The First Commandment of writing fiction is, Sit Your Ass in the Chair*.  And sit it there daily.  Strap on a seat belt if you must, but sit.

*And the other nine commandments are:

2.  Thou Shalt Not Bore the Reader.

3.  Remember to Keep Holy Your Writing Time.

4.  Honor the Lives of Your Characters

5.  Thou Shalt Not Be Obscure.**

6.  Thou Shalt Show and Not Tell.

7.  Thou Shalt Steal.***

8.  Thou Shalt Rewrite and Rewrite again.  And again.

9.  Thou Shalt Confront the Human Condition.

10. Be Sure That Every Death in a Story Means Something.

**If you have something to say, why would you make it difficult for someone to understand you?  Could it be that you’re not so smart?  That you think if you muddy the water a bit, it’ll seem deeper than it really is?

***Artists who have weighed in on the Seventh Commandment:

            Lionel Trillin: “Immature artists imitate – mature artists steal.”

            T.S.Elliot: “The immature poet imitates; the mature poet plagiarizes.”

            Igor Stravinsky: “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”

            Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Genius borrows nobly.”

            Wilson Mizner: “If you steal from one other, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.”

            Pablo Picasso: “Bad artists copy, good artists steal.”

            Picasso again: “Copy anyone, but never copy yourself.”

            George Moore: “Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.”

            Thornton Wilder: “I do borrow from other writers shamelessly! I can only say in my defense, like the woman brought before the judge on a charge of kleptomania, ‘I do steal, Your Honor, but only from the very best stores.”

            George Balanchine: “God creates, I do not create.  I assemble and I steal from everywhere to do it from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others can do.”

            John Billings: “About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.”

            Archibald MacLeish: “A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry of.”

            Alexander Pope: “Most authors steal their works, or buy.”

            Philip Johnson: “Creativity is selective copying.”

            John Updike: “My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge, but to come and steal.”

            Michael Caine: “I only steal from the best people.”

            Lawrence Durrell: “I pinch.”

From, “THE LIE THAT TELLS A TRUTH, THE TRUTH THAT TELLS A LIE”, by JOHN DUFRESNE