Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "geoff-dyer"

Last week I demonstrated why writers who post their “Rules for Writers” are making a big mistake. I included my own five – well, really six – rules for writers. They were a big success. So I thought of some more.

First a recap of my first six rules:

If asked to provide a list of rules for writers, don’t do it.
If you must (because your agent says it’s good for your name to appear in The Guardian), then try not to be cute.
Reveal no stupid prejudices.
Write rules for writers, rather than rules for people who CAN’T write.
Try to have your rules make sense.
If you can’t write, please don’t write.

You may be wondering how I came to formulate these rules. The answer: from reading rules that were anywhere from daft to offensive to pointless to just plain incomprehensible and which had previously been posited by notable writers including Elmore Leonard, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Richard Ford, and Anne Enright.

I concluded my post by writing that George Orwell had said it all and there ought to be no further Rules for Writers. Orwell’s last rule, however, suggests that rules are there to be broken. As are statements made on blogs. That’s why I’m adding to my list of rules today.

Rule 7: Don’t be precious.
Helen Dunmore’s rules for writers include “Read Keats’s letters” and “Learn poems by heart.” Perhaps they also should include “Pronounce Rs as Ws” and “Always wear an Ascot while writing.” Thanks to modern educational slackness, no one schooled after the early 1970s can learn a poem by heart without intense effort –– effort that should really be directed toward writing the book.

Rule 8: Don’t be ashamed of earning a living.
Probably you won’t. Earn a living, that is. But if you do, there are plenty of people who’ll suggest you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve sold out. You must’ve planned your book with “the market” in mind. Geoff Dyer, author of Paris Trance, gives his Rule 1 as “Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over.” I suppose you can always marry someone rich. But if you’re intending to write for more than an hour or so a day, you’d better at least consider whether anyone will buy it. For the most part agents and editors will expect you to do the fretting, unless they’ve spent a big chunk of cash on your advance and, therefore, the editor needs to make it pay. In which case, you obviously already considered the commercial possibilities… One of Ian Rankin’s Rules of Writing, I should note, is “Know the market.” Books are sold in shops – well, some of them are – so it’s a product and it has to be sold eventually.

Rule 9: Ignore Colm Toibin’s Rule 5.
The Irish writer says “No alcohol, sex, or drugs while you are writing.” Unless he means “don’t try to type up a chapter while snorting cocaine off a hooker’s ass and sucking champagne through a straw from a flute wedged between her thighs,” I think this is a bad rule. Even then it’d be debatable at best.

Rule 10: Really ignore Toibin’s Rule 5.
It’s a very, very bad rule.