
The “Rules” of Writing - lainon
https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/761/the-rules-of-writing
======
jackschultz
I really like the format of the question and how responses are. Giant header
where everyone can scroll down quickly and easily see their advice. Other big
factor is that each response can only have one piece of advice. Often in
threads like this you'll get comments where people list a bunch of tips and
people upvote because they agree with only one of those tips.

A big one in my opinion is the "Stay off the Internet when you're writing".
When I type on a compute writing anything, not fiction, I always get a tiny
bit tired and look on other sites. I'm even sitting here forcing me to not
open another tab while writing this comment.

On that note, I have to say how great having a typewriter is. I don't use it
for writing fiction or anything, but I know how great it to be forced to sit
forward, not be able to unfocus, and have a physical output rather than a
shiny screen everyone's so used to. Obviously you'll can't sent it quickly or
edit it, but it's great to use and know the results.

------
paulpauper
Creative writing has a huge subjective element to it. You can take two pieces
of identical writing and get entirely different responses by changing
variables such as the author and the audience. Michael Crichton famously
demonstrated this when he turned in an essay to his professor that he copied
from Orwell and still got a 'C'. An essay under the nom de plume an
influential person is likely to receive more acclaim than the same essay by
someone unknown. Why is 50 Shares of Gray so successful even though it is
stylistically poor? Why do so many competent writers struggle to get
recognition? A lot of randomness.

it depends on:

-audience,and the expectation of the audience

-the expectation of the agent and publisher

-the role of the editor

-societal tastes and mores

-how much promotion the author does, and or the author's connections

Skill, however, is less important. Active vs. passive voice or 'show don't
tell' is not hat important.

Being a competent writer means one can probably make a living ghostwriting or
writing sales copy, but it's not enough to be influential.

~~~
dredmorbius
Just plain dumb luck / random chance.

Look to the number of ultimately highly successful works (of various stripes)
that have been rejected or ridiculed numerous times. The Beatles. KFC. Agatha
Christie, Harry Potter, Louis L'Amour, Dr. Seuss, Chronicles of Narnia.

One of many lists: [http://www.litrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-
rejected...](http://www.litrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/)

~~~
EliRivers
_“It is so badly written.” The author tries Doubleday instead and his little
book makes an impression. The Da Vinci Code sells 80 million._

Absolutely true. It is awfully written. And indeed, is just awful in so many
ways. Not just the writing. But it sells, like cheap chocolate and Avengers
movies.

~~~
mjevans
I feel the Avengers movie comparison isn't fair. That's part of a larger
context and might be more likened to a capstone in an arch (the other stones
being the other movies in that 'phase').

Comparing an entire phase (like a book in a series), or maybe the previous
movies (chapters) focusing mostly on one character might be fair.

------
Theodores
The number one rule: have a need to write.

Imagine you have made a major scientific discovery and want to tell the world
about it - you have a need to write.

Imagine you have a highly dysfunctional family. You derive great benefit from
writing about them, this is your therapy. Again, you have a need to write.

Some people do not get into writing because they have something to write
about. They do it because they fancy the lifestyle or would like their name in
print or imagine they can get rich. I have met a few of these attention
seekers and realised that they have a different idea of what writing is about
to me.

Your writings about your highly dysfunctional family may be entirely
fictional. Perhaps you have made a composite character out of two unrelated
friends. Perhaps some story details are changed, details omitted, but the
narrative is essentially true. This is different to dreaming up a highly
dysfuntional family, perhaps they live in a yurt in Outer Mongolia and have
arguments over dates, dates being of the edible variety. Here details are
being added for the sake of it, not being added but changed slightly so as to
disguise the fact that it is George that is being talked about. I know the
desk officer at the local police station would know what was fiction and what
was credible with details changed to protect identities.

So if what you are telling is essentially the truth albeit varnished by
analogy and turned into fiction then most of the rules should come naturally
given time to find one's writing voice. For instance, on adding in useless
detail, if you are telling a story and the appearance of someone is noteworthy
and important to the bigger story then you will go into the details of their
attire. This will be required, important content, not flowery detail. You will
have included it in there for a reason, not because you are trying to make
some imaginary Outer Mongolians imaginably real.

------
leggomylibro
This sort of advice seems way more practical than the kind you get from books
like _Elements of Style_.

Sure, there are all kinds of books about how to write. But they're usually
structured like, you know, books. I think a sort of bullet-point list in under
50 pages probably is a better way to get these kinds of points across.

------
nickjj
I think the #1 rule is: Just write, and keep writing.

The same goes for coding. The more you do it, the better you'll become because
you'll constantly be put into new situations where you can practice and apply
your craft.

