Mr. G's Rules For Writing

1. Break up with "it."

2. If you're bored, then your writing is boring.

3. A comma splice is when you use a measly comma to set off independent clauses. The effect is to announce to the world that you don't have basic control of the most basic writing conventions. Don't do this.

4. No UPR's

5. "Because" is that kid you were once friends with, in junior high. But something happened. Because started listening to weird music and swearing and repeating inappropriate things he overheard from his older brother. Because got into trouble at school. Because grew distant, dark. The last time you saw him he was buying cigarettes at the Speedway. It's probably a good thing you stopped hanging around him.

6. Books don't talk. They don't "say" things. Use better words: states, suggests, concludes, argues, posits, etc.

7. Never ever write the cliche "for always being there for me," or any of its offshoots, "you'll be there for me" or "I'll be there for you" or "he'll be there for it" NO BEING THERE. FOR ANYONE.

8. You've thrown a two-hit gem. Don't go to the bullpen and bring in some bum to close the game. Close with your best writing.

9. A dialog rule: Dialog in fiction must serve to characterize and to advance the story. No bootless yappery.

10. Using Webster's dictionary as a logical starting point for analysis announces to the world that you have NO GAME.

11. Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms. --Alfred Hitchcock

12. Vonnegut: start as close as possible to the end.

13. Hemingway teaches us to avoid clutter. Sometimes transitions, like adverbs, are clutter.

14. If you want to write, read. Read, read, and read. Then read more.

15. "Pretty," "little," and "very" and other commonplace qualifiers are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.

16. You get three exlcamation points in your writing career(of course, not counting texting, within dialog, or email). Use them wisely.