Jonathan Franzen is Drinking and Wants YOU to Listen

1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2 Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
3 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.
4 Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6 The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".
7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10 You have to love before you can be relentless.