BookLife

Tomorrow is National Magazine Day. Time to “Attack the Stack.”

There are no guarantees, in writing or in life.

Teenage fiction’s death wish.

Web surfer recovers stolen Descartes letter.

Agony Column interviews Dan Simmons.

Keeping out the trolls: relevancy in user-generated content.

What is the worst sentence you ever wrote?

Nintendo makes moves into book market.

Thousands of authors opt out of Google Book plan.

Ask the editor: do edits change style?

Matt Staggs is a literary publicist and the proprietor of Deep Eight LLC, a boutique publicity agency utilizing the best publicity practices from the worlds of traditional media and evolving social technologies. He has worked in the fields of public relations and journalism for almost a decade. In addition to his work as a publicist, Matt is a book reviewer and writer whose work appears in both print and web publications.

Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s own ten rules of writing, The Guardian asked successful authors like Michael Moorcock and Joyce Carol Oates to submit their own lists of writing do’s and don’ts. You can read them all here.

While most of these are extremely useful – and it’s always fun to see how your favorite writer thinks – it got me to thinking about rules that aren’t so useful, and how things that we once thought were set in stone have a tendency to change as we advance in our understanding of our art.

I used to feel like I couldn’t write without a formal outline. I felt like that was the way “real” writers wrote. Despite that, it just didn’t work for me, and eventually I became brave enough to abandon that rule in favor of my own methods. I’ve since had several of my personal rules come and go as my writing has matured. What about you? How have your own personal rules for writing changed? What’s the most dramatic reversal or abandonment of a rule that you’ve experienced in your career? Have any managed to survive the passage of time?