Writing Rules Quotes

#1. It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.

Lev Grossman

#2. Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.

Darin Strauss

#3. Writing rules is not one of the more 'glamorous' aspects of working on games. It is a task that is, in general, more drudgery than glory.

Jim Dunnigan

#4. You need to realize that most writing rules aren't laws, they're rules of thumb.

Patrick Rothfuss

#5. You look at any industry - you're not innovating unless people are questioning it. If you're innovating, you're doing something nobody's done before, which means you're re-writing rules, resetting boundaries, re-creating systems. And that means the traditional industry is going to question it.

Ryan Kavanaugh

#6. There are no rules that say lawyers cannot write or speak from their heart. Passion has never been formally outlawed, although it is a little-known experience among most lawyers and nearly all academicians.

Gerry Spence

#7. The most important rules that I ever adopted to help me in achieving my goals were those I learned from a very successful man who taught me to first write down the goal, and then to never leave the site of setting a goal without first taking some form of positive action toward its attainment.

Tony Robbins

#8. There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.

Will Shetterly

#9. I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

Mark Twain

#10. Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging.

Rhianna Pratchett

#11. The three rules to writing a novel;

1) Write
2) Write more
3) Keep writing

Sci Furz

#12. Heinlein's Rules for Writers
Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

Robert A. Heinlein

#13. Arizona, our beautiful state, was built on mining. Copper is huge here, and now uranium. And then we have the federal government coming in, writing all these rules and regulations and telling us that we can't do this and we can't do that. We need concise, clear answers.

Jan Brewer

#14. Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject ... they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules.

Isaac Asimov

#15. Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Tom Robbins

#16. But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.

Fannie Hurst

#17. I write in a fantasy world so I can make up my own rules and can change facts when I want to. It's all about having control.

C.S. Woolley

#18. There are no rules in writing. If the words work for you, use them.

Claire Contreras

#19. At the 'Times,' all journalists on every subject followed the same rules and were supposed to meet the same standards, so I never really thought about fashion writing as being in a bubble.

Suzy Menkes

#20. I before E except after C. Weird?
By rebelling against the rules the word itself denotes its very meaning: of strange or extraordinary character, odd, fantastic.
I think all writers are weird.

Day Parker

#21. I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.

Raymond Chandler

#22. When I was writing about the Republican primaries, it was as though the Bible was a black box that people reached into to pull out edicts and prejudices and rules and opinions, and I wish they had fact-checked it! Especially Rick Santorum.

Walter Kirn

#23. I like rules. I like definitions, categories, and writing advice of all sorts. When I'm writing fiction, there are often a lot of things for me to try to get right at once, and rules help me to stay organized. But my favorite rule of all is that, ultimately, there are no rules.

Bruce Holland Rogers

#24. There's no rule for better writing. Make your own rules, and see what works best for you.

Tarang Sinha

#25. There can be a science to joke writing, there are certainly rules and patterns that can be followed, but I think most of the best comedy goes beyond the rules.

Robin Ince

#26. There are so many rules about play writing. I'd have a nervous breakdown if I followed them.

Terrence McNally

#27. I didn't write the rules. Why would I follow them?

W. Eugene Smith

#28. Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.

Neil Gaiman

#29. Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.

Jonathan Sacks

#30. There are no rules. You can write a story, if you wish, with no conflict, no suspense, no beginning, middle or end. Of course, you have to be regarded as a genius to get away with it, and that's the hardest part - convincing everybody you're a genius.

Fredric Brown

#31. The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.

Val Kovalin

#32. In You Are Not Dead Wendy Xu breaks all the old rules that have never done us any favors anyway. She writes beautifully, noticing who we are, and letting us see ourselves with a little more humanity, a little more humor, a little more humility. I'm happy to have read this book.

James Tate

#33. It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.

Eric Burns

#34. The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called 'Poetics.' It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules.

Aaron Sorkin

#35. Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.

Melinda Rucker Haynes

#36. I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

Neil Gaiman

#37. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

Virginia Woolf

#38. The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.

James Frey

#39. Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

#40. Rules for writing the first line? The last line?
First line: Make them want more.
Last line: Make them want the next book.

Darynda Jones

#41. I'm a terrible sentence finisher. I think that's why I'm a songwriter. When you write a song, there are no rules, and I think that I talk as if there are no rules. But then I run this great risk of no one understanding me at all.

Mirah

#42. Chief Justice [John] Roberts compared judges to umpires, who apply rules they did not write and cannot change to the competition before them.

Orrin Hatch

#43. We took a sledgehammer to the rules of English and reassembled the pieces into a language only we understood.

Anthony Marra

#44. One must learn the rules so one can break them properly.

A.D. Posey

#45. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

Elmore Leonard

#46. There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

Stephen E. Ambrose

#47. The three rules of writing: 1. It's Work. 2. It's Work. 3. Surprise! It's Work.

John Scalzi

#48. If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data - it doesn't mean the ad is written. Then you've got to close the door and write something - that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.

David Ogilvy

#49. In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life.

Marcus Aurelius

#50. The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.

