How to write good: First, select cool color of ink
Whenever I think about “rules” for writing, I think of the old Steve Martin gag where he’s about to relay a bit of advice, intoning pompously: “Always…. No, it was: Never …. ”
And he's a novelist, too.
Writing is so full of difficulty, imprecision, ambiguity and mystery that it’s not surprising so many of us yearn for the clearcut. To be instructed: Do it this way. We yearn for the rules.
But then we see the rules – whether it’s some bit of Writer’s Digest nonsense or something we tell ourselves in a workshop. And we realize they are false.
They might be true sometimes. But every rule about writing eventually dies at some logical extreme or is revealed as mere personal preference.
Show, don’t tell? True as can be. Except for the many, many times it isn’t.
Start late in the action and exit early? Tell it to Alice Munro.
Kill your darlings? Well, maybe not all your darlings. You’ll want to leave something in there for the folks at Bartlett’s.
Still, a lot of writers want that certainty. Do it this way and it will be good. I do. I want to be relieved from the ambiguity of not knowing — of never knowing, not even when other people tell me what they think, whether what I’m doing as a writer is “right.” Or good. Or something. Even though I know it’s impossible, I want it.
Anyway, the very impossibility of such rules is probably the reason there are so many. And it can produce some hilarious stuff. How to Write Your Novel, Part 3: What Does Your Character Look Like? A lot of this is simply hack advice for fitting together plot machines. Here’s the start of “How to Plot a Novel,” one of the many pages of advice at ehow.com.
The easiest part of writing your first novel, is the plotting process. … In your notebook, write out a one sentence idea for the story. Highlight it, or write it in a really cool color. Make sure that you can see that sentence when ever you work on the story.
(OK, I think I might have found a rule that can survive all tests: The hardest part of giving writing advice, is not making grammatical mistakes in the first sentence.)
Then there’s “Plotting the First Novel.”
A weak or wandering plot is difficult to read and doesn’t sustain interest. For instance, if the novice writer decides to write a murder mystery, it’s probably better if he knows who the murderer is when he starts the book, rather than trying to figure it out as he goes.
This stuff is easy to pick on, but so-called serious writers engage in rule-making, too. The Guardian asked a bunch of writers to submit their list of 10 rules for writing, to coincide with the release of Elmore Leonard’s famous list (“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”)
Just as I do with other kinds of lists (am I repeating myself already?), I find this exercise fascinating. That’s in large part because a lot of these rules simply aren’t rules — aren’t universally or even primarily true, at least for me. Here’s one from Ann Enright: “Only bad writers think that their work is really good.” Not even close to true. The history of literature is replete with super-talented egomaniacs.
Others of these “rules” are too minor and quibbling to be on a top 10 list. To try and cover the whole act of writing with 10 rules, and to make room for a cranky prohibition on using the word “then” instead of “and,” as Jonathan Franzen does, seems to miss the forest for the pine needle.
Anyway, these rules are good fun and useful in the way that all such declarations about writing are: as a way to focus attention on questions of craft, convey one person’s truth, and help us figure out what we think by realizing what we don’t think.
Here are the Guardian’s lists: Part One, Part Two. And here are some rules from their package that I am hereby de-codifying as rules, as least for myself.
Margaret Atwood rule: Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak.
Pens are superior to pencils in every way, unless you are in grade school. I cannot remember the last time I ever had a pen leak.
Geoff Dyer rule: Don’t write in public places.
Write wherever you want.
Geoff Dyer rule, part 2: Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.
Nabokov isn’t around to suck up to anymore, of course. But do it anyway. For a lifetime.
Ann Enright rule: Have fun.
Work hard.
Richard Ford rule: Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.
What is this a rule for again? How to be a blustery macho ass?
Jonathan Franzen rule: Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
You should always write in the second person.
David Hare rule: Write only when you have something to say.
Never write when you have “something to say.” Write to discover what you have to say.
Hilary Mantel rule: Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.
There is almost no chance that you will need an accountant.
Do you have any rules? What so-called rules do you refuse to accept?
Good post. I’ve always thought that rules for writers were just goddamn silly.
In my view, the only place one should be espousing rules is when one is dealing with brand-damn-new writers, as they can then be of some use. Some of the useful rules I heard as an upstart mushroom went like this:
Be aware that writing love poems and political poetry is really damn hard. As Amiri Baraka put it about political poems: You want to end up with a mess of pottage but almost always end up with a pot of message.
Don’t invert your syntax like Byron or you will end up sounding like Yoda.
Avoid sing-song verse (though this too often sounded like a proscription of rhyme/form, which is a serious mistake)
Try to avoid poems about poems or writing about writing, as it’ll probably bore the goddamn hell out of the entire planet.
Don’t think of yourself as a writer; instead just sit down and write.
etc.
Even then, one should make it clear all of these rules are just suggestions that most poets(if they keep writing ) will end up breaking–sometimes often.
My favorite Steve Martin line about writing goes something like this: I love words; words are my life. Words are really…well…you know…good.
“Don’t think of yourself as a writer; instead just sit down and write.”
This is the best rule ever.
Maybe there are only two real rules:
1) Read a lot.
2) Write a lot.
I’d say, also, 3) Rewrite a lot, and 4) Submit for publication. But those aren’t rules. Those are choices.
Make them rules if you want to.
Word counts at the sentence level should always be a prime number, always.
Never repeat the same verb within 450 words. Try to repeat-use modifiers as often as possible.
Give as twice as much shit as you can take.
Try to be the kind of writer who uses the word “pussy,” as in, “Don’t be a pussy.”
Smoke cigarettes and eat raw meat.
Some rules in the form of a quiz that I came up with as a result of reviewing submissions and manuscripts for journals and contests (some of you may remember this):
1. The quality of your story is in direct proportion to the quality of your title. As such, the font for your title should be:
A. At least 24 point
B. Script-like
C. Boldface and shadowed
D. All of the above
2. To make your story resonate with current events, you should have your character:
A. Lose everything in mortgage and bank failures
B. Drive a Prius
C. Text on a Blackberry while driving
D. All of the above
3. Stories are more culturally meaningful if they have:
A. A main character who’s Jewish
B. Gang violence
C. Dialogue written in accents and dialect (especially Scottish)
D. All of the above
4. Emotional impact is best achieved through the extensive use of:
A. Various conjugations of “to feel” and “to seem”
B. Secondary characters dying of cancer
C. Dead babies
D. All of the above
5. Action and intensity are best enhanced by using:
A. Countless adverbs
B. A different variant of “said” every time a character speaks
C. Multiple exclamation points in conjunction with underlining
D. All of the above
6. Your cover letter should be:
A. Printed in fuchsia ink on heavy, beige-colored cotton blend paper
B. At least two pages explaining why your dog is “really great”
C. Full of typos, including one in your own name
D. All of the above
How do you think you fared on that?
Other advice: Rewrite Shakespeare. Do it transparently.
If a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly, you are going to write a shitty book, using as your crutch a narrator whose defining characteristic is his irritating voice.
Which may explain why Thom Jones never wrote a novel, but wrote many great short stories.
Dan, that might explain all of Joseph Heller’s post-Catch-22 work.
oh, shit. that must be what i’m doing right now….