Six Writing Principles from the Author Who Wrote One of 2011’s Best Self-Published Books

Multi-award-winning AuthorHouse-published author Richard Hébert is the featured author in this edition of Bookends. You can read a comprehensive record of his writing awards and achievements over the years in this author spotlight. These include a Pulitzer Prize nomination and his latest book, Mindwarp, A Novella... And Other Strange Tales, published through AuthorHouse, being named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2011.

While being interviewed for his Bookends author feature, Mr. Hébert was kind enough to share his personal writing ethos with us. His approach to writing evolved at a very young age and has developed over a career spanning more than half a century. During this time, he has reported the news, written and reviewed movies and published three books.

Richard Hébert shares these six guiding principles to help you along on your writing journey.

1. No one can teach you how to write creatively.
   There is only so much you can learn from a teacher. The rest must come from within. Only you, the author, know how to write your book the way you want to tell it. “You can learn the rules of grammar, learn correct spelling, but you cannot learn creativity. It must emerge from your own psyche, or whatever you want to call that inner voice that guides your life.”
   
   
2. The only way to perfect your writing is to sit down and write.
   Writing a book is a process, something you must work on step-by-step. The only way to write a book is by “placing one word in front of another until you have a sentence, placing one sentence in front of another until you have a paragraph, and so on until you have a story.”
   
   
3. Write every day.
   Develop a regular daily writing routine, especially when your project is on as grand a scale as writing a book. “Set aside a block of time—two hours, or three or four—and do nothing during those hours except write, even if it means throwing away some, most, or all of what you wrote the day before. In time, you will develop your ‘voice,’ and it will be authentic.”
   
   
4. Make your writing voice your own.
   A major influence in Richard Hébert’s development as a writer has been his ability and willingness to accept and learn from advice he has received along the way. He recalls some of the earliest advice offered to him as “a teenage aspiring writer” from a book agent whom he had sent a sample of his work. He still remembers the contents of the agent’s response letter.
   
   “I wrote well, he said, but like someone ‘steeped in the classics,’ like a ‘smart-alecky Charles Dickens.’ I should read more contemporary authors, not to emulate their styles, but to develop my own voice, he said. He was right. I’d read Ivanhoe but not Hemingway. I took his advice.”
   
   
5. Do not let your reading infect your writing.
   When writing fiction, Hébert is careful to avoid reading stories of fiction. When writing nonfiction, he avoids reading the same. He explains his reasoning for this.
   
   “I’ve written and continue to write both fiction and nonfiction. I also read voraciously, but I never combine the two, for fear the one will infect the other. If I am writing fiction, I read only nonfiction, far afield from my fictional interest. If I am writing nonfiction, I read only fiction, far afield from the nonfiction I’m writing.”
   
   
6. Broaden your horizons and allow experience to expand your ideas.
   Hébert’s final piece of advice for his fellow writers is also passed on from “a wise author, a lady of consummate literary accomplishment and sagacity whom [he] met in Atlanta late in the 1960s.” This was during his time working at the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, early in his career. He explains their conversation and its results thus,
   
   “She was familiar with my work in the newspaper, she told me, and I wrote well. It was breadth of experience that I lacked. Travel, she said. Expose yourself to the world, to other cultures, to a broader range of ideas. Escape from your comfort zone and you will broaden your horizons immeasurably, and your writing will reflect that. I took her advice only a very few years later, after assembling enough savings to support me for a few years. I travelled, I saw, I learned. MindWarp is the result.”
   
   AuthorHouse Publishing is extremely grateful to Richard Hébert for generously sharing his considerable knowledge and writing experience with us. We hope his insights into how to write a book will help you find your own writing voice.