Ten principles of (effective) creative writing

Frank Laurence Lucas was a professor of English at Cambridge University for more than 40 years. He has written many books on how to write better. These principles are taken from his ideas/suggestions for prose composition.

It is bad manners to waste the reader’s time. Therefore brevity first, then, clarity.

It is bad manners to give readers needless trouble - therefore clarity. And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

The social purpose of language is communication - to inform, misinform, or otherwise influence our fellows. Communication is more difficult than we may think. We are all serving life sentences of solitary confinement within our bodies; like prisoners, we have, as it were, to tap in awkward code to our fellow men and women in their neighbouring cells.

Just as the art of war largely consists of deploying the strongest forces at the most important points, so the art of writing depends a good deal on putting the strongest words in the most important places.

One of the most important things, in Lucas' opinion, in English style is word-order. For us, the most emphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader’s mind. It has, in fact, the last word.

As the police put it, anything you say may be used as evidence against you. If handwriting reveals character, writing reveals it still more. You cannot fool all your judges all the time.

Most style is not honest enough. Easy to say, but hard to practice. A writer may take to long words, as young men to beards - to impress. But long words, like long beards, are often the badge of charlatans. Or a writer may cultivate the obscure, to seem profound. But even carefully muddied puddles are soon fathomed. Or he may cultivate eccentricity, to seem original.

But really original people do not have to think about being original - they can no more help it than they can help breathing. They do not need to dye their hair green.

This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature—that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.

One learns to write by reading good books, as one learns to talk by hearing good talkers.

Every author’s fairy godmother should provide him/her not only with a pen but also with a blue pencil.

Lucas' point is merely that the sophisticated (ready though they may be to suppose so) do not necessarily express themselves better than the simple - in fact, may often have much to learn from them.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to Lucas matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

From: https://www.thoughtco.com/f-l-lucas-principles-of-effective-writing-1691862.

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