My (Humble) Rules For Writing
If it’s not hard, then you’re not doing it right.
I’m not saying it has to hurt, but a little struggle is good for the soul….and the writing process. Have you ever heard of the runner’s high? Imagine yourself at the foot of a hill. You’ve got your running shoes on, a good playlist in one ear and a mental mantra cycling around in the other. The only thing in the way of you and the top is 1,200 feet of shaky ground, a steep incline, and the building pressure that this might just be the single greatest thing you ever do in your life. So you start running. The first few hundred feet are rough. You trip, you cramp up, you lose your footing and stumble (back to the beginning, more than once), but somewhere around the halfway point, there is a combustion. A great firing of your synapses as adrenaline rushes and you feel as if you have been granted wings or springs in your soles and you fly fly fly forward. And as your muscles pump and pulse and propel you across the last mere hundred feet—you realize that you know what magic is. What power and freedom truly feel like. That’s what good writing feels like. That is the high you should aim to chase. Now, with that being said….
2. Not all good writing has to come from those fiery pits of passion within, but all good writing should serve a point.
There are many good reasons to pick up a pen. One could argue that it is the best and only way to think in this rapidly changing, dangerously adapting digital world. Writing forces you to pause. To breathe. And to sit with the feelings that you aim to wrestle into words. It can be chaotic and confusing or it can be soothing and intentional. And both strategies can be considered good. As long as there is a point; a method behind the writing that leaves the reader with a greater understanding than they had before. Writing should both ask and answer the questions of the universe. If you’re scribbling away in a journal as a way to get something off your chest, what’s the point? What are you not able to physically say? If you’re trying your hand at songwriting, what’s the genre? Who are you singing this song to? And if you are writing the next epic fantasy/sci-fi novel that will crack open worlds and usher in social and cultural change, who are you doing that for?
3. The Devil is in the Details
Whether you want to admit it or not, everyone likes a bit of a tease. It can be said that the best writing will give you the ending all the way in the beginning, and wrap it in a way that you don’t know what it was you needed to decipher. And to do that you need to build. You have to construct a world that is so big and so random that even the most obvious tells can slip through the cracks. N.K, Jemison, a sensational writer once said “the key to building a world is understanding the day to day.” As writers, we are tasked with mining through the little things in order to get to the root of the big things. We need to understand how our characters live in the world. What is their history? Their culture? Their shared knowledge? All of these things make up the soul of a story. This pithy saying is just another way of asking the question: what are the simple mundanities that add up to a human life?
4. Read your work aloud. If it sounds stupid – change it.
I think all writers, at some point, should try their hand at poetry. If you’re a serious writer, then spoken word poetry. Once you are challenged with crafting a rhythmic piece of work that is both moving and melodical, you will come to understand and respect the importance of the beat. Your words should strive to have an underlying meter that the reader can use to flow and pass through. The worse types of texts have thick words with four part meanings and sentences that slam themselves together to fit onto a page. Your words should breathe. And the easiest way to learn how to do that, is to read them aloud. Find the moments between the lines where the meaning gets lost in the syllables, or the sounds start to clash and break. This will also help you to write more simply. The best types of poems are the ones that say so much, in so few words.
5. Let others read your work. If they think it’s stupid….listen, discuss – and then maybe change it.
To master the art of the peer review is another goal all professional writers should target. It can be uncomfortable, tiresome, and even downright wrong. But the ability to weed out the good notes and the bad, to accept and apply good feedback is an unparalleled skill. It will not only make you a better writer, but a better reader as well. All the ebay writers started out as readers and , as a reader, you know the types of plot holes you hate to see coming. So listen to your reader when they tell you that you’re falling into one. I know it may be a bit taboo to outright say ‘right for your reader’, so I’ll just leave you with a cheeky, but sincere, ‘honor thy reader’ instead.
6. Be smart, be clever but never grandiloquent
Did you have to look that word up? It’s okay if you did, that’s kind of the point. It’s super cool that you may have studied Latin in high school or that you learned to deconstruct multisyllabic words (and yes, I hear the irony) down to the root or that you memorized the first half of the dictionary when you were younger, but try to stick to one golden rule: less is almost always more.
7. Throw it away if you must, but never burn it.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do for the piece (and yourself) is to walk away from it. This can be one of the hardest decisions a writer can make–and far be it for me to tell you when that time should come for you– but if it does, just remember that a paper shredder is much friendlier than a match. Sometimes the ideas that won’t grow, that have you stuck pulling out your hair and cursing your English degree, are just stepping stones to what you really want to write. So in that case, it’s always better to come back to a taped up piece of inspiration than a pile of ash.
8. There’s a thin line between inspiration and theft, mind it.
There are plenty of sayings people use to make themselves feel better for copying off another person’s test. Truthfully, everyone does it. Find me a woman who claims to have an original, unsampled text and I’ll call her a liar. You would be hard pressed to find someone who calls themselves an artist and does not look out and around and backwards for a tinge of inspiration. Again, everyone steals. The mature thing to do is just admit it. There is an artful way to pay homage and show respect to the source without negating the creative spark you might have added to the story. Learn it, live it. And mind the line.
9. Scared Money, Don’t Make No Money
I think this one pretty much speaks for itself. If you are too afraid to try, then don’t. But you have to make peace with that decision.
10. You don’t have to share it, if you don’t want to.
Writing is so human and so deeply, deeply personal. No one has your words, but you. No one can pluck and string and sew them together in the same way that you can. Cherise that. It is okay to want to keep that for yourself. Not all writing is meant to be shared and that’s what makes it so powerful.
