Writing Tips from 6 All-time Great Writers | Hacker News Reader

Writing Tips from 6 All-time Great Writers

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59 pointspramit16 comments

What is interesting about such lists of N writing tips is the total lack of theory of fiction or narration. It like explaining people how to write software by listing formatting rules/code conventions.

Careful, that will start a claim that engineers are better at writing fiction than anyone else ;-)

Undoubtedly, there exists some engineer who believes that they are as good or better writer than anyone.

I was just viewing at Max Raabe's take on "Oops, I did it again" on YouTube and realized that the song follows to T all of these writer's advice to, "Keep it short and to the point." In just a few repeated sentences, she manages to dramatize a relatable scene of romantic misunderstanding, while characterizing both a femme fatale and earnest friend-turned lover. It's really minimal. (Richard Thompson's "2000 years of popular music" spiel includes his awesome cover of the same song.)

These rules are largely the low hanging fruit for aspiring writers. If an expert in a craft is asked to give advice to an audience of beginners, I'm guessing they'll pick the problems they see the most common, plus perhaps a few salient lessons they've learned recently and make a list.

Also, regarding theory of fiction / narration -- that is a mixed blessing. You see writing software like Dramatica push a particular theory (based on the hero's journey) -- and only if you find the high level of that theory compelling will you find the software to be maximally useful.

Also, I bet the authors managed to avoid a lot of low-tech author / writing community flame wars by avoiding fiction and narration theory ;-)

Very few places seem to contain structure and similar writing advice, the vast majority (at least targeting novel/short story/other forms of prose writing) all seem to target all the stuff like dialogue and ignore 3 act structure and similar forms. Most of the best info on those parts of writing seem to be found looking at screenwriting resources...

I wonder if the number of great writers who wrote according to a "theory of fiction or narration" is greater than zero.

What percentage of writers in general write according to some such theory? And would their writing improve if they did?

Vonnegut used such delicious metaphors (from the article):

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

For more top-10-list writing advice goodness, see also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-wr...

And the ur-text of all writing how-to's: Lester Dent's master plot formula for pulp fiction (Dent was the author of the Doc Savage pulp novels):

http://thelastreveal.blogspot.com/2010/02/lester-dents-maste...

"Omit <del>Needless</del> Words"

William Zinsser, On Writing Well

I've never understood that quote as I believe it removes a necessary word. "Needless" describes the type of word to delete. Without it, isn't William Zinsser suggesting we should omit random words?

Without an explicit predicate, I would guess that the implicit predicate would default to either "true" or "false" rather than "at random". If it defaulted to "false", then the imperative conjugation would make no bloody sense at all (i.e. "eat up" would parse into "don't eat anything"), so I think he's saying you shouldn't write anything.

I disagree, I find "omit all words" to make as little sense as "omit no words". Personally, I find it more likely to default to "omit some words". This, of course, does not describe the type of words we should be omitting, but rather that there exist words that we should omit. Saying "omit needless words" does describe the type, adding more information which is not there otherwise, making it a "needed" word.

I always read it as a joke with meaning. "Needless" within the context is a 'needless' word. =)

I agree, it's supposed to be a joke claiming that 'needless' is a needless word. I'm saying I do not understand the joke because I believe 'needless' is actually a necessary part of that sentence.

No.

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

The ability to put writing in one of the standard forms, novel, story, etc, seems important too.

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