British novelist Martin Amis (1949-2023) was one of the great literary stylists of our time. Described as “the overlord of the OED [Oxford English Dictionary],” Amis sculpted some of the most caustic, vivid and hilarious sentences ever put to paper.
The master wordsmith, who taught creative writing at the University of Manchester, also had some advice for writers, which you may find useful in your own literary endeavors. Here is an abridged list of Amis’s pointers, which you can find in full on the Stanford University website:
- Write in longhand: when you scratch out a word, it still exists there on the page. On the computer, when you delete a word it disappears forever. This is important because usually your first instinct is the right one.
- Minimum number of words to write every day: no “quota.” Sometimes it will be no words. Sometimes it will be 1500.
- Use any anxiety you have about your writing — or your life — as fuel. Ambition and anxiety: that’s the writer’s life.
- Don’t dumb down: always write for your top five percent of readers.
- Watch out for words that repeat too often.
- Don’t start a paragraph with the same word as previous one. That goes doubly for sentences.
- Stay in the tense.
- Inspect your “hads” and see if you really need them.
- Try not to write sentences that absolutely anyone could write.
- You write the book you want to read. That’s my rule.
- You have to have a huge appetite for solitude.