Dreaming of writing your novel this year? Rip up all the rules!
Illustration: Antonio Sortino/The Guardian
After 35 years of teaching fiction writing, the prize-winning author shares her wisdom. First tip? Don’t write what you know…
Elizabeth McCracken
Sat 3 Jan 2026 04.00 EST
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Beginning
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to write a first sentence so idiosyncratic, so indelible, so entirely your own that it makes people sit up or reach for a pen or say to a beloved: “Listen to this.” A first line needn’t be ornate or long. It needn’t grab you by the lapels and give you what for. A first line is only a demand for further attention, an invitation to the rest of the book. Whisper or bellow, a polite request or a monologue meant to repel interruption. I believe a first line should deliver some sort of pleasure by being beautiful or mysterious or funny or blunt or cryptic. Why would anyone start a novel, “It was June, and the sun was out,” which could be the first line of any novel or story? It tells you nothing. It asks nothing of you.
Not everyone agrees with me, nor do all great novels have memorable first lines. Pull books from your shelf and you’ll find plenty that start with a month or day of the week plus the weather. Maybe there’s a good argument: if you orient your reader on some level immediately, they will be ready for disorientation on others. Flatness can be a screen upon which brightness may be projected. Disorientation is one of the duties of fiction.
No, I insist. A generic first line is a failure of nerve.
Rules
It might be helpful to believe in absolutes when you’re first writing fiction. You can’t have more than one point of view in a story. Novel chapters should be a uniform length. The present tense brings the reader in. The present tense is shallow as a dime. Epiphanies are how we understand life. Epiphanies are false, flimsy. These absolutes should be as small and solid as training wheels; like training wheels, you can easily take them off later.
I have never encountered a rule for fiction I believed in, at least in the long run, apart from Don’t use a gothic font to make your work feel spooky.
Subject
If you’re writing a book, I tell my students, you had better make it a book of your heart: something you suspect only you can write, something that will menace you if you don’t get it down on the page. Too many people try to write somebody else’s book, hoping that it’s publishable.
I’ve taught creative writing for 35 years, longer than I’ve been publishing books, but I believe in modes of thinking, not rules. At heart, as both fiction writer and teacher, I’m an aphorist and a metaphorist. I hope to provoke my students into thinking the most interesting thoughts that they can, so they can teach themselves how to write.
Be ambitious
Ambition is everything. Fiction isn’t ballet. It’s not marathoning. You don’t have to start small, with drills or exercises; there’s nothing you need to perfect before moving on. Your budget for characters and sets and props and visual effects is infinite. You can splash out for equipment, but it isn’t necessary. You should attempt everything. Ambition in fiction is merely the willingness to make mistakes. Mistakes are essential. It’s not ice-skating. You won’t break a bone.
Sometimes a young writer decides to put off writing certain things, thinking they’re too “technically difficult”. This is a bad idea: if something excites you, don’t wait. You might forget what interested you so, and, moreover, there are some things you can only write when you’re young, and some things you can only write when you’re old. You can always try to write the same thing when you’re older; it will be a different book.
Concentrate on process
When you’re uncertain about the writing itself – the sentences or the content – write through it. If a page is impossible, try a sentence; if a sentence won’t come, take notes. Writing is a form of thought. Any superannuated writer will tell you – I’m one – that years after the end of any writing class or programme, it isn’t the most promising writers who are still working, still publishing books, it’s the most bullheaded. I’m one of those, too.
Be stranger
Embrace your particular oddness. Don’t give up your obsessions. They are dear to you: they are what make your work original. Be open to new fixations in life as well as writing. When you are fascinated with a subject or place or image, that fascination will exist for the fiction you write about it.
Perhaps this seems obvious: of course you should be interested in what you write about! You might be surprised at how many otherwise excellent writers choose material almost at random, a sort of frame on which to arrange their sentences and characters. These writers would rather be good than interesting; they worry about being caught in a passion. But what the writer isn’t interested in will never interest a reader. Your work may be beautifully formed, articulate, full of meaning, but if you’re not interested in it, it won’t have a soul.
