It’s a pleasure to share Cara Wordsmith’s first article with you.

This first post is dedicated to some role models, writers willing to think twice, or perhaps even three or more times, about what goes into a sentence. If you ever notice me violating any of the advice that appears below, please call me on it.

ADVICE FROM TEN CAREFUL WORDSMITHS

Kurt Vonnegut: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”

George Orwell: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

Toni Morrison: “You don’t throw up your hands and run out of the lab. What you do is you identify the procedure and what went wrong and then correct it. Write and erase and do it over.”

Mark Twain: “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

William Faulkner: “Kill your darlings.”

Stephen King: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

Elmore Leonard: “Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.”

Virginia Woolf: “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

Isabel Allende: “Write what should not be forgotten.”

And here is one more good piece of advice for those of us who work as editors:

Oscar Wilde: “A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”