Writers like laying down the law and there’s no shortage of advice from famous figures on how to write or, more often, what to avoid in writing. When I produced a book a few years ago on some of the unofficial rules and theories which operate in various areas of life from politics to economics to the arts, I naturally searched out rules on writing.
Crime and sci-fi writers are a particularly fruitful source of advice and admonishment. One reason, I suspect, is that even though the two genres deal with extravagant, improbable scenarios they are actually quite rule-bound. In 1929 Ronald Knox, a founding member of the Detection Club together with Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie, compiled a list of ten commandments which every respectable author of golden age crime fiction should observe. They include: ‘Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable’ and ‘Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.’
Knox’s rules are all about playing fair with the reader. If you’re looking for something a bit more robust then you need to cross the Atlantic. Raymond Chandler agreed that the mystery story ‘must be honest with the reader’ but his tip for anyone hitting a block or uncertain where to go next is excitingly blunt: ‘When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.’ He might have added
‘…and work it out afterwards’, since Chandler’s plots are notoriously convoluted.
I am a great fan of Elmore Leonard and, as anyone familiar with his work would expect, his rules for writing are no-nonsense and laconic. ‘Never open a book with the weather,’ he says, and bang goes half of English literature. Another rule with which I completely agree is: ‘Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.’ That’s the end then of ‘she muttered’, ‘he retorted’ – hurray!
The sci-fi writer and satirist Kurt Vonnegut also came up with a batch of practical suggestions. They include ‘Start as close to the end as possible’ and ‘Be a sadist…make awful thing happen to them [your leading characters].’ And: ‘Do not use semicolons. All they do is show you’ve been to college.’
As with other US writers such as Joseph Heller (and British ones, Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie), it’s no coincidence that both Leonard and Vonnegut began by writing advertising copy. The skills needed to attract attention and be economical and memorable while selling eggs or vodka are just as useful in writing fiction.
When it comes to getting your books out there, another sci-fi writer, Robert Heinlein, put his cards on the table in a 1947 essay called ‘On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.’ Despite the vaguely literary title, Heinlein’s rules are severely practical. His first is ‘You Must Write’, his second is ‘Finish What You Start’ and he concludes with ‘You Must Keep Your Story on the Market until it has Sold.’
There’s no space here to go into some of the more arcane rules I discovered while researching Skyscrapers, Hemlines and the Eddie Murphy Rule (Bloomsbury, 2015). But those tempted to write books about how to write and with a taste for opining about grammar and correctness should familiarise themselves with ‘Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation’. If they don’t, they run the real risk of falling victim to ‘Muphry’s Law’ (which is not the same as Murphy’s Law).