The Only 3 Writing Skills You Actually Need (And Why the Rest Is Noise)

What Are the Basic Skills You Actually Need to Write a Novel?

People love making lists about writing.

You need strong characterization.

You need vivid description.

You need good pacing.

You need conflict.

You need structure.

You need foreshadowing.

You need emotional arcs.

You need to understand point of view.

Then someone adds ten more things, and before you know it, a beginner who hasn't written a novel yet is carrying around a suitcase full of rules.

That is where the trouble starts.

A lot of writing advice sounds correct because each sentence works on its own. The problem shows up when you try to use all of it at the same time.

You tell a beginner to let characters drive the plot.

Then another teacher says plot has to force characters into difficult choices.

You tell them to slow down after a big climax.

Then you tell them the quiet section has to introduce the next conflict and plant new clues.

You tell them not to tag every line of dialogue.

Then you give them a scene with three or four people talking and expect the reader to keep track of everyone.

None of these ideas is automatically useless. The mistake is treating them like laws.

Writing fiction doesn't work that way.

Take visual writing. People often make it sound harder than it is.

You need a strong sense of imagery.

You need to describe the character's eyes.

You need to describe the movement of their fingers.

You need to describe the tilt of their head.

You need to capture the exact shape of the room.

You need to make the scene cinematic.

That sounds impressive. It also sends a beginner in the wrong direction.

Here's a much simpler rule.

Use more verbs.

Use fewer adjectives.

Let people do things.

A lot of weak prose comes from characters standing still while the writer studies them from six inches away.

His fingers tightened slightly.

Her lips parted.

His eyes fell to her face.

Her chin lifted.

His jaw tightened.

Her hand trembled.

You can use those details. There is nothing wrong with them. The problem comes when a whole scene is built out of them.

Now take a different sentence.

He grabbed her by the collar and pulled her back.

You don't need three lines explaining the tension. The movement already gives you something to see.

You know where the hands are.

You know where the bodies are.

You know there is force involved.

You know the relationship just changed.

The picture came from the action.

That's the part a lot of writing advice skips. Visual writing doesn't come from stuffing more description into a paragraph. It comes from putting things in motion.

A character crosses the room.

Someone blocks the door.

A glass gets knocked over.

A chair scrapes the floor.

One person reaches for the phone and another person takes it away.

A man gets punched.

A woman turns around and leaves before anyone can stop her.

Now you have a scene.

You can add a close-up when you need one. A hand that won't stop shaking can matter. A character staring at an unopened message can matter. A cigarette burned down to the filter can matter.

But those details work because something is happening around them.

Don't confuse detail with movement.

They do different jobs.

The same problem shows up when people talk about character development.

One piece of advice I keep seeing is that good novels are driven by characters, while weaker novels are driven by plot.

I don't buy that as a rule.

Sometimes a character drives the story.

Sometimes the story drags the character behind it.

Sometimes the two trade places every few chapters.

And some of the best novels work precisely because of that movement back and forth.

Take Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire.

Louis spends much of the story being pushed from one situation into another.

He wants to die.

Instead, Lestat turns him into a vampire.

Louis refuses to embrace the life Lestat has given him.

Lestat keeps trying to bind him to that life.

Claudia enters the picture.

Louis becomes attached to her.

Claudia grows older in mind while her body remains trapped in childhood.

She eventually turns against Lestat.

That decision changes everything.

Then comes the flight, the years of wandering, the encounter with Armand, Claudia's death, and everything that follows.

Louis makes choices all the way through.

But a large part of his story comes from circumstances he didn't choose.

He isn't sitting in a room designing the next ten moves.

Something happens to him.

He reacts.

He makes a choice.

That choice creates another situation.

Then the new situation pushes him again.

That is still character-driven fiction because his responses matter. It is also plot-driven fiction because events keep forcing his hand.

There is no contradiction there.

A novel doesn't have to pick one side.

Imagine a protagonist who quits his job because he can't stand his boss.

That is the character driving the plot.

Now imagine the opposite.

His company collapses. His family loses its income. He has to move to another city because there is nothing left where he lives.

Now the plot is driving him.

He still has choices. He can resist, adapt, lie, fight, run, or give up.

The direction of the story can change because of him.

But the reason he's moving in the first place came from outside.

That back-and-forth is normal.

A story where the protagonist makes every important event happen can become artificial.

A story where the protagonist never causes anything can become passive.

You need both kinds of pressure.

That is why I don't like teaching beginners fixed slogans such as "characters should drive the plot."

A slogan is easy to memorize. It doesn't teach you when to use it.

