Franzen’s writing rules (from the Wikipedia):
1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
“Hey buddy, wanna read my book? It’s got naked women in it!”
2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
“I took a match and lit it, anxiously peering into the dark that swallowed up my resolve to investigate that noise so eerily swirling up from the basement.” Ca-ching.
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.
“I counted the many ‘ands’ then decided to use ‘then’ instead a few times. What the hell? The New Yorker will never notice.”
4. Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
“I looked out at the many victims of my recent spree and smiled. A person as distinctive as myself had every right to bend a few rules. I don’t believe in rules; I believe in anarchy. Now where did I put that iPhone? A boring third person narrator cannot be trusted with this plot. I have to warn my editor!”
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
“No wonder his books are full of so many errors in fact. It’s pathetic in this age of readily available information. To think that Cairo is a town on the Nile and not the Mississippi. Shocking.”
6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
So Kafka really turned into a cockroach? Wow! That is a story I really need to re-read!
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
“From his seat on the bus, Jonathan saw Jessica, the soon to be defiled one dimensional female victim in his next novel. She was moving fast, and the bus was going in the opposite direction. He clambered from his seat and shouted at the driver to stop. He could see her yellow dress disappear around the corner. Once on the sidewalk, he made a run for it. In his haste, he ran past another woman walking her dog going the other way. He tripped over the leash, going down in a cursing heap. ‘You see more sitting still than running after,’ he thought.”
8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction [the TIME magazine cover story detailed how Franzen physically disables the Net portal on his writing laptop].
(See number 5, above) “Jonathan scratched his head. The blinking cursor was making fun of him again. He needed the name of a city in Ohio and all he could think of was Toledo. Also, how far was it between his Ohio city and New York? How long would it take Miss Jessica Yellow Dress to get here? She had already been accepted into the writer’s workshop. It was only a matter of time before they’d be at it hot and heavy. But how much time? Perhaps he’d better get a ticket to Ohio. But a ticket to where? If only he’d payed more attention in Geography!”
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
“Jessica undulated in the pale moonlight. He looked at that and frowned. Too interesting a verb, he thought. He crossed it out and typed ‘shook.'”
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.
“He was listless and unloved. He could barely stand to get out bed in the morning. He hadn’t shaved in days. Where was his muse? Lost somewhere in Ohio? Had he ever needed one as badly as he needed one now? If he could get one more peek at that yellow dress, those legs, the panache of her sprightly walk, then perhaps he could move on to bigger and better prizes, not be passed up again, to perhaps sell a few million more copies, and forge on to the end of a promising career. All of this sitting and not chasing after, his capricious denial of the ability to Google facts, his prejudice against interesting verbs, his made up autobiography… it all just made him very hard to love, and without the opportunity for reciprocity, where was the chance he’d truly loose his heart? What part of speech is reciprocity? It’s not the verb is it? Because it’s an interesting word in this context. It was a lovable word. He was in love with a word. It was all he needed for relentlessness.”