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10 great rules for writing

I saw a great piece the other day on rules for writing. Instead of glossy and superficial rules that make no sense, such as “avoiding using adverbs” and “not starting a sentence with a conjunction”, this list gave some really valuable advice that you could tell came from experience. It was actually dated 2012, and updated in 2017, so, in internet terms, ancient, but, like most truths, the advice remains pertinent. The list was specifically for screenplay writing, and if you want to read the original there’s a link at the end of this blog post. But novelists and screenplay writers share a lot of the same ground, and I thought the list could be easily adapted, and in some ways not even adapted but almost quoted verbatim. I’ve even used the same headings.

1. Writers write. And rewrite.

Unfortunately, having a good idea for a book is the easiest thing in the world. I have 20 good ideas for a book before breakfast, to paraphrase Alice in Wonderland. What might appear a good idea in the shower, or in bed just before you fall asleep, or stuck in a traffic jam on the flyover, might seem complete and flawless at the moment of inspiration. It’s only when you start to write it out in full that the cracks appear in the ostensibly impeccable logic of your plot or character arc.
Even finishing a novel is nowhere near the end of a writer’s task. In fact, as I mention in my book on self-editing, the first draft is usually the beginning of the hard work, not the end of it. It’s comparatively easy to rattle out the draft of a story. It’s a lot more difficult, as an author, to objectively analyse it and see its flaws and correct them. That’s why God invented editors, of course, but a certain amount of self-editing is a hugely important task for a writer to learn.

2. Show it, don’t tell it.

The original post talked about screenplays being a visual medium, and how a character showing how they feel rather than telling the audience how they feel is always going to be more compelling cinema (dialogue to camera: “I’m really pretty mad right now”, versus blowing the city to smithereens).
In a sense, books are a visual medium too. We want to see – but in our mind’s eye rather than our visual cortex – what the character is feeling. We don’t want to be told what the character is feeling because that’s not immersive – it’s not us imagining.

3. Write what you know.

The most confusing advice, because how many people have been in a gunfight, or have murdered someone, or have made love to a film star in the penthouse suite of the most expensive hotel in town? Most of us live pretty prosaic lives, and who wants to read about that? But the best stories are always about people, people sure, in all sorts of different settings and coming from different backgrounds, but if you strip away all the external rubbish, all that’s left is people and their emotions, their relationships, their feelings for one another and about each other and about themselves. All the external rubbish can be researched (and if you don’t know what being an astronaut is like but want to write sci-fi, then you’d better research pretty profoundly). All the best writers have a profound understanding of the human psyche – that’s universal.

4. Economise. Less is more. Small is large.

There’s a reason why some of the most intense and engaging war movies are centred on a very small number of characters. We lack the emotional reach to care about a great many people all at once. To describe a battle from the point of view of every soldier in it would be exhausting and pointless. That’s why the clever storyteller chooses a small group of characters and follows just them through all the blood and mayhem. Think of the squad in Saving Private Ryan, the two main characters in All Quiet on the Western Front, or the rookies in Full Metal Jacket. Then consider Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong. How many characters do we get close to in that book, where hundreds of thousands die in a single battle? It’s not just war storeis. In the dystopian nightmare of The Last of Us there were only two main characters, and for the majority of the series we followed them intimately. Almost by definition, all deeply engaging romances are about two people.
There’s a theory that most human beings can only have a certain number of close friends, and that number is much smaller than you’d think. That’s because we can only really deeply empathise with a fairly limited number of people. After that, our empathetic energy is exhausted and we just see numbers, not individual stories. I’m no psychologist but I’m guessing it’s a way of coping with natural disasters. If we tried to internalise the individual human loss suffered in a catastrophe, man-made or otherwise, where thousands die, we would go mad, so this “empathetic limit” is meant to safeguard our sanity.
So write your story about as few characters as possible. Certainly have as few point-of-view characters as possible. Your aim should be to have your readers profoundly connect with one or two characters, not try and have them care about an ensemble cast of thousands.

