On writing: My general rules
[Check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
This post will include the rules I wished I had followed since I started writing seriously when I was sixteen years old. I will emphasize some points that my younger self resisted.
I shall update this post whenever I come up with something else valuable.
---
If your subconscious nudges you with some idea or imagery that feels important, determine if it falls into a piece you’re working on or that you intend to work on at some point. Pay special attention to the “seed ideas” that the subconscious rarely provides, and that emerge with such strength that you know in your bones they will sprout a full story. In those cases, stop whatever you’re doing and write down all the details that linger in your mind. Do not let those ideas go: they’re the best ones you will ever get. If you don’t write them down, you will end up forgetting them. Most of the favorite parts of my stories come from notes that I don’t remember having come up with nor written down.
If your mind presents you with some idea or imagery that feels important but can’t be assigned to any project, it’s not necessary to write it down. Plenty of these rogue suggestions resurface later, sometimes years later, tangled with other ideas or imagery that could be categorized. Let them simmer.
Your subconscious is the one entity in this world that you can fully trust. Like Cormac McCarthy put it, “[It has] been on its own for a long time. Of course it has no access to the world except through your own sensorium. Otherwise it would just labor in the dark. Like your liver. For historical reasons it’s loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures. But it understands you very well. And it has no other cause save yours.” Always pay attention to its advice.
As you work on a project, go through your notes for it with the goal of reordering them chronologically. If you aren’t sure about where in your story an event is supposed to take place, arrange them in order of escalating tension. Do this from time to time, because some notes will end up moving around significantly.
When you’re working on a scene or a chapter, go through your notes and isolate them in logical blocks that you should be able to coalesce in about five to ten minutes of freewriting. Add as many notes as necessary to that block so that you won’t need to know anything else about the rest of your story while you’re busy rendering that part of the scene.
Once that next block of the scene or chapter you’re working contains all the necessary elements, render the block through freewriting. Do not ever sit down in front of your keyboard and try to come up with one word after another; that puts your conscious mind in control, the part of your brain that should only be in charge of putting together coherent sentences from raw material, and of revision. It will also end up making you hate the act of writing, which should be a labor of joy.
The way you force your subconscious to produce the raw material is through freewriting. Put on some mood-setting music, open videos and/or photos relevant to the block you will work on. I usually change the size of my windows in the PC to ensure that all the necessary parts fit on the screen at once. Then, while you play the notes in your mind as if they were part of a movie, type as fast as you can, coalescing what you’re sensing and feeling into a mass of raw material.
By “as fast as you can,” I literally mean it: banging your keys or repeating nonsense in case your brain can’t come up with some particular word, making enough grammatical and syntactic mistakes to make a teacher cry. Do not allow your fingers to stop. The goal is to bypass the slower conscious mind to access the much faster subconscious, the same way as you would while playing an instrument. You do not stop in the middle of playing a song because you don’t remember a specific note, or because you have just played the wrong one. If the end product of your freewriting session resembles the verbal diarrhea of a complete lunatic, then you’ve done it right: your subconscious isn’t sane, but it has survived for much, much longer than human beings have existed.
Once you end up with the raw material of a session of freewriting, let your conscious mind sieve through the outrageous nonsense, then arrange the fished-out meaningful words into coherent sentences.
Freewriting is also invaluable when you aren’t sure what details to produce out of a moment, or what feelings your point of view character would experience. Freewrite about it for a set amount of time, usually five minutes. In the process you will get the obvious out of the way, and your subconscious will provide some gems.
Beware the ladder of meaning. For example: entity > object > building > house > cottage > an English cottage with thatched roofs, a sprawling garden, and stone walls covered in ivy. Always try to include in your texts elements from the highest rung of the ladder of meaning. If you intend to include an element from lower rungs, justify its presence in the piece. Why would you mention an element that doesn’t warrant detailing?
If some sentence, or a whole paragraph, feels awkward, improve it until it doesn’t. If you can’t improve that element further and it still feels awkward, try to remove it from the text. If the text doesn’t start creaking, threatening to fall apart, leave that element out. If you have improved it to the best of your abilities and still feels awkward but you can’t take it out of the piece, forgive yourself and move on.
Do not ever leave in your story a sentence, or even a word, that’s not pulling its weight. Whatever you leave in that doesn’t need to be there detracts from the whole.
Base your sentences around specific nouns and vigorous verbs, both of which should generate imagery in your mind. Try to avoid forms of “to be” and “to have,” unless the alternative sounds more awkward.
Avoid clichés. A cliché is every single expression you have heard before. I don’t recall which books on writing said it, but it’s been proven that your brain doesn’t engage meaningfully with sentences it has read or heard a million times, the same way you don’t truly look at stuff you see every day. Your brain mainly reacts to surprise, in case it needs to fend off an attack. Your goal is to create something new with every sentence.
Show, don’t tell. What does that mean? When in doubt, ask “What’s the evidence of that?” If asking that question of a sentence or paragraph makes sense, then you’re telling. If it doesn’t, you’re showing. For example: “The woman was beautiful.” What’s the evidence that she’s beautiful? You’d go into specific details of her allure that would make your point of view character (important: not you) feel that she’s beautiful. And once you’ve added that explanation in, remove the sentence “The woman was beautiful.” You don’t need it.
You can violate any of the above rules if you’re going for a specific effect. For example, it’s not uncommon to use clichés (meaning any expression you’ve read or heard before) as part of your characters’ speech, because that’s what people do. You can also violate any of the above rules if the result would be funny.
Number one rule: offer the most meaning with the least amount of words. Don’t waste people’s time, starting with your own.
