Anne Rice gave the same core advice to nearly every writer who asked. Write, finish what you start, trust your own voice, and don't let critics or your own fear stop you. She kept saying it plainly, on her website and in interviews, right up to the end of her life.
Just Write, and Finish It
Rice's advice started blunt and stayed there. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. She treated the act itself as the only real qualification, and on her official site she summed it up: writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. Talent and permission come after the pages, not before them. The second half of that rule mattered just as much to her. A book only has a chance in the world once it's done, so she pushed writers to finish the draft rather than polish the opening forever.
Protect Your Voice, Ignore the Critics
She wanted writers to trust their own strangeness. Believe in your own approach and the characters only you would write, she said, and follow the feeling in the work: Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Critics got short shrift. As she wrote on her site, critics are a dime a dozen and anybody can be one, while writers are priceless. Her encouragement carried some urgency too. The world, she argued, is crying out for new voices, and if today's writers won't write the classics of tomorrow, no one will.
Never think you're too weird, never think that you're too crazy. Look, if I can make it, you can make it.
Anne Rice, CBC interview, 2014
A few of her tips were purely practical. Save everything you write, she urged, because a piece you abandon today can feed something later. When the work goes flat, she told writers to change course and make the novel exciting for themselves again rather than grinding on in boredom. And if you feel blocked, write through it until the ideas start moving again. When her own writing needed a jolt, she read authors who fired her up, Stephen King and Hemingway among them, and then went back to the page. The through-line in all of it is momentum. Keep the pen going and let the rest sort itself out.
See how she put this into practice in the full Anne Rice writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Finish the draft. Rice was firm that an unfinished book has no chance at all.
- Write through the block. Don't wait for the mood. Push words until the flow returns.
- Save every scrap. Today's dead end can become tomorrow's chapter.
- Stop reading the critics. Their opinions are cheap. The writing is the rare part.