The one that comes to my mind right away, about writing Westerns, where you're never, ever supposed to open a story by having a cowboy ride up on his horse and finding a naked woman taking a bath in front of him.

Don't start out by telling readers why they don't want to read your story, unless you're Lemony Snickett.

Don't use dashes instead of quotation marks on dialog, unless you're Cormac McCarthy.

Don't write about high school students, unless you're J.K. Rowling.

Don't write Finnegans Wake unless you're Joyce.

etc.

Well, 100 years ago it was OK because it was new and unique and it worked. But what happens next is that every author on the planet tries to copy those techniques that work, and ten years later the market is innundated with similar works. I mean, how many kid-in-a-wizard-school take-offs have there been since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone?

So it's not really that these techniques/plots are inherently bad. It's really just that they've been overused, and the editors--and their readers--are tired of hearing about them.

So, right now, before anyone else beats me to it, I'm going to add...

No stories about kids in a wizarding school.

Write your story in a recognizable language.

5.7.3 Don't put your cup of coffee to close to your computer.

...

One rule I've come up with is specific only to my own work (as far as I know).

I've written or half-written at least a dozen stories in the last dozen years that start with somebody waking up in bed in the morning. Things generally go on from there, one way or another, but they all start the same way.

Unfortunately, I didn't notice it until I'd written a half-dozen stories beginning that way.

"your character rides up from somewhere and finds a naked person taking a bath in front of him/her."

[This message has been edited by kgator (edited August 20, 2005).]

Seriously though, I know of fiction books which bore me to tears and those are modern ones.

But then two days later I read a spec fic story that's been bought for the Best American Short Stories 2005 and there, lo and behold, was a set of parentheses...

quote:

---

If a POV character wakes up and something important happens immediately, then you need to start the scene where it started. That means starting with the POV character waking up. There are scenes that don't begin when the POV character first wakes up. And if you have a scene where nothing more important than the usual morning routine takes place, you should skip it unless that routine contains vital information. So most stories shouldn't begin with the character waking up in the morning. But you shouldn't forbid yourself from starting a scene at the beginning of that scene.

---

Similarly, I can have a scene end with the character waking up and realizing he's been dreaming -- but if that's the final scene, it's a major cliche. Used elsewhere, it may be fine.

Don't start with the character waking up. I did this, not to be perverse, but because it was a transformer blowing that wakened him, and also started the problem of the story.

Don't write about VR. (Actually, that was the same story.)

Don't start with dialog. I do this a little more regularly.

Don't have inconsistent technology, as in, flying the helicar to the transport pad. I did this once, and it was the point of the story. I still want to start a story with "It was raining on Mongo that morning. That's right, the whole planet, with exactly the same weather."

Only one POV per short story. I break that a little more regularly, but still, it's the exception. The only time I got a comment on it I had *3* POV's, and then, it was, "You're breaking a rule here, but I see why."

But I don't break the actual rules of punctuation, spelling, and grammar. That would just be annoying. Sometimes someone will say, "You have bad grammar here," meaning, "My English teacher said sentence fragments are bad." Sentence fragments; semicolons; parentheses. (OK by me, although sometimes overused, as I did right here.)

I think it's ok to use more than one POV in a short story. It's just not usually worth it.

Usage Note: Despite the appearance of the form alright in works of such well-known writers as Langston Hughes and James Joyce, the single word spelling has never been accepted as standard. This is peculiar, since similar fusions such as already and altogether have never raised any objections. The difference may lie in the fact that already and altogether became single words back in the Middle Ages, whereas alright has only been around for a little more than a century and was called out by language critics as a misspelling. Consequently, one who uses alright, especially in formal writing, runs the risk that readers may view it as an error or as the willful breaking of convention.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

NOTE: As with altogether and already that gained acceptability over time, maybe SCIFI writers should use alright to add authenticity to the proposal that their story takes place in the future when all together, all ready AND all right are considered misspellings.

Edit: joke.

DIckens made a career of doing that.