Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the essayist, claimed to have worked out a fundamental formula: “that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.”
I’m a kindred spirit. I like a lot of things better than theories, including tips, rules of thumb, shortcuts and maps.
I’ve kept a list, on and off, of rules of thumb that other writer’s have found helpful. Here a few from William Maxwell:
• Forget outlines. Each story has a natural form. The writer’s work is to discover it.
• Instead of an outline, a one-page statement of what you intend to write sometimes helps.
• Save the oracles, the good sentences. Try them in different contexts.
• A complete scene early shuts too many doors. Cut material and use it later. “It is the death of a novel to write chapters that are really short stories.”
• The first-person narrator is a character, not a narration device.
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