8 Tips on Writing by Paulo Coelho

A Filipino blogger, Jerome, collected a series of my comments on writing – and I found his page by chance.

On Confidence: You cannot sell your next book by underrating your book that was just published. Be proud of what you have.

On Trust: Trust your reader, don’t try to describe things. Give a hint and they will fulfill this hint with their own imagination.

On Expertise: You cannot take something out of nothing. When you write a book, use your experience.

On Critics: Writers want to please their peers, they want to be recognized. Forget about this. Who cares? You should care to share your soul and not to please other writers.

On Notetaking: If you want to capture ideas, you are lost. You are going to be detached from emotions and forget to live your life. You will be an observer and not a human being living his or her life. Forget taking notes, what important remains what is not important goes away.

On Research: If you overload your book with a lot of research, you are going to be very boring to yourself and to your reader. Books are not there to show how intelligent you are. Books are there to show your soul.

On Writing: I write the book that wants to be written. Behind the first sentence is a thread that takes you to the last.

On Style: Don’t try to innovate storytelling, tell a good story and it is magical. I see people trying to work so much in style, finding different ways to tell the same thing. It’s like fashion. Style is the dress, but the dress does not dictate what is inside the dress.

* This article was pulled from Paulo Coelho’s Blog. It is a great blog by a wonderful writer….check it out!

From Wikipedia:  Paulo Coelho (Portuguese: [ˈpawlu kuˈeʎu]; born August 24, 1947) is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist. He has become one of the most widely read authors in the world today. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious international awards, amongst them the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum and France’s Légion d’honneur. “The Alchemist,” easily known as his most successful story, is a story about a young shepherd who follows his spiritual journey to the Egyptian pyramids in search of a treasure. Since the publication of The Alchemist, Coelho has generally written one novel every two years including By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, The Fifth Mountain, Veronika Decides to Die, The Devil and Miss Prym, Eleven Minutes, Like the Flowing River, The Valkyries and The Witch of Portobello.