Here’s one way to become a better writer. Listen to the advice of writers who earn their daily bread with their pens. During the past week, lists of writing commandments by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard (above) and William Safire have buzzed around Twitter. (Find our Twitter stream here.) So we decided to collect them and add tips from a few other veterans — namely, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. Here we go:
Henry Miller (from Henry Miller on Writing)
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
George Orwell (From Why I Write)
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.
Margaret Atwood (originally appeared in The Guardian)
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 freelunch. 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 visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
Neil Gaiman (read his free short stories here)
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.
William Safire (the author of the New York Times Magazine column “On Language”)
1. Remember to never split an infinitive.
2. The passive voice should never be used.
3. Do not put statements in the negative form.
4. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
5. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
6. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
7. A writer must not shift your point of view.
8. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
9. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
10. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
11. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
12. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
14. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
15. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
16. Always pick on the correct idiom.
17. The adverb always follows the verb.
18. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
![writersmanifest:
vintageanchor:
10 Tips for the Screenwriter by Joseph McBride, author of WRITING IN PICTURES…1. Don’t write what we can’t see or hear: If I can leave you with one basic rule about screenwriting, this is it. Once you keep this point firmly in mind, you will be writing in cinematic terms. Cinema can’t show the invisible, and a script should avoid nebulous concepts. So don’t tell us about what happened to characters in the past (the backstory) or tell us things about them the viewer can’t glean from the images or dialogue.2. Don’t tell us what people are thinking or feeling or remembering unless you can show it: Descriptive passages in a script that delve deeply into a character’s feelings or thoughts risk irrelevancy. They are usually a crutch for failing to dramatize your story. How do you convey the interior life of your character without spelling it out in dialogue or resorting to a crudely explanatory flashback? This is one of the most complex questions facing a screenwriter.3. Don’t overdo dialogue: Robert Towne advised students at the American Film Institute, “Generally speaking, the process of writing a screenplay is figuring out how to keep the dialogue as spare as possible.” Try to think of a scene first in visual terms and only resort to dialogue when it is truly necessary. Not that there’s anything wrong with strong, colorful dialogue, as long as the narrative keeps moving. But it’s too easy to fall into the trap of turning your movie into lifeless and static-looking scenes. Alfred Hitchcock complained that most movies resemble filmed plays; he scorned such works as “pictures of people talking.” What he preferred – and what is hardest to create – are pictures of people [itals]thinking[itals].4. Don’t underdo dialogue: It’s unfortunate that many films today, especially action films, seem to regard actual conversation as an audience turnoff. Characters who don’t talk much can be interesting, if the talk is well chosen and expressive. But inarticulate characters can also be cartoonishly dull. Even the characters in an action movie can talk with wit and brio, as James Bond movies have been demonstrating for decades. Because we have become so accustomed to thinking of cinema as “a visual art form” and to exalting directors over writers, we tend to downplay the importance of words in filmmaking.5. Keep scenes short (usually): When I started writing feature screenplays, I tended to write twenty-page dramatic scenes, no doubt influenced by the fact that I’d read a lot of stageplays and only a few screenplays. Scenes in modern films tend to be short – two or three minutes is a substantial length for a scene, and some scenes can be only a few seconds long. Occasionally a scene can run longer than a few minutes. The length of the scenes should not always be the same, because that quickly becomes monotonous and predictable; structure your script with a musical rhythm, varying the pace and decelerating or accelerating it as the story demands.6. Don’t show everything that happens in the story: As William Goldman puts it in John Brady’s interview book The Craft of the Screenwriter (http://www.johnbrady.info/AboutBrady.html), “Ruleof thumb: You always attack a movie scene as [itals]late[itals] as you possibly can. You always come into the scene at the last possible moment.”7. Use the helpful devices available to writers in the professional screenplay format: Clear and creative use of scene headings keeps the script easy to follow and gives a sense of visual variety and movement. Transitional devices (“CUT TO:,” “DISSOLVE TO:,” “FADE OUT,” etc.) should be used when you go from one place to another or from one time period to another. These devices are some of the ways that have evolved over the years to make a screenplay a quick read. Screenwriter Sam Hamm says that’s the first job of the screenwriter, “to keep the reader’s eye moving down the page.”8. CLARITY!: That’s the virtue Alfred Hitchcock stressed most in directing. The same applies to screenwriting: If your script is not clearly written, it won’t tell the story in a way the reader can follow. Clarity is the quality most conspicuously lacking in most bad writing. Put a sign above your desk reading “CLARITY.”9. Write good English: If your script is riddled with writing errors, the reader will quickly lose confidence in your abilities and become distracted from the story you are trying to tell. Many professional screenwriters are not the most polished writers, but there is a certain minimum standard of legibility that must be maintained in the professional world, or the script will be cast aside.10. Don’t write an epic unless you’re working for Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese: When I arrived in Hollywood, I found myself witnessing a strange native ritual. The first thing a producer or reader would do with a script, instinctively, was to pick it up and “weigh” it. Literally weigh it. Professionals develop a keen sense of how a professional script should feel in their hands. If it’s too heavy, the script starts life with a strike against it. It has little chance of being read with care or read at all.Read more at Word and Film.
I’m taking two screenwriting classes now. These are all very good into tips for the medium.
The first rule on this list - 300 loved breaking that one. They were very fond of mentioning scent - probably because the screen directions were pulled right from the comic. - That was the least of the problems with the 300 script…
If you want to take a crack at screenplay, your first step should be downloading celtx - its the best free screenwriting software - so at least you can get a feel for the format.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0f8chj2iG1qd9a66o1_500.jpg)
![thenelsontwins:
theatlantic:
6 Writing Tips From John Steinbeck
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
Read more. [Image: AP]
Excellent.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0sevcgD2Z1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
