Writing & Editing Tips

Writing & Editing Tips

Kurt Vonnegut’s Tips on Writing

  • Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  • Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  • Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  • Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.
  • Start as close to the end as possible.
  • Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  • 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.
  • Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writing

  1. Never open a book with weather.
  2. Avoid prologues.
  3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
  4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
  5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
  6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
  7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
  8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
  9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
  10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

His most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.

Somerset Maugham’s Rules on Editing:

  1. If it should occur to you to cut, do so.
  2. If you’re reading through and stop, something is wrong. Cut it.
  3. If something bothers you, then it’s bad. Cut it.

Emlyn William’s Rules on Editing:

  1. Cut within speeches.
  2. Make those cuts without cutting a cue.
  3. If you can cut inside the speech, you’re really cutting most effectively.

Paddy Chayefsky’s Rules on Editing:

  1. Cut out all the wisdom. (All the pontifications, passed on lore, etc.) Show, don’t tell.
  2. Then cut all the adjectives.
  3. Have no compassion when it comes to cutting.
  4. No pity, no sympathy.
  5. Cutting leads to economy, precision, and to a vastly improved script.
  6. You learn to say, “Let the rest of the world worry about posterity. I’ll just go on with what I want to do.”
  7. Dialog comes because I know what I want my characters to say.  I envision the scene; I can imagine them up there on the screen. I try to imagine what they would be saying and how they would be saying it, and I keep it in character. And the dialog comes out of that.
  8. When I write a play, I imagine what’s up on stage. When I write a movie I imagine what’s up on the screen. Two different mediums.
  9. I suppose my primary concern is the preservation of humanity in an increasingly dehumanized world.

A writer is what he writes.