James A. Michener

#51. The banks lobbied Washington so they could write the rules that got us into this crisis. They then lobbied Washington to get the money to bail them out. And then they are lobbying Washington to write the rules so they can get us into the next crisis. It's perfect circularity.

Elizabeth Warren

#52. Yes I am aware of the rules.
Yes I can totally see how I err the Queen.
Yes it is this very fact of slaying her language.
That gives my soul its melodies.

Malebo Sephodi

#53. I think authors are just realizing there's no real reason to feel limited to a narrow set of genre rules in their writing. There's no reason a mystery novel can't have fantastic elements in it. Similarly, there's no reason why your epic fantasy series can't have elements of a mystery.

Patrick Rothfuss

#54. When it comes to the college essay, feel free to break some rules. Many still apply, of course: you need to watch your grammar and spell everything correctly. Sentence structure still matters. But the formula that got you A's in English can be a straitjacket when you're writing your college essay.

Cassie Nichols

#55. Be in love with everything .

Jack Kerouac

#56. One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.

George R R Martin

#57. Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use.

Samuel Johnson

#58. I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.

William Carlos Williams

#59. The thing you can't let go of is gravity. The reality of gravity in writing. If someone says something really mean in a sitcom, and the next wave isn't a reaction to the reality of that, you start losing relatability. In a lot of romantic comedies, they throw out the rules of life.

Michael Patrick King

#60. Three Rules for Literary Success: 1. Read a lot.
2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.

Robert Silverberg

#61. For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.

Red Smith

#62. I think I have a God complex, and I like moving mountains and writing stories that affect entire worlds, and it's a bit hard to do that in a contemporary setting because you have reality intruding. Whereas, when you set your own reality, you can make up your own rules and do whatever you like.

Jennifer Fallon

#63. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]

Helen Dunmore

#64. When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

George Saintsbury

#65. One of the rules of history is that people do not write about what is too obvious to mention. And so the information, having never been recorded, is now lost for ever.

Michael Bywater

#66. The four rules of writing ... 1. Write to discover. 2. There is no greater discovery than love. 3. All love comes from the Creator. 4. Write what you will.

Ted Dekker

#67. Wherein we discover that many of the "rules" for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think.

Natalie Goldberg

#68. Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.

Edmund White

#69. Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind is an arduous task ... In order to dive into those recesses and lay them open to the reader in a striking and intelligible manner, 'tis necessary to assume a certain freedom in writing, not strictly perhaps within the limits prescribed by rules.

Sarah Fielding

#70. I didn't know that there were many rules in music when I first started writing.

Tyler Joseph

#71. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

W. Somerset Maugham

#72. There are no definite rules (in writing). You learn as you go.

Winna Efendi

#73. Every separate sector of artistic creation has its own basic rules ... data which govern it. They are contained in the textbooks on these subjects. A professional knows the rules of the game as a matter of course so that he can achieve, in the upper strata above that, a high quality of art.

L. Ron Hubbard

#74. When it comes to writing, clarity trumps all rules.

C.E. McLean

#75. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

Alberto Manguel

#76. The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic ... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.

Chuck Palahniuk

#77. Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

Octavia E. Butler

#78. I write movies about mavericks, about people who break rules, and I don't like movies about people who are pulverised for being mavericks.

Quentin Tarantino

#79. The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

Raymond Chandler

#80. The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.

H.L. Mencken

#81. Clarity trumps all rules.

C.E. McLean

#82. We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy, and we should do it today while our economy is in the position of global strength, because if we don't write the rules for trade around the world, guess what: China will.

Barack Obama

#83. The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

Ernest Gaines

#84. If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.

Kate Zambreno

#85. There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.

Mason Cooley

#86. He who writes must master the rules of grammar. He who shoots photographs needs only to follow the instructions as given by the camera ... This leads to the paradox that the more people shoot photographs, the less they are capable of deciphering them.

Vilem Flusser

#87. I'm the first to admit that I don't write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is.

Lori R. Lopez

#88. So that's why one of my rules of parody writing is that it's gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.

Al Yankovic

#89. I've never been averse to a little risk - after all, writing without risk is not really writing at all. Sometimes one has to just let fly with a high concept piece and see where the pieces fall. As it generally turns out, the central story is familiar, but just with different rules of engagement.

Jasper Fforde

#90. Sometimes the rules of writing get in the way of a good story told.

Jason E. Hodges

#91. Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Pablo Picasso

#92. Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.

Ethel Waters

#93. Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Roxane Gay

#94. Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.

Margaret Atwood

#95. Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.

Ayn Rand

#96. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote

#97. There aren't any rules, as far as anything-and that applies especially to writing songs, whatever gets the point across. So you're just kind of brought up to feel-in any field, if you say you can do it, do it. There it is.

Guy Clark

#98. You had censorship. If you brought a manuscript to the publisher, you knew he would suggest changes. If you wanted to write and speak what you thought had to be written and spoken, you had to act against all these suppressive rules.

Stefan Heym

#99. When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

Umberto Eco

#100. The basic rule [of writing] given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules.

John Steinbeck