Write when you can
Possibly the most ubiquitous advice is that you must write every day. Real writers write every day – that’s what the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop told us at our first-day picnic. Plenty of writers do. Make it a job. Sit at your desk and put your time in, first thing in the morning, four hours or five hundred words or five pages. Do the math: in a year you’ll have a draft of a book, even if you move slowly.
It’s excellent advice for those for whom it is good advice, and, I imagine, satisfying to dispense. Nothing ambiguous about it. I would go so far as to say that everyone should try daily writing. You might find it changes your life.
As advice, though, it’s not universally useful. Not everyone can write every day; not every writer wants to or works best on such a schedule. I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to do math or keep accounts. I can hear the voice of an every-day writer even now: If you wanted to – if you were serious! No: by circumstance or temperament, some writers can’t or shouldn’t. Many people work on timetables run by the needs of others: small children, elderly parents. Other people’s illnesses; their own. Their own need to work a job to support themselves or others.
There are circumstantial reasons not to write every day, but you don’t need one if writing every day makes you write badly. That’s reason enough.
Worse: if you believe you must write every day and life intervenes and you stop, it can feel as though you’ve stopped for good. Too late to pick it up again. You might even feel ashamed. Writing becomes an unpaid bill. You can’t even open the envelope. You stick it in a drawer so you don’t have to look at it. Then the time away from writing stretches on.
Don’t give up
You won’t injure yourself, writing after days or weeks of not writing; you won’t have atrophied. Indeed, you may be a cicada of a writer, back full force after going away. You might be an annual, or a shook-up bottle of soda pop, more forceful when you resume.
If you’ve stopped writing for any reason, you can start again, from the exact place you left off or somewhere even better. The reasons you stopped have changed you as a writer. Made you more interesting. In your time away, you haven’t lost a step. You’ve probably gained some.
Ideas
The first inklings of a piece can arrive in nearly any form: an image, a line of dialogue, a line of narrative, a setting (place or time period), an abstract idea (I have always wanted to write about a scientist who is a devout believer in God), a title, a plot, a structure, a character. A character might arrive in any way: as a predicament, or a moustache; as a role (for instance a mother or a priest); as a physical fact. Concrete or abstract, it doesn’t matter. Myself, I know the height and weight of my characters before I know their names or secrets.
Drafts
Some writers compose drafts quickly, carelessly. They don’t worry about beauty at first, or music. They know ahead of time that they will write many drafts, and the most important thing is to get the shape of the thing on the page. In order to begin, they tell themselves it’s all right to write badly. Otherwise they might never get out of the first paragraph. They don’t look back until it’s time to revise.
Other writers must be painstaking from the start. Every morning, they reread what they’ve done so far and edit sentence by sentence. They cannot go forward until the thing feels right.
I am, in my way, a painstaking drafter: I sit down, read the entire book from the beginning before I go on, print it out an environmentally irresponsible number of times and scribble all over it. Still, there’s nothing exacting in my process. Nothing tidy. I don’t produce nearly-there drafts, even when I tell myself that I am doing so. But I can’t bear to write what strike me as bad sentences. In the innermost chamber of my writer’s heart, the only thing I really care about is language, and I cannot think about fiction except in sentences. Sentences are how I lower myself into the dreamworld, how I know my characters (body and soul); sentences are my bucket and my torch.
Some people wait to start a novel until they feel confident enough, but you have to be a little panicked to make it across the ocean in a rowing boat.
Planning
Proponents of outlining, like every-day writers, like to recommend the process to everyone. They are talking to themselves, announcing how their own brains work.
