"Rules" for writing

A friend sent me 51 ways to improve your writing, by Mike Sager. Some of these may be original to Sager, but I've seen many of them that originated elsewhere. Like all prescriptive sets of soi-disant "rules", each rule has its purpose, but you'll never be a good writer if you slavishly adhere to each of the rules. Knowing when to break them is more important, but to do that, you must also know why a given rule is effective.

The rules presented by Sager appear to be a mishmash of advice for fiction and non-fiction, but they can all be applied to fiction with a little manipulation to adapt them to that context. In this post, I've combined a bunch of separate rules that deserved simultaneous discussion, so this post won't always follow Sager's order.

Without further ado, Sager's rules, a few irreverent thoughts, and some insights into when to break the rules:

"Thou shalt not bore. Never turn down an assignment." Seems so obvious that it's hardly worth mentioning, except that Joseph Heller bored me into a near-death experience with Catch 22. I've never managed to make it through this "classic" work. And I only made it through D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers because "it was on the test"; the book permanently cured me of any desire to read any other Lawrence books. From this, I propose the rule that "boredom" is an entirely subjective state. This advice is best recast as "don't bore yourself". If you're passionate about your topic, others will be too. Not everyone, of course, but if you're a writer, you quickly learn that it's not possible to please everyone and that you shouldn't bother trying. You'll often see the (largely correct) advice that professional writers can and should write about anything, hence the advice about accepting all assignments. The problem is that if you're not passionate about the topic, it's tremendously difficult to convincingly fake that passion, and this generally shows in your writing. If you aren't excited about an assignment and have other things to keep you busy, turn it down and work on something more interesting.

"Do not start stories with the time, season, or weather conditions. Do not start with “It was” or “It’s” or “When.”" For this one, I invoke Dickens' Tale of Two Cities as my rebuttal. The usual source for this proscription is the infamous "it was a dark and stormy night". Whatever else one may say about this phrase, it's going to outlive a great many better pieces of writing. Start with the time, season, or weather if they're relevant and if you can make it interesting. If not, reconsider.

"Do not ever use time subheds (12:15) to break up a feature story. Write in scenes." I've read so many stories that used times or dates as an effective framing device that I hardly know where to begin. Using dates and times is particularly necessary in time travel stories, for which I offer as evidence my own Time's Arrow.

Get an imagination. If it has been done before, find a different way to do it. If it has been said before, find a different way to say it." Although it's better to break new ground than to walk in old paths so well-trodden that readers can't see your head above the ruts, it's also true that there's nothing new under the sun. Many authors make a good living and please a great many readers by providing literary comfort food that follows much the same paths. As proof, pick any series fiction that you enjoy to prove this point; for me, it's Jim Butcher's Dresden Files.

"If you can’t find the killer declarative sentence to lead with, use an evocative scene-setting description." I find little to fault with this one, except for the belief among many teachers of creative writing that the lead sentence has to be a "killer". A great many very good stories get by with a merely "good" lead sentence, and many stories start me off on a very skeptical foot and with a raised eyebrow because of the author's heroic and artificial and self-conscious efforts to start with a killer sentence.

"See like a movie camera—make your writing cinematic." This advice works best if you're writing movies. Not all readers are highly visual, and the technique clearly doesn't work if you're writing inwards-focused tales, for which there's nothing much to see. However, imagining that you're a movie camera when you review your manuscript is a very good technique for maintaining consistency in point of view. For example, compare the effects of a first-person narration in which the camera is stapled to your narrator's forehead, versus third-person omniscient, in which the camera swoops from perspective to perspective and character to character, as needed.

"Use all five senses." This would be better stated as "use all senses that are relevant for a given situation and character". There's nothing so awkward as repeatedly interrupting the story to provide a complete sensory catalog. Using all five senses might work well to capture the sensory chaos of a great street market, such as a souk, but elsewhere it's overkill. And even though sight is dominant for most sighted people, this is clearly not true for the blind or for the character out for a walk on the proverbial "dark and stormy night", and everyone has different senses that they prioritize: musicians tend to be highly auditory, gourmets tend to privilege taste, perfumers prioritize smell, and textile artists are highly tactile. The senses you emphasize should say something about the character who is using those senses.

