A Code of Conduct for Writers

This is going to be a mix of moral philosophy and writing craft – and perhaps the two are more closely aligned than at first appears. Good writers after all are good people… Or are they?

These thoughts were inspired by one of the writers at our Venice Writing Retreat. He wondered whether there was a code of conduct for writers – a set of moral precepts, guiderails, if you like, that conscientious writers are bound to observe.

It seemed to me that the question could be broken down into three sections.

1. 1. What are our duties to ourselves, as writers.
   2. What are our duties to our characters – and, perhaps, our creations.
   3. And thirdly, what are our duties to our readers?

1. Your duty to yourself as a writer

Our primary duty could be said to be the best possible writer we can be. So the question is, what are the specific and practical steps that enable you to realise your talent most fully? Another way of putting that might be: how do you maintain your creative integrity and protect what makes your voice distinctive. It means

• Writing what genuinely compels you rather than chasing trends.
• Staying curious about craft. One way of doing this – apart from practising, reading books on the craft, attending courses and retreats and so on, is to pay particular attention to how other writers whom you admire achieve certain effects. How do they use adjectives? How do they create atmosphere? How do they establish tension and suspense? How do they avoid exposition? How do they frame conversations that sound real but that serve a dramatic purpose? The lessons we can learn from those who have come before us are literally endless.
• Being honest about what you know and don’t know. Remember that well-worn progression of understanding from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence; but remember too, that your skills are advancing across a wide front. You can be unconsciously competent in one area, but unconsciously incompetent in another at the same time.
• It’s our duty to take risks, stretch ourselves into areas that frighten us, to try writing the sort of scenes that we’ve avoided heretofore; to create characters that are outside our immediately experience.
• And of course, we owe it to ourselves to remain true to our vision, to write as best we can the story we have set out to tell.

2. Your duty to your characters as a creator

This duty is about fidelity to the internal logic of the people we’ve imagined into being.

Your characters deserve to be themselves –  not just mouthpieces for our ideology or convenient plot devices.

They should indeed be capable of surprising us sometimes, resisting us, demanding their own trajectories even when it makes our lives harder. Our plot demands that our character relax a strict moral precept by which she has lived her life. This threatens to damage the character. The only way we can get away with this kind of lapse is by going back in our story and building into it the seeds of this corruption (if that’s what it is). Abrupt changes of character can work if we’ve done enough to motivate the volte face.

This also means that if we create an uncomfortable character, one whose views we disagree with, or whose prejudices are unseemly, we should not retreat from the honest presentation of these flaws. A really good bad character is a wonder to behold.

This is where “authenticity” lives most clearly – honouring what would actually happen given who these characters are, rather than what you wish would happen.

But duty to our creation also means resisting the pressure to make everything instantly graspable, to smooth away difficulty, to write for the mind  with, famously, a seven-second attention span , rather than the contemplative one.

3. Your duty to your readers as an author

This is perhaps the most fraught. We owe readers clarity where we intend clarity, and coherence in our storytelling. We owe them our best effort – not first-draft laziness dressed up as spontaneity. We owe them respect for their time and intelligence.

But we don’t owe them comfort, agreement with their worldview, or stories that fit their preconceptions. We don’t owe them explanations outside the text or apologies for difficult content.

We also don’t bear responsibility for the difficult feelings your writing can trigger in them.

And yet if a writer chooses to write in the mode of one or another genre, she is striking a deal with her readers: that what they find between the covers of her book will conform, to some degree at least, to the tropes of the form, and therefore satisfy the expectations of the reader.

This is where our third duty – to the reader – becomes concrete and binding rather than abstract.

When we write a mystery, we’re making a promise: there will be a mystery, clues will be fairly planted, and there will be a resolution. When we write romance, the promise is different: emotional focus on the relationship, and likely a satisfying ending for the couple. Genre is essentially a contract.

Breaking that contract isn’t forbidden – but it has consequences. We can write a mystery where the detective never solves the crime, but we’ve violated the terms of engagement. Some readers will appreciate the subversion; others will feel legitimately cheated. They came for a specific experience we advertised and then cheated them of.

The best genre writers honour the contract while stretching it. They deliver on the core promises but surprise the reader with how they deliver. They understand that genre expectations aren’t limitations – they’re a shared language that allows for sophisticated communication.

The interesting moments come when these duties pull in different directions. Our duty to ourselves as writers might demand we write something experimental that our readers will struggle with. Our duty to characters might require us to let them do something our readers will hate. Our duty to readers for clarity might push us toward exposition that feels false to character.

And yet, here’s what’s interesting: when we choose a genre deliberately, our three duties can actually align.

• Our duty to ourselves means choosing a form that genuinely excites us.
• Our duty to characters means letting them be complex people even within genre constraints (the hard-boiled detective who’s also a father, the romance heroine who has ambitions beyond love).
• Our duty to readers means delivering on the promise while making it fresh.

The writer who fails is often the one who picks a genre cynically—for market reasons – while secretly despising it. That contempt leaks into the work.

So, is there a code of conduct that writers should bear in mind when they sit down to compose their immortal prose?

Well, there is now.