Writing Guidelines Quotes

I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.

If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations.

Place yourself in the background; write in a way that comes naturally; work from a suitable design; write with nouns and verbs; do not overwrite; do not overstate; avoid the use of qualifiers; do not affect a breezy style; use orthodox spelling; do not explain too much; avoid fancy words; do not take shortcuts as the cost of clarity; prefer the standard to the offbeat; make sure the reader knows who is speaking; do not use dialect; revise and rewrite.

Can't publish. Don't rhyme, don't scan.

Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules."

Is rule of thumb in writing game: if story requires many long descriptions of smells so vile that will give reader nausea, is not likely to find publisher.

The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.

Write on any subject you choose. There are no taboos except what is prohibited by law and press ethics.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

You need to realize that most writing rules aren't laws, they're rules of thumb.

Whenever you write for someone else, you're always aware - sometimes overtly, other times at an almost cellular, subliminal level - of the rules about what you can and can't do.

I don't think, in my entire 18 years as a student, I ever used an exclamation point in an academic paper.

Here is a golden Rule.... Write legibly. The average temper of the human race would be perceptibly sweetened, if everybody obeyedthis Rule!

I didn't understand in the beginning that the editor didn't want me to know the author. I'd make an effort to meet the author, but it would end up being a disaster because then I had the author telling me what I should be doing.

The way that I sort of direct the writers is, let's do the best story we can. Let's not worry about production issues. 'How much will that cost? How are we going to shoot that?' Let's not set up those constraints on the writing. I don't think it helps the project to work like that.

I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom.

The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called 'Poetics.' It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules.

Never write more than two pages on any subject.

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

What I feel is there are certain demands that you have to satisfy in any piece of writing. When it's just for me, it's just for me, but if it's a piece for a particular publication, I know what they're going to ask for.

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

I once had a story editor ask me not to use the word 'placenta.' I wanted to say: 'Now tell me again how you got here?' Oh, right, an angel of God placed you into the bill of the stork.