Opinion

Rules For Writing — Are There Any?

I think there might be four, but the usual suspects are not amongst them

Decades of digging into what people call rules for writing has taught me a few things:

• What works well for one doesn’t automatically work for everyone;
• “Show don’t tell” is no more of a rule than “Tell don’t show” — Ditto for most of the usual suspects;
• In amongst the messy jumble of advice is a quartet that seems to apply across the board.

Before I list them, a word of warning about taking advice from other writers, including me:

You’re not the world’s first writer — neither am I

Writing is a path well trodden, and where people have trodden, they leave travel diaries. It’s worth reading about others’ experiences, but don’t assume you’ll be taking the same journey. Think of it as going on a trip with other people’s hand-drawn maps — the terrain changes, new roads are built, old ones disappear — but still, they’re a guide. They can give you insights and ideas. They set you on your way.

My trio of go-tos for writers with useful insights are Stephen King (can’t argue with his success), James Frey (I was always rather drawn to the controversy over his memoires) and Shirley Jackson (no one ever made words work harder). I might have a different set of front runners tomorrow but these three are always up there.

Listen and be entertained: “I can’t write unless…”

It’s always worth hearing about the habits and foibles of successful writers — they’re good at what they do. Listen and be entertained by their need to sit in a favourite chair, drink X cups of coffee, colour-code their pens … but never forget that they’re saying “I” not “You”.

Hear and run a mile: “You can’t write unless…”

I sat in a conference once and listened to an author harangue his audience of writers. “You can’t call yourself a writer,” he declaimed, “unless you’ve written 5000 words every day before breakfast.”

In the seat next to me was an author who had sold more books than the speaker had written words in his whole life. Forget breakfast — in a typical week, she rarely wrote a word before Thursday afternoon. We exchanged a glance as she murmured, “Ah, so that’s where I’m going wrong.”

At the same time, there were people in that audience looking worried as they scribbled “5k words” in their notebooks. I wanted to shout, “Relax! He’s wrong! Just because it works for him, doesn’t make it a rule for you.”

When you hear, “You can’t write unless …” turn on your critical faculties and don’t get sucked in. Stephen King faces a wall when he writes. He wants no distractions. There’s no denying his success, but the wall does nothing for me, and it might do nothing for you.

What Are The Rules?

Now I’m going to tell you that you can’t be a writer unless … So sharpen your critical faculties and see if you think I’m right. These might be guidelines or advice rather than rules. I don’t think the label matters, but I believe they apply across the board.

1. Get words on paper

I’m not talking about being creative or producing coherent prose. I’m talking about the act of getting words out of your head and on to the page. You can think up a world-beating article, the novel to take the planet by storm (don’t we all do this anyway?) but you’re truly not a writer if the words never emerge.

Getting words on paper is a specific task that is physically different from thinking about writing, working out structures, planning, plotting or any of those other techniques you need to learn. As a writer, it’s a skill you’re going to need. So make sure you can do it.

There are various tricks to get yourself going with this. If I find myself writing reams in my head whilst staring at a stubbornly blank screen, I set a timer and make myself write without stopping for two minutes. If I can’t think of anything to write, I write: I don’t know what to write, and I keep going through garbage, meaningless words, matchless prose (rarely), and whatever else spills from my head through the keyboard to the screen, until the timer pings. It can be surprisingly liberating.

Julia Cameron goes for pages rather than minutes and calls the exercise Morning Pages. She says:

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages — they are not high art.

2. Own your writing career

There are people who get lucky breaks: their first article goes viral; their first attempt at a novel becomes a best-seller; they bump into the right person at just the right moment to be picked up and nurtured to writing stardom. Then they flit about declaiming that “anyone can do it” which makes the rest of us grit our teeth and roll our eyes, because the anything that anyone can do will be along the lines of “have a cousin who was owed a favour by the right person in the right place at the right time.”

It’s as pointless to plan for instant success as it is to give up because someone else got an undeserved break — why feel bad over something you can’t control? Put your energies into supporting the one person who has the power to change things. That’s you. Own your writing career.

3. Don’t reinvent wheels

If you need a car to take you on a journey, you buy, hire or borrow one. You don’t find a couple of odd wheels and start to build yourself a vehicle. As a species, we cracked reliable car building a long time ago. If your aim is the destination, there’s no sense in cobbling together an inferior vehicle that’s unlikely to get you where you want to go.

If you want to add tension to a novel, precision to a technical paper, or any of the other techniques that writers need, don’t flounder around cobbling together a method from old tyres. Go and get a ready-made top-of-the-range one. People have been analysing the written word from every angle for a very long time.

Look for the properly-researched versions, don’t fall for an inadequate technique that someone else cobbled together in their shed (that’s the equivalent of the hand-drawn maps of earlier — it might work for them). Find the basics of the underlying forms that you need, practice them, learn them, hone them to suit your writing, but don’t try to invent them from scratch.

4. Make writing a part of your life

OK, you can physically produce words, you are as practiced as you can be in the techniques that will polish those words into matchless prose, and you’re all set to do this without waiting for a fairy godmother to spring up and give you a million-dollar book deal. All you need is the time to write.

It’s so easy not to have time. Have you ever thought, I’ll just clear the decks before I start? Seriously, don’t go there. Life will fill every nook and cranny of time forever. Don’t assume your nearest and dearest will cooperate. The writer at the desk is somehow fair game for “Can you just… walk the dog … check the fridge … retile the roof …?” in a way that other professions are not.

Writing needs to become a part of your life, not just the thing that you might fit in after you’ve … walked the dog … checked the fridge … retiled the roof … cleared the decks.

The Path To Success

You’re heading into a race… a fight… whatever metaphor suits you best, and if you don’t learn to get the words out, don’t own your writing career, and keep on building wheels from scratch, then you’re starting the race with your left wrist handcuffed to your right ankle. You’re going to struggle.

Next time you catch yourself thinking: I’ll just do X, Y or Z first … Stop. You’re in a trap. Life’s decks never clear.