This post will include the rules I wished I had followed since I started writing seriously when I was sixteen years old. I will emphasize some points that my younger self resisted.
I shall update this post whenever I come up with something else valuable.
---
If your subconscious nudges you with some idea or imagery that feels important, determine if it falls into a piece you’re working on or that you intend to work on at some point. Pay special attention to the “seed ideas” that the subconscious rarely provides, and that emerge with such strength that you know in your bones they will sprout a full story. In those cases, stop whatever you’re doing and write down all the details that linger in your mind. Do not let those ideas go: they’re the best ones you will ever get. If you don’t write them down, you will end up forgetting them. Most of the favorite parts of my stories come from notes that I don’t remember having come up with nor written down.
If your mind presents you with some idea or imagery that feels important but can’t be assigned to any project, it’s not necessary to write it down. Plenty of these rogue suggestions resurface later, sometimes years later, tangled with other ideas or imagery that could be categorized. Let them simmer.
Your subconscious is the one entity in this world that you can fully trust. Like Cormac McCarthy put it, “[It has] been on its own for a long time. Of course it has no access to the world except through your own sensorium. Otherwise it would just labor in the dark. Like your liver. For historical reasons it’s loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures. But it understands you very well. And it has no other cause save yours.” Always pay attention to its advice.
As you work on a project, go through your notes for it with the goal of reordering them chronologically. If you aren’t sure about where in your story an event is supposed to take place, arrange them in order of escalating tension. Do this from time to time, because some notes will end up moving around significantly.
When you’re working on a scene or a chapter, go through your notes and isolate them in logical blocks that you should be able to coalesce in about five to ten minutes of freewriting. Add as many notes as necessary to that block so that you won’t need to know anything else about the rest of your story while you’re busy rendering that part of the scene.
Once that next block of the scene or chapter you’re working contains all the necessary elements, render the block through freewriting. Do not ever sit down in front of your keyboard and try to come up with one word after another; that puts your conscious mind in control, the part of your brain that should only be in charge of putting together coherent sentences from raw material, and of revision. It will also end up making you hate the act of writing, which should be a labor of joy.
The way you force your subconscious to produce the raw material is through freewriting. Put on some mood-setting music, open videos and/or photos relevant to the block you will work on. I usually change the size of my windows in the PC to ensure that all the necessary parts fit on the screen at once. Then, while you play the notes in your mind as if they were part of a movie, type as fast as you can, coalescing what you’re sensing and feeling into a mass of raw material.
By “as fast as you can,” I literally mean it: banging your keys or repeating nonsense in case your brain can’t come up with some particular word, making enough grammatical and syntactic mistakes to make a teacher cry. Do not allow your fingers to stop. The goal is to bypass the slower conscious mind to access the much faster subconscious, the same way as you would while playing an instrument. You do not stop in the middle of playing a song because you don’t remember a specific note, or because you have just played the wrong one. If the end product of your freewriting session resembles the verbal diarrhea of a complete lunatic, then you’ve done it right: your subconscious isn’t sane, but it has survived for much, much longer than human beings have existed.
Once you end up with the raw material of a session of freewriting, let your conscious mind sieve through the outrageous nonsense, then arrange the fished-out meaningful words into coherent sentences.
Freewriting is also invaluable when you aren’t sure what details to produce out of a moment, or what feelings your point of view character would experience. Freewrite about it for a set amount of time, usually five minutes. In the process you will get the obvious out of the way, and your subconscious will provide some gems.
Beware the ladder of meaning. For example: entity > object > building > house > cottage > an English cottage with thatched roofs, a sprawling garden, and stone walls covered in ivy. Always try to include in your texts elements from the highest rung of the ladder of meaning. If you intend to include an element from lower rungs, justify its presence in the piece. Why would you mention an element that doesn’t warrant detailing?
If some sentence, or a whole paragraph, feels awkward, improve it until it doesn’t. If you can’t improve that element further and it still feels awkward, try to remove it from the text. If the text doesn’t start creaking, threatening to fall apart, leave that element out. If you have improved it to the best of your abilities and still feels awkward but you can’t take it out of the piece, forgive yourself and move on.
Do not ever leave in your story a sentence, or even a word, that’s not pulling its weight. Whatever you leave in that doesn’t need to be there detracts from the whole.
Base your sentences around specific nouns and vigorous verbs, both of which should generate imagery in your mind. Try to avoid forms of “to be” and “to have,” unless the alternative sounds more awkward.
Avoid clichés. A cliché is every single expression you have heard before. I don’t recall which books on writing said it, but it’s been proven that your brain doesn’t engage meaningfully with sentences it has read or heard a million times, the same way you don’t truly look at stuff you see every day. Your brain mainly reacts to surprise, in case it needs to fend off an attack. Your goal is to create something new with every sentence.
Show, don’t tell. What does that mean? When in doubt, ask “What’s the evidence of that?” If asking that question of a sentence or paragraph makes sense, then you’re telling. If it doesn’t, you’re showing. For example: “The woman was beautiful.” What’s the evidence that she’s beautiful? You’d go into specific details of her allure that would make your point of view character (important: not you) feel that she’s beautiful. And once you’ve added that explanation in, remove the sentence “The woman was beautiful.” You don’t need it.
You can violate any of the above rules if you’re going for a specific effect. For example, it’s not uncommon to use clichés (meaning any expression you’ve read or heard before) as part of your characters’ speech, because that’s what people do. You can also violate any of the above rules if the result would be funny.
Number one rule: offer the most meaning with the least amount of words. Don’t waste people’s time, starting with your own.
No comments have been added yet.
