1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create
atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to
go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are
exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo
to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather
reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a
prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are
ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you
can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck'sSweet
Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what
my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I
don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I
want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry
dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer
sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than
"grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned",
"lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with
"she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"
... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a
mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that
distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in
one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of
rape and adverbs"
5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are
allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the
knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in
by the handful
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell
broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed
that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the
application of exclamation points
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start
spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes,
you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of
Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck
covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do
the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken
off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a
physical description in the story
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things,
unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't
want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see
have too many words in them.
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