On Writing Well is a page dedicated to writing advice from our authors and editors. We at Dragon Eagle are always trying to foster a strong literary community, and what better way for our readers to develop than doing exactly what the experts say.

(PLEASE NOTE: This page does not provide any information on how to type faster or how to improve your penmanship.)

 

Make writing an addiction. Don’t let yourself go a day without it. Once you do, you’ll find yourself improving faster and faster. And as an added bonus, you’ll have less time to devote to cigarettes and booze and pills and hookers and church.

• John Lazarus

The auxiliary and past subjunctive did, when not used for negation, is somewhat more frequent as an emphatic form and is conjugated the same as the indicative.

• Tabitha Cartwright

Write as if it is your only source of income, and paying rent means meeting your deadline. If your writing gets good enough, eventually that dream will come true.

• Jayden Chen

Use other writer’s sentences and paragraphs as models and emulate their syntactic structure. Then just change a couple words per sentence to cover your ass.

• Blake Colby

Use a thesaurus as recurrently as tenable.

• Tabitha Cartwright

Write what you know. And if that makes you self-conscious, just write about dragons or ghosts or whatever, because you can make all that shit up.

• Blake Colby

Don’t tell me “the moon is shining.” Of course it’s shining – if it wasn’t shining, you wouldn’t be able to see it, so why are you even bringing it up in the first place?

• Ding Yunyi

Be your own editor. Unless you have a lot of money.

• John Lazarus

In novels, there’s nothing more important than character. Except maybe plot. Or a very well-designed, captivating book cover. And name recognition, definitely. Or at least some kind of publishing experience. Connections to anyone in the publishing industry – either agents or editors inside the big publishing firms – are a huge factor, too. Awards are a big one. And the current state of the book market for your genre in particular. That’s probably the last one that’s as or more important than character.

• Jayden Chen

Write simply. And simply write.

• Ding Yunyi