Believe you have an awe-inspiring novel stowed away in you somewhere but you’re intimidated by the indomitable blank page (or screen)? Never fear, we’re here to help with these lists of tips from acclaimed classic and contemporary authors. So, whether you can’t find a way to start or are stumbling around for a way to define your prose, the answer may rest in one of the following lists.
Kurt Vonnegut
Known for his keen wit and insight into the ironies and ailments of 20th century America, Kurt Vonnegut was a prolific author of novels and short stories that incorporated elements of postmodernism, science fiction, and humor to offer social and cultural critiques. In one of his later publications, titled Bagaombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (2000), he offered eight simple rules that aspiring writers should follow:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the worlds, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
John Steinbeck
Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck reigned from the Great Depression through the start of the 1960s with a plethora novels. Chief among them was The Grapes of Wrath (1939). He is also known for his tragic novella about two migrant workers titled Of Mice and Men (1937). In a 1975 interview for The Paris Review, Steinbeck offered his views on what helped him write such perceptive literature during his time.
“1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.”
Henry Miller
The sexually candid author of the infamously banned Tropic of Cancer (published in France in 1934 and in the U.S. in 1961), who achieved a free and easy style that became a critical influence for the following Beat Generation, offered, in his book Henry Miller on Writing (1964), 11 “commandments” for writing that he wholeheartedly believed to aid his success.
”1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”
Jack Kerouac
Now known as the “martyred king of Beats,” Jack Kerouac, with his impulsive yet lucid prose as typified in On the Road (1957), led a generation of poets and authors known as the Beat Generation. Listed below are his 30 thoughts, titled “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” that he believed to enable him and others to write as he did.
”1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven”
George Orwell
George Orwell—acclaimed novelist, essayist, and critic—has been praised for his allegory of the Russian Revolution in Animal Farm (1945) and for his warnings against the dangers of totalitarianism in the dystopian novel 1984 (1949). However, few (other than literary and language scholars) remember the author for his deft command of the English language, as demonstrated and discussed in his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), in which he lays out some key questions and rules for the production of good writing.
”A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
Zadie Smith
Becoming an instant success with the publication of her inaugural novel, White Teeth (2000), Zadie Smith has continued to earn the praise of readers and critics for her perceptive renderings of unique characters described through her witty and astute prose. In a 2010 article for The Guardian, Smith offered some sound tips for those trying to compose creative fiction.
“10 Good Writing Habits
1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3. Don’t romanticize your “vocation.” You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle.” All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand—but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”
Neil Gaiman
As an internationally renowned author of comic books, novels, and children’s books, Neil Gaiman has effectively captured the dark side of his readers’ attention. His comics, notably his most famous Sandman, deal with horrific and fantastical themes that demonstrate a style entirely unique in its own right. Gaiman, in an article for The Guardian, shares what he believes to be the definitive rules for writing.
”1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.”
Source: http://www.britannica.com/list/writing-tips-from-7-acclaimed-authors
