I’m a collector. I’m convinced there’s a gene for it. As a child I collected stamps, coins, and fantasy miniatures (one of those collections continues into adulthood). In addition to various small items, I collect information in various categories.

My favorite collecting category writing advice. I keep a vast spreadsheet of advice and “writing rules” from my favorite authors.

Here are a few highlights from that collection:

Kurt Vonnegut’s Rule #8

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I love this rule. Understanding it gave me permission to inject a little more exposition into my stories than a modern literary approach might allow. Speculative fiction requires a bit more explanation and context; the reader doesn’t necessarily know the rules and history of the world.

Lee Child on How To Create Suspense

Make the reader wait.

Something in contrast to the rule above, the advice above is paraphrased from the thriller writer’s New York Times Op-Ed piece from 2012. Lee used a cake-baking analogy in the article; if you want to bake a great cake, part of that process has to do with ingredients, the temperature of the oven, etc. But a more important part of that process is making your family wait for hours while the smell of cake permeates the house. Make your reader hungry for information. Dole it out in bits. Make them salivate.

David Mitchell’s One Sentence Writing Philosophy

In the The Bone Clocks, the curmudgeon author character Crispin Hershey reveals his (and possibly Mitchell’s) writing philosophy/strategy in a single sentence, referencing the “tricks of the trade”:

“What tricks? Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and back flash, artful misdirection.”

While there is much more to Mitchell’s own writing than this, he definitely uses all the “tricks” listed by Hershey, and it’s a great toolkit.

Alyssa Wong’s One Rule to Rule Them All

Don’t make it boring.

I think I got this one from the Nebula-winner’s Twitter feed. She may have been joking, but I think the context was that this was the number one thing she wanted her writing students to remember. And it’s what she felt all her other advice boiled down to. I like this – when my brain is too full (with my plot, my characters, how to make a sentence), I can still keep this simple directive in my spare memory buffer.