The same problem appears with pacing.

Everyone agrees that a novel needs variation.

You can't write every chapter at maximum intensity.

You can't keep a fight scene running for five hundred pages.

After a major climax, the reader often needs room to breathe.

Fine.

But then a strange instruction appears in a lot of writing advice.

After the climax, write a quiet everyday scene.

Make it relaxing.

Use that scene to plant a new clue.

Use it to introduce the next conflict.

Use it to set up the next big event.

That sounds neat when it's written in an article.

It can be a mess in an actual novel.

A recovery section has a job. It lets the reader come down.

Maybe the characters sit in a diner and argue about something stupid.

Maybe they eat dinner.

Maybe one of them falls asleep on the couch.

Maybe they go shopping because somebody needs new shoes.

Maybe they joke about something that would have seemed impossible twenty chapters earlier.

That's useful.

The reader has been under pressure. Give them a few pages where nothing is exploding.

But don't drag it out.

A quiet scene that runs too long becomes dead space.

And when you start demanding that the quiet scene also carry the next major plot thread, you're asking it to perform two opposite jobs at once.

The problem isn't that quiet scenes can never contain a clue.

Of course they can.

The problem is pretending that a scene stops being active just because the characters are drinking tea.

Suppose a woman notices that her husband's coat has a train ticket in the pocket.

That's a clue.

She asks where he's going.

Now there's tension.

You have started a new problem.

The scene isn't quiet anymore.

The story has moved.

That's fine. But call it what it is.

Don't tell beginners they're writing a "relaxing daily-life scene" when the chapter is actually turning the next screw.

A calm scene can still contain movement. It just doesn't have to contain a major conflict.

And there is another reason I prefer planting important information before the climax rather than after it.

Readers move fast.

When you've just finished a huge scene, they carry that scene's emotional pressure into the next page.

You don't have much time to make them care about a completely new thread.

A well-placed clue before the climax has a better chance of sticking.

Put something strange on the table three chapters earlier.

Let the character dismiss it.

Let the reader notice it.

Then, after the climax, bring it back.

The reader gets that small moment of recognition.

Oh. That thing was there.

That's usually stronger than stopping the story after a big emotional scene and announcing a new problem with a suspicious-looking object.

Foreshadowing works best when the story has already given the reader a reason to remember.

You don't need to hang a sign over it saying, "Remember this."

The story should do the work.

Dialogue has the same problem.

There's a piece of advice that gets repeated almost as a universal rule: once two characters are talking, stop writing dialogue tags.

That can work.

It can also make a scene unreadable.

If two people are talking, and their voices are distinct, you can often drop some tags.

"Did you call him?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because he lied to me."

"About what?"

"Everything."

That is easy enough to follow.

But add a third person.

Then a fourth.

Now give all of them short sentences.

Now let them ask questions.

Now let one of them interrupt another.

Suddenly the reader has to stop and figure out who said what.

That is not a small problem.

The reader shouldn't have to solve a seating chart in the middle of an argument.

Dialogue attribution doesn't exist only to identify the speaker.

It also gives you a place to put physical action.

"Give me the money."

Mark slapped his palm against the table hard enough to rattle the glasses.

Now you know who spoke.

You also know what the room feels like.

The table moved.

The glasses shook.

Mark isn't standing there delivering a line in a vacuum.

He's angry.

The action carries part of the emotion.

This is especially useful because spoken words alone often don't carry everything you want them to carry.

Compare these two versions.

"Give me the money."

"Give me the money!" Mark shouted angrily.

The second version tells the reader exactly how to interpret the line.

A physical action can do more without explaining the emotion.

"Give me the money." Mark slapped the table. One of the glasses tipped and spilled water across the invoice.

Now the emotion comes from what he does.

The scene gets larger too.

The invoice matters.

The glass matters.

The spill matters.

Maybe another character now has to move the papers.

Maybe the wet invoice reveals a name that was hidden underneath it.

A simple action can create another piece of the scene.

That's why dialogue tags, gestures, movement, objects, and setting all have a job.

None of them should be used automatically.

Use enough to keep the reader oriented.

Use enough to carry the emotional weight you need.

Then stop.

There is another condition that matters when you try to write dialogue with very few tags.

Your voices have to be good.

Not "good" in some abstract literary sense.

I mean the reader has to be able to tell these people apart.

Does one person always answer with a question?

Does another person never say what she means directly?

Does one character swear when he's nervous?

Does another become very polite when she's furious?

Does someone keep changing the subject?

Those habits are useful.

But you still have to control the scene.

Two characters can carry a long exchange with very little attribution.

