S.P. MacIntyre

24 Rules for Writing

I discovered, years ago, that Allen Ginsberg had a list of mottoes and adages that informed his writing, and, if asked for advice about being a better poet, he would hand out these Mind Writing Slogans to serve as guidance or fodder for meditation. When I was in college, my mentor, Katharine Haake, had a similar list committed to memory, quotes from craft and philosophy books that she could deploy to enigmatically address any of her workshop students' questions. In my MFA program, Richard Powers showed me his digitized list of quotes and passages he had stored on his computer that he used for research and reference.

There are no "rules" to writing except those you set for yourself. Writers, I've learned, hone their art both through practice and by internalizing meaningful snippets of insight. We look to others, and we look in ourselves. The fictions that flow from us are informed by the pastiche composite of what we have taken, just as the flow of water is dictated by the aperture of a nozzle. Part of becoming a writer, thus, requires the development of one's own idiosyncratic sense of language and process. Here, I present to you some of the snippets I have been collecting from craft books, essays, poems, and listicles over the years that have helped me and which I hope help you, too:

On narrative structure: "An 'ideal' narrative begins with a stable situation which is disturbed by some power or force. There results a state of disequilibrium; by the action of a force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium is re-established; the second equilibrium is similar to the first, but the two are never identical."—Tzvetan Todorov

On conflict and theme: "Examine your objects for the tension inherent in them, the polarity, the natural conflict, the innate conflict, what is already there, and in the unpacking of this tension, you will reveal…the whole of your story, and how each unpacked object relates in [the] story to every other object."—Gordon Lish

On incipient conflict: "Yearning is always part of fictional character. In fact, one way to understand plot is that it represents the dynamics of desire. It's the dynamics of desire that is at the heart of narrative and plot."—Robert Olen Butler

On pacing: "If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster."—Gustav Mahler

On characterization: "Exact and rich characterization is attained by a careful selection and careful distribution of minute but striking features."—Vladimir Nabokov

On character development: "The proper use of a hammer is to stand fifteen feet away and throw it at a nail. If you're the hammer in the beginning, you've got to be the nail by the end."—Dean Young

On character believability: "Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page."—Thomas Pynchon

On character mistakes: "In fictional stories, mistakes are every bit as interesting as achievements are. They have an equal claim upon truth. Perhaps they have a greater one, because they are harder to show, harder to hear, harder to say. For that reason, they are rare, which causes their value to go up."—Charles Baxter

On resonance: "The rendering upon the 'human element' is not a question of conveying emotion, or even direct affect, but by infecting me with what I do not realize I am being infected by because it is in me and so becomes me and is there."—Blake Butler

On permanence and writing implements: "The ichor of eternity belongs to India ink and crow's blood, not to machines."—Anne Fadiman

On short stories: "The material that makes up a short story must be placed under a terrible compression, but it must not simply release its meaning, the way a joke does."—William Gass

On concentration: "In tranced fixation dreaming upon the object before you."—Jack Kerouac

On concentration, part 2: "When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder."—Richard Powers

On process: "Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers."—Henry Miller

On revision: "When it's broken, you don't always have to fix the whole thing. You can fix half—you just have to know which half. And that's not always easy."—Sam Miller

On style: "Only by having no inessential words can every essential word be made to count."—Diana Athill

On style, part 2: "A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung."—Robert Frost

On meaning: "An artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but [don't] confuse [these] two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist."—Anton Chekhov

On experimentation: "By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment."—W.G. Sebald

On publication: "Art brings vehement confirmation. At the heart of form lies a sadness, a trace of loss. A carving is the death of a stone."—George Steiner

On quality: "Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood."—Friedrich Nietzsche

On writing: "Write what you love, allways what you love."—Mark Z. Danielewski

And here are two from me:

On focalization: "No objectivity in narrators, no objectivity in characters. Explore the bias in omniscience."

and

On rulemaking: "Make your own list of writerly rules, then find some way in every story to undermine or find exceptions to those rules."

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