10 Habits of Successful Writers

As I started my training for fiction and literature after journalism — the kind of path Hemingway followed — I found Donald M. Murray. The columnist for the Boston Globe was at the heart of the teachings of the Amherst Writers & Artists methods. Along with studies at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Tin House Summer Workshop, and the Writers’ League of Texas, AWA was my earliest training in leading writers of fiction. Everyone can write, Murray preached, and he’s not wrong. He wrote an essay for the magazine The Writer that sums up 10 habits that lead to writing success.

Number 9 is especially important when you approach writing in a group of any kind. “You do not correct the errors as much as try to discover the strength of the draft and try to make it stronger. Praise the best in your prose.” This is strengths-based training. When we read to one another in a Lunchroom Write session on a Tuesday, we’re always listening for what we connect with in the writing, what is strong, working, and alive.

1. A habit of awareness. Constant observation fills your cup.
2. A habit of reacting. Be a student of your own life and allow your feelings to ignite thoughts.
3. A habit of connecting. Making unexpected connections is a treasured skill of good writers.
4. A habit of rehearsal. Mulling over what you’re about to write is like rehearsing a part.
5. A habit of disloyalty. Writing is an experimental art, so you must be disloyal to your most comforting beliefs and myths to see something anew.
6. A habit of drafting. Do your writing by grabbing it “by the end by first offers itself,” which can be the foot or the head.
7. The habit of ease. Study the conditions that make it easy for you to write: rituals, music, tools, meditation, starting well ahead of a deadline.
8. The habit of velocity. Writing as if “your bike is going downhill and your feet leave the pedals means your grammar ain’t and my spelling is worse,” you speed ahead of the censor.
9. The habit of revision. You do not correct the errors as much as try to discover the strength of the draft and try to make it stronger. Praise the best in your prose.
10. The habit of completion. A piece of writing is not finished until it is submitted for publication as many times as necessary for publication. Self-publishing, of course, provides the completion that you pay for as if you were running a press.