We imagine Dave Lerner looked like this as he wrote these rules.
Editor’s Note
Numerous writers have attempted to codify their principles into a small number of easy-to-understand rules. In previous posts we have discussed the usefulness of rules given by Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, and Elmore Leonard.
Unfortunately, we have discovered that just because one is a skilled writer, that does not mean they can articulate the reasons for their success. Figuring that the skill, quality, success, and professionalism of a given writer may have an inverse relationship to their ability to sum up useful rules for writing, we have asked our own Dave Lerner to weigh in.
The editors here at Mythcreants have asked me to give you some rules on how to write better. They have over two hundred posts on writing, but they want me to teach you everything you need to know in eight rules.
Turned out to be easier than I thought. So easy, as it happens, that I provided a bonus tip for each rule. No need to thank me. On second thought, yeah. Thank me.
The First Rule
Write better.
The first rule makes sense. If you write better, then the stuff you write will be better. Try it. You’ll be surprised at how much better your writing will be if you would just write better.
Conclusion: If you follow this rule you will be a better writer. Therefore, it is very useful.
Bonus tip: Don’t write poorly.
The Second Rule
Write at least one sentence every day. ‘This is my daily sentence.’ is a good sentence. So write that sentence. Every day.
The second rule discusses basic process advice. It is simple and easy to follow. And if you write this sentence every day, then after thirty years you will have written over 50,000 words. That’s a novel.
Conclusion: This rule can be useful if you want to write a novel. But you do need patience for it to work.
Bonus Tip: If you write on leap day, you’ll get five extra words.
The Third Rule
If you truly wish to be a writer, then you must live in a cheap garret in Paris during the 1920s.
This is a fact. I’m sorry. I don’t make the rules. Well, actually, I am making these rules. But this one is true nonetheless.
Conclusion: You may not be able to follow this rule, but knowing it will help you acclimatize yourself to your situation. In that way, it is useful.
Bonus Tip: For maximum effect, spend your days at a cafe moodily drinking coffee.
The Fourth Rule
Conflict is important. So have a character punch another character in the face every two to four paragraphs.
This is a good rule. Too many stories fail to have sufficient conflict. Following this rule will ensure plenty of conflict. You can always come up with a reason for the punch in a later paragraph.
Conclusion: This rule is useful for maintaining a decent level of conflict.
Bonus Tip: It doesn’t always have to be a punch. Kicks, headbutts, bites, etc., will give you conflict and variety.
The Fifth Rule
If you are about to write an epic novel that’ll be over 100,000 words long, remember that it’s probably okay if you repeat a couple of words.
This rule says something most people don’t even realize. Do you know 100,000 words? Are there even 100,000 words?
Conclusion: Basically necessary if you want to write an epic novel that’ll be over 100,000 words long.
Bonus Tip: If it’s fantasy, you can make up your own words. You won’t even need vowels. But you will need apostrophes.
The Sixth Rule
If you write your characters so vividly that they actually come to life, they inevitably will attempt to murder you, particularly if you followed the Fourth Rule. So don’t write your characters that vividly.
As you probably know, murder by one’s own characters is the second leading cause of author deaths, right after form rejection letters.
Conclusion: This rule will literally save your life. Very useful!
Bonus Tip: If you can’t help but write vivid characters, make them wimps you can beat in a fight.
The Seventh Rule
You don’t need to please all of your readers. You don’t need to please the entire world. There is only one person in the world you need to please. Only one person whose opinion matters. Me. Dave Lerner. So write accordingly.
It’s about time that somebody made this rule! Far too many people are writing without me in mind. While some of these stories may be “good,” if they’re not for me, then they are absolute garbage.
Conclusion: This rule is very useful. Essential, even.
Bonus Tip: Gorillas are cool. Whether actual size or King Kong, ape intelligence or human intelligence, grunts or sign language or human speech, gorillas are cool. Put a gorilla in your story, and your work is mostly done.
