Ten rules for writing fiction. Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin 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. Jonathan Franzen’s 10 Rules of Writing. Last week, I posted about George Orwell’s rules for writing, so while I’m finishing book #12: The Corrections I thought this would be a great opportunity to check out what Jonathan Franzen has to say on the subject.
This list came from The Guardian: The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.Never use the word “then” as a conjunction– we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention.
I love #2.