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Showing posts from February 16, 2009

The Rules of Writing (Part I)

Authors, agents and editors talk much about the rules of writing . Most of us will agree that these rules are more like guidelines than laws set in stone. What we can’t agree on is what the rules are and what they mean. Oh well, such is life. Mark Twain said there are nineteen rules, though some people say there are twenty-two. He doesn’t say what the nineteenth rule is, though I doubt he knew since he mentions it in a critique of James Fenimore Cooper’s work . I think he chose the number nineteen to bring attention to how poorly written he believed Deerslayer to be. Twain does give us the eighteen he said Jame Fenimore Cooper violated. I see among them some of the same rules we keep spouting today, so I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at Twain’s eighteen rules governing the literary art in the domain of romantic fiction over the next few days. As we do, I will say that knowing the rules and understanding them is a far cry from being able to apply them to our own...