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By Kevin S. Giles

I’ve created this page to house stories I’ve written about writing. To aspiring writers, I offer this simple advice: If you want to write, then write.

Today we have an enormous volume of advice available to help people learn how to write. Sources range from informed books (insightful) to short lists of tips (often repetitive), but none of this advice will accomplish your physical task of writing.

Again: If you want to write, then write. (Check the “Write like a pro” pulldown on the toolbar at the top of this page for more about writing.)

Write like you believe it

Writing comes in many forms. We have poets and novelists, magazine writers, script writers, memoir writers and nonfiction book authors. I spent a career writing newspaper stories and editorials, a tighter fact-based style built on diligent reporting. The foundation for successful writing of all means begins with collecting facts through observation, research and interviews. One of my university journalism professors harped on the importance of being “tight, terse and telegraphic” when writing news stories. I never found an instance where his lesson didn’t ring true. The same rules apply when writing a book or long-form article. Whatever craft the writer chooses, it’s important that words committed to paper (or a screen) tell a story in an engaging and coherent fashion.

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For the beginning writer, that won’t happen right away. Without trying, it won’t happen at all. When I was a teenager I wanted to write a novel. I recall being more enamored with the excitement of thinking about it than wanting to reason through a plot. So, in those years, notions ran through my head. They were dreams without action. Except for English class in school, I didn’t write. While it’s hard to recover my complete frame of mind from those long-ago days, I do remember feeling pretentious to think I could write a book. Feeling that way, I emphasize, without even trying. If you want to write, then write.

It’s simple: writers write

I’ve spent my adult life writing, sometimes with regret. Beware, writing is a solitary practice. Serious writers, in any craft, know creativity requires imagination, deliberation, endurance, experimentation, exploration and occasional dead ends. Some stories work better than others. Some don’t work at all. Then again, others brim with such inspiration that readers applaud the magic. I consider myself a Montana writer although my newspaper work took me elsewhere. Many of my writings, including three of my books currently on the market, have their roots in my native western Montana. I have more books in me, probably novels, that I will start with a first page, and a second and a third and on it goes as days turn into weeks and winter passes and I write by early sunlight on summer mornings.

I attempted my first novel while living in Australia. It was a western, amateurishly attempting to portray a conflict in a mining camp but nonetheless a work I composed with care on my portable typewriter. I did the very thing I advise now. I just wrote. It was a start, anyway, at the very time I was fully employed as a newspaper reporter. My unpublished novel sits in a trunk in the garage. Someday I’ll read it and marvel how far I’ve come.

You’re not the other writer

It’s best that any of us who write avoid comparisons with other writers. We each do the best we can with our individual talent, plumbing the depth of the creative waters within us. And yes, just do it.

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Kevin S. Giles is an American journalist and author whose books have roots in his native western Montana. He published “One Woman Against War” in October 2016. Two other books take place in his hometown of Deer Lodge: a novel, “Summer of the Black Chevy” (2015) and the nonfiction work, “Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance.” (2005) He’s currently published “Mystery of the Purple Roses” and is writing subsequent Red Maguire novels that take place in the legendary Montana mining city of Butte.