Writing Rules, Part One

Thank you to K. for this guest post...the first of several.  In fact, his original post was so long that I'm splitting The Rules up into a few different posts...so stay tuned!

K says:

In the past year I have found myself in a writing funk. All things ebb and flow, and maybe I was ebbing, but on a much deeper level I no longer felt excited about writing. I noticed that instead of having several ideas of writing projects a week, I would have one or none. There were many possibilities for this change—I was attempting to write long-form stories, mainly screenplays; I wasn’t satisfied with my screenplays, or my prose; My humor writing wasn’t interesting me; Writing stories is long and hard work; I wasn’t receiving much feedback; I didn’t feel like I was advancing my craft, etc. Part of this funk was going through a creative growth phase where I was attempting projects beyond my skill, but achieving (though not to my standards), while also learning about writing and myself along the way. So, fed up with feeling like I was writing inadequately I did a Google search for “rules of writing.”

I wanted to see what other writers, successful writers, had to say about writing. I wanted to know the rules that governed their craft and their world. What I found was great advice, sly sarcasm, black humor, and fellowship regarding the difficulty of writing and storytelling. Here’s one rule that says way more than the seven words she used:

The first twelve years are the worst. (Anne Enright, Rule #1)

Agreed. And I’m only in year four. Though that rule is like a cold bath of realism, some rules, or even sets of rules, were uplifting:

Write with gusto! (Ray Bradbury, Rule #1)

Of course! That might have been the first rule I was breaking in my own writing. I wasn’t writing the type of stuff that excited me on a basic level. Mostly because I was tying to balance what I thought was fun, with what I thought was “marketable.” I was definitely verging on breaking this one:

Don’t write for money or fame. (Ray Bradbury, Rule # 4)

Not that I was worried I might accidentally make money or become famous, but the “Is this saleable?” thought is always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. And it must have been lurking somewhere in Bradbury’s mind, too, if he thought it was so important to put in his top five.

On the whole, I try to use these rules as guideposts to direct my creative energy and writing. Many of us only have a finite amount of writing or creative time. So it’s important to do it correctly and in the right humor. Here’s a quick distillation of the 137 rules gathered so far:

1. Write.
2. Love what you’re writing; don’t waste your time by writing what you aren’t intrinsically drawn to.
3. Don’t waste the reader’s time by overwriting (AKA The Ironclad Rule of Strunk & White: Omit needless words.)
4. Work on one project at a time until it is finished.
5. Love life; love people; have adventures.
6. Like yourself and your work.
7. Don’t worry about quality, that’s for rewriting.