Rules to help writing

Chapter 4 outlines the essential skills and knowledge for the travel journalist. The guardian.co.uk put together a list of rules by Zadie Smith that may make any writer better. Here are a few of her rules,

  • When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
  • When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
  • Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
  • Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.