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Saturday, February 20, 2010

Rules for writers.

There's a great compilation of advice from writers for writers on the Guardian website today. It leads off with Elmore Leonard's famous (and dreadfully simplistic and anti-intellectual) Ten Rules; those that follow will likely serve any writer better.

Pick and choose, mix and match--there's some good stuff there.

Not unexpectedly,this reminded me of Lester Dent's Master Plot Formula, a famous dictum from one of the great and prolific pulp writers.

1 comment:

  1. Catching up on some old stuff...

    Anyway, reading the Lester Dent stuff, I find myself very very interested in reading a story that includes "Hero should accomplish something with his tearing around, if only to rescue Eloise, and surprise! Eloise is a ring-tailed monkey. The hero counts the rings on Eloise's tail, if nothing better comes to mind.They're not real. The rings are painted there. Why?"

    Reminds me of that issue of Sandman where the fellow spouts a bunch of plots to stories he's thinking of...

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