It's All About the Reader (and 24 Other Rules About Writing)

Whether you maintain a humble personal blog or are an aspiring novelist, this manifesto on writing can help you stay focused on the most important thing about writing: getting read. Compiled by former Guardian editor Tim Radford, these 25 “commandments for journalists” offer clear guidelines for anyone serious about writing.

Radford says that, ultimately, there’s no other reason for a journalist to write unless you make someone read your stories. So his first seven rules are:

1. When you sit down to write, there is only one important person in your life. This is someone you will never meet, called a reader.

2. You are not writing to impress the scientist you have just interviewed, nor the professor who got you through your degree, nor the editor who foolishly turned you down, or the rather dishy person you just met at a party and told you were a writer. Or even your mother. You are writing to impress someone hanging from a strap in the tube between Parson’s Green and Putney, who will stop reading in a fifth of a second, given a chance.

3. So the first sentence you write will be the most important sentence in your life, and so will the second, and the third. This is because, although you – an employee, an apostle or an apologist – may feel obliged to write, nobody has ever felt obliged to read.
 
4. Journalism is important. It must never, however, be full of its own self-importance. Nothing sends a reader scurrying to the crossword, or the racing column, faster than pomposity. Therefore simple words, clear ideas and short sentences are vital in all storytelling. So is a sense of irreverence.

5. Here is a thing to carve in poker work and hang over your typewriter. “No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand.”

6. And here is another thing to remember every time you sit down at the keyboard: a little sign that says “Nobody has to read this crap.”

7. If in doubt, assume the reader knows nothing. However, never make the mistake of assuming that the reader is stupid. The classic error in journalism is to overestimate what the reader knows and underestimate the reader’s intelligence.

The Rules of Writing

Beginning writers often want to know what the hard and fast rules are, the rules they simply must follow. Sometimes writing teachers and books of advice even provide them with rules, which they then get obsessive about.
 
Don’t.
There are no hard-and-fast rules in writing. There are guidelines and suggestions.
If you call them guidelines and suggestions, beginners will often decide to ignore them — “they’re just suggestions.”

If you call them rules, beginners will obsess foolishly about them. “I can’t do that; it’s against the rules!”

It’s a no-win situation for advisors, and feeds my conviction that many beginning writers are simply determined to worry about all the wrong things in order to avoid looking at the true situation and acknowledging how simple, and how difficult, writing professionally is.

One person I dealt with said he’d been told never to start a story with a cliche because it would give an editor an excuse to reject the story. This is based on a faulty premise. Editors aren’t looking for excuses to reject stories; they don’t need excuses, because at least 90% of what’s submitted is utter crap. They’re looking for reasons to buy stories.

Think about it from the point of view of the editor. He’s not a teacher, showing you the best way to do something. He’s not a bureaucrat, mindlessly following rules. He’s a merchant trying to put together the best product he can for his customers. His major concern is pleasing his readers, so they will continue to pay for it. He’s looking at what you offer him to see whether it’s something he wants to offer his customers.

Therefore, he looks at each submission as if he were a customer — that is, as if he were a reader looking for entertainment. He picks up the story, starts reading — and if at any time he finds himself thinking, “This is boring; I don’t want to read any more,” then he puts the story down and rejects it and goes on to the next. Because if it bores him, he can assume it will bore his readers.
Substitute “stupid” or “pointless” or anything else for “boring,” if you don’t think that’s the right word, and the result is the same. For me, stupidity and pointlessness and all the other possible flaws are subsets of being boring, but maybe that’s not how other people use the word.

If the editor gets all the way through the story without rejecting it, which he usually won’t, then it becomes a matter of deciding whether it’s a good story and suitable for his market, which is a whole ‘nother issue and not what I’m addressing here, because it has nothing to do with cliches or bad grammar or eccentric prose or any of the other things that people make Rules about and which new writers get confused by — if the editor read the whole story through, then you’re past concerns with prose and style and into deeper matters.

When someone tells you that if you start your story with a cliche the editor will reject it, he’s generally telling you the truth. It’s not because the editor has an arbitrary rule against cliches; it’s because a cliched opening will cause the editor to think, “This is boring, and I don’t want to read any more.”

If you write an opening which is, by some technical definition, a cliche, but which does not evoke this response in the editor, then there is no conceivable reason to change it. Cliches are not bad because they’re cliches. Cliches are bad because they make editors reject stories.
Keep cause and effect the right way around here. Cliches are bad because they bore editors. If they don’t bore editors, then they’re not bad, and there’s no reason to avoid them.

I should note that this brings us to the single largest advantage established writers actually have over beginners. Newbies often think that the Big Names have an advantage in short fiction because putting their names on the cover will sell more magazines; editors will tell you that this is bull, that only a very few names on the cover (Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, maybe Harlan Ellison) will actually help sales perceptibly. Editors may err on the side of caution and favor Big Names somewhat just in case — but that’s BIG names.

Look at the cover of a recent issue of Analog (April ’99). No offense to G. David Nordley, but does anyone out there think his name is really going to help sales? Daniel Hatch? Michael F. Flynn? (Well, Flynn, maybe, because there are people out there who adored Fallen Angels.) These are good writers, but I really don’t think they make any difference to sales.

So what is the advantage an established writer has? That the editor will give him the benefit of the doubt when reading a weak opening.

