Every Wednesday, I share a short newsletter that lists the ideas I’ve been particularly struck by that week. They can be big or small, philosophical or practical.
The following post is a quick round-up of the writing tips I've found most insightful:
ELMORE LEONARD
If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
Elmore Leonard's 10 rules for writers are solid.
His own summation says it best: "My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,"
JOHN STEINBECK
Speak, don't tell.
Imagining the world you're creating is the reader's job.
"...I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
— From John Steinbeck's 'Sweet Thursday'
STEPHEN KING
Rewriting is removing.
Kill your darlings, or simply remove them.
“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
— Stephen King, 'On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft'
BRET EASTON ELLIS
Write an emotional outline
Just finished reading Brett Easton Ellis' 'Imperial Bedrooms' and really enjoyed it (despite an insanely dark ending, which features a particularly graphic image I can't get out of my mind).
In this recent interview, Ellis outlined how he works:
“...the first draft [...] is really written in the heat of the moment. It’s really written with a lot of emotion. I’m drawn by my feelings. I don’t over-intellectualize the process,”
Then, he rewrites it, with particular eye on the voice of the lead character. What the character says, what they don’t say. What they notice, how they notice it, how they don’t.
For example, in Imperial Bedrooms:
“I don’t think [Clay] …would notice and describe a wall in a restaurant that he favoured, for a page. Which I did in the first draft. And I kept stopping at this page I’d written, because I realised- oh, he wouldn’t notice that. I mean, I noticed the wall in the restaurant. It was silvery, it was mirrored. I love this wall, in this restaurant. I thought how cool it would be to describe it. But then I realise, Clay would never, NEVER spend a page describing that, so it had to go,”
The famous Hemingway line "write drunk, edit sober," could also work as "write emotional, edit cold".
It's not as snappy though, obviously...
JOHN MCPHEE
Prime the pump.
GQ have a nice short interview piece with legendary non-fiction writer John McPhee, on his new essay collection 'Tabula Rasa':
"McPhee describes the collection as an “old-people project,” by which he means the kind of endless pursuit that keeps one old—as in alive. “You’re no longer old when you’re dead,” he writes."
The following sentence caught my eye:
"GQ spoke with him via landline phone from his home in Princeton, New Jersey, where he still “primes the pump” by writing on legal pads between bouts of writer’s block."
I do something similar.
When something needs to be written but the words won't come to me, I open a second document, and title it 'why I'm not writing'.
Once I've typed out a few weak excuses, I usually find myself unstuck and enjoying writing enough to go back to the task at hand. Sometimes you definitely just need to get unstuck.
ME
'Over-written' is a misnomer.
'Over-written' implies you can work on something too much, which I don't think is true. Most work we might call 'over-written' is usually overstuffed, complicated, too wordy.
In other words... not worked on enough.
It reminds me of the line:
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,"
