Rules on Writing

*A response to the Guardian's collection of writing rules by Molly Young, one of my favorite bloggers.

"Using adverbs is a mortal sin," declares Elmore Leonard. "Prayer might work," offers Margaret Atwood. Does any of this help? Molly Young weighs in ...

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Deep down, we know the rules of writing. Or the rule, rather, which is that there are no rules. That's it. That's the takeaway point from any collection of advice, any Paris Review interview and any book on writing, whether it be Stephen King's "On Writing" or Joyce Carol Oates's "The Faith of a Writer" (both excellent, by the way, but only as useful as a reader chooses to make them).

Despite this fact, writers continue to write about writing and readers continue to read them. In honour of Elmore Leonard's contribution to the genre, "Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing", the Guardian recently compiled a massive list of writing rules from Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Annie Proulx, Jeanette Winterson, Colm Tóibín and many other authors generous enough to add their voices to the chorus.

Among the most common bits of advice: write every day, rewrite often, read your work out loud, read a lot of books and don't write for posterity. Standards aside, the advice generally breaks down into three categories: the practical, the idiosyncratic and the contradictory. From Margaret Atwood we learn to use pencils on airplanes because pens leak. From Elmore Leonard we learn that adverbs stink, prologues are annoying and the weather is boring. Jonathan Franzen advises us to write in the third person, usually.

The "idiosyncratic" category of advice, because the most specific, is naturally the most interesting. "Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide," says Roddy Doyle. Neil Gaiman advises readers to laugh at their own jokes. Read you work as an enemy would, offers Zadie Smith. And from Geoff Dyer: don't try to imitate Nabokov. Just don't.

It's a funny thing, this list. Assembling so many rules from so many authors serves to highlight the essential hopelessness of giving advice on how to write. Not only do rules proliferate, it seems, but they coexist without any agreement. Roddy Doyle, for instance, advises avoiding distraction ("Restrict your browsing to a few websites a day") as well as being distracted ("Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing.") Anne Enright suggests whiskey as a lubricant, but Richard Ford and Colm Tóibín warn away from mixing booze and work. Predictably, the comments following the Guardian's list are themselves a jumble of caveats, modifications and dissent. "If Thomas Hardy had followed Leonard's rules," writes a commenter named 'billcostley', "he would never have written The Return of the Native...or anything else."

No kidding. But can anyone doubt, after scrolling through all 7,000 words of the Guardian's advice, that an author's rules are as specific (and exclusive) to her as her DNA? And yet, if we can't learn anything new from such lists, why do we find them fascinating? Their value, I think, is mainly an affirmative one. At their best, writing rules remind us of the things we already know about ourselves. The advice that rings true, in other words, is the advice we already follow.

(Molly Young is a writer living in New York.)