Twain's Rules of Writing
(from Mark Twain's essay The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper)
1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausably set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.
An author should
12. _Say_ what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.
(I've always been particularly fond of Rule #3)
Lol. Number 4 is one of my favorites.[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited November 18, 2009).]
Edited to add:
Did Twain get a town named after him? - Maybe he was just jealous (like Stephen King - ha ha).
[This message has been edited by philocinemas (edited November 21, 2009).]
quote:
Did Twain get a town named after him? - Maybe he was just jealous (like Stephen King - ha ha).
There is Twain Harte in California, named for both Mark Twain and Bret Harte.
There's a "Samuel Clemens" high school, a "Mark Twain" high school...and a "Fenimore Cooper" high school, too...the only "Stephen King High School" is fictional...
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Of course my point was that Fenimore Cooper did all these things that Mark Twain said were the wrong things to do, and got published and got praised nonetheless. (I think he was safely dead by the time Twain published his essay.)
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On a related note...some of you may have heard of A. E. Van Vogt, a prominent and much-praised SF writer in the 1940s. The writer / critic Damon Knight wrote an essay taking Van Vogt apart, demonstrating that, essentially, Van Vogt wrote nonsense.
Later, when these stories were republished, Van Vogt tried to revise these stories to meet Knight's objections---but the consensus opinion was that doing so weakened the stories. What should Van Vogt have done? What would you do?
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There's a Mount Clemens, as in Samuel Clemens, in Michigan...but, really, I don't know if it's named after Clemens / Twain or not.
Well...there is no mountain anywhere in sight of Mount Clemens.