12 Rules For Writing

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Here are twelve rules for writing.

1

Write to entertain yourself first. Because if you’re bored, your reader will be bored too. This applies even to client work with specific briefs and notes you may not actually agree with. Find a way to keep yourself interested and engaged and it’ll reflect in the work. Pander or try to write for an imagined audience and it will show.

2

Steal useful rules from other writers. Two from Mike Moorcock: “obey and enjoy the genre” and “when your main thread gets stuck, descend into a secondary character.”

3

Write every day, but set a minimum boundary. Graham Greene only wrote 500 words a day. Some people set ten minutes of full focus a day. Putting your body in front of word-making materials for a period of time is the thing, and if that ever seems hard to you, think about Jean-Dominique Bauby, who had to dictate an entire book using only his left eye to signal with. Books are written only by the people who show up to write them, even if it’s only ten minutes a day.

4

Don’t wait for the muse to show up and make your words beautiful. Just sit your arse down and lay bricks. You can make it pretty later. Getting words down is the important thing. Edit, sculpt and polish them later. You have the luxury of not showing it to anyone until after you’ve made it look nice.

5

We all write novels with no contract, and send them out in the hope they find a home. That’s fine. Writing pitches on spec for no money is acceptable. You can even make a case for writing outlines or a few pages of script for no money. Anything more than that is generally someone else fucking you around for their own benefit. I was once asked to create a brand new thing and write a full script for it so they could crowdfund it in order to generate the seed money to launch their own company.

6

Only write “for exposure” on your own terms.

7

Always question your first idea.

8

Read everything, listen to everything and everyone, go outside to new places, do everything you can. Keep stretching yourself. Learn, remember and write it down. I’ve done fire walks, flown a small plane across the English Channel, cut amethyst from a mine under a mountain, loosed arrows in the grounds of a medieval castle. As a writer, your subject is the entire world, everything in it, everything it was and everything it might be, from the time I sat in a neolithic burial chamber, to the first time someone held your hand, to the blessed moment when aliens offended by TikTok finally land and put us all out of our misery. Get as much of it as you can.

9

Always know when to leave the stage and what to leave behind.

10

Don’t start from the position of wanting to be the next Alan Moore or Margaret Atwood or whatever. You don’t want to be the next anyone. You want to be the first you. Figure out what you truly sound like and what you really want to say. Writers with nothing to say are never loved, not even by themselves.

11

Do not start with your multi-volume epic. Start with something smaller, that you know you can finish in the near future.

12

When you feel utterly stuck and you just can’t push through, leave the desk. Go for a walk or a wheel, do your email - in times past, writers would warm up by doing their correspondence in the mornings - tidy your space, do some cooking, things that aren’t writing stories. Get your forebrain off the problem by doing something physical and your backbrain will work on the problem in the background.

13

There are no rules. Invent your own.

And if you made it through that, your reward is the trailer for the next film by Ben Wheatley:

What artists wear, as projection and performance.

I like clothes. This year I hunted for weeks to find a Breton long-sleeved shirt with a proper boat neck and a black stripe, and I dropped several hundred quid at AndSons here in the UK for autumn/winter clothes and their Drover boots in black. I’m that idiot who haunts Etsy and eBay, hoping for that lucky repeat of the time I sourced a rare vintage long-cut black French chore jacket for next to nothing.

I occasionally see various versions of this Issey Miyake watch on those sites, and one day I will see the version and price point that forces me to pull the trigger:

Isn’t that a mad looking thing?

Oh, talking of weird watches. There are a few places selling old Soviet-era watches that have been reconditioned by Ukrainian watchmakers, like Sputnik 1957. Which is where I saw this:

CURRENTLY READING:

It seemed almost like he was doing his best impression of the way a regular human being walked, but having never seen one before.

• THE MANIAC, Benjamin Labutut. Labutut’s recent speciality is fanciful fictional biographies of real scientists. He very much bends the boundaries between novel, essay, reportage and invention, and, as in his previous book, WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, you didn’t always know which was which and what was happening. It was an excellent book. This one zeroes in on John von Neumann, and is told in a series of statements by the people who knew him. All of which is invented, although the bare biographical elements and timeline are true. Like I said: a fictional biography. And it’s just brilliant. Von Neumann was one of the scientific/mathematical prodigies of the 20th Century, with a deeply conflicted legacy - initiating our digital world, but using those tools to ensure the hydrogen bomb worked. And the device he used to do that, he named the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer. The MANIAC. And a maniac is how the genius von Neumann is presented - an alien child. Superbly written - each chapter is its own little story of him, and some of them are fully eerie. Very recommended. (UK) (US)

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, ‘And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.’ Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us second-hand.

• SECOND-HAND TIME, Svetlana Alexievich. Just started this fairly grim collected oral history of the Soviet era and its end, the hopes and dreams of Russia’s transition to capitalism and the early warnings of heavy weather ahead. (UK) (US)

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And that’s me for this week. Life is a pleasure. The bad stuff passes and the good stuff remains. Be alive. See you next Sunday.

W