🖋️ Greatest Writing Wisdom: Legendary Writer's Rules Edition

Writers don’t always follow rules but they sure love making them. From Hemingway and Kerouac to Henry Miller and Zadie Smith, many of the greats have taken the time to write theirs down.

This edition collects some of the most enduring “rules of writing” ever shared. They are bold, brilliant, contradictory, and sharp. Some read like commandments. Others are more like nudges. Together they offer a glimpse into the minds of writers who’ve wrestled with the work, and lived to tell the tale.

Below, you’ll find eight legendary writers laying down their rules and laws of writing. Take what you need. Ignore what doesn’t land.

If nothing else, enjoy watching masters of the craft try to explain the unexplainable.

6 Rules of Writing by George Orwell

• Avoid long words.
  
• You don't need cliches.
  
• Write in the active voice.
  
• Write as clearly as possible.
  
• If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out.
  
• Better to be interesting than to follow all the rules.
  
  

5 Techniques for Good Craftsmanship by Annie Proulx

Proulx writes literary fiction brilliant enough to win major accolades (Pulitzer, National Book Award, etc.) and accessible enough to win a wide audience. Her specialty is short stories, including Brokeback Mountain. Her masterpiece is the novel The Shipping News. Proulx didn't begin writing until her 50s. She did not believe in rushing things.

• Proceed slowly and take care.
• To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.
• Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
• Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.
• Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase / sentence / paragraph / page / story / chapter.

11 Writing Commandments by Henry Miller

• When you can't create you can work.
• Work on one thing at a time until finished.
• Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
• Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
• Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
• Start no more new books. Add no more new material to Black Spring.
• Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
• Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
• Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema — all these come afterwards.
• Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
• Discard the Program when you feel like it. But go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10 Good Writing Habits by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith rocked the literary world in her late twenties with her novel White Teeth, a look into contemporary multicultural London. She followed this up with the novels, The Autograph Man and On Beauty. In addition to being considered one of the freshest and most ambitious voices of her generation, Smith is also a leading light in literary criticism.

• Don't confuse honors with achievement.
• Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.
• Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
• Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.
• When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
• When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
• Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
• Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
• 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.
• Don't romanticize 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.

10 Rules for Writers by Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche penned these ten rules in a letter to his muse under a heading entitled, Toward the Teaching of Style.

• Of prime necessity is life. A style should live.
• The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures.
• The law of mutual relation. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate.
• Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose: Choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
• Writing must be mimicry. One must first determine precisely "what-and-what do I wish to say and present," before you may write.
• Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.
• One must learn to feel everything: The length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments, like gestures.
• Since the writer lacks many of the speaker's means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation. Of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.
• Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea, not only that one thinks it but also feels it. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
• It is not good manners or clever to deprive one's reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one's reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

10 Rules on Writing by Ernest Hemingway

• If reading good writers discourages you, you ought to be discouraged.
• There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it.
• Write when there is something that you know and not before, and not too much after.
• Write as long as you can live and there is any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about.
• Writers are ruined by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first time they cannot write, the first time they cannot do anything else.
• If you start to write elaborately, like someone introducing something, you will find that you can delete that ornament and start with the first true declarative sentence. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
• Just start to make it up and have happen what would have to happen as it goes along. Don't invent anything that could not actually happen. You want all your stories to sound as though they really happened, as if they were just skillful reporting.
• The temptation is usually to write too much. Leave out a lot of what you know. You can omit something if you know that you omitted it, and the omitted part strengthens the story. But if you omit things because you don't know them, it only makes hollow places in the writing.
• Once you are into the work it is pointless to worry about whether you can go on. You have to go on, so there is no sense to worry. You have to learn this to write. The hard part about a project is to finish it. You have to go on when it is most helpless. The only thing to do with a book is to go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.
• Bad writers love the epic style. If you take on a phony style you can write any amount of words. You can mystify to avoid making a straight statement and it will take a while for you to be known as a fake. This is not true mysticism but only incompetence, which mystifies where there is no mystery and only reveals the need to fake in order to cover a lack of knowledge or an inability to state clearly. If you write clearly enough anyone can see if you fake it or not.

30 Beliefs and Techniques for Modern Prose by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was one of the writers who reinvented literature. He climbed into James Joyce's stream of consciousness and careened down the streets of Beat poetry and the alleyways of Bebop jazz, writing novels like The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and his masterpiece, On the Road. Along the way he influenced countless writers and, some say, helped usher in the 1960s counter-culture movement.

Eventually, Kerouac set down 30 essential beliefs in something he called “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” These tips may or may not make sense to you, but that’s Kerouac.

• Accept loss forever
• Be in love with your life
• You're a Genius all the time
• Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
• Believe in the holy contour of life
• Blow as deep as you want to blow
• Visionary tics shivering in the chest
• Like Proust be an old teahead of time
• No time for poetry but exactly what is
• Submissive to everything, open, listening
• The unspeakable visions of the individual
• Try never get drunk outside yr own house
• Something that you feel will find its own form
• Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
• The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
• In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
• In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
• Telling the true story of the world in interior monologue
• Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
• Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
• Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
• Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
• Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
• Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
• Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
• Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
• No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
• Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

10 Writing Rules by Stephen King

1. Focus
2. Cut fluff
3. Read lots
4. Write 1 word at a time
5. 2nd draft 🟰 1st draft ➖ 10%
6. Kill adverbs. "Never use many words when you can use one."
   • She didn't "Yell loudly." She "Screamed."
   • The man didn't "Run quickly." He "Sprinted."
   • The house wasn't "Really small." The house was "Tiny."
7. Write simple. "Avoid fancy words. Complicated writing is harder to read. Harder to read is fewer people reading. The smartest writers write 'dumb'."
   • Don't say: "Utilize." Say: "Use."
   • Don't say: "Affirmative." Say: "Yes."
8. Hook them fast. "People won't read your last line if you don't hook them on the 1st."
   • Ask a question
   • Create curiosity
   • Hint at a benefit
   • Use simple words
   • Use words "you" and "your"
   • Start in the middle of the action
   • Keep your opening sentence short
9. Write to your reader. "Create an avatar of your ideal reader. Respectable writing respects the readers' time."
   • What's their job?
   • How old are they?
   • Where do they live?
   • What are their goals?
   • What are their hobbies?
   • Are they a man or woman?
   • What keeps them up at night?
10. Separate writing and editing. "Write to generate ideas, edit to clarify them. You kill your creativity when you edit while you write. Editing and writing is like stepping on the gas and hitting reverse."
    • When writing...
      • Write fast and stupid
      • Don't worry about mistakes
      • Focus on drafting your ideas
    • When editing...
      • Cut fluff
      • Simplify words
      • Shorten sentences

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