“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” (Albert Einstein)

A line (a story-line for instance) is 1-dimensional. A line is the shortest connection from A to B and all you can do with it is bend it into some curves (plot twists), you can add a few loops (flashbacks) and you can draw the line with dots or with stripes (add plot holes).

A picture is 2-dimensional. Some say that one picture says more than a thousand words, so I challenge them to show me a picture that at least says what those eight words make very clear (so far nobody could). If your story were two-dimensional, you could write anger and danger in red, envy and nature in green, you could use different fonts or play with the font size, you could put one word in bold, another in italic and underline a third word… Belgian poet Paul van Ostaijen became world-famous for it in the world before 1928. But this is the 21^st century, the age of digital reading, and when your manuscript in word.doc is converted into the epub format for the black-and-white eReader, all your beautiful make-up will be lost.

A movie is 3-dimensional. It adds time, sound, movement, music and special effects to the story. The movie director has a 30 million dollar budget and such a large crew that the list with their names fills up the last 10% of the movie, the entire world is his recording studio and if that is not enough he can take his computer and add dinosaurs or spaceships to his plot. There is absolutely no way any writer can compete with even the lousiest movie director.

There is also a 4th dimension: the critics, the publishers, the editors, the manuscript correctors, the school teachers that write a red ’3’ on the upper right corner of your exam in creative writing without telling you why or how to do better. This 4^th dimension earns money by looking at the creative work of others and… they defend their own income by giving us an illusion that they know so much about writing that they can play God, sit on His chair to tell all those writers how it should be done. The 4^th dimension has invented ‘rules for writing’. Remember this, because I will come back to it later.

Back to writing and the simple one-dimensional world, that WORLD of which WORD forms 80%. The writer has only one toolbox, which contains this:

-          He has 26 letters, 10 digits and some signs like @ or ¿

-          He can write fiction or non-fiction.

-          He can choose past tense or present tense.

-          He can change the point of view or keep the same point of view during the whole story.

-          His story can be told by an impersonal all-knowing narrator, he can have a third person narrator or he can let the story be told by a first-person narrator, an ‘I-figure’.

-          He can use short sentences or long sentences.

-          He can use dialogue or description.

-          He can follow the storyline from A to B or he can use flashbacks.

That is about it. Those are all the choices any writer has to make. Fortunately, there are two more elements of writing, two things that can give each writer his own face: content and form, genre and style, what you say and how you say it, topic and vocabulary.

The first element of style is your tone. Every human being has a unique voice. Computers can identify you by your voice. Music lovers will recognise the guitar of Carlos Santana from hundreds of others, or identify Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin from various pieces of classical music. That’s the third dimension of your story: tone. You can add music to it. Can you hear the music in this short story?:

– ^{“Uncle Adolf?”} – “YES…” – ^{“Tomorrow will be my 4th birthday.”} – “I DON’T THINK SO…”

(I warned you about Dutch humour, didn’t I?) In the tragedy about Snow White, I tried several different voices, several different tones to tell the story. The only advice I can give you is the lesson I learned from Cheryl. She wanted to become a singer. She loved to sing, but… she had the voice of a crow. So she listened to others and tried to copy them. She took lessons in singing, by teachers who taught her how to dominate her only tool, the instrument she had in her throat. Learn, work and ask for help. That’s how Cheryl did it. She became Cheryl Crow and sang every day.

Tone is something you can learn and the best teachers are… other writers. Read books. Try to find out why you like one book so much better than another title about the same topic. You have about 50% chance that the tone makes the difference.

