In 2010, inspired to Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing, The Guardian asked some of the world’s most respected writers to share their best tips for writing fiction. Here’s the list American novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen provided.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money. Never use the word “then” as a ­conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page. Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it. The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than “The Meta­morphosis”. You see more sitting still than chasing after. It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting. You have to love before you can be relentless.

About Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen is the author of four novels (Freedom, The Corrections, Strong Motion, and The Twenty-Seventh City), two collections of essays (Farther Away, How to Be Alone), a personal history (The Discomfort Zone), and a translation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. He was born in Western Springs, Illinois and now lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.

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