Famous writers on creative writing
There are a million books about 'how to write' by people who have never written a best seller. What do real, famous, and most of all rich writers have to say?
On this page you will find tips, advice, and views about writing from some of the most successful writers to sit before a keyboard.
Heinlein's rules
1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Absurd and wonderful scifi writer, on short stories
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 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.
From Bagombo Snuff Box, a short story collection by "Vonn".
Stephen King's On Writing
The King of horror on the horror of writing
On Writing
Amazon Price: $7.99 (as of 10/06/2008)
Authors don't come much richer than Stephen King. He's been churning them out for longer than I've been alive, and they're all at least entertaining reads.
In On Writing he lays out his method: a combination of instinct (stories are 'found objects'), hard work (every day), and disciplined editing -- several weeks after the first draft is over.
Jack Kerouac's "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose"
Beat this....
Either magnificent wonders or inscrutable nonsense. Perhaps both...
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr 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. Don't 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
Kerouac also provides the Essentials for Spontaneous Prose. Equally baffling.
Ian Rankin says...
* Have an element of luck!
* Look at the market and which publishers publish what
* Stick at it: you will get rejection letters
* Have self-confidence
* Show your work to complete strangers like editors or writers' groups
* The more successful you get, the less chance you have to write!
George Orwell's writing rules
As he acknwoledges in the final rule, applying them all the time can result in writing without finesse.
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never us a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- 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.
Lester Dent -- pulp writer extraordinaire
The creator of Doc Savage was a successful, prolific, and wealthy fiction author.
Here he lays out his own 'formula' for churning out fast-paced adventure stories quickly and easily. A must!
http://www.miskatonic.org/dent.html
Add advice from more writers
Pros only, please
If you've found some pithy tips or advice from other well known, successful writers then add it here.
I'll give the best ones their own section on the lens.
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Quilter
Stephen King's book "On Writing" is what kept me focused and going forward. I am now published & my book is in it's second printing. Nicely presented lens. Posted April 01, 2008 |