The voice of the writer is not your own voice. Well, in fact, it is. Imagine that you get a letter from the taxman who tells you that you should pay more. First, you go to his office and tell him your story (you are a poor writer and you don’t have the money). He smiles, is amused by the anger, fury, rage that you put in your story. But there is no happy end, this is life and not fiction, so he tells you that there is nothing he can do for you (which is a lie, of course, but the truth is that his boss pays him his salary, that’s why he does favours for his boss and not to you). The next step is to take a beer and tell the same story to your friends. They smile, are amused by the sadness, the tears, the hopeless drama of this story about you, a sympathetic and noble hero who has this dramatic conflict with Winston Wolfe, the taxman, and the unhappy end that every real life story has. It’s the same story… It’s the same plot, the same narrator, it’s the same A-to-B timeline, the same point of view, the same past tense and it results in the same results: your audience smiles and wants to hear the story until the end. The only difference between the two stories is the tone. You changed the tone because you know how each audience likes it. Do you realise that you are a damn good writer? I’m glad I got to know you. I can learn a lot from you.

The second part of style is ‘Language’, like your mother said, with that severe tone: “Johnny? Language!” when you came into the house, practising all the words that started with the letter F in the New York Gangsta Dictionary of Swearwords after hitting your thumb during carpentry class. There is vocabulary, grammar, construction of sentences and some other stuff you might have learned at school and I didn’t. From my point of view, ‘language’ consists of knowledge and attention.

Knowledge you’ll get by reading a lot. That’s good news because reading a lot was already on the top of your To-Do-list, because you wanted to study Tone, and now you have another use of the same effort. Reading books is one of my favourite ways of working. I can do it when I float in the pool with a drink in my hand. There’s only one type of work that I like doing better than reading: writing, because I can do that when I float in the pool with a drink in one hand and a snack in the other with my eyes closed. The only hard part of writing comes when my wife asks me: “Can you help me with…?” and I have to explain that I can’t help her because… I’m working.

Attention is also simple. Imagine yourself, writing. You know you are a good writer, you know that with all that practise you can only get better, so the Pulitzer and the Nobel are just a matter of time for you. Do you also realise that this last word you just wrote… will be read by at least a million of readers? Probably it’s more realistic that will be one billion because I feel the potential that you have as a writer. Are you still convinced that this last word is the best word you can think of in this sentence, in this situation? With one billion readers, that word might need a little more thinking before it is written down. You’re not the writer of some soon-forgotten article in the New Joke Times about the review of some bad book, you’re not writing to fill books that are only used to put in the bookcase of people who like to show their friends how interesting they are with all those number ones of the New Joke Times Bestseller list, no, you write for a billion readers who will adore you and will be so happy that they spent their precious time reading that word you just wrote…

In one of the Snow White snippets I wrote something like ‘Snow White wanted to escape, moved back, but she already stood with her bum against the mirror…’ I’m not native English. The only word I knew to describe that part of the body most people use to sit on, I learned from Eddy Murphy, Beverly Hills Cop: “Don’t you think it’s about time that you start to think with your head instead of with your ass?” (great dialogues will always be remembered). The only word I knew for that place where the sun don’t shine was ‘ass’. If I have the choice between putting my hands on the ass of Eddy Murphy or touching the bum of Snow White… I’m sure it will be a completely different sensation. I think that’s because I paid very little attention to the ass of Eddy and I spent a whole lot of time thinking about Snow White’s bum. You can call me a fanatic, but I can assure you that Snow White’s bum gave me a lot of satisfaction, in a purely literary way of speech, of course.

Writing with attention pays off. You decide when you put that attention to your writing. Some prefer to write a draft with 3.000 words per hour and read-and-edit it with attention when the race is over, while others prefer to think about every sentence, every word, every letter at the moment they write the first draft. Oscar Wilde said: “I spent the whole morning on writing: I deleted one comma. In the afternoon, I put it back again.” That’s writing with attention. When I write about Cheryl Crow, you see what happens when I don’t google her and find out her name is Sheryl instead of Cheryl. I should have taken Jennifer Lopez as an example, which would have been much better because Jennifer has a great bum too, but… when I google Jennifer I see that her name is spelt López instead of Lopez, so… For me, it works best to write every word with attention AND read-and-edit it with even more attention when the race is over. And to make the story complete: I don’t start with writing the draft. I start with hours of thinking about it, how to write and what to tell, simply because my thinking goes much faster than my typing. But I’m a lousy writer, not a writer like you, whose words will be read by millions, billions of readers. I only know that my reader likes my story because I paid attention to it, not because I wrote it in a new words-per-hour World Record.

