I’m running a series of posts of several authors’ Ten Rules for Writing Fiction. These rules were all published in an article in the Guardian, February, 2010. Can’t say I agree with all the rules, but it’s interesting to read—one writer’s bete noir is sometimes another’s signature prose. So don’t take them tooooo seriously:
Helen Dunmore (she only has 9 – the 1oth: never fake it)
1 Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.
2 Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
3 Read Keats’s letters.
4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
5 Learn poems by heart.
6 Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
7 A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
8 If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.
9 Don’t worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed “What will survive of us is love.”