How to Write a Book in More Than Three Days

In addition to his speed-writing thoughts, Michael Moorcock has also offered some writing tips that are more geared to writing in general. It seems only fair to share those, as well. I wouldn’t want to give a bad impression of the poor chap…

There’s some overlap with the speed information, which I’ll crop out for brevity’s sake. So. Michael Moorcock”s Rules of Writing:

1. My first rule was given to me by TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from, Bunyan to Byatt.
2. Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.
3. Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.
4. If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophising. This helps retain dramatic tension.
5. Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).
6. Ignore all rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say!

As a little bonus something, you might be interested in Jack Kerouac’s list of 30 hints and tips for writers. Some of them are a little, um… Kerouac. You’ll see what I mean…

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven