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).

Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules of Writing

by Maria Popova

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.

Ten Commandments for Writers*

     I check and recheck my writing (short story, essay, poem), and to be positively sure, I recheck again for facts, grammar, punctuation, adverbs, and adjectives. Then I commit final triage, liposuctioning misfits, maladroits, and other scalawags that do little to bolster my creative intent. After, I make a few hand-to-forehead gestures with some audibles, but I'm learning from those mistakes and oversights.

     One year I plucked Stein on Writing off a bookstore shelf, perused the table of contents and a few chapters, and bought the volume. Right now, it's sticky-noted, annotated, and high-lighted. The book ends with Part VII, "Where to Get Help." It's here I double-check my work, especially against his Ten Commandments, which are:

1. Thou shalt not sprinkle characters into a preconceived plot lest thou produce hackwork. In the beginning was the character, then the word, and from the character's words is brought forth action.
2. Thou shalt imbue thy heroes with faults and thy villains with charm, for it is the faults of the hero that bring forth his life, just as the charm of the villain is the honey with which he lures the innocent.
3. Thy characters shall steal, kill, dishonor their parents, bear false witness, and covet their neighbor's house, manservant, maidservant, wife, ox, and ass, for readers crave such actions and yawn when thy characters are meek, innocent, for-giving, and peaceable.
4. Thou shalt not saw the air with abstractions, for readers, like lovers, are attracted by particularity.
5. Thou shalt not mutter, whisper, blurt, bellow, or scream, for it is the words and not the characterization of the words that must carry their own decibels.
6. Thou shalt infect thy reader with anxiety, stress, and tension, for those conditions that he deplores in life he relishes in fiction.
7. Thy language shall be precise, clear, and bear the wings of angels, for anything less is the province of businessmen and academics and not of writers.
8. Thou shalt have no rest on the sabbath, for thy characters shall live in thy mind and memory now and forever.
9. Thou shalt not forget that dialogue is as a foreign tongue, a semblance of speech and not a record of it, a language in which directness diminishes and obliqueness sings.
10. Above all, thou shalt not vent thy emotions onto the reader, for thy duty is to evoke the reader's emotions, and in that most of all lies the art of the writer.

I use these to check against my short stories or essays as they near homestretch. I pencil in the Commandment numbers that make the mark on my draft. The missing ones tell me I need to revisit my work. Writing is all about moving forward, and learning to get it right, isn't it?

* Chapter 35: A Final Word