A Sense of Doubt blog post #3831 - TWELVE Rules for WRITING
I have been doing some writing lately, so this set of rules came at a good time.
12 Rules For Writing
Orbital Operations for 10 August 2025
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. | ||
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- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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