Neverisms

authors today who would agree with the great Russian novelist, who completed his thought this way:

Never accept payment in advance. . . .

Never give a work to the printer before it is finished.

This is the worst thing you can do. . . . It constitutes the murder of your own ideas.

A novelist friend years ago gave me two pieces of sage advice—

(1) never fuck a fan, and

(2) never engage in an argument with a correspondent.JOHN GREGORY DUNNE, from an essay in Harp (1991)

Never be so brief as to become obscure.TRYON EDWARDS, in A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908)

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer are:1. Never read any book that is not a year old.2. Never read any but famed books.3. Never read any but what you like.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, from “Books,” an essay

in Society and Solitude (1870)

Never start to write without a plan.RUDOLF FLESCH & ABRAHAM LASS,

in The Way to Write (1947)

A little later in their classic book, the authors offered a stern word of warning for those tempted to simply glance through a thesaurus to help them sound better: “Don’t just hunt for synonyms, and never, never pick a synonym at random from a book of synonyms where words with different flavors are listed but not explained.”

Never use the word “audience.”

The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money,

seems wrong to me.ROBERT GRAVES

Graves was one of the twentieth century’s most prominent literary figures, a respected poet, a major translator of ancient authors, and a popular historical novelist. He added, “Poets don’t have an ‘audience.’ They’re talking to a single person all the time.”

Never force an idea; you’ll abort it if you do.ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, in Time Enough for Love (1973)

This entry from “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long” appears in the middle of a longer passage that speaks to a common experience among writers:

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work,

never force an idea; you’ll abort it if you do.

Be patient and you’ll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.

Never write about a place until you’re away from it,

because that gives you perspective.ERNEST HEMINGWAY

This came in a conversation with Arnold Samuelson, who recorded it in With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba (1984). Hemingway added:Immediately after you’ve seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That’s good practice, but it isn’t creative writing.

Samuelson hitchhiked from Minnesota to Key West, Florida, in 1934, hoping to meet Hemingway, his literary hero. The writer took an immediate liking to the adventurous young man and hired him as a deckhand for his new fishing boat, the Pilar. After a year, Samuelson returned home, and the two men continued a correspondence until Hemingway’s death in 1961. Samuelson eventually settled in Colorado, where he built homes by day and violins by night. After he died in 1981, his daughter Darby found a draft of the With Hemingway manuscript stashed away in a trunk. She spent over a year readying the manuscript for publication.

Never tell your reader what your story is about.GEORGE V. HIGGINS

In On Writing, a 1990 writing guide, Higgins added: “Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.”

Never put off till to-morrow the book you can read today.HOLBROOK JACKSON, tweaking a classic saying,

in his 1930 book The Anatomy of Bibliomania

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure;

emotion is easily propagated from the writer to the reader.JOSEPH JOUBERT

Never insult a writer.

You may find yourself immortalized in ways you may not appreciate.GARRISON KEILLOR

Never force yourself to read a book— it is a wasted effort.ARTHUR KOESTLER

Koestler offered this in his 1945 book of essays The Yogi and the Commissar. He added: “That book is right for you which needs just the amount of concentration on your part to make you turn the radio off.”

Never use an abstract term if a concrete one will serve.DAVID LAMBUTH

In The Golden Book on Writing (1976), Lambuth added, “Appeal directly to your reader’s emotions rather than indirectly through the intermediary of the intellectualizing process. Tell him that the man gave a dollar to the tramp rather than that he indulged in an act of generosity.”

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

The proper function of a critic

is to save the tale from the artist who created it.D. H. LAWRENCE, in Studies in

Classic American Literature (1923)

Lawrence, a novelist who was writing as a critic in this observation, believed there was often a great difference between the tale authors intended to tell and the story that was eventually told. Speaking as a critic, Lawrence said the “didactic statements” that authors make about their works should be ignored. It’s an audacious pronouncement, suggesting that critics know more about an author’s work than the authors themselves.

Never open a book with weather.ELMORE LEONARD

This was the