Advice to Writers – A.L. Kennedy’s 10 Rules of Writing

Have humility. Older/more ­experienced/more convincing 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 – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.

Have more humility. Remember you don’t know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.

Defend others. You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love – and love itself – by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.

Advertisement

Advice to Writers: Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules of Writing

When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

Don’t romanticise 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.

Advice to Writers: Sarah Lewis on Mastery

Mastery requires endurance.

Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate — perfectionism — an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us.

Mastery is also not the same as success — an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time.

Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.

 

– Sarah Lewis in The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (via)

More Advice to Writers >>>

Advice to Writers: Franz Kafka on Individuality

“Don’t bend; water it down; or make it logical; don’t edit your soul for fashion. Follow intense obsessions mercilessly.“

– Franz Kafka

More Advice to Writers >>>

Advice to Writers: Ira Glass on Good Taste

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap.

For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit.