10 Rules For Novelists From The Greatest Living American Writer
Jonathan Franzen Image by Getty Images
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If you are writing a novel, remember that all your competition has already died, except for Joyce Carol Oates, who is undead. Your enemies are watching you via a porthole from hell, and they are envious.
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The reader is your enemy, for they are idiots who sometimes watch TV. The only acceptable TV is “The Sopranos,” which you are permitted to watch at the library on a portable DVD player borrowed from your partner, also a novelist.
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Do not use a computer, or a typewriter, or an electric typewriter. Only write longhand, in pen, on parchment obtained for you via secret channels by your beleaguered manservant, Roger.
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Intermittently change the points-of-view of your characters to make it seem like they are cats who are living through the apocalypse.
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Never use the verb “to be” and never say “to be continued.” Novels are self-contained entities, like sandwiches that you refuse to eat because they aren’t expensive enough when your agent takes you out to lunch. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about this.
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When darkness falls upon the night of the full moon, gaze out the window and sweat nervously as you feel the change coming on.
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As you sit in the park and feed leftover pizza crust to the pigeons, your only friends, you will have profound insight.
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The Internet, a series of tubes, cannot replace the joy of sitting in a dark basement with yellowed documents that only you can understand.
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The power of love is a curious thing. Makes one man weep, and another man sing.
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It does not matter what you write, for Mother Nature has risen up to reclaim all human civilization. Your words will be buried under a great storm of fire and water and mud. Also, you cannot top me. Abandon hope, for I am the Greatest Living American Writer, now and forever.
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