Do you write as a hobby? Do you never have worries about how not to stink at writing? Do you belly up to the keyboard just to dip into your brain’s well of dopamine and enjoy the warm fuzzy buzz of creating something you can later read? You have zero ambitions for publication? You’ve burnt at least one of your journals? Then this post is not for you.

I write for the ambitious scribe who splashes and thrashes to the point of choking in a tsunami of toner, trying to tame that big rogue breaker into smaller waves an actual readership might want to surf with you. Here are three tips on how not to stink at writing.

How Not to Stink at Writing Tip #1: Shun Clichés

First, avoid clichés. There was that bad, sad day I was handed a manuscript written by a very earnest lady. Her work was grammatical. She was a fine typist. And yet her work was dull to the point it almost set me weeping. Upon laying the bloodless manuscript down (after being sapped of the will to live by just a few of its soporific pages), the only things I could remember were the clichés.

This person’s study of fiction writing amounted to little more than building an extensive collection of commonplace phrases tacked together in a non-story. Her touchstone for good work was offering an inoffensive, bland discourse of familiarity. For shame. I felt like a guy in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, in which the main character intentionally tortured and bewildered his acquaintances by hiding his true nature behind a slurry of clichés.

The Killer Inside Me (2010), Revolution Films.

What was this lady hiding? The real story; her real self, perhaps. Please for your sake and for ours, reach deep inside yourself and conjure a radical bigotry against clichés.

But you like clichés? Okay, I guess, but then try to do something different with them. Express them in a quirky way that tells us your work is unique. If you find a cliché in your work, dig deeper into the idea behind it, and relate that idea back to your story. A cliché is a shortcut. I read books for the long journey. I will not take that journey with you and your characters if I have seen the countryside and heard its people before. I wager half the unfinished manuscripts in the world died because the writers themselves became bored with their own work. Clichés can contribute to that self-vitiating ennui. “It was not writer’s block that killed the project. It was a stubborn plug of word-poo.”

How Not to Stink at Writing Tip #2: Realize You Are Not Your Hero’s Best Friend

If you are writing a work you hope will hackle your readers into a perpetual state of goosebumps, you cannot be your hero’s pal. Your job as writer is to make an alliance with your hero’s enemies, empowering them to do everything they can to destroy your main man or woman.

Do we like your hero because of physical beauty, honed wit, and uncanny skills? Perhaps. I venture we truly align with him because of the utter monstrosity of the story’s antagonist. Would we like Hercules because he conquered a kitten? No way. He is heroic because he defies gods, and performs daunting feats that would kill the rest of us.

Hercules (2014), Paramount Pictures.

We want to empathize with a hero who might flag, who might even fail, but who rallies against Homeric forces not just to survive, but to vanquish every opponent, one by one, or by the regiment, even if they have the numbers, the guns, the dark magic, or whatever makes the hero (and the reader) think more than once that carrying on is hopeless.

How Not to Stink at Writing Tip #3: Don’t Let Your Mom Do Your Editing

You have reached the end of your rough draft. To whom will you show it? Family and most friends will not help you discover the flaws in the work. Your story, like your hero, needs the benefit of a superior enemy, someone who will pull the work down one brick at a time and complain about the very clay from which those bricks were fired.

And that editor might cost you money. Real money. If you don’t have it on hand, start saving up when you start writing your story. You’re a professional, not a hobbyist. It will take another professional to help shape your work. If you are independently putting out your work, a freelance editor with major publishing house experience can run you $15 a page. There are many who will work for less. Find them if you need to. Offer up your work like a sacrificial animal, and know that on the other side of that terrifying act lies the real goal: a great manuscript.

Hey, you had your shot at writing it your way. It’s called the rough draft. You didn’t really think it was going to survive to publication without any changes, did you? That is a dilletante’s dream.

Good luck with your work. You are more like your hero than you realize.

Tell me your opinion: What do you think is the most important tip for figuring out how not to stink at writing?