For a beginner, the editor will think, “I’ve read this opening a thousand times; toss it.”
For an established writer (like me), the editor will think, “I’ve read this opening a thousand times, but this is Lawrence — he’s probably got some twist in mind, so I’ll read a little further.”
This is what we mean by saying that once you’re a known quantity, you can break the rules — once you’ve shown that you can write a good story, editors (and readers) will give you more slack thereafter. But you still need to write a good story!

And that’s the one real true unbreakable rule: Don’t Bore the Reader. Everything else is just hints and suggestions on how best to achieve this.

Specific Category Writing

Fiction v. Nonfiction. There is a difference between entertainment and information, known as fiction and nonfiction. Every nonfiction book is unique. The buyer interested in the subject of raising llamas is not necessarily a good prospect for a book on skydiving or waste-water treatment. Fiction, on the other hand, is related to other fiction in its category. A reader who buys one mystery is a prime candidate for another mystery. Fiction must compete for peoples’ time. People must choose not only between reading this book of fiction and reading other books but between reading this book and engaging in other forms of entertainment such as going to a movie or walking on the beach. Nonfiction does not compete for time. Nonfiction is information that people buy because it will save them time or money. It is much easier to convince people to buy nonfiction than fiction. We often say “start with nonfiction and do not publish fiction until you can afford it.”

At Para Publishing, we specialize in coaching nonfiction book publishers to sell more books. Some of our programs, ideas, leads and resources will work for creative literature but that is not our specialty.
Children’s books. Twenty percent of the US is made up of children; 4,000,000 babies are born every year. There is a large market for children’s books and they are relatively easy to sell be they fiction or nonfiction. Children’s books tend to have a longer sales life than adult books. They start off slow and build over time.

According to Publishers Weekly, children’s books fall into the following categories: 27% picture books, 17% books for babies and toddlers, 20% for younger readers, 19% for middle readers, and 17% for young-adult readers. Decide which category your work falls into.
Producing children’s books just recently became a lot less expensive. A new type of printing allows you to avoid expensive color separations and to print in quantities of 100 or 500 to test the market before you print more.

Cook Books. People are cooking less but obsessing about it more. They are eating out more (spending 29.4% of their food dollar) but are buying more cookbooks. They are doing more reading about cooking than cooking. People are cooking for others so infrequently that when they do, they will do anything to make sure the meal comes out perfectly.

More than 1,000 new cookbooks are published each year and they sell well.
So cookbooks are becoming more and more specialized: For diabetics, no salt, for menopause, etc. The Civil War Cookbook intertwines history and cuisine for insight into the lives of the soldiers in the battlefield.

Travel books. Getting paid for travel can be great fun. In fact, digging out a story in a distant land can be stimulating, allowing you to get more out of your trip. Few people are full-time travel writers. Most supplement their income and their lust for journeying to far-away places.

Religious books are relatively easy to sell. There is a large market and much demand.
Screenplays. With the expansion of television to 500 channels, there is a larger and ever-increasing need for content. Viewers want fiction (entertainment) and nonfiction (how-to, documentaries, etc.). Someone has to come up with the ideas and someone has to write the scripts.

Newsletters. Articles and news items you publish in your magazine or newsletter can be saved for your book. So the periodical can help you to get maximum value out of your research. Newsletters can bring you fame, fortune, help a lot of people and fulfill your mission but they have to be part of your overall company plan. Make sure your newsletter provides a lot of helpful, interesting news; do not make it just a puff piece for your books and other company activities.

Block Busting – beating writer’s block

Here are a bunch of quick ideas to help you beat that creativity killer – writer’s block…

Take a walk

Much more effective than you might think. It’s not simply about a time out. Fresh air invigorates your brain and the muscle movement releases chemicals into the bloodstream. Also, new visual stimulus will get your synapses crackling.

Freewriting

For ten minutes write non-stop… anything at all. Seriously, anything. Even if it’s just the same word over and over and over again. Misspellings, sense, we care not for these things!

Work on some notes instead

Less pressure, fun, and a good chance it will kick start some prose writing.

Listen to some music

Engage another part of your brain to kickstart creativity.

Make a pointless rule and write to it

Such as: you can’t use the letter e more than once per sentence or each sentence must have an even number of words. Limits create focus and change your perspective.

Read the papers

Great for ideas that nobody will ever believe are true.

Write a rant

Who really got up your nose this week? What would you say to them if you could? Get those juices flowing, let the emotion pour out onto the paper.

Explain your dilemma to a teddy bear

If you can’t think how to proceed, explain your problem to a soft toy. The process of formulating the problem out loud is often enough to let you see the solution.

Create a strict schedule

With short periods dedicated to writing. For example, write for ten minutes, then water the plants, then write for fifteen minutes, then hang the laundry, then write for ten minutes, then do the dishes. Stick to it. That means when it says to stop as well, even if you’re in a flow. Having very short time periods can help you focus and stop you thinking you’re going to write a whole novel at one sitting.

Don’t obsess when you’re drafting

Are you in a draft stage and worrying about word and sentence level? What on earth for? Haven’t you heard of editing? Just get it down any old how and the polishing will come later.

The 20/5 technique

Get yourself an egg timer, set it for twenty minutes, put it on the table and get as much done as you can in that time. When it goes off, your fingers must leave the keyword (or paper and quill or whatever). Set it for five minutes and do something else for that time. Relieve yourself, stare out the window, play with the puppy, learn a few words of Spanish, whatever. Then repeat.

Set a small, achievable goal

Finishing the novel is not going to cut it. Finishing the paragraph, the page, or at most the first draft of the chapter, is a fine catalyst.

Use a photo

Describe all the details of the photo.
Hopefully you’ll find something there to get you going!