too. You don’t have to follow their rules.