Several GITS readers emailed me about a great series The Guardian ran recently: Ten Rules For Writing Fiction. Today we feature Rose Tremain:
1 Forget the boring old dictum “write about what you know”. Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that’s going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
2 Nevertheless, remember that in the particularity of your own life lies the seedcorn that will feed your imaginative work. So don’t throw it all away on autobiography. (There are quite enough writers’ memoirs out there already.)
3 Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you’re certain it’s as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.
4 Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted “first readers”.
5 When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats’s idea of Negative Capability and Kipling’s advice to “drift, wait and obey”. Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.
6 In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
7 Respect the way characters may change once they’ve got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.
8 If you’re writing historical fiction, don’t have well-known real characters as your main protagonists. This will only create biographical unease in the readers and send them back to the history books. If you must write about real people, then do something post-modern and playful with them.
9 Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.
10 Never begin the book when you feel you want to begin it, but hold off a while longer.
Anything on the list here today that catches your eye, gives you inspiration, or causes you to rethink your approach to writing?
Tomorrow I’ll feature a different writer from The Guardian series and their rules on writing.
Funny her thoughts on endings. I've seen a good numbers of people saying that should be the first thing you decide once you have your story idea.
#8 startled me! A lot of historical writers have violated this – including the much-acclaimed (by me, too) Hilary Mantel with Wolf Hall. But the rule evidently worked for Tremaine.
But a list like this that contains some unexpected rules instead of all the obvious ones makes great food for thought – and is really more helpful for that reason than a list that doesn't have any surprises in it.
Like her idea about endings. It makes a lot of sense.
Not sure what #10 means – I think it's the word 'when' that confuses me. Does she mean that you shouldn't sit down to write when you first want to, but should let it percolate a little longer, or is she saying the usual thing about how your story should start closer to the real action than your first instinct usually dictates?
I wondered the same thing, Michele, but I think she meant letting the idea percolate. Doing this does seem to bring in more depth and complexity, which is a good thing.