Sit at a typewriter and bleed? Well, that sounds easy enough. Who couldn’t do that?

Maybe I am thinking that way because my original foray into writing was inspired by an amazingly awful heartbreak. My heart bled all over the place.  It was more “Sit at a PC and bleed” … but still …

One of my favorite quotes about writing comes from W. Somerset Maugham.

Well. That makes it easy … no?

John Steinbeck offered these …

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.

Am I the only one who thinks they sound a whole lot like the premise for NaNoWriMo? Especially numbers one through four.

The recently late Elmore Leonard had ten really great rules.

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” … he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

They make sense. He was published. He made money.

I’ll listen to these. And his final “rule” …

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.