I picked this up from the Brain Pickings website. You can click the link to see it there, but I wanted it permanently copied onto my site too, because this is good stuff.
Usually I have issues with all these “rules of writing”. Seriously, fuck the rules. Write the way that works for you.
For example, so many people say, “You must write every day!” I say, bollocks. You may not being able to write every day, and that’s okay. There’s no point in berating yourself and having writerly existential crises if you don’t or can’t do that. Sure, you should write as often as you possibly can. If that’s every day, then bully for you. If that happens to be every Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, that’s fine. Just make sure you actually make time to write as often as you can, because you won’t find time. No one has spare time just lying around.
There are so many other rules out there and you can drive yourself batshit lala trying to adhere to them all. In truth, rules are there to be broken. More often than not, they’re designed to give you a framework that gives you the best chance of succeeding as a writer. And remember, kids, succeeding as a writer is first and foremost writing. If you write regularly, instead of just talk about being a writer, then you are a writer. If you write, you are a writer. Simple as that. How far you get with it is something else entirely. So when I see lists of rules that put all this pressure on people, it gets my back up and I get all, “Fuck the rules, man!” Just like I did in the paragraph above this one.
So why am I reproducing Neil Gaiman’s rules? Well, yes, it’s partly because I’m a total Gaiman fanboi. But I would still argue with his rules if I didn’t agree with them. As it happens, Gaiman’s “rules” are actually the best, most simple writing advice I’ve ever seen. There are no hard and fast directives, and every part of it is something that I can vouch for as being effective in my own writing life. Remember, if it doesn’t work for you, that’s cool. Don’t worry about it. The only one of these eight rules that absolutely applies to everyone is rule 1. But I do agree with the others too. I particularly like rule 5. Here they are:
1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
See what I mean? That’s good advice, right there. And don’t forget to check out Brain Pickings, as there’s plenty of other good stuff there too. But really, this is all you need. Now go and write.
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When I got up this morning I was checking through the social networks over breakfast and saw from Trent Zelazny’s Facebook page that Anne McCaffrey had died of a stroke yesterday. It hit me like a speeding a truck and a small part of my childhood died too. To say that Anne McCaffrey was instrumental in the person and writer I have grown up to be would be an understatement. I immediately put my condolences out through Twitter only to realise that the news hadn’t spread yet. I’m usually a bit behind on this stuff, but suddenly I found myself being the first person people had heard the news from. It was an unusual experience for me, but a profoundly touching one as I saw the massive heartache that Anne’s passing caused, saw so many other people as deeply affected as I was.
At about 12 years of age, I wrote my first ever fan letter to an author. I needed to tell this lady how much her books meant to me, how wonderful they were. In the back of one book I saw a note, with an address for any correspondence. I found it hard to believe that such a thing was possible, but I sat down and wrote my letter and asked my mum to post it off. Weeks passed. Weeks are a long time for a twelve-year-old and I thought, Oh well, it was worth a try. It was no surprise that someone as magical as Anne McCaffrey wouldn’t have time to write to some precocious kid in England.
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is one of my favourite literary events. It’s a brilliant idea. It stems from the awful writing of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. You probably think you’ve never heard of him. But I can almost guarantee you have. Here, see if this is familiar:
