Billionaire Psycho's Rules for Writing:

Some Useful Tricks

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”

—Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Issue Nineteen: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” 

Stephen King, If It Bleeds: “Rat”:

“He felt safe. And he felt pregnant, ready to pop. There was no fear about starting the book tomorrow, only anticipation. The words would pour out, he felt sure of it.

…

His real life — kids, running errands, chores around the house, picking up Stacey and Brandon from their after-school activities — was behind him. He would come back to it in two weeks, three at the outside, and he supposed he would still have the bulk of the book to write amid the clanging round of that real life, but what was ahead of him was another life, one he would live in his imagination.

…

In The Paris Review some writer — he couldn’t remember who — had said, “When you’re writing, the book is the boss,” and it was true. If you slowed down the story began to fade, as dreams did on waking.”

—Stephen King, If It Bleeds: “Rat”

“Mark Sutton, my superior at K & D, had thrown me the proposal about three months before and I’d been tossing the idea around ever since — circling over it, talking it up to friends, pretending to be doing it, but looking at the notes I’d made on the computer, I realized for the first time just how little actual work on it I’d done. I had lots of other work to do, proof-reading, copywriting, and I was busy, sure, but on the other hand this was exactly the kind of work I’d been nagging Sutton for since I’d started with K & D in 1994 — something substantial, something with my name on it. I saw now, however, that I was in serious danger of blowing it. To do the job properly, I was going to have to write a ten-thousand-word introduction and about another ten to fifteen-thousand words in extensive captions, but as of now, judging by these notes, it was clear that I had only the vaguest notions about what I wanted to say.”

—Alan Glynn, The Dark Fields (Limitless)

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused. 

Now it is necessary to get to the grindstone again. I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones.”

—Ernest Heminway, The First Forty-Nine Stories: Preface

Stephen King, Misery:

“What had she said yesterday? All I ever did was… talk you out of a bad book you’d written and into the best one you ever wrote…

Maybe there was a queer sort of truth in that. Maybe he had wildly overestimated just how good Fast Cars had been. 

…

So what was the truth? The truth, should you insist, was that the increasing dismissal of his work in the critical press as that of a “popular writer” (which was, as he understood it, one step — a small one — above that of a “hack”) had hurt him quite badly. It didn’t jibe with his self-image as a Serious Writer who was only churning out these shitty romances in order to subsidize his (flourish of trumpets, please!) REAL WORK! Had he hated Misery? Had he really? If so, why had it been so easy to slip back into her world? No, more than easy; blissful, like slipping into a warm bath with a good book by one hand and a cold beer by the other. Perhaps all he had hated was the fact that her face on the dust jackets had overshadowed his in his author photographs, not allowing the critics to see that they were dealing with a young Mailer or Cheever here — that they were dealing with a heavyweight here. As a result, hadn’t his “serious fiction” become steadily more self-conscious, a sort of scream? Look at me! Look how good this is! Hey, guys! This stuff has got a sliding perspective! This stuff has got stream-of-consciousness interludes! This is my REAL WORK, you assholes! Don’t you DARE turn away from me! Don’t you DARE, you cockadoodie brats! Don’t you DARE turn away from my REAL WORK! Don’t you DARE, or I’ll—”

—Stephen King, Misery

Good writing speaks for itself. 

Communication that is clear, efficient, and meaningful. 

Beautiful writing goes a step further, and separates from the crowd; delivering an experience, revealing hidden truths, escalating and intensifying with fluid elegance, articulating repressed taboos in a digestible fashion, capturing the unspoken desires and anxieties of a generation — while remaining unpredictable.

Rhetorical skill fuses with passion, wisdom, charisma. 

Audiences remember. 

Stories resemble snowflakes, in the sense that every great story is unique, and when communication stagnates, when communication degrades into a predictable formula, tedium is the immediate result. Life is surprising. Real life dazzles, or disorients. Or disturbs. Tragedies strike randomly. Fortune rains and shines on the just… and the unjust, alike. The artificial nature of art becomes obvious, and jarring, when art disobeys natural laws, when plot armor protects trapped heroes from the logical consequences of their mistakes. 

Clumsy illusions are rejected.

Fans thirst for drama.

Proper, operatic drama. 

Fans crave an accelerated rollercoaster of emotions and wish fulfillment that is more thrilling, terrifying, glamorous, grotesque, chaotic, sensual, philosophical, and rewarding than real life ever could be.

A compressed onslaught of catastrophes and celebrations. 

There is an expected depth, scale, texture, ambition, intensity, and complexity to stories that feel BIG ENOUGH to satisfy the duration of a film, novel, or television franchise. Stories that feel Cinematic.

Ups and downs, victories and reversals on the scale of a Cleopatra, Caesar, Napoleon, Gandhi, Galileo, Carnegie, Magellan, Cincinnatus, Sulla, Diocletian. To match the life of a historical figure pinned between the collision of vast historical forces.

To rise and fall… to risk it all… to daringly STAND TALL, suffering and enduring and persisting and eventually triumphing against fate. Conquering circumstance. Transforming into a legend, an ideal version of who the audience like to dream they could be — if they applied themselves. 

Fans demand lovely deceits… fictional worlds colored by realism, sculpted by a consistent aesthetic, sharpened by dangers and adventures, glittering with magnificent treasures, warmed by loyal friendship and euphoric, exotic romance. Coded with riddles and games; secrets and mysteries; insights and intrigues; vendettas and villains. Labors of love. Art embedded with terrible significance. 

Lovely deceits which elevate a higher, spiritual purpose. 

Illusions which somehow ring true. 

Worlds where beauty, courage, and innocence triumph against monsters… Diseased, ugly horrors are always defeated. Honor is protected. Decency prevails. Civilization builds, each generation respecting, remembering, improving upon the legacy of their forefathers. 

Good writing speaks for itself. 

Beautiful writing goes a step further, and farther. Reaches beyond ordinary limitations, to seize hearts and minds and dreams. 

Audiences remember.

There is no magic formula. No silver bullet. No enchanted sword, or typewriter.

But every artist orients towards an aspirational sensibility, what they believe art could be, if it was made correctly. An aesthetic drawn from the best examples of master craftsmen, and then refined, sharpened, streamlined.

Subtle patterns appear.

Every artist assembles their own personal guidebook of rules, a compilation of internalized observations and emergent, systemized processes.

Design principles.

Many authors have published a list of tips, tricks, and techniques to help other writers grow.

Here are mine:

Billionaire Psycho’s Rules for Writing:

• Highlight contrast, and explore that tension. Comparison provides the best measuring stick.

• Each word, sentence, and paragraph must serve a unique purpose. Cut anything redundant. Not a single word should be wasted. 

• Add more verbs. Prose that dances, climbs, plunges, strobes, stutters feels kinetic. 

• End each scene, each section, with an Act Break. Provide a sense of resolution. Or introduce a question… deliver a payoff, which provides the audience with a feeling of structure, satisfaction, and a sense of trust that the author will deliver a product worthy of their time investment. 

• If you can’t make it good, make it short.  

• Approach from unexpected angles. Begin each sentence by carefully choosing the first word, and write with variety. Prepositions, pronouns, and determiners such as “The”, “This”, “That” can usually be cut, and their inclusion tends to add three words to any sentence. Even professional journalists, novelists, academics don’t seem to understand this rule, and their prose is highly inefficient. The function of a word such as “my”, “when”, or “his”, is to provide the clarity of a reference point to the audience… but references are unnecessary after the initial setup, when the audience knows the story’s main thesis and direction. 

• End violently. The last word of every sentence is your punchline. Again, choose carefully, and write with variety. 

• Alternate one long paragraph with one short paragraph which is only a single sentence. Long, short, long, short. Then long, short, short, short. Brevity gives the audience a rest, and terse observations are more dramatic, more memorable. Your most important lines should be expressed in a short, one-clause sentence that stands by itself as a separate paragraph. Long paragraphs provide the audience with texture, a sensory experience. Short paragraphs hit hard, with sudden, brutal epiphanies. 

• Each paragraph should communicate one idea, and no more than that. Figure out what you are trying to say. If confused, take a step back, write an outline, and identify logical gaps. 

• One finished manuscript, novella, or essay is worth three unfinished projects. 

• After finishing, take a break. Later reread the piece. See if it flows fluidly, if the logical progression of ideas; arguments; elaborations; digressions; recapitulations is coherent, and cogent. During revisions, isolate generic verbs and descriptions, then replace them with more distinct, interesting semantic choices. Check for accidental repetition. 

• Reorganize dramatic sequence. During revisions, isolate each individual sentence, and consider whether the material can be eliminated, broken into fragments, combined with another sentence, or shuffled up or down. Sometimes a beautiful sentence delivers a sharp witticism, or provokes deep emotion, but it needs to be inserted two paragraphs earlier… or later. 

• Be decisive. Never apologize, equivocate, or qualify. Don’t bother with useless setup, or explanations. Never justify yourself; if you believe in your actions, commit with a savage urgency. If you aren’t proud of actions, why are you doing them? Be fearless. During first drafts, the words just need to be written, and inefficient transitions should be expected, because you are figuring out how to express inchoate, half-developed concepts. Nearly all these transitions will be cut, during revisions. 

• Experiment small. Mistakes are inevitable. If your first draft is perfect, you didn’t push yourself. Lack of ambition produces bland, forgettable material. Too much ambition, the project never gets finished. Tiny mistakes are less complicated, less stressful, and easier to correct.  

• Present novel ideas, then clarify them. Treat the audience as intelligent, but also explain relevant ideas from the perspective that the audience is busy, and distracted, and readers don’t have the time to read through 700 pages of research to learn what the author intends to communicate. Deliver complex, exotic, highly technical ideas — have confidence the audience is smart enough to comprehend Big Problems. But then give an immediate explanation, in layman’s terms, of what complex, unfamiliar concepts mean… focus on the power dynamics of how a system interacts.

• Be patient, and consistent. Allow projects time to develop. Some topics require months to consider every angle. Others can be written in a single hour. 

• Never publish anything that you aren’t proud of, that doesn’t meet a standard of quality that is the best you can do. 

• No regrets; don’t worry about honest mistakes. Admit failures, but don’t bother to correct them after publication, or to go back and rewrite finished work. Always look forward. The past is dead. Neuroticism cripples productivity. And the truth is, nobody else cares, everyone else is more focused on their own imperfections than worrying about yours. 

• Mask and misdirect; cloak and conceal. The audience wants to be deceived. That’s the game… a delicious seduction. Stories are religious sermons, yes. Stories are also puzzles, which the audience tries to decipher, while the author does his best to disguise. A magician never reveals his secrets — never solve a mystery, except when hiding another. Conceal tricks inside confessions — this is a clever form of misdirection, to pretend to clarify, while seeding another deceit.  

• Bleed on the page. Pain is temporary, cinema endures forever. The emotional experience of the artist planning, preparing, producing, and performing is separate from the audience’s experience receiving the story. Five dysfunctional, agonized years of writing a novel might translate into five sweet, delightful hours of daydreams for the audience. Authors misunderstand this truth, in both directions. Art doesn’t need to be created in a miserable, neurotic, self-loathing mindset to be good — you can actually relax, and have a good time doing high-quality work. But at the same time, the industrial production of mass leisure doesn’t involve much leisure. 

• Conduct meticulous research. A finished story, novella, essay is a dense compression of the author’s time, labor, and obsession — which readers swiftly devour. Your perspective needs to be different from anyone else. Look for bizarre ideas, strange connections, market inefficiencies. Dig into weird, obscure topics that nobody else cares about: the Meji Restoration, Julian the Apostate, Elagabalus, the Albigensian Crusade, the Hussite Wars, Tamerlane, the correspondence of Srinivasa Ramaujan, the rise and fall of the Hapsburgs, how the du Pont family built their fortune, Issac Newton’s years wasted pursuing alchemy, the conquests of the East India Company, the industrial espionage of Francis Cabot Lowell, the fall of Outremer, how James Simons assembled hundreds of scientists into his Medallion Fund to outsmart Wall Street, MKUltra, military funding of Silicon Valley startups. Dig deep, take notes, search for historical contradictions, and expose yourself to concepts nobody else is thinking about. Weird ideas are found by searching in weird places. 

• Study classics. Nothing on television this week will be remembered in thirty years. Ignore mainstream trash. Content platforms, and publishers, are fueled by a recency bias to promote and sell their current material. Learn from the best literature, and aspire to exceed it.

• Build on phantom’s bones. Nothing is original; there is nothing new under the sun, what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. Remember this Biblical truth. The desire to be original frustrates, infuriates, and misleads young authors. Ingenuity aims at the wrong target. Personal tragedies, and eternal themes, are the foundation of every great novel or film. Don’t try to be original. It’s a classic, fatal mistake. When devoted fans think you are inventing something 100% new, this only means they don’t recognize your influences. Use stories you admire, copy their structure in the early stages. During writing, your story will mutate beyond recognition, and take on a life of its own. Westeros is an upside-down map of Ireland… Middle-Earth is a warped map of Europe… Begin with high-fidelity mimicry. Implement tiny changes… a butterfly effect will result in rippling cascades of consequences, and the final outcome will be gorgeous.

• Inject weirdness. Novelty builds an aesthetic signature. Novelty achieves product differentiation, which is necessary to stand out in the overcrowded market of the Attention Economy. What critics, peers, and audiences perceive as originality most commonly stems from strange, eccentric combinations of two unrelated sources of exotic data. Discovering, and exploiting undervalued market inefficiencies. Weird combinations produce unpredictability, a delightful suspense. But rather than incorporating weirdness simply to confuse and distract, this technique empowers new forms of structural complexity — now it becomes possible to fold layers of multifaceted meaning, to weave separate threads into a gestalt tapestry, highlighting duality, juxtaposition, parallel structure, in order to critique and deconstruct the constraints of the medium itself.

• Go the extra mile. Always deliver an adequate baseline, a minimum viable product, then include some kind of unexpected bonus material which allows audiences to congratulate themselves on a receiving a great deal lopsided in their favor, rewarding their time investment. To downplay hype, and then consistently exceed promises, builds brand loyalty and a trustworthy reputation. A long pattern of sustained, dependable integrity will separate you from the Hustle Economy of lame fraudsters who frantically attempt to exploit strangers with shortcuts, illusions, and deceits. Focus on the work, trust the process.

• Dream big. Entire worlds can be destroyed in literature. The author plays with an infinite budget. Creativity demands gigantic, elaborate spectacles. Frugality is a virtue in real life, but it has no place in stories. The artist should conduct himself like the paranoid dictator of a crumbling African economy, loading up on foreign debt, selling and stripmining his nation’s infrastructure, plundering business, bribing mercenaries, printing fiat currency until the common citizen is hopelessly bankrupt. Push beyond comfortable limits. Your stories can be epic symphonies, birthing and wrecking and vivisecting ancient civilizations; gargantuan demons; bizarre philosophical cults; impossible science; sinister conspiracies; sacred mysteries. Forget inhibitions. Allow your imagination to run free, visualizing opulent castles, thousands of named characters, panoramic landscapes, vivid colors. Design with immense scale. Then zoom in, narrowing focus on a handful of key figures, ground the world’s incomprehensible vastness with a more familiar intimacy, caressing your story with the patient tenderness of seduction, humanizing abstract concepts, so that the personal struggles of your main characters embody macroeconomic tensions.

• Heighten intensity. Risk is punished in real life. Drama shows how, and why. Build up your characters, teach them, torture them, transform them, tear them down. Avoid the mundane and petty. Chase after aspirational power fantasies, then show the logical consequences of traumatic events. Heroes and villains are bigger than us, better than us. They are creatures of excess, defined by addictions and obsessions; delusions and depravities; euphoria and exuberance; isolation and despair. Tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin. The pain and absurdity of our world is confronted by exceptional figures who do things we only wish we were brave enough, strong enough, or smart enough to do.

Those are my suggestions. Feel free to ignore them. Nobody else can write your destiny’s map. 

Gathering data, finding answers, searching long hours, filtering signal from noise — this process can waste years. To accelerate that search, this Substack is intended to present a long assortment of advice from various craftsmen, and present their knowledge for your consideration. 

An idiosyncratic style is instantly recognizable… but slow to cultivate. 

On some level, mastering your craft is less about imitation of the masters, and more about rejection — studying famous masterpieces, isolating narrow techniques, identifying the mechanical application of a particular skill, and then choosing what to copy… or reject. 

The last caution I would add is that if you try to do everything, you end up accomplishing nothing. Skills must be studied, drilled, applied, and internalized in isolation to be retained. Even if someone gave you 500 tips to change your life, and every single one was a transformative gamechanger, each skill would need to adopted with a narrow, singular focus. Always start by analyzing the best sequence to proceed, then pick your next target — it could be the most useful, fun, puzzling, time-consuming, or the easiest method to learn.

Write down an actionable plan for who you want to be in five or ten years, what skills must be acquired to become that aspirational future version of yourself, what projects must be built to train those skills, and a schedule to proceed.

Start small, and dream big.

The ideal attitude of a writer is to be curious, observant, self-aware, obsessive, passionate, inventive, organized, and sympathetic. Some of these qualities don’t come naturally, and can be trained. I tend to gloss over discussions of temperament due to the brilliance and enthusiasm of this digital swamp — an amazing subculture swarming with insightful commentators — which is far in excess of the necessary baseline.

Many of the world’s best writers have delved into great detail about the subject of writing. Some of their advice is contradictory, which reflects clashing aesthetics. A small fraction of their insights are presented below:

Stephen King, Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully (in Ten Minutes):

“IV. Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully

1. Be talented: This, of course, is the killer.

If you're not talented, you won't succeed. And if you're not succeeding, you should know when to quit. When is that? I don't know. It's different for each writer. Not after six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty. But after six hundred? Maybe. After six thousand? My friend, after six thousand pinks, it's time you tried painting or computer programming. Further, almost every aspiring writer knows when he is getting warmer — you start getting little jotted notes on your rejection slips, or personal letters… maybe a commiserating phone call.

2. Be neat. Type. Double-space. Use a nice heavy white paper, never that erasable onion-skin stuff. If you've marked up your manuscript a lot, do another draft.

3. Be self-critical.

If you haven't marked up your manuscript a lot, you did a lazy job. Only God gets things right the first time. Don't be a slob.

4. Remove every extraneous word. You want to write for money? Get to the point.

5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule… If you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it —but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

6. Know the markets. If you write a good story, why send it out in an ignorant fashion?

7. Write to entertain. Your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around.

8. Ask yourself frequently, "Am I having fun?" The answer needn't always be yes. But if it's always no, it's time for a new project or a new career.

9. How to evaluate criticism.

Show your piece to a number of people — ten, let us say. If a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with you piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I'd still suggest changing it. But if everyone — or even most everyone — is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.

10. Observe all rules for proper submission. Return postage, self-addressed envelope, all of that.

11. An agent? Forget it. For now. Agents get 10% of monies earned by their clients. 10% of nothing is nothing.

You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.

12. If it's bad, kill it. When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.”

Stephen King's "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes" (aerogrammestudio.com)

—Stephen King, Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully (in Ten Minutes)

Neil Gaiman:

1.) “Write.

2.) Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3.) Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4.) Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5.) Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6.) Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7.) Laugh at your own jokes.

8.) The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.”

—Neil Gaiman

Michael Moorcock:

1.) “My first rule was given to me by T.H. White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies and was: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.

2.) Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.

3.) Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.

4.) If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction.

5.) Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.

6.) Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.

7.) For a good melodrama study the famous “Lester Dent master plot formula" which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.

The Lester Dent Pulp Fiction Formula - Mysterious Press

8.) If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophising. This helps retain dramatic tension.

9.) Carrot and stick — have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).

10.) Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.”

—Michael Moorcock

E. B. White:

1.) “Choose a suitable design and stick to it.

2.) Make the paragraph the unit of composition.

3.) Use the active voice.

4.) Put statements in positive form.

5.) Use definite, specific, concrete language.

6.) Omit needless words.

7.) Avoid a succession of loose sentences.

8.) Express coordinate ideas in similar form.

9.) Keep related words together.

10.) In summaries, keep to one tense.

11.) Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.”

—E. B. White

Zadie Smith:

1.) “When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2.) When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3.) Don't romanticise your “vocation." You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no “writer's lifestyle." All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4.) Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.

5.) Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6.) Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.

7.) Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

8.) Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9.) Don't confuse honours with achievement.

10.) Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”

—Zadie Smith

Elmore Leonard:

1.) “Never open a book with weather.

2.) Avoid prologues.

3.) Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.

4.) Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.

5.) Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

6.) Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."

7.) Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

8.) Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9.) Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

10.) Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

11.) My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

—Elmore Leonard

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language:

“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1.) What am I trying to say?

2.) What words will express it?

3.) What image or idiom will make it clearer?

4.) Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1.) Could I put it more shortly?

2.) Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1.) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2.) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3.) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4.) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5.) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6.) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

Politics and the English Language | The Orwell Foundation

—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language:

Henry Miller:

1.) “Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2.) Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

3.) Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

4.) When you can’t create, you can work.

5.) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

6.) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.

7.) Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

8.) Discard the Program when you feel like it but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

9.) Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

10.) Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”

—Henry Miller

Corita Kent:

1.) “Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

2.) General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

3.) General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.

4.) Consider everything an experiment.

5.) Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

6.) Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

7.) The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

8.) Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

9.) Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

10.) We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

11.) Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything — it might come in handy later.”

—Corita Kent

Billy Wilder:

1.) “The audience is fickle.

2.) Grab 'em by the throat and never let 'em go.

3.) Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.

4.) Know where you're going.

5.) The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

6.) If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

7.) A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever.

8.) In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they're seeing.

9.) The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

10.) The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then — that's it. Don't hang around.”

—Billy Wilder

Joyce Carol Oates:

1.) Write your heart out.

2.) The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.

3.) You are writing for your contemporaries not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

4.) Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

5.) When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun. (This is Raymond Chandler's advice, not mine. I would not try this.)

6.) Unless you are experimenting with form gnarled, snarled, & obscure be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.

7.) Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

8.) Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader or any reader. He/she might exist but is reading someone else.

9.) Read, observe, listen intensely! as if your life depended upon it.

10.) Write your heart out.

—Joyce Carol Oates

Kurt Vonnegut:

1.) “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2.) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3.) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4.) Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5.) Start as close to the end as possible.

6.) Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7.) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8.) Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

Tracy Kidder:

1.) “To write is to talk to strangers. You have to inspire confidence, to seem and to be trustworthy.

2.) It is always prudent to remember that one is not Tolstoy or Dickens.

3.) Don't concentrate on technique, which can be the same as concentrating on yourself. Give yourself to your story.

4.) The reader wants to see you not trying to impress, but trying to get somewhere.

5.) For a story to have a chance to live, it is essential only that there be something at stake. A car chase is not required.

6.) Try to attune yourself to the sound of your own writing. If you can't imagine yourself saying something aloud, then you probably shouldn't write it.

7.) The creation of a style often begins with a negative achievement. Only by rejecting what comes too easily can you clear a space for yourself.

8.) Use words wantonly and you disappear before your own eyes. Use them well and you create yourself.

9.) The best work is done when one's eye is simply on the work, not on its consequence, or on oneself. It is something done for its own sake. It is, in Lewis Hyde's term, a gift.

10.) Be willing to surprise yourself.”

—Tracy Kidder