Ten rules for writing fiction

[kromen]

Agree, disagree, or more rules needed?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

 

[3113]

Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri can 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.

Yeah, I really want to write like Hemingway...NOT!

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

Oh, yes, indeed! Let's thin books out and make it easy for readers to read less and less until books are like Twitter. This as good as says, "Stop making the reader work so hard! Poor babies!" People need to be made more literate, not less.

Rule 11: After you've learned all you can from rules on writing, toss them out the window. Real writers know when, how and where to break such rules. And writers that don't know it, still, unfortunately, sell books (as the popularity of Robert Jordan--who broke every one of those rules and more, in every one of his lengthy, awful books of his lengthy, awful series) more than proves so what the fuck do they matter?

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Rule 12. Always be wary of rules posted by 'authorities'. Like English grammar, they are most often fraudulent.

 

[stephen55]

Who would have thought......

Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray.

Well, that one is going to go over big around here.......

 

[Liar]

A whole bunch of them there. The only one I find myself agreeing with is Neil Gaiman. Mainly cause he remebered the most important rule:

1 Write.

 

[DeeZire]

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

I wish more authors would consider this one. I read to find out what happens, not to find out what the character was thinking ten years ago when her dad took her for a walk on the beach that scorching hot day that reminded her of the sunburn she got that time she was riding horseback when a dog, who was owned by the neighbor in the big yellow house jumped out and made the horse take off galloping across the field that reminded her of where she grew up when she was little, with her dad kicked back in his easy chair, his pipe dangling from his gnarly fingers, with the blue haze hanging in the living room like the clouds in November.

I hate when authors do that.

 

[sr71plt]

I'm not even going to read the "rules."

 

[Bobby_3111]

I'm not even going to read the "rules."

I have to agree with this. Learn what you can in a traditional university but be very wary of *rules* written by independent writers (even if some are well known and considered to be brilliant). What works for one might not work for the other. Every writer has his own style and form. To follow a set of rules is handi-capping oneself.

 

[3113]

I wish more authors would consider this one. I read to find out what happens, not to find out what the character was thinking ten years ago when her dad took her for a walk on the beach that scorching hot day that reminded her of the sunburn she got that time she was riding horseback when a dog, who was owned by the neighbor in the big yellow house jumped out and made the horse take off galloping across the field that reminded her of where she grew up when she was little, with her dad kicked back in his easy chair, his pipe dangling from his gnarly fingers, with the blue haze hanging in the living room like the clouds in November.

I hate when authors do that.

And what about when it really matters? That's the problem with rules. If you make a rule, then all of it goes whether it's Nabokov's Humbert Humbert remembering the girl who got him fixated on nymphets (leadng to his obsession with Lolita), or that passage you found so useless with the horse. A rule like that tends to toss out the baby with the bathwater.

And to make it even more problematic, the rule doesn't tell you what part each and every reader skips. You may skip all of the section of A Christmas Carol that involves the ghost of Xmas past not caring what happened to Mr. Scrooge as a boy, but others read it with relish. Meanwhile, they may be skipping the part you love and adore. And what if the writer left that out and put int he part those other readers adored--so it's all flashbacks to the past and none of what you want?

You can't make a bad rule good by reading into it what isn't there, namely, that writers will cut out what they think YOU skip and not what they rightly or wrongly think readers in general skip.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Remember how you wrote your masterpieces.

This advice is from Stephen King and comes from the preface of a recent collection of short stories. He says he cant recall how he wrote the books that made him famous, but whatever it was is lost and he cant find it. Sad.

Its fear Stevie.

I agree with 3113. If you post a BRIDGE OUT AHEAD warning some people will ignore it. e.e.cummings wrote a poem about the phenomena, PLATO TOLD HIM,

plato told

him:he couldn't
believe it(jesus

told him; he
wouldn't believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even

(believe it
or

not(you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn't believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

 

[Zeb_Carter]

The only rule I follow...

Write what you like.

 

[DeeZire]

You can't make a bad rule good by reading into it what isn't there, namely, that writers will cut out what they think YOU skip and not what they rightly or wrongly think readers in general skip.

