Ten Rules for Writers, or, We're All a Little Mad Here

Jonathan Franzen (whom, true confession, I had never heard of before a few days ago) apparently just got himself in trouble for producing a list of ten rules for aspiring novelists.  Without having the foggiest whether Franzen’s work is any good, much less anything I’d enjoy, the furor strikes me as amusing.  One expects writers to be a bit pretentious about their writing (who, me, what? moving right along here …), and Franzen’s list is that.  One expects writers to be quirky, and his list is that too.  And as for his anti-internet rule(s) (two by my count), I suspect he is hyperbolically stating what all writers know deep in their souls to be true: that the internet is a foe of productivity, even as it is a friend of research.  This is not new information.

The truly funny thing about the resentment Franzen has sparked is that the internet is ALIVE with people offering advice on writing, and not infrequently in the “ten rules” format.  It is ubiquitous.  I don’t have time to read them all, but I suspect that between Marion Harmon, Sarah Waters, Elmore Leonard, Denis Lehane, Neil Gaiman, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Monica Ali, Janet Fitch, various and sundry asked by the Guardian, and LifeHack, … someone has produced a list that is even more offensive than Franzen’s.

Just for fun (and maybe it will help you write better) here are two sterling prose compositors speaking from their podia (that’s on their feet, which is probably Greek for “off the cuff”), offering their take on how to produce a bestseller.

Mark Twain:
1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.
12. An author should say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.

P.S.  You will notice that these are actually eighteen rules, not ten.  Despite the fact that some on the internet have deigned to abridge Mark Twain, I see no particular reason to fit so sprawling and ingenious a writer into a box.

Nietzche (source):
1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.
2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)
3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.
4. 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.
5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. 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.
6. 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.
7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
10. 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.

For a bonus, here’s a digest of a Rex Stout interview in which he explains the difference between himself and Dostoyevsky (which, as an admirer of both, I found fascinating).

I can’t really top that, and maybe I shouldn’t try, but reading Franzen’s list did make me think about my top rules.  And maybe that’s the good thing about the proliferation of pseudo-advice on the internet: it has the potential to produce some self-examination that may lead to the development of best practices.

Now excuse me while I go wash my mouth out of contemporary jargon.  Here, without further ado, is The Girl Who Is Saturday’s Ten Rules for Writers, which comes with no guarantees whatsoever attached.

1. When you sit down to write, set a double timer to ring once in three minutes, and once in thirty-three.  The first bell ensures that you actually start writing, and the second that you have written a good deal before you stop.
2. Spend your good ideas; do not hoard them.  The best way to have more good ideas is to let the ones you have get out and play.
3. Outline down to the scene.  Be pleased rather than chagrinned when your scene turns out to have a good deal more occurring in it than your outline let on.
4. Read what you enjoy, and then forget about it.  Your subconscious will remember the bits worth stealing.
5. Write what makes you happy, whether that’s “what will sell,” or “what I like to read,” or “what I think is important and worthy.”  Writing is hard enough without making yourself miserable with the produce.
6. Don’t be afraid to sound pretentious.  Make sure to ask truthful and wise people if you actually do sound pretentious.
7. Give all your characters arcs.
8. Don’t forget the trail mix.
9. Keep it to one swig every half page.
10. Unless you’re drinking cocoa, in which case the sky is the limit.

And finally, because I don’t like boxes either, but also lastly, because I’m not Mark Twain …

11. Pick up the phone when it cries and the baby when it rings.  Real people are always more important (and you’ll write better for acting on that fact).