{Adapted from The Lie That Tells a Truth, by John Defresne}
1. Thou shalt sit thyself in thy chair.
2. Thou shalt keep holy thy writing time.
3. Thou shalt not bore thy reader.
4. Thou shalt not be obscure.
5. Thou shalt show not tell. Unless thy story requires telling.
6. Thou shalt honor the lives of thy characters.
7. Thou shalt steal.*
8. Thou shalt rewrite and rewrite again and again.
9. Thou shalt not pity thy manuscript.
10. Thou shalt confront the human condition.
*Artists who have weighed in on the Seventh Commandment:
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Genius borrows nobly.”
Pablo Picasso: “Copy anyone, but never copy yourself.”
Thornton Wilder: “I do borrow from other writers shamelessly! I can only say in my defense, like the woman brought before the judge on charges 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.”
Josh Billings: “About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.”
Archibald McLeish: “A real writer learns from earlier writers they way a boy learns from an apple orchard: by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.”
Philip Johnson: “Creativity is selective borrowing.”
John Updike: “My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge, but to come and steal.”
