In December of 1959, C.S. Lewis sat down to answer a letter from a young writer named Thomasine who asked him for advice.

Lewis offered eight suggestions—everything from turning off the radio to reading good books to making sure you actually know the meaning of the words you use. He also advised writing “with the ear, not the eye,” hearing every sentence as though it were being read aloud.

It got me wondering. What would happen if we put Lewis in a room with some of the other great writers of the last century or two? Would Hemingway agree with him? What about Steinbeck? Twain? Orwell? Stephen King? Jerry Jenkins? Would J.K. Rowling walk in, look at everybody’s list of rules, and promptly tell them to throw the whole thing away?

Lewis’s advice to “write (and read) with the ear, not the eye” immediately jumped out at me because this is my favorite way to edit. I read my work out loud. A lot. There are things my eyes will skim right over that my ears catch immediately—a sentence that’s too long, a word I’ve used three times without realizing it, a rhythm that’s off, or something that simply doesn’t sound like something an actual human would say.

Apparently, Lewis was onto something. And he wasn’t the only one.

John Steinbeck offered almost the same advice specifically about dialogue: “If you are using dialogue, say it aloud as you write it.” His reasoning was simple: that’s how you know whether it actually sounds realistic.

Steinbeck had another piece of advice I love: forget the enormous, anonymous audience you’re imagining and write to one person.

He warned that thinking about a “nameless, faceless audience” could be intimidating. Instead, he suggested choosing one person (real or imagined) and writing to that person.

That makes so much sense to me. The minute we start writing for a large audience, something can happen. We stop talking and start Writing—with a capital W. Suddenly we’re trying to sound profound or clever or, and this is the worst, writerly.

Mark Twain understood the importance of choosing exactly the right word. In an 1888 letter to George Bainton, Twain described the difference between the almost-right word and the right one as the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.

That’s quite a difference.

George Orwell approached the same problem from another direction. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” he offered six rules for writing clearly. Among them: use a short word when it will do the job, cut words you don’t need, favor active voice and skip jargon when ordinary English will say the same thing.

In other words, don’t make the reader work harder than necessary to understand whatever it is you’re trying to say.

Here’s where our writers really start agreeing with each other.

Lewis told Thomasine to read all the good books she could. Decades later, Stephen King made essentially the same point in On Writing: if you want to be a writer, you need to do two things—read a lot and write a lot.

King says he doesn’t primarily read because he’s studying technique. He reads because he likes stories. But learning happens anyway. Every book teaches us something, and he even argues that sometimes a bad book can teach us more than a good one.

Ernest Hemingway adds something a little different to the conversation.

In 1935, Hemingway offered a young writer a piece of advice that seems almost backward at first: when the writing is going well and you know what happens next, stop.

Don’t drain the well. Leave something waiting for the next day.

I like that, because so much writing advice focuses on pushing harder. Write another page. Hit another word count. Keep going.

Hemingway’s advice suggests that sometimes discipline is knowing when not to keep going.

Leave yourself somewhere to start tomorrow.

After reading all this advice, I keep coming back to Rowling’s dislike of lists of things writers “must” do.

Because… there’s something a little funny about asking writers how to write.

Lewis wrote like Lewis. Hemingway wrote like Hemingway. Twain certainly wrote like Twain. If any of them had followed someone else’s formula perfectly, we probably wouldn’t still be reading them.