/lit/ - Literature

Hey /lit/, how do you feel about Jonathan Franzen's rules for writing?

>>The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

>>Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

>>Never use the word "then" as a conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.

>>Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.

>>When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

>>The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than " The Metamorphosis ".

>>You see more sitting still than chasing after.
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

>>Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

>>You have to love before you can be relentless.