Anne Rice's writing advice
- Author
- Anne Rice
- Year
- 2010s
- Cluster
- off the page
- Format
- video
In her later years Anne Rice talked to her readers directly — on camera and on her famously unfiltered Facebook page — and among the postings were her thoughts on writing. No production, no curriculum: a bestselling novelist at her desk, telling beginners what she believed. The advice that recurs across those videos is consistent and characteristically hers: write the book you are burning to write, not the market’s; treat the standard workshop rules — write what you know, show don’t tell — as suggestions you may freely violate; go where the pain is; and defend your voice against everyone, including well-meaning critique.
Weigh it for what it is: courage, not craft. Rice teaches no mechanics, and her own method — trust the obsession, revise little, protect the voice absolutely — worked for a writer of her particular gifts and may sink a writer still developing theirs. Video also resists study; you cannot dog-ear it.
But courage is a real scarcity, and hearing the rules are optional from someone whose books sold in the tens of millions lands differently than reading it in a manual. Her channel remains up at youtube.com/user/AnneRiceDotCom; start with any video titled about writing and you’ll find the voice at once.
You need courage more than technique — a major novelist telling you directly that the rules are optional is worth hours of craft reading.
You need mechanics; video advice can't be skimmed, searched, or dog-eared.
The Kick-Ass Writer — off-page energy in book form · On Writing — the craft memoir her advice keeps circling