I think the point of that rule is to keep the story moving forward. Of course it's subjective, since some people want a lot of atmosphere, backstory, character motivation in a story, while others (like me) just want to be carried along by a narrative. I suspect I'm in the minority in my desire for economical prose, considering that I've been disappointed by some very successful authors.

 

[sr71plt]

I suspect I'm in the minority in my desire for economical prose

I don't think you are in a minority to keeping it to a minimum. I've just told the author of a novel he needs to cut about 10 percent out of his manuscrpit--all paragraphs of excrutiating detail of restaurants in towns and what minor characters are wearing that just stops the flow of the storyline in its track.

I don't think of this as a rule so much as a survival technique.

 

[mynameisben]

Put me down for disagree, lock stock and barrel. The article should have been titled "10 Guidelines for Writing Fiction." Rules are for science. Writing good fiction is more akin to witchcraft.

There's what. . . 500 rules in there from fifty or so different authors? If you adopt even ten of those rules you will wind up writing like a confused idiot. Each of the rules offered by the pros is distilled wisdom, gleaned from decades of hard work and failure and personal triumph. Read the rules. Read them twice or a thousand times if you like. You didn't live their work. You won't learn squat.

Writers write. Live your own work, and your failures and your triumphs will write your rules for you. Your voice will never rise above the din in the jungle of somebody else's rules.

 

[stephen55]

This gem from Elmore Leonard....

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
That ought to keep him busy for a while.

But these two from Richard Ford are good........

8 Don't wish ill on your colleagues.
10 Don't take any shit if you can possibly help it.

 

[3113]

I don't think of this as a rule so much as a survival technique.

Except that we come right back to Robert Jordan who survived very well on stories that moved like a glacier. With details of every...single...move...the heroes made whether it was pertinent to the story or not (walking down a road. Stopping for lunch. Washing their faces. Moving down the road. Stopping at an inn. Getting ready for bed...I kid you not!). Which brings me to what we're really discussing here. Cutting out self-indulgence. And I'm in agreement with that. When a writer starts to masturbate on the page, act like a little kid wanting to show and tell you everything about their little playground and playmates, then you've got self-indulgence and that's not very good writing. I'd loved to have taken a hatchet to Jordan myself and wondered why the editor hadn't. But his success gives lie to the fact that readers skip such stuff. Evidently, a lot of readers relish such stuff--they masturbate on their reading of it as the writer masturbated in the writing of it. So while it doesn't make for good writing--it still sells.

But what is most important to me, is that the rule is written in a way that doesn't allow writers to understand what it means, what to do and why to do it. This means they chance destroying "style" rather than a lack of substance. Hemmingway who simplifies till all you've got is the "There was green grass and green leaves--" is actually creating a style as much as he's streamlining the story. What a terrible thing it would be to do what he did to Fitzgerald who has "This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."

However baroque by compare, Fitzgerald is not Hemmingway. Cutting out certain things would undermine not only substance but style. Can readers understand that if all you tell them, "Try to leave out what readers skip--" If they then poll people who say, "I don't like a lot of atmosphere--" There goes the valley of ashes, not because it should go, but the writer assumes readers will skip it. The rules don't give writers an understanding of why they should do these things or what they're accomplishing by doing them.

 

[sxyoldguy]

I sometimes think that authors get caught up in word count. As if in some way the more they write the better the story. Especially in an instance like Sr71 describes.

Paint the word picture that stimulates the most imaginations, then shut up.

A preacher friend of mine had a great line. If you can't stop boring in 30 minutes ... shut up.

 

[3113]

Each of the rules offered by the pros is distilled wisdom, gleaned from decades of hard work and failure and personal triumph. Read the rules. Read them twice or a thousand times if you like. You didn't live their work. You won't learn squat. Writers write. Live your own work, and your failures and your triumphs will write your rules for you. Your voice will never rise above the din in the jungle of somebody else's rules.

Bravo! That's it exactly!

 

[sr71plt]

Hemingway. (one "m")

(Sorry, but that jumps out every time and it seems to be an epidemic.)

The reference to "self-indulgence" is a bingo--and I plan on using that in covering this with the author of the novel I'm now editing.