There’s a wonderful moment while writing a book when, after swimming alone in the ocean of your dreamworld, you can sense it becoming actual, you can imagine how another person might navigate it by the landmarks you have installed, but you don’t want to arrive at that shore too soon. For some people, outlining is a form of thought: free from sentences and paragraphs, they can make meaningful decisions about their books. The outline prolongs the dream. Others of us dream in sentences only. We dream as we draft. Nothing is possible (I am talking to myself) without language. I figure things out. I write with the abandon of a tourist. What interests me at first might bore me later. That’s all right.
No process is wrong that leads to a first draft of a book.
Plotting
In fiction there are needful mysteries and needless mysteries. If the author and characters know a secret and only the reader is left in the dark, that’s a needless mystery. If you withhold a fact and think, When I reveal this, it’s going to blow the reader’s mind, nine times out of 10 it will only make them think you’ve been playing cards with an ace up your sleeve. Fiction can disorient readers, but if they don’t know where they are, if a piece of fiction continually shuts a reader out of what’s happening, who’s talking, what year it is, they will feel as though they’re on the other side of the door of an interesting party. Some personality types enjoy this feeling of exclusion. Not many.
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken review – all about my mother
Altogether, it’s easy to overestimate the pleasure readers take in figuring out facts, who is speaking, their relationships to one another, where they are, what time period or geographical location we’re in, what level of reality. It’s not that everything must be instantly clear, only that if everything is obscure, readers are only looking down at their feet, wondering where they are, not up at the glories of your fictional universe.
Needful mysteries are about the mysteries of life. What can be done and not done, what can be seen and not seen. Needful mysteries tend to be mysteries for the characters as well.
Actual people are always saying the strangest things. They wish to wound, persuade, shock, be heard, be understood
Dialogue
If you’re writing dialogue between strangers that’s just zinging along it’s possible they are only saying what you expect them to say. Don’t let your dialogue become too generic in your wish to make it realistic; don’t make it solely informational, characters talking for the sake of the plot. Actual people are always saying the strangest things. They wish to wound, persuade, shock, be heard, be understood. Talking is not an involuntary process.
Dialogue is the answer to any number of problems in fiction. A character you can’t get close to? Let ’em talk. Dialogue characterises, shows the odd way people put sentences together. A plot that’s stalled? Dialogue is action; it’s something characters do to each other.
Language
The writing of metaphors should not be laboured, nor automatic. Many a leafless tree has been described as having branches like an old man’s hands, reaching for the sky, but do they really? Must all lawns in suburbia be manicured?
I often suggest that writers cut explanatory conjunctions and adverbs in fiction: but, because, therefore, since. Such words point out meaning; losing them paradoxically imbues the language with meaning, because the reader supplies it.
She didn’t want to go because she had a headache.
She didn’t want to go. She had a headache.
When a reader gets to supply the connection between the two thoughts, there’s a little jounce of pleasure. We feel closer to the character: we know something they don’t.
Material
Material should be personal in that you should be personally interested in it: puzzled, intrigued, troubled. You should want to get to the bottom of it. Material needn’t be something lived through, though it can be. Lucky, some writers think, hearing of another writer’s eventful or terrible childhood. A complicated childhood full of privation and catastrophe isn’t an inheritance that sets up a writer for life. It isn’t even the childhood itself that’s useful: it’s that the writer is interested in the childhood and doesn’t entirely understand it and works to get it on to the page, out of the body, so it can be looked at.
Plenty of excellent writers have awful childhoods that they’re not interested in and never write about; some do only later in life, when youth can be viewed through the telescope of time. This is true of geography, too: it can be easier to write about home when you’ve left it far behind. Then you can hold it in your palm, like a snow globe, and look at it from multiple angles without being overwhelmed.
You don’t need to write what you (already) know, because with research and hard work and pure will and a willingness to blunder and bomb as you write, you can make yourself know a great deal.
Write about what you know. If you already know it – if there’s no mystery – what’s the point in writing it?
This is an extract from A Long Game: How to Write Fiction (Jonathan Cape). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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