The hotel New Hampshire - J. Irving

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I read somewhere that if you want to write, you should write about things you know very well - the idea being that you can then focus on all the rest without having to worry about the raw material, I suppose.

Some other writing rules I found:

Elmore Leonard’s ten rules of 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.

While the list is partly oddly specific, I like it because if you were to follow this rules, only book with an actual content would still remain.

Here another list:

WRITING ADVICE FROM Raymond Chandler…

  1. A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
  2. Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder. The moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
  3. The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It [style] is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.
  4. The challenge is to write about real things magically.
  5. The more you reason the less you create.
  6. Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone’s advice about changing it.
  7. I am writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn’t have to be great writing, it doesn’t even have to be terribly good. It just has to be

The last word of the last sentence would be “mine” (just googled it), but the picture I am copying it from is from a scrap of paper which is torn, so you would not be able to tell from that. You can leave it like that or complete it with something else if you want.

About Irving - I looked a bit into his biography, and it has several common points with this book and also Garp. I remember bears making an appearance also in Garp, so I thought there was some kind of reference between the books, but then there’s another novel he wrote with bears in the title, so I have the feeling that also has to be somewhere in his biography.

It is a good book!