The Eighth Rule
Give your editors nice compliments. For instance, I mention here that Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle are both highly intelligent, insightful, and all-around generally nice people, and incredibly good-looking to boot, thus guaranteeing that they’ll love this piece.
Although this should be obvious, apparently many people don’t seem to know this. Editors are human* and appreciate a nice compliment. They would appreciate cash even more, but if you’re a real writer living in a garret in Paris in the 1920s, you don’t have any.
Conclusion: This rule will get you published anywhere. Perhaps the most useful rule of all.
Bonus Tip: Don’t be afraid of going too far. No editor will care or even notice if you’re over the top. Not even if they’re as amazingly sharp and intuitive as Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. Did I also mention that they’re both incredibly good-looking?
So my eight rules range from useful to very useful to essential to will literally save your life. And now you don’t need anything else on this site!
Editor’s Note
Well, it was worth a shot.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
Rule one is closely related to one of the previous rules from this series, about choosing the right word to put down one after another. If we can choose better words every time, we will write better.
It all comes together.
If I write a novel about a gorilla that punches someone every few paragraphs, will Dave want to read it?
In 30 years, I mean.
I would read that! Guess I’ll just have to wait…
I actually live in an attic flat. Does that mean I live in a garret?
I love these writing rules, they’re all so useful. ;)
Eh, close enough…
Thank you
ROFL! (I assume it’s part of the joke that I can see these in a lot of real writing advice).
Thank you
You’d THINK rule #1 went without saying, but in my writers’ group, I’ve seen far too many examples of people submitting things that are obviously terrible, getting in-depth feedback, and submitting something else a couple months later with the same flaws. Or resubmitting the same thing with all the flaws still in place. And that’s not even counting the guy who thought deliberately including every possible cliche and/or being offensive was the road to success.
Yeowch!
But I’ll bet just shouting rule #1 at them wouldn’t help
You can’t learn if you don’t want to learn
They’ve discussed here about the ego of beginning writers. You need quite a bit of ego to start, to assume you can write something people will want to read. But then you need to tamp down that ego and realize you can improve your work. Then let it flare up again so you can let other people look at it. Then tamp it down again so you can improve it more. And so on…
>the guy who thought deliberately including every possible cliche and/or being offensive was the road to success
Did they learn otherwise, or are they still at it?
Dunno, he eventually dropped out. But I can’t imagine him maturing.
I think I like this satirical side of you, Dave! More please!
The notion that there might be rules — or at very least guidelines — for being creative is appealing for precisely the reasons you identify in your reply to GeniusLemur above. It is such a tricky balancing act — fostering an ego healthy enough to know when we’ve written something worthwhile but sufficiently flexible to take constructive feedback. Learning to trust one’s creative instincts (and like all forms of trust, it’s earned over time), to distinguish good notes from bad (most of them fall into the latter category), and to protect a story’s central premise (provided, of course, the narrative is conceptually sound to begin with) through the often-messy editorial process are all very refined skills acquired only with lots and lots of experience; no one can teach you this stuff. (I’ve got a post going up later this week, in fact, about what it means to be creative and how to best practice creativity, and I address an instance in which, to my great regret, I surrendered too much of my ego on a particular project during the revision process. But live and learn, right?)
Anyway, my man, you always bring such great insights to the conversations on other people’s posts, it’s nice to see you holding court for a change! Hoping for much more of that in the year to come…
SPC
Thank you
I would recommend Sean P Carlin’s blog to anyone interested in the relationship between stories and social change, and the responsibilities writers have to society
And it’s a fun read, as well
Oh, now I see where I was doing wrong! This was very insightful, I’ll definitely finish a novel in 30 years, just you wait
I look forward to it!
Just remember to include gorillas
How about this for a bonus rule? Rule number 9: Include lots of action, and I mean lots of it. LOL I bet that wouldn’t even make any sense.
“You won’t even need vowels. But you will need apostrophes. »
That one was waaaaayyyy too accurate
That was one of my favorites — I snorted!
Phew.. i’m relieved to find out the whole series was a satire. I was concerned.
The best writing advice comes from science fiction author Joe Haldeman
“Bad books on writing tell you to “WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW” , a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
Everything else is commentary.
askdjhkasjd this was hilarious, i actually feel like writing now, its a miracle
(also side note, it’s nice that they express that certain articles are satire in the ‘topics’ section. As someone who has trouble with telling what’s satirical/sarcastic sometimes–not this time, but often–it’s nice to have it stated. too many people go ‘lol telling you its sarcastic ruins the joke’.)
How oddly effective
For some reason “Try it.” really got me. Also the editors’ note at the end :D
1. Gorillas are cool but what’s your position on orang-utans?
2. The satire warnings on Mythcreants are very helpful – it’s not always that easy to tell, especially given their similarity to supposedly serious articles. I once watched a documentary about hypothetical alien contact and didn’t realise it was hypothetical until near the end. Apparently the title, (“What If?”, I think it was) and the lack of news stories about alien contact didn’t tip me off.
1. Orang-utans are cool, mostly because of the Discworld Librarian
2. Yeah, I’ve done satire that was thought be serious before. And w/ Poe’s Law, you can never be too careful
Could you do an article on Ray Bradbury’s rules of writing? I found most of them rather outdated, but a couple I have saved in a special place.
Interesting, I wasn’t aware Bradbury had a list of writing rules, do you know where I can find them? Google isn’t turning anything up. Or rather, it is turning things up, but not what I’m looking for.
I’m not OP, but I found this online: https://germmagazine.com/ray-bradburys-8-rules-for-writers/
Thanks for the link! This is one of the sites I turned up in my searching, and while it has some interesting quotes from Bradbury, the reason it doesn’t really work for a writing rules post is that these are excerpts from a book of his, not rules that were intended to be read on their own.
Let’s see…”Ray Bradbury’s Eight Writing Tips.” Great, I found it!
1) “Quantity creates quality:
The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.”
2) “Don’t think too hard:
The intellect is a great danger to creativity…because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth—who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter—you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.”
3) “Writers’ block is just a warning that you’re doing the wrong thing:
What if you have a blockage and you don’t know what to do about it? Well, it’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing, aren’t you?…If you have writers’ block you can cure it this evening by stopping what you’re doing and writing something else. You picked the wrong subject.”
4) “Write what you love:
Fall in love and stay in love. Do what you love, don’t do anything else. Don’t write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won’t write anything worth reading…I want your loves to be multiple. I don’t want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it. It’s got to be with a great sense of fun. Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun at it.”
5) “You don’t become a writer by taking writing classes:
I took a writing course in summer school in 1939, when I was in high school. But it didn’t work. The secret of writing was, to go and live in the library two or four days a week for ten years. I graduated from the library having read every single book in it. And along the way I wrote every day of every week of every month, for every year. And in ten years, I became a writer…You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices…The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.”
6) “Take off the safety harness:
You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
7) “Indulge in your own personal madness:
If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
8) “Write only for yourself:
You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things.”
He does ramble on a bit, and, yeah, outdated much. A lot has changed since he started writing.
[#3 and #4 were the ones I saved.]
Thanks Tifa! Do you know where you found that list? I’ve found a number of pages that list writing tips from Bradbury, but a lot of them seem to be pulling quotes from different places.
I found all those Ray Bradbury rules in this article, complete with sources:
https://lithub.com/ray-bradburys-greatest-writing-advice/
Unfortunately, there’s a lot more than just those eight rules, and they’re from various sources. So it doesn’t look like he had a single, “Ray Bradbury’s Eight Writing Tips” type article. Just a lot of advice over a long career.
Hope this helps!
You’re welcome! Unfortunately, it’s been so many years since I posted it in my old ‘random things to keep’ google document, I honestly have no idea where I found it originally.