WHAT ARE MY "RULES" FOR WRITING?

Based on reading Robert's Rules of Writing," it suddenly struck me, duh!, that we all carry in our heads an idiosyncratic set of "rules" of writing that we inherited from years of instruction, standards and norms meant to check or guide our writing thinking behavior. Those rules are a template, an ideal, often drummed up to prevent would-be writers from making typical mistakes or making sure that would-be writers squeeze their thought into a limited Procrustean bed of "rules." These idiosyncratic rules are all subsets of the dialect we call "standard" edited English.

Then there are the actual rules that we follow. The reality of what we do. The rules and guidelines and insights that we have gained as writers to shape what we really do. The reality that governs what we do when we think and write, when we transfer our thinking into writing.

We are all familiar with the normative standards and rules and expectations that are meant to impose a clear concise and unified (and hence bloodless) theme from our stray thoughts.

So what are the "rules" that we as writers really follow when we write?

What would be the "rules" that i offfer if my way of writing were a system of producing reliable, good writing?

1. Write in fits and starts. Jot down ideas, phrases, and words on any paper or surface you can when they come to you. (If you don't, they will be lost.) Write them down and keep these scraps. When you retrieve them, more often than not they will blossom into ideas, poems, full-blown thoughts, memories, insights. Lose those scraps, or forget to write down even a wisp or phrase, and the soul of what you thought is forever gone.

Write down so as not to lose, and write down so as to grow.

2. Let words and ideas and phrases and notes and first drafts lay fallow. Trust the organic process. You can return to them and work the soil and stir the words--they will yield in the richness of time. Trust the process of time, the subconscious. You need to get away and see again, clearly, unimpeded, with wonder, freshly.

3. To write well, you inevitably have to make a mess. You need to be willing to make a mess. Writing is a process of finding clarity and order and purpose.

4. To write well, you have to trust the process of making a mess and be comfortable enough with that mess in time so that you have the trust and wherewithal to create order out of that mess.

5. You have to commit yourself on many levels. To the project at hand. To yourself as a writer. To your belief and trust in yourself as a writer, in how you value the act and process of writing.

6. Get a lot of thoughts down early. Spread it all out and do not be afraid to repeat yourself. Trust the revision and editing processes. It is far easier to revise and edit when you have a lot of writing down on the page.

7. Juxtapositions. Push ideas against each other. Force sparks. Let the collisions trigger thinking.

8. Intuitive leaps. Your intuitive mind knows more and knows in different ways than your rational mind. Sometimes the leaps do not work, but often they do.

9. Long sentences and short sentences.

10. Wiliam Gass once noted that sentences have a soul. I believe that. Good sentences, sentences of merit, possess or carry or communicate a certain soul.