Jessica P. Morrell©
A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn’t spin a bit of magic, it’s missing something. Esther Freud
Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, in 2010 The Guardian newspaper asked authors for their advice on writing productivity. Superstars such as Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Neil Gaiman, Richard Ford, Jonathon Franzen, and PD James weighed in on their tips for churning out pages. These tips ranged from ‘hire a good accountant’ to ‘get rid of adverb’s to ‘do back exercises since pain is distracting’. With tongue firmly planted in cheek here is advice on how not to write a novel or much of anything else.
Quit your day job so that you’re wallowing around in your bathrobe most of the day amid unstructured time as your money runs out, your confidence withers, and your spouse mutters dark threats.
As long as you’re at it, you might as well slip back into bed. After all, sleep is important, as are dreams, and daydreams. In fact, adopt prone as your favorite position since you never know, inspiration just might alight while snuggled under quilts and blankets.
Do not develop a routine or schedule, instead write when the muse winks your way. Never matter that this only happens around the full moon or more unfortunately when a lunar eclipse occurs, or when your wife asks you to mow the lawn.
Lean on your spouse, roommate, your writing group, your therapist and the barista at your favorite coffee shop for emotional support. LOTS of emotional support. After all, writing is torture, and you’re an artiste, right?
Seek empty praise whenever possible. We all know that writers need heaps of accolades in order to thrive.
Ignore criticism, feedback and advice. And while you’re at it, ignore ALL experts. Thus never attend a class, workshop, or conference, never crack a book on craft, and don’t allow your precious manuscript in the hands of a story consultant or book doctor.
Adopt writerly affectations. Here’s where creativity pays off as you don beret, pipe, red knee socks with garters, a velvet blazer, monocle, and stooped posture. Or, you could just become unshaven and slovenly. It beats writing.
Don’t learn how to be your own editor. In fact, eschew revision since most certainly each of your ideas are golden, each phrase a pearl.
Loathe life and thus develop frustration, anxiety, insomnia, depression and crippling despair which impede you from accomplishing pretty much anything at all. Then start blaming your symptoms on the people around you when your story and your world starts crumbling.
Develop a chip on your shoulder and sour attitude about the publishing industry, agents, and authors who seem to glide to success with the ease of a butterfly.
Write from your need to vent about your lousy childhood, your ex-husband, or ungrateful children. Better yet, when writing about people who’ve done you wrong, be sure to imbue them will all sorts of ugly attributes including bad breath, vanity, flatulence, and incurable acne.
Brew another pot of coffee and gulp down a cup while wandering around your office. And another. And another. After five, switch to gin.
Instead of writing send emails to everyone you’ve ever known and play Solitaire by the hour. Check out your Facebook pals. Tweet about what you’re going to make for lunch. After lunch Tweet about the movie you’re going to see later that evening.
Avoid reading in the genre you’re writing. You don’t want another author’s methods to rub off, after all. In fact you’re probably best served by not reading altogether or choosing only out-of-print tomes.
Start projects. Lots of projects. Do not complete anything. Let alone a chapter.
Do not write about life and love and relationships and philosophy and pain, feelings and family. It’s better to write about evil overlords with violent mood swings, demonic beings who exist only to destroy humankind, existential angst, kidnapped beautiful princesses who fall desperately in love with the nerdy protagonist who strangely resembles the author, and dank dungeons scattered with bones. Realism is for sissies.
When in doubt, blame the world for your shortcomings as a writer.
Join a critique group that’s a bunch of fluffy bunnies and sunshine, fueled by wine. Make that lots of wine and praise and agreement which makes the artistic soul soar while criticism kills the muse.
Ignore the fact that readers cannot see inside your head and create stories that seem to take place on an empty sound stage inhabited by faceless, unidentifiable story people who are as mysterious as fog. Never utter a stage direction or ask the actors to lower their voices.
Since you’re the God of your novel and story world, when it comes to plotting, never ask yourself why. Especially don’t wonder about murder motives and why fits of rage are breaking out on your pages with alarming frequency, why your characters fall in love with cads and bimbos, and why you’ve set the story in Istanbul when you’ve never visited the city. Because after all your capricious genius doesn’t need to toil overmuch and randomness and whimsy are the path to great storytelling.
If it was good enough for Dickens, it’s good enough for you. After all, Ebeneezer Scrooge is one of the most famous characters of all time. So just for the hell of it, chisten your characters with pretentious and offbeat names like Hieronymus, Beelzebub, Hortense, Prospero, and Minerva, ignoring the fact that your characters don’t live in Victorian England or long-ago Rome. While you’re at it, you can pretend you’re a brainless celebrity and bestow scratch-your-head-at-the logic names on your literary offspring such as Moon Unit, Apple, Kyd, Prince Michael, or Rocket. Then there’s Nevaeh (heaven spelled backwards) or using names that signify attributes such as Sincere, Justice, Noble, Calypso, Colt, and Cash but I need to stop this list since I could go on for days.
As for the actual words on the page: lard your story with filigreed symbols, motifs, tropes, bad metaphors, euphemisms, and purple prose. Language is, after all, for lavishing onto the page in bold, florid strokes. So bring on those round, melting orbs of day, nights of sighing, bedeviled anguish in claustrophobic rooms, and afternoons of longing so eloquent they threaten to burst your bulging heart seams and create wound dew. On the other hand, you can create worlds using beige prose that is so pallid that each sentence limps rather than gallops to a conclusion. This means the bland verbs you use most often are either passive forms of ‘to be’ or get, put, look, move, see, and saw, and your nouns are barebones (house, car, tree, bird, dog, boy, object). The answer, my friends, isn’t blowing in the wind—your style should simply never intrude.
Create characters who all sound alike—wry, urbane, and raffish—able to drop one-liners at the drop of bowler, which inexplicably your main character, who tends to be peevish and preening for most of your pages, wears year round along with pin stripes.
Use exclamation points! Lots of them! After all, your story is exciting and readers need to pay attention to your most intense moments!!
“Along with a great deal of sensitivity, you need to develop and practice the habit of noticing: a flicker of a facial muscle that suggests anger; the tone beneath words being spoken; the movement of wind in the linden trees; the bagging at the knees of a pair of pants; what your grandmother’s apron smelled like when she pulled you in for a hug; how, when you bite your cheek, the blood tastes in your mouth. You need to study your species and your habitat, and then you need to be like my daughter, Julie, when she was three years old and saw tannish sand from the snow plows covering the white. “The snow looks just like crumb cake,” she said, and she was absolutely right. You need to notice all the time, and then tell what you saw in a new way. As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it. What’s unique about you is what makes your writing interesting, and what makes it shine. It is yet another reason why you should never try to imitate other writers.