"Draw images from the bowl of details you gathered in your reporting." This is best recast as the standard advice that aspiring writers should pay close attention to their world and file away useful details and impressions for future use. Photographs, recordings, and physical samples (souvenirs, in the literal sense of tangible memories) are particularly helpful if you want to be able to remember the nuances of a detail a year later. "Images" are fine for literary passages, but not all passages are or should be literary. Overburdening a story with images is the mark of a Litrachure 101 grad, not of a good writer.

"Employ the elements of drama. Tease the reader—benign manipulation." Of all dramatic techniques, omitting details to build interest or suspense is perhaps the most powerful. Other dramatic techniques should be used judiciously, particularly if you don't know their function and understand when and why to use them. Dramatic elements must produce effects that support the plot and characters rather than drawing attention away from them.

"Don’t begin your narrative stories with the climax. Give the reader a reason to keep reading until the end." As my rebuttal, I offer The Usual Suspects, which provides one of the most effective lessons I've seen in starting with the climax. Sat me right up in my chair and ensured I wouldn't stop paying attention until I figured out how we'd reached this point. Insisting that the climax only come at the end can lead to stale, predictable, formulaic stories. Iain Banks was a master of starting with the ending or a pre-climax climax and only gradually revealing enough to lead us to an understanding of how we got there.

"Don’t reveal everything all at once." This advice is belied by the most common format for a detective novels, in which the story ends with an explanation of how everything fits together. Of course, the art lies in building an accumulation of details along the way that compels the reader to seek out that final explanation and confirm their own reconstruction of the events.

"Make sure that your lede hooks the reader." Although you never want to turn the reader away with your first sentence, I've come to believe that you have much more than a single sentence to hook the reader. Most readers will give you at least the second sentence, and possibly even the whole first paragraph. But for that to be true, you have to build interest, sentence by sentence, throughout that paragraph. If interest wanes, you've lost the reader.

"Employ Holy Shit details. Combine the everyday with the eye-popping. Be careful of too much effect. It becomes affect." Here, I've combined some contradictory advice. Powerful details (special effects) are indeed powerful, but that's a tautology and therefore not meaningful. The useful corollary is that you should save the power chords for those points in the story where you need a crescendo. Unless you're writing a video game -- and probably not even then -- readers need some respite from the non-stop action. Powerful details are like explosions: use too many and you eventually deafen your reader, leaving them numb to subsequent explosions.

"What you don’t describe is just as important as what you do describe–omission invites the reader to fill in some of the details themselves: Reading as the first interactive game." This is very true, but the devil lies in the details. It takes a very strong sense of your readers to know with any confidence what details they need and what details you should make them create themselves. Unfortunately, this varies widely among readers. I've had discussions in which readers of the same story told me both that they had no clear image of the character because the author hadn't spoonfed them that image, and that they disliked having their impression of the character constrained by the details the author had provided. There isn't any good solution to this, other than to note that you should rarely provide all details, and should leave at least something to the reader's imagination. Speaking of details:

"Ask yourself: Why am I using this detail? When in doubt, cut it out. Less is more. Make every word count." I tend to have considerable sympathy for this advice, but it's a style prescription, not a rule. As an example of writing that illustrates this rule, I offer Mervyn Peak's Ghormengast, a "classic" that I tried to read perhaps a dozen times over more than a decade, and never managed to get past the first dozen pages. As a counterexample of being too spartan, I offer Elmore Leonard's Raylan, inspired by the events in the wonderful TV series Justified. The writing in this book is so laconic and free of detail that I barely made it through, and although I can see glimmers of the same story sequence as it appeared in Justified, I doubt I'd have finished the book had I not already been familiar with the series and characters.

