Best Writers' Rules (Part 3)

Michael Morpugo: By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.

Andrew Motion: Let your work stand before deciding whether or not to serve.

Joyce Carol Oates: Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

Will Self: You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you.

Colm Tóibín: No going to London.

Rose Tremain: Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know". Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

Sarah Waters: Writing fiction is not "self-­expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. 

James Joyce: Write it damn you, what else are you good for?

And finally, from Shakespeare's Top Ten Rules O' Writing: If ye suffer from block, have your mistress take up the quill while you cane opium and give her daughter goodly tup. If ye be nabbed, claim research.

Best Writers' Rules (Part 2)

Helen Dunmore: Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love".

Geoff Dyer: Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

Anne Enright: 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.

Richard Ford: Try to think of others' good luck as encouragement to yourself.

Jonathan Franzen: It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Esther Freud: Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained.

PD James: 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.

AL Kennedy: Have humility. Older/more ­experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. ­Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.

Michael Moorcock: 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.

Hilary Mantel: First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?

Best Writers' Rules (Part 1)

I have done you a service and read a bunch of writing rules lists, and picked out the best ones. Not the best advice, mind you. Just the best rules. Sometimes it's a bit of classic advice, but well expressed. Other times it's the most entertaining. My favorite was this one from Henry Miller: Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. It just appeals to my current attempt to live more in the present, be mindful etc.

Neil Gaiman: 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.)

Zadie Smith: ...try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

Susan Sontag: If I am not able to write because I’m afraid of being a bad writer, then I must be a bad writer. At least I’ll be writing.

John Steinbeck: Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

Jack Kerouac: Try never get drunk outside yr own house

Kurt Vonnegut: Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Margaret Atwood: Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

Elmore Leonard: Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.” …writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

Diana Athill: Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no ­inessential words can every essential word be made to count.

Roddy Doyle: Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.


To be continued tomorrow.