Ten Ironclad Rules for Writing the Novel You Just Finished
Ten Ironclad Rules for Writing the Novel You Just Finished
By: Joel Dane
I published twenty-six books, most of them with the Big Five, before I managed to stop giving a shit. Then I wrote my passion project: a short, deranged, cozy postapocalyptic novel that I believe is about the necessity of miscommunication, though I can’t be sure.
THE RAGPICKER is the closest thing to horror that I’ve written, because the best horror embraces the unfathomable, the irrational, the unknowable. Instead of providing closure and comfort, horror offers lessons which don’t, to paraphrase Scarlett Thomas, teach us how to turn our lives into copies of stories.
The only person I’m qualified to teach about writing is me, and even that’s a stretch. Still, here are ten tips for how to write the book I just finished. (With apologies to James Carse, whose Finite and Infinite Games inspired some of this.)