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.

Stop the madness

Here's some of the captcha codes I encountered on a blog round last week. (Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Incidentally rhymes with "gotcha!")

Seriously, these things make my monkey crazy. The ones on Blogger are the worst.

If you don't want to drive your frogs mental, you can either (a) turn on moderation so you have to check the comments before posting them, or (b) accept the Anonymous computer spam and delete it. If the commenter isn't signed in, and signs with the name "Anonymous", Blogger will send them to you to decide whether to post or not, and anything else will go through. I have an email filter so they go into one folder, and then I automatically delete them all.

Captcha codes are devil's spawn, yo.