Interesting article ovee at the at The Guardian. A writer named Jonathan Franzen wrote a short set of writing tips and got dumped on for it.
The author of the article suggests that it happened because Oprah chose one of his books for her book club list and he wasn't completely cool with it.
The article links to his list on Lithub, but I've copied it below for convenience.
1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator
2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money
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 "and"s on the page.
4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it
6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis"
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after
8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting
10. You have to love before you can be relentless
Not all of these I agree with, but maybe some aspiring writers here will find them useful.
The link to the article discussing Franzen is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/commentisfree/2018/nov/24/writing-tips-jonathan-franzen