Writing Blog

20230501 Writing Advice!

May 1, 2023, 10:30am

RULES FOR WRITING!

As far as I am concerned, there are 3 rules:
         Write a lot.
         Read a lot.
         Get the technical aspects down.
But, then, I also dislike writing rules.

That hasn't stopped a heap of authors from giving their own ideas of rules for writers. I have accented (bolded) the ones I agree with:

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writers
* Never open a book with the weather.
* Avoid prologues.
* Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
* Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
* Keep your exclamation points under control!
* Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
* Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
* Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
* Same for places and things.
* Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.

Neil Gaiman's 8 Rules of Writing
* Write
* Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
* Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
* Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
* Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
* Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
* Laugh at your own jokes.
* The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses: Walter Benjamin’s Timeless Advice on Writing
* Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.
* Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
* In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.
* Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.
* Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
* Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
* Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.
* Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.
* Nulla dies sine linea [‘No day without a line’] — but there may well be weeks.
* Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.
* Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
* Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
* The work is the death mask of its conception.

Geoff Dyer’s ten rules for writing fiction
1 Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project.
2 Don’t write in public places.
3 Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.
4 If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings.
5 Keep a diary.
6 Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
7 Have more than one idea on the go at any one time.
8 Beware of clichés.
9 Do it every day.
10 Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to per­severance. But writing is all about perseverance. You’ve got to stick at it.

Jeanette Winterson's 10 Rules For Writing
* Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
* Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
* Love what you do.
* Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are ­doing is no good, accept it.
* Don’t hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.
* Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect.
* Take no notice of anyone with a ­gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
* Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
* Trust your creativity.
* Enjoy this work!

Margaret Atwood's 10 Rules Of Writing
* Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
* If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
* Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
* If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.
* Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
* Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
* You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality.
* Ask a reading friend or two to look at your book before you give it to anyone in the publishing business.
* Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road.
* Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visualization of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

Ten Rules for Writing: Anne Enright
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not?
The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not ­counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

Jonathan Franzen's Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
* The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
* Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
* Never use the word “then” as a ­conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
* Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
* When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
* The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than “The Meta­morphosis”.
* You see more sitting still than chasing after.
* It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
* Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
* You have to love before you can be relentless.

P.D. James: 5 Bits of Writing Advice
* Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
* Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
* Don't just plan to write—write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
* Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
* Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer—however happy, however tragic—is ever wasted.

Michael Moorcock: 10 Tips for Good Storytelling
* Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.
* Find an author you admire and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.
* Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.
* If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction.
* Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.
* Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.
* For a good melodrama study the famous “Lester Dent master plot formula" which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.
* If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophising. This helps retain dramatic tension.
* Carrot and stick—have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).
* Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.

“Five rules for writing fiction”: Annie Proulx
1 Proceed slowly and take care.
2 To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.
3 Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.
4 Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
5 Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.

Lisa Jewell’s top tips for new writers
* Read a lot
* Write about what you know
* Have your own voice
* Do a creative writing course
* Decide on a genre
* Write the ending first
* Do a first draft
* Don’t be afraid to self-edit
* Be disciplined
* Keep a notebook
* Don’t give up
* Give it to trusted friends to read

Mark Twain's Top 10 Writing Tips
* Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
* Use the right word, not its second cousin.
* As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
* You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it.
* God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.
* Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
* Use good grammar.
* Damnation (if you will allow the expression), get up & take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is for girls. . . . There is one thing I can't stand and won't stand, from many people. That is, sham sentimentality.
* Use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.
* The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.
* Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.