Now we are at the most important part of writing: finding a reader who likes what you wrote. The feedback from your reader, his opinion about your story, is the 4^th dimension of writing. You have one billion readers, but I have only one, the one who sent me the message: “What a great story.”, so you and I can both be proud of ourselves: we delivered information, we translated sentiments into words and at least one reader confirms that we succeeded. That makes us both successful writers.

There is a small part of the 4^th dimension, I mentioned them before: the critics, the publishers, the school teachers. They gave themselves the right to judge the work of others. My first question to them is: “If you’re so good and know it all… Why aren’t you at the top of the New Joke Times Bestseller List?” Their only argument to justify their own behaviour is: “We know more because we earn money with what we do.” If that is an argument, I refer to my story ‘Read to be read or read to be fed’. A policeman writes (parking tickets) for a living, but does that make him a better writer than me?

Of course, you can learn from others and of course, professionals can give you great tips, but you should realise that it is nothing but their opinion. I read that ’50 Shades’ was sold to 1 million readers and I know that there are 7 billion readers on this planet, so I can only draw the conclusion that 6.999 million people hated the book and didn’t buy it. The vast majority agrees with me that this is an awful book. Right?

Wrong. It is impossible to do something that everybody likes. Therefore, it is better just to focus on the people who do like what you write. One reader is enough and, in my opinion, the opinion of every reader counts; it doesn’t matter if he is a professional reader or not. When my school teacher gives me a 3 for my essay but my mum likes it a lot, I know why I always have to listen to my mum: she confirms that I am a successful writer, who might still improve (and I expect my school teacher to show me how, not to limit his contribution to putting a number on top of my work). Oh, by the way, my teacher didn’t give me a 3 on my final exam. He gave me a 4. I still don’t know what I did wrong.

The 4^th dimension has invented Rules For Writing, to justify their own superiority that writers of nothing-but-critic should have to judge the work of creative people. One of their rules is: ‘Show, don’t tell.’ Your synonym book is a better tool than your dictionary if you want to write ‘Show, don’t tell’.

To check that rule, we look at the first line of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” How is it possible? This is ‘tell’ and not ‘show’.

We do another test: The Old Man And The Sea’, by Ernest Hemingway: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was…”

My friend told me that it is “catching a fish” and not “taking a fish”, and even I can tell that there should be a comma instead of a point before Hemingway’s butt But, but Hemingway won a Nobel with it, so he is right. What should be clear about ‘Show, don’t tell’ by now is that, according to the rules of the 4^th dimension, both Hemingway and Dickens were literary criminals and their works should have been forbidden by all means. Or perhaps the 4^th dimension is wrong…

Another rule of the 4^th dimension is when they say: ‘Fiction should be realistic.’ I’ll come back to that later, but my opinion is: ‘Fiction should come alive. The reader should get the sensation that he is part of the story’. That is a completely different sensation.

The next argument the 4^th dimension uses to judge the work of others is: ‘Your work is not very original.’ So we have a look at today’s New Joke Times Bestsellers, a close look, and find out that more than 95% of the best-sold books are the following genres:

1.                   55% of the sold fiction books are Romance (two people meet, there is some kind of Miss Understanding who puts her big bum between them and it ends with a kiss and a wedding).

2.                   40% of the sold fiction is either a thriller (on the first page a hero encounters a problem, and the story is over when the hero solves the problem) or a detective (on the first page we find a dead body and on the last page we find the killer).

3.                   Also very popular are books of non-fiction (when you have a problem, you buy this book and your problem is solved).

