Tag Archives: writing rules

Words of Wisdom: Rules for Writers

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Are there rules for writers? Some say yes, some say no, while some say rules are meant to be broken. I believe there are rules. Perhaps they are really more like guidelines, to paraphrase Hector Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean, but they are guidelines worth knowing and heeding. If there’s a good reason to break one, especially if it helps the story or unblocks you, by all means break it, but it helps to know the rule (guideline) first.

Today’s Words of Wisdom dives into the TKZ archives to find an intriguing grab bag of rules. Joe Moore lays out the rules of writing, with humor, wit and more than a little wisdom. I share the first fifteen on his list, and it’s worth clicking on the date-link at the bottom of this excerpt to read the other nineteen.

Next, John Gilstrap gives us his “Ten Rules for Manuscript Evaluation,” thoughtful advice on how to approach a manuscript you plan on submitting for feedback at a conference. His first five rules are included in this excerpt, and again it’s worth clicking on the date-link below to read all ten.

Finally, James Scott Bell looks at science fiction grand master Robert A. Heinlein’s “Five Rules for Writers,” and provides commentary on each. Here too it’s worth clicking on the link to read his full commentary.

Who said there are no rules for writers? Of course there are:

  1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
    2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
    3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
    4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
    5. Avoid clichés like the plague.
    6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
    7. Be more or less specific.
    8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
    9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
    10. No sentence fragments.
    11. Contractions aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be used.
    12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
    13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
    14. One should NEVER generalize.
    15. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.

Joe Moore—December 17, 2008

Over the years, then, I have developed a list of Gilstrap’s Ten Rules for Manuscript Evaluation:

1. Number your pages and put your name or project title on every page. The reality is that I will lose your paper clip and I will drop your papers on the floor at least once. I don’t do this on purpose; it just always happens. Sometimes the pages get separated in my briefcase. However it happens, jumbled papers are jumbled papers. It helps to know which ones belong to whom, and in what order.

2. Have confidence in Times New Roman 12-point type. Reducing the font size to sneak in more story does not slip past unnoticed. I recently participated in a conference where someone actually gave me 15 pages of double-spaced 8-point type. Ignoring the fact that it pissed me off, I literally could not read the text. While I like to think of myself as young, my eyes are marching toward old age.

3. For me to believe that your story has any hope of success, something must happen in the first two hundred words. That’s the length of my interest fuse. Billowing clouds, pouring rain and beautiful flowers are not action. Characters interacting with each other or with their environment is action.

4. If you insist on walking into the whirling propeller that is a prologue, check first to make sure that your prologue is in fact not your first chapter in disguise. Next check to verify that your prologue is truly for the benefit of the reader, and not a crutch for the writer who needs to dump a bunch of backstory so that the first chapter will make sense.

5. Ten pages are plenty. Actually, five pages are plenty, but I understand that conference organizers can tout the larger number more easily. In my experience, unless dealing with a journeyman writer, the sins committed in the first few pages are replicated throughout. It’s rare that I discover a new issue on page thirteen or fifteen that hasn’t been noted several times previously.

John Gilstrap—July 22, 2011

Robert A. Heinlein’s “Five Rules for Writers.” They are as follows:

Rule One: You must write.

Rule Two: You must finish what you start.

Rule Three: You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

Rule Four: You must put it on the market.

Rule Five: You must keep it on the market until it has sold.

I’d like to offer my commentary on this list.

Rule One: You must write.

Pretty self-evident. You can’t sell what you don’t produce. The writers of Heinlein’s era all had quotas. Pulp writers like W. T. Ballard and Erle Stanley Gardner wrote a million words or more a year. Fred Faust (aka Max Brand) wrote four thousand words a day, every day. They did so because they were getting a penny or two a word, and they needed to put food on the table.

I always advise writers to figure out how many words they can comfortably write in a week, considering their other obligations. Now up that number by 10% and make that the goal. Revise the number every year. Keep track of your words on a spreadsheet. I can tell you how many words I’ve written per day, per week, per year since the year 2000.

Rule Two: You must finish what you start.

I remember when I finished my first (unpublished, and it shall stay unpublished) novel. I was still trying to figure out this craft of ours and knew I had a long way to go. But I learned a whole lot just from the act of finishing. It also felt good, and motivated me to keep going.

Heinlein was primarily thinking about short stories here, so the act of finishing was an easier task. With a novel, there’s always a moment when you think it stinks. When you wonder if you should keep going for another 50k words. Fight through it and finish the dang thing. Nothing is wasted. At the very least you’ll become a stronger writer.

Should a project ever be abandoned? If you’ve done sufficient planning and have the right foundation, I’d say no. If you’re a pantser … well, the temptation to set something aside is more pronounced. But you chose to be a panster, so deal with it.

Rule Three: You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

This is a bad rule if taken at face value. Again, Heinlein was thinking about the short story market. With novel-length fiction, the old saw still applies: Writing is re-writing.

I’ve heard a certain #1 bestselling writer state that he only does one draft and that’s it. Upon closer examination, however, that writer is revising pages daily as he goes, so it comes out to the same thing—re-writing.

As for “editorial order,” Heinlein meant that once a story sold—which meant actual payment—you made the changes the editor wanted (that is, if you wanted him to send you the check!)

For all writers, a skilled editor or reliable beta readers give us an all-important extra set of eyes. Don’t skip this step. There’s always something you need to fix!

James Scott Bell—December 11, 2018

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There you have it, three different sets of rules for writers. Do you believe that there are rules for writers? Do any of these resonate with you? What rules have you broken, and if so, why?

Rules? Who Needs Rules?

