Last Saturday The Guardian published an article titled ‘Ten Rules for Writing Fiction’ consolidating advice from noted authors such as Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Helen Dunmore, Richard Ford, and Neil Gaiman. You can read the entire piece here. There’s some great stuff… some you might have heard before, but it’s always fantastic to hear it from such an amazing list of some of the most celebrated writers on Earth.
Being a genre guy, Neil Gaiman’s perspective really hit home and I wanted to share it with you here:
[Writing Tips from Neil Gaiman]
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.
I particularly like Number 3 and Number 8. As writers or filmmakers it’s important to finish things. Finishing things is hard work, and there are so many people out there with half-written books or screenplays or short films that need one more edit. It’s important to push through and get it done, which is where Number 8 rings so true. Writers are extremely self-critical, but at the end of the day in order to finish something (#3) it takes confidence to make it happen. Confidence isn’t arrogance, but instead a strong belief in the project to move it to completion.
It’s great advice. Be sure to check out the rest of the article, too. [link]