4.                   Last but not least there are literary novels. Those are the books that get the highest points from the critics, although the large majority doesn’t sell to the big audience.

Almost all readers prefer… books that are very, very predictable. The most popular books have one thing in common: they are not original. If you would buy the book ‘A Perfect Figure in 30 Days’ and it would tell you how to put on 30 kilos of weight in one month, THAT would be original. If the murder will not be solved or if James Bond would be shot by Doctor No, THAT would be original. If a married couple decided that fucking around with everyone else would be so much more fun than getting married and being happy with just one person for the rest of their lives, THAT would be original. Those books don’t sell. That would be reality, not fiction. In real life the majority of crimes are not solved, 70+% of marriages end up in a divorce and almost everyone has a problem with being overweight. So that also makes mincemeat of that other argument of the critics: ‘A story should be realistic, people should feel like in real life.’

In Star Wars, the spaceships move in airless space like aeroplanes (even future science will confirm that’s impossible). In Fantasy dwarfs are heroes, while in real life midgets are treated like Orcs. In fiction romance the following dialogue would be unacceptable: – “Our relation is over. You cheated on me with somebody else.” – “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I will not do it again. I love you.” – “Okay, I forgive you.” In fiction, you know what a promise of a cheater means: nothing, because (s)he already made it clear that you can’t trust him/her. In real life, people make mistakes, learn from them and change (or not). So the task of the writer is: write good dialogue, make the story complete, make it clear for the reader what goes on and why it happens. There is no rule. Your reader will tell you if you did a good job or not.

Imagine there would be a rule: for action you use short sentences. Sounds good. Don’t think. Act. Short lines. Great rule. Action. And imagine there is that other writer who doesn’t know that rule and he wants to take the reader on a trip where things start slow like a small brook in the mountains but they speed up when a waterfall turns into a ride on a roller coaster and everybody loses control and the wind blows around your ears and you lose your hat and your sunglasses and you go upside down and with a desperate speed you enter that black tunnel where… Action?

And there is one other rule: the rule how you should use punctuation marks. You should do it like this:
Jake said, “Happy birthday.” / “Happy birthday,” said Jake.
And this is wrong: Jake said: “Happy birthday.” / “Happy birthday.”, said Jake.

When Jake is the silent type, the thinker, the example would be like this:
Jake thought, ‘happy birthday.’ / ‘happy birthday,’ thought Jake.
And this would be wrong: Jake thought: “Happy birthday.” / “Happy birthday.”, thought Jake.

And if Jake would say or think the same in another country, almost all these punctuation signs would be different. The rules of punctuation are not like the rules of traffic: every language has its own language dictator who makes them.

If you want agents or publishers to publish your work, you should study their laws and follow their rules. I think that it is enough if your reader understands you story: it should be clear and consequent.

The only final result of any writing is: being read. There is a four-paragraph contract between the writer and the reader: if the writer doesn’t follow the contract, the reader will close the book. There is only one rule: the reader should like what you write. It’s impossible to do something that everybody likes, so you should write for the ones who like what you do and shrug your shoulders about the opinion of the rest.

The contract between the writer and the reader has four conditions (if the conditions are not satisfied, the reader closes the book):

1. The story should be interesting: it should deliver information and sentiments from writer to reader.
2. The story should be complete; plot holes are not appreciated.
3. The story should be clear; the reader should understand what the writer wants to say. If the reader doesn’t understand, the writer should write it better.
4. The story should be taken care of; avoid errors in typing and grammar and be consistent in the language: write consystently the same thing in the same konsistent way.

A four-year-old child writes the message “I lofe mummy” on top of his drawing. This produces an emotional tear in the eyes of his belofed mummy: the reader understands what the writer wants to say, the story is interesting and complete and a sentiment is delivered. This mummy is genuinely proud of her kid, who just transformed himself into a writer.

Ronaldo7 Rules…