5 Writing Tips That Can Turn Any Newbie Into A Best-Selling Author

You’ve started a novel, and now you’re stuck with a bunch of characters who don’t seem to have anything to do.

To write best selling fiction, figure out what readers in your genre want, then build a story that gives them a reason to keep reading.

An outline helps you finish that story; editing helps you see where it gets boring. Neither can promise you a bestseller.

How to write best selling fiction

Start with books people already enjoy reading. If you’re writing romance, the love story needs to matter. If you’re writing a thriller, readers want suspense. These sound obvious, but it’s pretty easy to get excited about your idea and forget the person who has to sit through it.

Read in your genre. Pay attention to what makes you turn the page, and where you start skimming. What are you waiting to find out? What would make you stop caring?

Chris Fox’s Write to Market covers the basics of writing for an existing audience. It’s a rough lesson if you want to follow your inspiration wherever it takes you, but the number of people who want to read books like yours matters.

You can’t train the world to want your book.

You can learn what readers enjoy and build that into your story. Say you’re writing a cozy mystery: spending ages on the main character’s childhood before anything happens may satisfy your curiosity about her, but what is the reader getting out of it? Give them something to care about NOW.

The Derek Murphy method

If you’re looking for a specific method, start by figuring out what happens in your book before trying to make every sentence beautiful. That sounds less fun than opening a blank document and following your characters around, but characters can wander for a very long time.

Make an outline. It doesn’t have to contain every conversation or every detail of the setting. You need enough of the story to see what your character is trying to do, what gets in the way, and how things get worse.

Then look at the scenes. Does something happen in each one? Does it change anything? If you can remove a scene and the rest of the book works exactly the same way, figure out why it’s there.

You can spend weeks polishing an opening, choosing names and researching the furniture (all of which feels like writing); but if you still don’t know what happens after your character leaves the room, making that room more detailed probably isn’t the work your book needs.

There are a ton of novel outlining methods. Pick one that helps you see the story. Don’t spend so much time comparing them that choosing a method becomes your new excuse for avoiding the book.

Give your characters something to do

A character can have an interesting background and still be boring to read about. Knowing their favorite food doesn’t help much if they spend the opening chapter eating breakfast and thinking about their life.

Get them into trouble.

You need to know what they want, and why it matters to them. Their fears and past experiences can help explain their choices, but the reader doesn’t need the whole history before the story starts.

Make them someone readers can care about, then give them a problem. Let us see how they react when getting what they want becomes difficult. That will tell us more than a page explaining that they’re brave or loyal.

The backstory can come later, when it changes how we understand what’s happening. If a detail only explains something you find interesting about the character, it may belong in your notes.

Techniques of a selling writer

Active voice and showing instead of telling are useful, but they get repeated so often they start sounding like instructions to make every sentence louder and longer.

Active voice usually makes the action more direct. “She slammed the door” is simpler than “The door was slammed by her.” You don’t need to turn that into a rule you obey at the expense of everything else.

For showing, ask: what does this look like?

If a character is angry, what do they actually do? Maybe they grip the edge of the table. Maybe they answer a perfectly reasonable question with something cruel. Give readers enough to see the moment and understand the feeling, without explaining it again afterward.

But don’t describe every clenched fist in the book. That gets ridiculous pretty quickly.

Show the important moments, especially the ones with conflict. A confrontation should usually happen where readers can experience it, rather than being reported afterward. It’s the difference between seeing an accident and hearing about it later.

Ordinary information can be told. If nothing interesting happens on the walk home, you don’t need to describe the walk. The more attention you give something, the more important it seems, so save that attention for things that matter.

Edit the story before polishing the sentences

Your draft may have some crap in it. Finding that crap is part of editing.

First look for places where nothing happens, where a character’s decision doesn’t make sense, or where you’ve explained something the reader already understands. Fix those before spending hours on sentences you may end up deleting.

Feedback helps, though getting someone to read an entire manuscript and give useful comments can be tough. Ask where they got bored or confused. A specific answer gives you something to work on.

If you can’t get useful feedback yet, look through these common writing mistakes and check your own pages. Start with a scene that feels slow: what does the character want, what prevents them from getting it, and what changes before the scene ends?