When writing about places and periods and technology (and, in the case of the book I'm working on now, designer clothing labels) the author often needs to do a lot of research. There's no reason at all to regurgitate all of that back to the reader, though. You only need to use what's relevant to the storyline and enough to make your reader comfortable that you are based in plausibility without disturbing the flow of the story.

 

[JackLuis]

Style covers a lot of sins. I find Poppa's story telling to be stark contrasts and other some writers to be shades of grey when they wander off into illusion.

Yet each style can work, and you can "break" the rules, as long as it works.

I find it hard enough to just finish a story. Which is what I am going to do , now.

 

[Loring2]

Right on Dee

I think the point of that rule is to keep the story moving forward. Of course it's subjective, since some people want a lot of atmosphere, backstory, character motivation in a story, while others (like me) just want to be carried along by a narrative. I suspect I'm in the minority in my desire for economical prose, considering that I've been disappointed by some very successful authors.

Most people just want to read a story that keeps them reading and they never think about why they're reading it. At the risk of getting too insistent about it, I think there really isn't much else you can do without showing that you just may be too smart for your readers.

I've been making a fine living as a Screen Writer for 15 years and I realize that some of you (maybe many) think of people like me as hacks but to write in the TV or Movie arena requires an economy of narrative because the story is told in related scenes and dialogue.

Most of the time 60 minute shows are controlled by the storyline but sometime the storyline is controlled by character motivation.

I remember reading Zane Grey's novels as a 9 year old. His "Riders of the Purple Sage" is on my desk and whenever I start writing 'literature' as opposed to 'telling a story' I look at my hero. He rode a horse and sometimes he talked to it I'm sure.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

LORING

I tried Zane Grey twice (RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE and UNION PACIFIC) and abandoned the efforts after a dozen pages. Boring.

Alan LeMay knew how to write Westerns; if there are better Westerns than THE SEARCHERS and THE UNFORGIVEN, bring them on! Elmore Leonard almost reaches the pennacle with HOMBRE and VALDEZ IS COMING but loses his mind at the tail-ends, by peeing in excellent punch.

On the other-hand, last night I sampled Robin Cook's wares; he was recommended to me as an example of HOW TO WRITE! The man must own adverb and adjective plantations cuz his sentences are filled with both. In one sentence I counted 5 adverbs, 3 adjectives, 4 auxillary verbs, and 2 serious punctuation errors; it is not a long sentence. Reading Robin Cook is like walking through a cow pasture on a summer day.

 

[driphoney]

I'm not even going to read the "rules."

Ahh, now ... some of them were quite humorous! I particularly liked most of Margaret Atwood's. And then there were these two gems by Anne Enright:

2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.


5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

9 Have fun.

There's a guy around here who always picks on other writer's who appear to declare absolutes in writing. Thought he might enjoy seeing someone else agree.

As for most of the rules ... I quit reading after Enright. I found them quite stifling. Oh, and the first list, man, I tried to imagine someone sitting down and attempting to tell an interesting story and keep all those rules. All I could come up with was Dick and Jane.

 

[driphoney]

LORING

I tried Zane Grey twice (RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE and UNION PACIFIC) and abandoned the efforts after a dozen pages. Boring.

Alan LeMay knew how to write Westerns; if there are better Westerns than THE SEARCHERS and THE UNFORGIVEN, bring them on! Elmore Leonard almost reaches the pennacle with HOMBRE and VALDEZ IS COMING but loses his mind at the tail-ends, by peeing in excellent punch.

On the other-hand, last night I sampled Robin Cook's wares; he was recommended to me as an example of HOW TO WRITE! The man must own adverb and adjective plantations cuz his sentences are filled with both. In one sentence I counted 5 adverbs, 3 adjectives, 4 auxillary verbs, and 2 serious punctuation errors; it is not a long sentence. Reading Robin Cook is like walking through a cow pasture on a summer day.

Maybe you should have read Grey when you were nine, like Loring.

Thanks for the e.e. cummings poem.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

DRIPSTICK

When I was 9 I read MAD Magazine like everyone else. I was into biographies back then.