Writing advice is often distilled into lists. Most of it is well meant, but unnecessarily proscriptive.  So, I take all advice with that in mind. Breaking rules occasionally makes great writing, but not often, and the rule breaker who thinks they know better than great writers on how to undertake the craft, probably will not be joining them any time soon. Having said that, the best advice comes from George Orwell, who wrote, “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

Here are the lists:

Elmore Leonard

1. Never open a book with weather.

2. Avoid prologues.

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

10. Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.

Stephen King

1. When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

2. If you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it.

3. While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.

4. Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.

5. You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.

6. Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy, the work is always accomplished one word at a time.

7. There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.”

8. One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem.

9. The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.

10. Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.

Margaret Atwood

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.

5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6. Hold the reader’s attention.

7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality.

8. Ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road.

10. Prayer might work. Or reading something else.

Anne Enright

1. The first 12 years are the worst.

2. The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

3. Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

4. Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

5. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.

6. Try to be accurate about stuff.

7. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So, change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

8. You can also do all that with whiskey.

9. Have fun.

10. Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

Henry Miller

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books.

3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to the 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 draughthorse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

10. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Hilary Mantel

1. Get an accountant.

2. Read Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible.

3. Write a book you’d like to read. Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.

4. If you have a good story idea, don’t assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

5. Be aware that anything that appears before “Chapter One” may be skipped. Don’t put your vital clue there.

6. First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?

7. Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. When your character is new to a place, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.

8. Description must work for its place. It can’t be simply ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element.

9. If you get stuck, get away from your desk.

10. Be ready for anything. Each new story has different demands and may throw up reasons to break these and all other rules.

Jonathan Franzen

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

3. Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.

4. Write in the third person, unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention.

7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.

8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

Jack Kerouac

1. Submissive to everything, open, listening.

2. Be in love with your life.

3. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.

4. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.

5. Telling the true story of the world in interior monologue.

6. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

7. Accept loss forever.

8. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better.

9. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning.

10. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it.

A.L. Kennedy

1. Have humility. More experienced writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. Consider what they say. However, don’t automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else.

2. You don’t know the limits of your own abilities. If you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life.

3. Defend others by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.

4. Defend your work. Individuals will often think they know best about your work. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away.

5. Defend yourself. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.

6. Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.

7. Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can.

8. Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave.

9. Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

10. Remember writing doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care. It can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.

Mark Twain

1. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

2. Substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

3. As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

4. You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it.

5. Take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. There is one thing I can’t stand and won’t stand, from many people. That is, sham sentimentality

6. Use good grammar.

7. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

8. Use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. Don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

9. The time to begin writing is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.

10. Write without pay until somebody offers pay.

George Orwell

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.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Neil Gaiman

Rule One: Write.

Seems like a given, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t; many of us want to write or think about writing or plan to write, but don’t actually write.

Rule number one to be a writer is to write. Even if you feel you’re not ready.

Especially if you feel you’re not.

Rule Two: Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

This can be challenging. Sometimes, you can’t find the right word until later. However, if we stop to try to find that right word, we often freeze.

Okay, I freeze. I sit there looking through dictionaries and wikis and thesauruses, trying to find just the right word. And when I do that, I’m not writing.

Stick with the first half of this rule. Put one word after another—and don’t stop.

(Quick tip: need to figure out that word for later? Put it in brackets, like this: “In the middle of this sentence, I could not come up with the [] word that I needed.” Then later on, you can search for the brackets [] and find it.)

Rule Three: Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

• Yes.
• Yes.
• Yes.

I KNOW how hard this is. When it just isn’t right yet, we can go a little crazy. Hear me out: it doesn’t matter what you have to do to reach that final page.

It’s okay if you have to rip it out and fix it later. If there’s an ending, it can be fixed.

Rule Four: 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.

This one’s actually a bunch of rules, but they’re important.

1. Put it aside. If you don’t put the thing down for at least two weeks, you won’t be able to read what’s actually there. Author-brain is an unfortunate malady that forces us to see what we wish was there, not what is there.

2. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Essential. Your readers won’t have read it before. If something isn’t clear to them, you need to fix it.

3. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is. YES! Show it to people who will understand what you’re trying to do. This may not be family; this may not be your local group of friends. This WILL be a good writing group, when you find one—folks who know what an unfinished, unpolished story looks like, and because they can see what you’re trying to do, can help you get there. (I belong to this writing group, and I love them to death for that reason.)

Rule Five: 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.

This is a hard one to wrap your head around, but very often, it’s true.

Your average reader can tell when something is off. They know they didn’t connect with that character, or didn’t understand that plot point, or had no idea where you were going with that tangent.

Listen to that. If your reader’s lost, then something needs elucidation—but you’re the writer, and that means you know your piece better than they do. Trust your gut when it comes to fixing the problem; just pay attention when your reader says there’s a problem to begin with.

Rule Six: 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.

This goes back to rule one: write. It also goes back to rule three: finish it. See the theme?

Rule Seven: Laugh at your own jokes.

Ever heard, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”? It also applies to laughter.

If you don’t think what you’re writing is funny, why would anyone else? But it goes deeper than that: writing things that make you laugh isn’t just for your reader. It’s also for you.

If you’re able to laugh at your own jokes, then you haven’t fallen out of love with your story. Stay in love. Laugh. It’s good for the soul (and whatever you’re writing).

Rule Eight: 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.

That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? It breaks down nicely, though:

1. Write with confidence. Sometimes you have to fake that confidence, and that’s okay, too. Don’t write letting your fears drive.

2. Write it honestly and tell it as best you can. That means the best you can at that moment in time. You owe no apologies for whatever you create. Sure, you’ll write better later; that doesn’t make what you did before embarrassing in any way. It was what you had to give at the time.

Just as you (hopefully) wouldn’t shame a small child who’s still learning their ABCs, you shouldn’t shame yourself as you’re learning to write.

Kurt Vonnegut

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 world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell 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.