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Rules? Who Needs Rules?
Terry Odell

Rules in WritingAs writers, we don’t read the same way “normal” people do. We have internal editors who insist on reading along with us and shouting their opinions.

  • She’s used that word five times on this page.
  • Look at all the filler words.
  • That sentence would flow better if the clauses were reversed.
  • What a fantastic metaphor. Why don’t you use it in your next book?
  • A narrator would hate that alliteration, but it works for the written word.

And so on, and so on.

I’ve belonged to several book clubs. I find it enlightening to see what resonates with the members, as well as what turns them off. Every once in a while, we even agree. I’m usually the odd woman out, since I don’t read much “literary” fiction. Or, a sub-genre I was unaware of, “book club fiction.”

I recall pointing out that an author was pulling me out of the story because they had more than one character acting in a paragraph, so it was hard to tell who was speaking. The rule I learned was that the speaker owns the paragraph. One of the club members looked at me, eyes widened in surprise.

“I never knew that,” she said. She wasn’t the only one. The knowledge, or more accurately, lack thereof, doesn’t keep them from enjoying the story.

Recently, I downloaded a book. It was a freebie, so I didn’t look at a sample first. The author, for whatever reason, had opted to do away with quotation marks. Instead, dialogue began with a dash and ended with a paragraph return. No beats or tags to accompany the dialogue.

Now, maybe language is changing, and maybe the ‘rules’ we are taught are changing as well, but one “rule” I try to follow is:

Don’t Do Anything To Pull The Reader Out Of The Story.

And for me, seeing dashes, figuring out they represented dialogue, and trying to figure out who was talking yanked me out like the guy with the hook in a melodrama.

Why did the author choose to make their own rules? I don’t know. Liked gimmicks? Wanted to be clever? To rebel against convention?

Or is this a case of Learn the rules, then break them?

Short of finding the author’s contact information and asking, I have no idea.

What are your thoughts, TKZers? Are you a “rules were made to be broken” sort of writer, or do you prefer to stick with convention? Would you have trouble reading a book that threw basics like the rules of punctuating dialogue off the cliff? Have you read anything where a blatant deviation of “normal” pulled you out of the story? Enticed you to read more? Made you consider trying it?

And now, a total digression, but I’m curious.
Wordle? Yes or No?
Reacher on Prime? Yes or No?
Olympics? Yes or No?

On a personal note, I will be heading off on a bucket list trip next week and cyberspace access will be extremely limited in Antarctica. I have guests filling in for my posting days, but if I’m not participating in discussions for several weeks, that’s why.

In the Crosshairs by Terry OdellAvailable Now. In the Crosshairs, Book 4 in my Triple-D Romantic Suspense series.

Changing Your Life Won’t Make Things Easier
There’s more to ranch life than minding cattle. After his stint as an army Ranger, Frank Wembly loves the peaceful life as a cowboy.

Financial advisor Kiera O’Leary sets off to pursue her dream of being a photographer until a car-meets-cow incident forces a shift in plans. Instead, she finds herself in the middle of a mystery, one with potentially deadly consequences.

Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”

Vonnegut’s Rule #5

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By Joe Moore
@JoeMoore_writer

A topic I’ve seen on forums and blogs is Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules of writing fiction. They’re worth reviewing and taking to heart. But his rule number 5 is the one that made the biggest impression on me. Rule number 5 is: Start your story as close to the end as possible. This is relevant for both the entire book and a single chapter. We often hear that the most common mistake of a new writer is starting the story in the wrong place.

Well, it happens to published writers, too. Lynn Sholes and I are guilty of drafting whole chapters that either occurred in the wrong place, or worse, weren’t even needed. Usually they turn out to be backstory information for us, not the reader. We go to the trouble of drafting a chapter only to find it’s to confirm what we need to know, not what the reader needs to know.

So if we apply Vonnegut’s rule number 5, how do we know if we’ve started close enough to the end? Easy: we must know the destination before we begin the journey. We must know the ending first.

To me, this is critical. How can we get there if we don’t know where we’re going? And once we know how our story will end, we can then apply what I call my top of the mountain technique. In my former career in the television postproduction industry, it’s called backtiming—starting at the place where something ends and working your way to the place where you want it to begin.

But before I explain top of the mountain, let’s look at the bottom of the mountain approach—the way most stories are written. You find yourself standing at the foot of an imposing mountain (the task of writing your next 100K-word novel), look up at the huge mass of what you are going to be faced with over the next 12 or so months, and wonder what it will take to get to the top (or end).

You start climbing, get tired, fall back, take a side trip, climb some more, hope inspiration strikes, get distracted, curse, fight fatigue, take the wrong route, fall again, paint yourself into a corner—and if you’re lucky, finally make it to the top. This method will work, but it’s a tough, painful way to go.

Now, let’s discuss the top of the mountain technique. As you begin to plan your book, even before you start your first draft, imagine that you’re standing on the mountain peak looking out over a grand, breathtaking view feeling invigorated, strong, and fulfilled. Imagine that the journey is over, your book is done. Look down the side of the mountain at the massive task you have just accomplished and ask yourself what series of events took place to get you to the top? Start with the last event—the grand finale— make a general note as to how you envision it. Then imagine what the second to the last event was that led up to the end, then the third from the last . . . you get the idea. It’s sort of like outlining in reverse.

This takes it a step further than Vonnegut’s rule number 5 by starting at the end and working your way to the beginning while you’re still in the planning stage. Guess what happens? By the time you’re actually at the beginning, you will have started as close to the end as possible. And you will see the logic and benefit of rule number 5.

Naturally, your plan can and probably will change. Your ending will get tweaked and reshaped as you approach it for real. But wouldn’t it be great to have a general destination in mind even from the first word on page one of your first draft?

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