"If someone reads this 20 years from now, will they understand the reference?" I would note, with some justice, that like an iceberg, most of what Shakespeare wrote is now submerged beneath the seas of time. Without help from a knowledgeable teacher or annotated guide to one of his plays, most students won't have the faintest idea of what Will is saying with one key exception: the human story is always recognizable and relevant, and that's why Will's plays have endured 400-some years. Shakespeare will survive long after most writing that explains the topical references has sunk beneath the aforementioned waves.

"Don’t put yourself in stories unless absolutely necessary. (“He told me.” Ugh!) The byline should be enough. Clearly, this advice is more appropriate for journalists, although the entire field of "immersion journalism" provides a strong counterexample. (See Harper's magazine for examples. I'm not a fan, but this approach has its merits for creating a sense of "you are there".) For fiction, this advice ignores the inconvenient fact that anything we write is so strongly influenced by our beliefs and by the axes we want to grind at any given point in time that it would be disingenuous to ignore this. We are indissociably part of everything we write, and the real trick is not to be unpleasant about it. On a related note, fiction is replete with examples of reliable and unreliable narrators, not to mention narrators who are both at different times. These folk clearly and unavoidably put themselves in the story. Roger Zelazny's entire Amber series is an excellent example of such narrators, but that's just one example of first-person narratives, in which "you" (the narrator) are inextricably present in the story.

"Think of something to describe besides clothes! Although this may be good advice for porn writers, clothing tells a tale and it's often the first thing anyone learns about you. So although clothing is rarely the most important detail, it or its absence almost always tells the reader something important and useful. At a minimum, it tells you about the POV character by revealing what that character focuses on. Someone like me for whom clothing is primarily a climatic and social necessity would waste few words telling you what someone is wearing, unless it's somehow exceptional, but the characters I write often find clothing relevant, even where I wouldn't.

"Let your choice of details work subtly to invoke the attitude you wish to convey." Nothing much to criticize here, other than the choice of "subtly", which I'd eliminate. Sometimes you've got to be subtle; sometimes being subtle means that only 1% of your audience will notice how clever you've been. That's fine so far as it goes, but subtlety will only get you so far. It also must be appropriate for the character; "The Hulk" is really not the poster boy for subtle details, though Bruce Banner might well be.

"A little dialog goes a long way. True enough, unless you're actually good at it, in which case dialogue can take the place of pretty much everything else in the story. Steven Brust's writing, though enjoyable for many other reasons, offers some of the best examples of dialog in contemporary writing, particularly when his characters are bantering.

"As dialog runs, have the characters do “business.” The business should be “telling”—something that advances the story or the character in a subtle or not so subtle way. Only use dialog that advances the action, the information, the details … something in the story. Don’t have people talk just for talking’s sake." This is far too prescriptive. Again, I offer Brust as the counterexample, since often the entire business is carried by the dialog, and nothing much in the way of physical business or motion of the plot happens. It's sheer, exuberant, dialog for dialog's own sake.

"When running dialog, use “said” or “says.” Avoid fancy attributions—recalls, retorts, replies, unless it is done for effect. That's Steven King's advice, and it's reasonable. Better still, eliminate such roadsigns entirely where you can manage it. Zelazny and Brust offer examples where the entire dialogue is carried out for (in extreme cases) pages without every explicitly stating who said what. This is so clear from the dialogue's context and from differences in how the characters express themselves that anything else would be superfluous.

"Everything should be in for a reason. Otherwise it should be out. Granted, but with the exception that my "for a reason" will often differ remarkably from yours.

"Be simple when simple will do." Seems too obvious to mention, other than perhaps by co-opting William of Occam's advice to "make it no more complex than necessary". The problem always lies in defining "necessary"; sometimes you've got to make it complex. In the context of dialogue, Brust's ornate phrasing in his Khaavren Romances is a delicious example of complexity done right.

