Some Maxims for Writers Part 2

Following on from Part One:

17. Break your heart and you break others’ hearts.

Heartbreaks open the floodgates to emotional commitment from readers.

18. Readers are fooled by story logic until they get lost in the woods of emotion.

They feel with their hearts not their heads. You’re in the business of leading their heads astray to tell them heart-truths.

19. Whatever you write about, remember love.

No matter what your subject, love underpins it.

20. Pain has to happen before healing can.

Things which hurt also enable you to understand more than you would have otherwise.

21. Set a world on fire to set your readers alight.

Love at risk is a call to emotional action.

22. A well-told tale never says goodbye.

Claim territory in a reader’s heart that will always be yours.

23. Words are an illusion that disguise real emotion, force and power.

Words are tools to create real effects with weight and mass in the hearts of readers.

24. Writers are strangely full of emptiness.

That’s an oxymoron that writers recognise.

25. Negative responses from readers are challenges.

Treat them as such and write better and better.

26. Raising story success depends on both quantity and quality.

You can’t reach viability based on either quantity or quality alone: you need both.

27. Unhappiness and happiness are both forms of fuel for writing.

Sometimes sadness prompts better stories.

28. Everything is a story for the writer who sees.

Fiction is created by placing one thing next to another thing and perceiving a flow between them.

29. Writers see three dimensions in a two-dimensional world.

Working out how to tell blind people about colour is part of a writer’s task.

30. If you want to break a reader’s heart, break your own.

Only true emotional pain creates true emotional pain that lasts in others.

31. Loss creates space.

Fill it or leave it empty to create different types of tale.

32. Pretend that stories are looking for you.

Listen with all your heart, and they’ll find you. Your pen or keyboard are your antennae.

33. You’re a mini-universe in motion.

Writing is your astronomy.

34. A completed story is achieved when all the barriers between it and you are removed.

Remove obstacles with every word.