Friday, April 12, 2013

Atwood's 10 Rules of Writing

     Last week I shared Sol Stein's "Ten Commandments for Writers,"(Stein on Writing). A reader of that Blog post, emailed to me a for-your-interest website, Brain Pickings. I was smitten with the multitude of informational nuggets found there––and, those of you who know me, know how adrenalin pumped I become with discovering new things (view 1/4/2013 Blog Post Intriguing Resources).

In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian asked some of today’s most celebrated authors to each produce a list of personal writing commandments. After 10 from Zadie Smith and 8 from Neil Gaiman, here comes Margaret Atwood with her denary decree:
  1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.  
  2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type. 
  3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
  4.  If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.
  5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
  6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
  7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
  8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
  9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
  10. Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­ization of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
Two distinguished writers in just as many weeks. I hope you have sorted what's important for you and your writing. Thanks for visiting, and please let me know if you've been influenced by another writer's rules.

2 comments:

  1. There is a big difference between this week's list, from Margaret Atwood, and last week's list, from Sol Stein. The former, insightful and valuable, provided a practical guide for concrete do's and don'ts. The latter is the opposite, addressing instead much larger concepts. For example, her first rule is to take a pencil on an airplane. This seemingly narrow bit of advice is actually a broad admonition: don't lose an idea for being unprepared. The next four do's fall under the same category--a grander bit of advice made easier to grasp by a specific example. The second set of five items has specific pieces of advice but their value is even greater when reflected upon, like the first five.

    As you point out, it's up to us to sort out what's important. Thank you.

    RB

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  2. Thank you, RB––your comment targeted my reaction when I read it, and then returned to Sol Stein's commandments.

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