10 Unusual Tips for Writers by Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer has been described as "one of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself, and one of our most original writers" by acclaimed journalist Kathryn Schulz of the New York Magazine. The British-born writer is the author of four novels and seven books of non-fiction that have won him a number of literary awards, including, GQ Writer of the Year Award (2009), National Book Critics Circle Award (2011) for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, and Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (2015).

In the fall semester of 2012, Dyer was a Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa and in the fall semester of the next year he was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York. In 2014, he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Let’s just say you will do well to heed to Dyer's advice as pertaining to the writing craft owing to his vast experience.

Geoff Dyer's Writing Advice

Dyer shared the following writing tips with the Guardian in 2010. Not your usual writing tips, different but good all the same. Enjoy.

1.) Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over—or not. Conversation with my American publisher. Me: “I’m writing a book so boring, of such limited commercial appeal, that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job.” Publisher: “That’s exactly what makes me want to stay in my job.”

2.) Don’t write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés … Since then I’ve developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.

3.) Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

4.) If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great auto-correct files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: “Niet” becomes “Nietzsche,” “phoy” becomes “photography” and so on. Genius!

5.) Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.

6.) Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

7.) Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.

8.) Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought—even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.

9.) Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don’t follow it.

10.) Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to per­severance. But writing is all about perseverance. You’ve got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That’s what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won’t do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.