Darwin's Twelve Tools (Not Rules) of Writing
From my many, many years of teaching, and even more of writing
Most of us have come across George Orwell’s Six Rules of Writing, and of course there’s Elmore Leonard’s Ten. But who knew that so many other authors have written lists of rules for writing and writers? Nietzche? David Ogilvie of advertising fame? R L Stine?
Editor and author Emily Harstone knows, and she helpfully rounds forty-five of them up here. It’s well worth a browse, provided you remember:
Darwin’s Razor applies: none of these ‘rules’ are personal(ised) for you, they’re just that person’s rules for themselves - however much they claim to be universal.
Even if that person is Anton Chekhov and Chekhov is your writing god, that doesn’t mean how he worked best is how you will work best.
That writer’s desires as writer and reader may not be yours. I’m as irritated as any reader by pompous, self-conscious and elaborately imprecise writing, but I love rich, baroque, playful, energetic, layered writing thick with the scent of centuries including ours. So Elmore Leonard’s, ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,’ is not for me.
There’s a relationship between how you write - process - and what ends up on the page - product - but no one’s ever figured out exactly how one leads to the other. Even writers-to-order like journalists and copywriters know that on a different day the piece might have come out rather differently. So,
Parse anyone’s ‘rule’s into those about process, and those about product
Remember it’s never a given that a certain starting-point and a certain series of procedures will produce a story which successfully fulfils a certain set of readerly desires.
For what it’s worth, my take on the ‘rules’ that some writers and - worse still - editors and teachers peddle is a sentence which is nothing to do with creative writing:
These rigid codes of conduct were made for those who did not know morality when they saw it.
As in life, so in writing (this is from one of my absolutely favourite novels, E H Young’s Miss Mole): rigid rules are made and enforced by people who don’t know good writing when they read it. Orwell knew it, of course: his Rule 6 is ‘Break any of these rules sooner than say something outright barbarous.’
So when someone says ‘must’, or ‘don’t’ (rather than ‘try’ or ‘maybe not’) spend a moment thinking of a circumstance in which it would be exactly what you should do. That’s not just for your Inner Anarchist to let off steam, it’s a genuinely good way of testing the usefulness or otherwise of this particular ‘rule’. It also gets in a bit of writer’s yoga, which is all to the good.
So the truest rule of all is this:
Do anything you like, so long as you make it work for the reader
But as I go on blogging and teaching and writing, I do find that the same questions and issues keep on coming up.
What counts as ‘work for’ and ‘reader’ makes a difference, of course, but there are plenty of tools, guidelines, rules-of-thumb and self-written rules of engagement which can help you with producing such a piece: the Itch of Writing Tool-Kit is one place to look for those.
But the usefulness of tools for shaping your product will always depend on what kind of product you’re making for what kind of reader. What if the goal is for each individual writer is to do their individually best writing - and for the current story to become its own best self?
As both writer and teacher, I find it even more fruitful, and more universally useful, to explore process: the ways each of us might set things up so that our kind of good writing has the best chance of happening.
So in that spirit I offer you …
Darwin’s Twelve Tools of Writing
Never follow a rule until you understand why someone’s made it, and then treat it as advice, not law.
Don’t write what you know: write what you like, and make us believe you know it.
Train your writer’s ear: learn to count syllables and think rhythms; read poetry aloud; take some speech-and-drama lessons; write poetry; read your own work aloud; keep doing the writer’s yoga.
Train your listener’s ear and all your sense-receptors: your nose, your tongue, your finger-tips, your body, your eyes, your proprioception... to sense and then recall everything about how humans experience the world.
Train your mind to switch the censor off with freewriting, clustering or similar, for when you don’t want your Inner Editor in the writing room (and certainly not your Inner Critic). Even if, when you switch the IE back on, 90% gets cut in revision, remember that nothing you write is ever wasted.
When you sit down to writing on your story, know what you're doing and why, do it, then stop. Don’t fiddle, hop about or get diverted.
Understand showing and telling, and use them both for good.
Never use secondhand, off-the-peg language except deliberately, making the most of its secondhand-ness for your storytelling purposes at this point.
Get to grips with psychic distance, and narrators and point of view, and practice all the possibilites till they’re part of your toolkit.
Understand adverbs and adjectives and why you’re so often told to cut them... and then use their power for good.
Learn to punctuate, to spell and to use grammar and syntax first properly and then skillfully, because only then will you be able bend these conventions of communication to your creative will, yet still keep readers reading.
Never write anything purely to achieve an external goal, or something you’ll regret having bothered to write if it doesn’t achieve that goal. Consider ideas that come from the market place in the same receptive but critical spirit as you do any other ideas: use them if they're right for the book.
A version of this post first appeared on Typepad.