Tips for Writers: UK Guardian

The UK Guardian recently published a two part article on the “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction” [Use Ctrl+Click to open in a new Tab].

There are actually many more than ten rules covered in the Guardian’s postings. What the Guardian did was get a number of fiction writers (authors) to provide their Top 10 rules for writing fiction. The Guardian then published these Top 10 lists—although some of the writers contacted did not supply all 10 rules.

There is something like eighteen A4 pages of rules so I will not take up 15 screens and put them all into this posting. What I have done is collect all the rules together into a print-ready formatted PDF file (formatted for A4 paper) which can be found at this link. The PDF file is 600KB so it may take several seconds or so to open when you click the link.

To give you an insight into the “rules” provided by the writer’s that were approached by the Guardian here are the number one rules from the first 12 of the 29 authors featured.

Elmore Leonard: “Never open a book with weather”.

Diana Athill: “Read it aloud to yourself because that’s the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK”.

Margaret Atwood: “Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak”.

Roddy Doyle: “Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide”.

Helen Dunmore: “Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue”.

Geoff Dyer: “Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over—or not”.

Anne Enright: “The first 12 years are the worst”.

Richard Ford: “Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea”.

Jonathan Franzen “The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator”.

Esther Freud: “Cut out the metaphores and similes”.

Neil Gaiman: “Write”.

David Hare: “Write only when you have something to say”.

To see the rest of the authors rules and to see all of the rules they provided (and the titles of some of the books they have written)  then open this PDF.

Probably a pretty boring post unless you are someone thinking about getting into writing fiction. I thought it was interesting.