What Will Survive of Us Is Love: Helen
Dunmore’s 9 Rules of Writing
1. Finish the day’s writing
when you still want to continue.
2. Listen to what you have
written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet
understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
3. Read Keats’s letters.
4. Reread, rewrite, reread,
rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you
don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have
everything in them except the life they need.
5. Learn poems by heart.
6. Join professional
organizations which advance the collective rights of authors.
7. A problem with a piece of
writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
8. If you fear that taking
care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG
Ballard.
9. Don’t worry about
posterity — as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed ‘What will survive of us is
love’.
