Jeremiah Tolbert

When you start writ­ing, you cling to rules.  Rules take this great sea of pos­si­bil­i­ties and attempt to turn them into a river that flows in one direc­tion.  They’re not nec­es­sar­ily bad ideas, but you can gain as much from break­ing them as you can by fol­low­ing them.  Here are a few writ­ing “rules” and rules of liv­ing a writ­ing life that I have heard and the rea­sons I have rebelled against them.  Particularly, I come at these as a writer of sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy, so your results may dif­fer from the pic­ture on the box.

1.  Write what you know.

This rule should be “draw from your per­sonal expe­ri­ences.” I imag­ine as told orig­i­nally, that’s what it meant, but some begin­ning writ­ers take this to mean that they should only write work set in places they have been, about peo­ple they know, and so on.  As some­one who has set sto­ries in the Himalayas (never been there), East Africa (been there), and the outer orbit of the solar sys­tem (never been there, except that one time, long story), well… some­times, we write about things we want to know, not just the things we already know.  A book is the eas­i­est way to travel with­out going some­where.  There shouldn’t be a rule exclud­ing the writer from trav­el­ing through their writ­ing too.

2. Don’t try to force devel­op­ing your voice.

You don’t have time to let your voice develop nat­u­rally.  The world is full of writ­ers, maybe more than ever before.  Everyone you know is work­ing on a book.  If they say they aren’t, they’re lying.  Writing is a hell of a lot bet­ter of a job than dig­ging ditches or flip­ping burg­ers, so of course every­one wants to be a writer, and every­one thinks they have some­thing to say.  Having some­thing to say is impor­tant, but if you’re going to stand out these days, you need to find a unique way to say it.  Get a voice, and get it quick.  It doesn’t mat­ter how.  You need to find a way to remove your­self from the horde of 20/​30-​​something white nerds who want to write sci­ence fic­tion.  Or what­ever your group is, if you’re not me.  I don’t want peo­ple to say, “Jeremiah Tolbert? He’s like, Cory Doctorow, only dumber, right?”   Don’t be like some­one else.  Be you, but if you is bor­ing, and you really want to make it, change who you are.  We are not all orig­i­nal snowflakes, but we can pre­tend to be.  Self-​​trepanation is not rec­om­mended, but it might not hurt.

3.  Omit need­less words.

Yes, fine, some words can be removed to strengthen a sen­tence, but some writ­ers will take this too far, to the point of turn­ing every nar­ra­tor into the same per­son.  Word choice plays a large part in the voice of a char­ac­ter.  If you take this rule to the extreme, you neuter your writ­ing.  Verbal tics are okay.  Bloated prose is not.  Unless your nar­ra­tor likes bloated prose.  But that’s hard to pull off and look like you meant to do it.

4. Don’t take rejec­tions per­son­ally.

This is like telling peo­ple to stop breath­ing or to stop lov­ing their par­ents.  I sup­pose if you’re the kind of per­son who just can’t let some­thing go, then maybe you should find another career, but every writer takes rejec­tions per­son­ally.  Don’t believe them if they say they don’t.  The trick is get­ting over it quickly. And for God’s sake, stop post­ing on your blog about every rejec­tion you get.  Nobody cares.  Hardly any­body cares when you get an accep­tance either.  They will con­grat­u­late you, but that’s only because they want you to con­grat­u­late them when they sell to Hentai Slash Fic Online for half a cent a word and a bagel.    Editors aren’t just reject­ing your story.  They’re reject­ing you and your work. If you’re going to keep writ­ing like that, yeah, they don’t want to see any­thing else you willl write either.   It hurts.  Nothing can be done about it except for you to stop suck­ing so much.  So get to work.

5. Don’t blog so much. Write more.

Blog as much as you want.  Just don’t expect any­one to read it.  If you had to be doing some­thing besides blog­ging, I don’t think it should be writ­ing more fic­tion. You should be read­ing more.  Read the instruc­tion man­ual to your blender.  Read cereal boxes.  Read trashy romance nov­els, and read the clas­sics.  Read 400 blogs and news web­sites.  Write when you have some­thing to say, and a new way to say it.  Writing more is going to help you espe­cially when you are start­ing out, but after a cer­tain point, you’re bor­der­ing on hyper­graphia, and that’s a men­tal ill­ness, sorry, not a career.  In gen­eral, stop beat­ing your­self up about how much you do or don’t write.  Live your god damn life, and the writ­ing will come.  Or it won’t.  Nobody will care but you.

6. Kill your darlings.

Some peo­ple take this as an imper­a­tive to be harsh in your edit­ing.  Other peo­ple take it as a com­mand to mur­der your char­ac­ters.   If it’s a dar­ling to you, it might actu­ally, you know, be good writ­ing.  Find a way to kill the bor­ing dri­vel and keep the dar­lings.  But yes, I  agree that you should mur­der your char­ac­ters. Murder every sin­gle one of them, so long as it’s inter­est­ing to do so.

7. Get rid of your TV.

Do you know why it’s so hard to moti­vate your­self to write?  It’s not because your life is full of dis­trac­tions like TV and video games.  It’s a lack of con­crete rewards.  Most peo­ple roll out of bed and go straight to work, and they don’t have to get rid of their tele­vi­sion or inter­net access to be able to do it.  That’s because they know there’s a pay­check com­ing at the end of the period.  Writing, unless you’re already suc­cess­ful, is on spec.   You do the work and then you hope some­one wants to buy it.  The solu­tion isn’t to get rid of your tele­vi­sion.  Even the most pro­lific writ­ers need to rest and relax some­times.  The solu­tion is to make writ­ing the reward itself. Challenge your­self with each piece.  You have to find it ful­fill­ing on the page before any­one else sees it. Selling the piece and see­ing it pub­lished should be a bonus.

I almost wrote “icing on the cake” here but to hell with cake with­out icing.  That’s just a spongy bread. Screw that.

8.  Never sub­mit a first draft.

Sometimes you nail it.  I’ve sold first drafts.  You will too.  The mis­take here is think­ing that all the work in writ­ing hap­pens on the page.  At my guess, it’s about 20% of it.  The rest goes on before you even sit down.

9.  Always sub­mit your first draft.

I for­get who said this.  Heinlein?  Screw that guy.  Nobody always nails it.  When your name car­ries a cer­tain amount of pres­tige in your field, you might be able to sell every first draft, but do you really want to do that?  Do you really want work out there, cir­cu­lat­ing, that you know isn’t the best you could have done?  Do you have that lit­tle pas­sion for what you do that you just can’t be both­ered?  Then read on to rule 10.

10. Don’t Give Up.

There should be a lot more giv­ing up in the world of writ­ing.  If you can be encour­aged to quit writ­ing and find a more lucra­tive pro­fes­sion, like, say, clean­ing toi­lets, then do so.  You’ll save your­self a lot of heart­break and rejec­tion.  And you make room for the rest of us who are psy­chot­i­cally obses­sive about “break­ing in” to mar­kets that pay the same thing they paid in 1952.

I mean all of the above with the upmost love and respect, of course.