5. Know your structure.

I agree with the original writer that you can overthink structure. I’ve seen some blogs where “the inciting incident must be on the first two pages” or that you can divide a novel into percentages of wordcount and certain plot highlights must happen at certain percentage points of the book. Ugh! It’s a logical fallacy to deduce that, since a certain set of characteristics are present in a lot of successful books, all future successful books must have those characteristics.
However, on the other hand, most books do have a plot which follows certain typical sequential waves of realisation and failure, and there must be a reason why the hero embarks on their quest at all, otherwise there is no quest. So read all the books on structure that you can, and then forget about them. The points they make will still be kicking around in your subconscious somewhere, guiding you silently, but please don’t get the calculator out when writing.

6. Raise the stakes.

In order for the plot to engage us, it must be consequential – really bad stuff will happen if the hero doesn’t achieve their goals. However, goals are contextual and subjective. For your story to have really significant stakes doesn’t necessarily mean Armageddon and the ending of humanity. In the wonderful novella The Body, by Stephen King, four boys simply grow up.

7. Action happens on the screen.

Or in the novel writer’s case, the page. This point is the weakest of the ten, really referring back to the “show don’t tell” advice of point 2, but it does have some relevance to novel writing. If you find that you are telling a lot of your story in flashback, by having characters narrate what happened to them in the past, then you have a structural problem with your novel. A character telling the reader about an incident that happened to them is never going to be as immersive and engaging as reading the scene in which it actually happened – there are very few exceptions to this rule. If you find you have to narrate lots of flashbacks, because of logistical issues in the plot, then consider ways you might change the timeline of the plot to reframe that as a recent scene. The story will be much more engaging if you manage to pull that off – a disaster if you fail to pull it off!

8. Make it believable.

This is a very wide-ranging point. Clearly with historical fiction, writers should attempt to make their historical fiction period-accurate. With sci-fi, the laws of physics and chemistry, in our known universe, remain immutable – you’d be a bold author who challenged them. But more subtly, motivations have to be believable. Is a character going to give up on a relationship because their putative partner ate their bagel?
The catch here is that real life throws up some frankly unbelievable plots – we’ve all said “If you made this up, no one would believe it” at some point or another, like when the troubled rookie comes on in the last five minutes of injury time and scores a hat-trick to win the final for the team of plucky but outplayed underdogs. Truth is stranger than fiction, the saying goes, and reality, unfortunately, is no justification for an unbelievable story.

9. Eat your ego.

As an editor, I was particularly amused by this point. Writing is a collaborative art form. That comes as a profound shock to many people who assume that writing is a solitary career pursued by a lone, romantically starving artiste (with an “e”) who then unveils their straight-off-the-cuff finished work with a flourish to global acclaim and plaudits. Err … nope. That isn’t really the way it works. If you want your book published by a traditional publisher, they will take your initial draft and mould it into something they think they can market, which might mean chewing it up into a thousand pieces and spitting them back out in an almost unrecognisable form. If you want your book traditionally published, then you have to subsume your creative ego and agree to that process, otherwise you’re wasting both your own and the publisher’s time.
Many modern authors have eschewed that process, instead believing that they have the creative knowledge and market savvy to know what their readers want, and at what price point. Many have failed, but some small number have been proven amply correct, and all of them, I can say without fear of refutation, have used an editor to improve their work. It’s a weird truism that we just cannot see the problems in our own writing. Even editors need editors.

10. Character will save your life.

The original blog related to logistical issues. How do you resolve the plot point of “[the character] having a crowbar with him when he gets to the warehouse”? The response was to rely on the character to come up with the answer. I’d like to relate to this anecdotally. I was writing a swords-and-sorcery fantasy novel and got stuck in a plot rabbit hole that I couldn’t see a way out of. I resorted to dialogue, my go-to for plot resolution, and as I was typing out the conversation, the character suggested a plot twist that I hadn’t thought of. As I sat there looking at the words that I had typed out but hadn’t thought of, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. When you’re really invested in your characters and you breathe life into them, they will help you out. Believe in them, above all else. If you do, your readers will, and then your job is done.

The original blog post was written, as I said, in 2012, and updated in 2017, by the BAFTA award-winning Danny Rubin, who is probably best known for the script of Groundhog Day. A link is here.