Three can be difficult.

Four can become a disaster.

The more people you put into the conversation, the more help the reader may need.

This is another case where copying a famous writer's technique without understanding the conditions behind it gets beginners into trouble.

A technique is not a magic trick.

It works because the writer has control over the material.

That matters more than the trick itself.

This is also why I get nervous when beginners spend months collecting writing advice without writing.

They hear a sentence.

It sounds smart.

They write it down.

Then another sentence contradicts it.

They write that one down too.

Soon they have twenty rules about pacing, twelve rules about character, seven rules about dialogue, and absolutely no idea how to get through chapter six.

Writing doesn't reward that kind of preparation.

At some point you have to put your hands on the keyboard.

You have to write bad scenes.

You have to write scenes that run too long.

You have to make a character behave in a way that doesn't fit.

You have to finish a chapter and realize nothing happened.

You have to read your own dialogue and hear four different characters speaking with the same voice.

You have to write thirty thousand words and discover that your entire middle section is a mess.

That's not failure.

That's the process that teaches you what the rules were trying to tell you in the first place.

Before you have written enough, another person's advice is hard to judge.

Someone says, "Your climax needs a longer buildup."

Maybe they're right.

Someone else says, "Cut the buildup and get to the point."

Maybe they're right too.

Without your own pages in front of you, you don't know which problem you're actually solving.

That's why I have never been very interested in telling beginners to memorize a giant list of writing techniques before they start.

Write first.

Read widely.

Watch what your own pages are doing.

Then go back to the advice.

A sentence like "show, don't tell" becomes more useful after you've seen what bad telling looks like in your own draft.

"Characters should have goals" becomes more useful after you've written a character who wanders through three chapters because the author needed him to.

"Every scene needs conflict" becomes less mysterious after you've written a quiet conversation that has no argument but changes a relationship.

You learn the difference by doing.

And that brings me to what I think the basic skills actually are.

They're much less glamorous than the internet makes them sound.

First, you need enough brains to understand what you're writing.

You need to be able to read sentences, follow cause and effect, remember who your characters are, and notice when something you've written doesn't make sense.

You don't need a literature degree.

You don't need to know every term in a screenwriting handbook.

You need to be able to think.

Second, you need something to write on.

A computer helps.

So does a cheap laptop, an old desktop, or anything else that lets you produce pages without fighting the machine.

You don't need a perfect setup.

You need a working one.

Third, you need time.

This one gets ignored because it isn't exciting.

But writing novels takes time.

Not thinking about writing.

Not watching videos about writing.

Not organizing your notes.

Writing.

You need time to sit down and produce a page when you aren't in the mood.

Then another.

Then another.

Eventually you have a chapter.

Then another.

Eventually you have a manuscript.

That's the basic equipment.

The rest can be learned.

You can study structure after you've discovered where your structure breaks.

You can study dialogue after you've written conversations that sound like cardboard.

You can study pacing after you've bored yourself with your own chapter.

You can study characterization after you realize your hero and villain both talk exactly like you.

You can study description after you notice that every room in the book looks like the same room.

Those problems are useful.

They give you something concrete to fix.

What does not help much is filling your head with rules before you've built the habit of writing.

New writers are especially vulnerable to polished advice because they don't yet have enough experience to challenge it.

A bad rule can sound brilliant.

A half-true rule can be even worse.

Half of it works.

The other half quietly damages the story.

Then the beginner starts blaming themselves because they think they haven't mastered the technique yet.

Sometimes the technique is the problem.

That's why I would rather see a beginner write a messy hundred-thousand-word novel than spend a year preparing to write a perfect first chapter.

A hundred thousand words will teach you things no checklist can teach you.

You'll discover what kind of scenes you can write naturally.

You'll discover where your characters come alive and where they turn into cardboard.

You'll discover whether you rely too much on dialogue.

You'll discover whether you explain emotions instead of dramatizing them.

You'll discover whether your plot keeps moving because the characters make choices or because the author keeps throwing disasters at them.

And eventually you'll start noticing the difference between advice that helps your story and advice that merely sounds good.

That's the skill I care about most.

Not memorizing rules.

Judgment.

You get judgment from writing, reading, revising, and writing some more.

So when someone asks what the basic skills of novel writing are, I keep the answer simple.

You need enough sense to tell a coherent story.

You need something to write with.

And you need time to do it.

Then write.

Write badly.

Write awkwardly.

Write scenes you hate.

Finish things.

Fix them.

Start again.

Get to a million words eventually, and you'll have a much better idea of which writing rules deserve your attention.