The “Rules” of Writing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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".

> 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.