10 Rules of Writing

Some days I just want a large, neon arrow, pointing me in the right direction when it comes to my writing career. I try to explain to the muses. Declare to them that sometimes, I need loud clanging bells and whistles indicating: “Go THIS way!!!”

I know there are several schools of thought that like to say that the signs we’re looking for can be found in whispers and gentle nudges. Thankfully, with the use of the interwebs finding the whispers of inspiration is a little easier.

And the whispers I found were ten rules of writing by several famous authors.

Margaret Atwood’s 10 rules of writing:

1 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.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6 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.

7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

9 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. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10 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.

 Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing:

1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3. Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation.’ You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

After reading her rules, I found that her list was inspired by a short piece Elmore Leonard  wrote in 2001 for The New York Times, outlining his ten rules of writing.

1. Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing:

   1. Never open a book with weather.
   If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

   2. Avoid prologues.
   They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

   There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

   3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
   The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

   4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” …
   …he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

   5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
   You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

   6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
   This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

   7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
   Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

   8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
   Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

   9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
   Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

   And finally:

   10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
   A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

   My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

   If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
   Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

   If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

   What Steinbeck did in Sweet Thursday was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

Well, with all these rules running around in my head, I wondered what my ten rules of writing would be. I’ll give it a go. 

Nicole Sharp’s 10 rules of writing:

1. Make sure you have enough coffee. Make sure you can make your favorite coffee at home. Or make sure you have enough money to go buy your favorite coffee in a place that allows computers and pens and paper.
2. Get some good duct tape and rope, because when that naysayer who lives in your brain comes ambling by and starts questioning what you’re doing or why you’re doing it … you’re gonna need to tape that mouth shut, tie those hands up and toss that negativity in a closet where it can’t get out. The only opinion that little voice is allowed to have is: “Good Job!” 
3. You have to write the words.
   Here’s the hard truth. If you’re going to be a writer, you have to write all the words.
   I’ve been asked several times now how I make myself write every day: Get a timer. Put 20 minutes on it. Get in front of your paper or computer. Start the timer. Write. Write legitimate bullshit and awful words; string them together into sentences and hammer them into paragraphs. Sometimes all you’ll write is “I hate this, I hate you, I hate typing, I hate the late afternoon.” When that timer goes off. HANDS OFF. Stop. Walk away. You’re done for the day.
   This is how you learn to write every day and how you get to the point three years down the road, when you no longer need a timer and you and your brain have figured out how you write best. 
4. Throw out all the rules. (You can go ahead and ignore several of Elmore Leonard’s rules.) Replace them with madness. Write late into the night. Write early in the morning. Write in the business meeting. Write in the carpool line. Write on a bridge in a rainstorm. 
5. Be open to failing. Be open to looking stupid. Be open to floundering and foolishness and folly. Allow your voice to shake. Second, third and fourth guess yourself. Then, do it anyway …
6. Write what interests you. I hate that old idiom “write what you know.” I’m not enthralled with what I know, which is why I have books set in different countries with plenty of adventure. You are going to have to sit with yourself every day and write the words and create the storyline. Might as well love what you are writing.
7. Not every word and sentence and paragraph you write is amazing. Sometimes, for the sake of a story, you need to cut a lot of it out. I once ditched 64k words because they weren’t driving the story in the right direction. Be open to releasing the words and characters and situations that don’t work.
8. Even if you do cut out 64k words. No words you write are wasted. As a writer, when you write, you’re learning how you write, you’re finding your voice, you’re figuring out how to make it all come together. No words are wasted.
9. Mow the lawn, or vacuum the house for long stretches when you’re stuck. Or take a shower. Do something that involves movement, drudgery and white noise. It has taken a lot of lawn mowing for me to get characters out of sticky situations.
10. Don’t forget to have fun.