~~~
paulpauper
I never liked this answer because doing something over and over again doesn't
lead to mastery, and there are many writers who keep writing and writing and
never attain success, either due to poor technique or other factors.

~~~
jogjayr
> doing something over and over again doesn't lead to mastery

Mastery is probably unachievable without guidance (unless you're an
undiscovered genius in the field) but competence is well within reach for
most. For people who need to write, being a competent writer is sufficient to
achieve their goals.

> there are many writers who keep writing and writing and never attain success

Because there isn't a linear correlation between writing skill and success.
There's not even necessarily a positive correlation. You just need to clear a
certain (often low) bar of quality and after that many other factors come into
play: subject matter and audience, marketing, promotion by an influencer (eg.
Oprah book club), fads and mores, even outright luck.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to get as good at writing as possible,
because doing good work is its own reward.

------
ianamartin
I find it completely interesting that creative writing still seems to have not
found any decent mechanism for being taught.

In Music Theory, one of the first things you learn to do is write music in the
style of the common practice period. That's shorthand for writing like Bach.

While Bach will occasionally bend some rules, he more often does his most
interesting work by using them against each other to come up with unexpected
results rather than actually breaking them.

The point being, that there are well-defined mechanisms in music such that if
you follow them to the letter, your music will sound like Bach--at least a
really boring version of Bach. But still, you're starting with that as a
baseline. And as you practice that style and get more familiar over time, you
start to see opportunities for more interesting options than what the baseline
rules seem to suggest.

And as you progress through a theory curriculum, you start studying other
styles and sets of rules for other noteworthy composers. You spend some time
imitating Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, at least one of the Russian epics, 20th
century and modern composers, and sometimes you might take the time to go back
and learn the styles of pre-Bach composers.

By the end of this series of courses, you have a solid understanding of the
rule-sets that different composers were drawing on and how they were using and
abusing them.

You, yourself, might not be a particularly brilliant or inspired writer of
music. But you have a minimum baseline ability to write something that could
pass for any of a number of famous composers from the 16th century to the
present day.

That won't make you rich or famous or successful or even good. Because there's
a lot more to it than that--mostly luck. But you won't suck. At worst you'll
be unoriginal and derivative. Then again, you can say that about a lot of
contemporary composers and writers.

My point is that you can go through a course of study either on your own or at
a university and just through simple practice, achieve a certain level of
skill.

It completely baffles me that for as long as people have been writing and
teaching people to write that no such formal system exists in that realm.

This particular collection of "rules" is not a bad example of all the
gobbledy-gook that we get taught in writing classes. But it's all entirely
subjective, and there are famous counterexamples to every single one of them.

It's . . . I don't know. It's just baffling to me how this situation exists.

~~~
knight17
Imitating the greats before venturing on your own was an accepted practice in
the earlier days. It is called copywork. Many famous writers used this method
to hone their writing chops. Benjamin Franklin, Jack London, Robert Louis
Stevenson all practiced copying the work of authors they admired.

[http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/03/26/want-to-become-a-
be...](http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/03/26/want-to-become-a-better-
writer-copy-the-work-of-others/)

[https://thehustle.co/how-to-not-write-like-an-
asshole](https://thehustle.co/how-to-not-write-like-an-asshole)

------
dredmorbius
I'm a big fan of "show, don't tell", most _especially_ in news or similarly
journalistic reporting. Most especially _don 't tell me how to respond_.
That's the deadly sign of clickbait.

I'm in favour of writing without editing _when you are actually writing_. But
I'm _also_ a fan of _editing and editing ruthlessly_ when it comes time to
edit.

Much of my own writing is in the form of essays and explorations. Here, I
strongly favour being _very well prepared_. And, if not as prepared as you'd
like to be, _then be open about the state of your unpreparedness_. Consider
the piece "a line in the sand of my present state of knowledge" \-- something
about an idea I'm presently exploring.

(Being well prepared also, sometimes, means you can simply open the taps and
let the words flow out. I've had numerous essays spontaneously emerge in this
way, though most are really the result of long-time rumination. And it still
doesn't hurt to edit the results, though enjoy the flood whilst it flows.)

Don't ask me about fiction or narrative -- not my genre.

------
sixhobbits
These are great -- looking forward to seeing this list grow.

I've added it to this repository [0] where I'm tracking technical writing and
publishing resources. It's still small, but please feel free to open pull
requests to grow it!

[0] [https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-
writing/](https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-writing/)

------
m52go
The rules listed are a bit more eclectic than those found in most published
books & articles, perhaps because it's a crowd-sourced list.

I particularly like "Give yourself permission to suck."

It's the spiritual twin to Hemingway's "the first draft of anything is shit"
but articulated from the writer's perspective. Which, for writers, is the more
important perspective.

~~~
paulpauper
but the problem is, if you suck, no one will tell you you suck or how and why
you suck, so you will keep repeating the same bad habits. In math, at least,
if you suck you know it because you are unable to get the correct answer.

~~~
shanusmagnus
Let me put your mind at ease -- I promise there is no shortage of people who
will tell you that you suck, whatever your creative medium. It's okay to defer
that judgment for a little while to muster the will to actually produce
something.

------
mannykannot
There are no axioms of writing, just rules-of-thumb, proverbs, and advice. The
piece of advice that I would most like to see applied more frequently is: put
yourself in the mindset of your intended audience, who are seeing this for the
first time.

------
thewhitetulip
I guess this is the reason why publishers don't offer rejection letters.
Indian publishers say "we will email you if we are interested in 90 days".

------
shubhamjain
> Don't tell us the protagonist's girlfriend is beautiful. Show us her flowing
> black hair, her lips perpetually on the verge of smiling, her brown eyes
> with those eerie golden flecks.

Truth be told, some writers go way overboard portraying everything, especially
using metaphors, that it just gets annoying. For instance, this excerpt in
Fahrenheit 451:

> He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water,
> himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything
> there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might
> capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk
> crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical
> light of electricity but—what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and
> gently flattering light of the candle. One time, as a child, in a power
> failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a
> brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast
> dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son,
> alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon…

I can't visualise what the author is trying to illustrate. Whenever I see
something similar, I try hard to understand by going over and over again, but
then, I just move on feeling a bit stupid. I have come to a conclusion that
maybe fiction is just not my cup of tea. I am sure these are the parts other
people can appreciate but I am just tempted to close the book and move to next
one.

~~~
jeffwass
For "Show, don't Tell," Anton Chekhov summed it up best, much more succinct
than your quote from the article :

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken
glass."

That brief quote alone really hit me when I first read it about a year ago.

But you're right, consistent showing of everything can become tedious. Like
all things the key is moderation. I find rules like this are only guides, you
need to find your own voice and your own style.

But damn. The glint of light on broken glass. Brilliant.

