How do you take a blank sheet of paper, an idea, and make "good writing?" It all boils down to a few simple lessons. Here's the secret in three easy swallows:

1. Remember that the language is a medium as well as a means.

What happens when you take away Vincent Van Gogh's lively, swirling brush strokes or Georges Seurat's uncountable pointillist dots? Your picture gets dull, that's what. Prose is more than a mechanism for the delivery of a story- it is an infinitely plastic medium that has the power to convert a few square inches of black and white space into vivid imagery behind the reader's eyes. Unless, of course, the writer chooses to ignore it. But then I thought that boring readers stiff was a bad thing.

Prose style, whether hard-hitting and compact (ala Ernest Hemingway) or opulent and baroque (ala Ray Bradbury) is nothing to be afraid of, and he who scorns it will probably never write anything worth reading more than once.

2. Don't waste the reader's time.

The best, brightest, and boldest creators in any medium are those that remember that they only have so many pages, so much air time, so much film, and so much space on a CD with which to entertain the audience. The key to crafting an exciting, memorable story in writing is to keep out all the bits and pieces that don't go anywhere, lead to anything, or enlighten any aspect of the unfolding narrative. Go through your work with a fine-toothed mental comb and peel out the slow bits, the boring bits, and the bits that never seem to end. Meandering conversation? Kill it. Superfluous dialogue? Kill it. Subplot left hanging, unresolved, or fundamentally unimportant? Kill it, slay it, take it out back and hang it without benefit of trial.

Oh, yeah. I'm not talking about the parts that are important or unimportant to your plot, knucklehead. I'm talking about the parts that are important or unimportant when seen through the eyes of your reader. Let me ask you this- if it's necessary for the reader to suffer through thirty pages of dull exposition in order to understand your plot, your characters, and your setting, what's stopping you from keeping the substance of those passages but replacing them with thirty pages of exciting exposition?

You say it gets good on page 154? Fuck you. Lost sale. Make it good on page one or get lost.

3. Read a fricking book.

If you are a writer or would-be writer and you claim that you don't have the time or the need to read the work of other writers, you are lying to yourself. You are crippling your potential. You are wrong in every case and you cannot cook up a counter-argument that trumps the need to read widely if you want to write well. It's that simple.