"Show, don’t tell." This works well in third-person narration, but less well in first person. I'm reminded of the concept of the "telling detail", and understanding what that detail might be gives you a clue as to whether it can be shown or must be told.

"Read out loud to yourself when you write. Hear the rhythm of the syllables, the words." This is good advice when you're starting out, but after a while, you learn to hear the rhythm in your head. Indeed, for some characters, you start to hear their actual voice, particularly when they're trying to tell you that they don't like what you're asking them to do or gently pointing out that they'd never do that thing you think they should be doing. Still, reading aloud as a reality check is definitely worth a try.

"Avoid second person." This ignores a whole series of successful novels and short stories that use this technique to create immediacy and rapport with the narrator. I suspect this is more difficult to reliably do well than other points of view, but when you do pull it off, no other approach can compete for effectiveness.

"Build ‘em up before you take ‘em down. Not being sure what this means, I can't really say whether it's good advice. Possibly this is an example of asking every word to count, or letting your characters rise to great heights before hubris brings them crashing back down. Mostly, I find this prescription better as an example of where Sager omitted a few crucial words that would have clarified his meaning.

"Use full stops and paragraph breaks to heighten drama. Period, paragraph, indention, new graph—it’s the same as a dramatic pause: an opportunity for the eye to reset, for the mind to absorb the thing that was last said." In short, learn how to use punctuation, sentence structure, and paragraphs. Always good advice for a writer.

"Be reader friendly. If they don’t get it, they’ll stop reading. Generally good advice, except for a significant fraction of science fiction and fantasy writing. In many such stories, you cannot stop to explain everything odd; we have a whole jargon (infodump, "As you know, Jim") to describe clumsy explication. SF/F readers expect you to occasionally drop them into the tempest and have to figure things out as you're blown along with the characters, and that's part of the pleasure of this sub-genre. This clearly won't work for beginning readers, who lack enough cultural knowledge of the genre to know how to cope with this ambiguity.

"Artful digression is the key to good writing. This follows from the "tease" advice provided earlier in the list. A little bit of tease is a very good thing; too much, and readers get bored and wander off. At some point, you have to consummate the transaction.

"Throttle back. Don’t be a show off. Generally good advice, except when the whole goal of the story is to tear off the brake pedal and pitch it out the window. Rudy Rucker is the posterboy for ignoring anything that much resembles restraint. The whole point is showing off, and if you're in the mood for that kind of thing, nobody does it better.

"Work behind the scenes. Never let them see you sweat." This can be very good advice, particularly when it relates to resisting the temptation to shoehorn your 20 years of readings in medieval studies into your fantasy novel. Roger Zelazny once described how he used to write many unseen scenes that led his characters from point A to point C, even when only A and C appeared in the final novel. Point B might never be necessary for the reader, but Zelazny found it essential to understanding why the character felt obliged to leave point A and why they subsequently felt obliged to make the journey to point C.

"Plant your gems in the rough. Not sure what this means, other than perhaps that the characters should stand out from their background. If that's the intent, it seems like reasonable advice, with the caveat that in many very good stories, the characters cannot be separated from their background: the two are so interwoven that there's nothing to separate. Many of the characters in the Lord of the Rings novels achieve their power from being so embedded in their background that the whole narration forms a seamless tapestry. Most only briefly emerge from that two-dimensional background to achieve three-dimensionality. Whether or not you like that approach probably determines whether you loved or loathed the novels.

"Dare to be bad. Then go back and edit. Writing is editing. Be your own toughest editor. Be your own best editor." Good advice, with the strong caution that no matter how good you are as an editor, someone else is always better when it comes to your writing. Each of the 400-some times I've published an article, I've received a lesson about a different form of blindness to my own assumptions.

The moral of this long post: Beware prescriptive rules, including this one. All rules are bounded by criteria that define when you should follow them, and if you don't know those criteria, rules are more likely to lead you astray than to guide you towards success.