I love rules about writing, whether I agree with them or not. A good "rule" will make you thoughtful, and then tickle you when you find yourself breaking it. Here are some of my favorites, but remember they're meant to be inspirational rather than onerous. Value them when they're useful, and discard them when they aren't.

Many of us have heard Chekhov's rule about firing a gun in the third act if you've shown it in the first, and heard it so often that it's no longer interesting. You've probably heard that we should "write what we know." I hope these rules are more motivating (or funny).

If you have any good rules of your own, please e-mail me, and I'll put them up and give you credit.

• A reader can only remember three things about a character at once.

This is from Roger Zelazny. Suppose you're introducing a new character, and you say that she has calloused hands, a nose that had once been broken, and a fly-away eyebrow. A reader will remember all three. Suppose you go on to say that she was six foot two, had a twitch in her chin, a snaggle tooth, and was wearing bright red cowboy boots and a t-shirt that said "Does anal retentive have a hyphen?" Now there are eight things your reader has to remember, and most of those won't stick. Instead your reader will unconsciously pick three at random to take with them as they keep reading, and you as the writer won't know which three they are. If you use any of them later, you won't be able to count on your reader remembering them.

• Narrative is not a gimmick.

James T. Whitehead. He was arguing with me back in the days when I thought narrative was just another trick in the writer's magic hat. I've come to think he's right. Every culture we've ever found tells stories, which means that narrative is not a cultural artifact, but a genetic one. It's in our blood and bones. Thinking about how narrative works may seem artificial, but no more so than studying how we breathe or how our heart pumps blood.

• You should have no more than one dream per novel.

This is paraphrased from Leo Tolstoy, and it's worse than you think because he wrote thousand-page novels. His idea was that dreams rarely contribute to the narrative, and so he thought of them as something written for the writer's benefit rather than the reader's. I've also heard the next one attributed to Tolstoy:

• You shouldn't use the word "suddenly" more than once per novel.

Apparently Tolstoy liked his counting rules. It is true, "Suddenly...!" is an ineffective way to heighten drama. You might as well say to your reader, "Be excited now!"

• "Ouch" simply isn't a story.

From James Tiptree Junior. I wish I'd heard this one when I was younger. I spent at least six years trying to write stories that did nothing but say "ouch." Pain is important to many stories, but it's not sufficient by itself to make someone want to read.

• There are only two kinds of story: stories of decision, and stories of accomplishment.

This comes from the dinosaur of how-to-write books, The Only Two Ways to Write a Story, by John G. Gallishaw, published in nineteen hundred and twenty eight. He thought: either the main character is trying to decide something, or the character is trying to do something. Anything else isn't a story.

Maybe you've heard ideas similar to this, sometimes phrased as "the character must be trying to overcome an obstacle," etc. When I first heard this rule, I could only think of a few exceptions, like the epiphany stories of James Joyce in Dubliners. These days I know better. Those are two good kinds of stories, but there are others. One common type that doesn't fit in either category is:

• Stories of acceptance

In this kind of story something awful happens, and the story is the main character coming to accept the situation, or not. Many books and movies follow this plot line, stories about cancer or death or divorce. Anne Tyler is one of my favorite writers of this kind of story. It's also common in war novels, like Catch 22, among many. Here is a terrible situation, and we have to learn to live with it. Or not. These stories have their own kind of tension, but to think of them as overcoming obstacles or making decisions is a distortion of what they're doing.

• The narrative interest in a romance is only as strong as the impediment keeping the two characters apart.

I don't know if I've ever heard the crux of a genre summed up so succinctly.

• There are only seven kinds of motivation for a character: love, curiosity, self-preservation, greed, self-discovery, duty, and revenge.

This is from one of Dean Koontz's books on writing, Writing Popular Fiction. It's the kind of list his writing books are full of, flabbergasting in their audacity of putting all human motivation into one of seven little mail boxes. On the one hand, I find it hard to take this kind of list seriously, and on the other hand, I love it for its ambition. Almost against my will I've sometimes found this list useful, when I'm ticking through Koontz's motivations, trying to clarify a minor character to myself.

• No one reads italics.

This from a friend of mine back in the mid-80s, Mark Burgh, after a few beers. He made us all laugh. I do think large paragraphs of italics send an unconscious signal to the reader that what's coming can be safely skipped, since it won't affect the story. Italics tend to get used for dream sequences, flashbacks, etc.

• One use of the past perfect (She had thought at the time....) is enough to send the reader into a flashback. One use at the other end is enough to bring them out of a flashback.

There's no reason to have a whole paragraph in past perfect.

• Never name a character Fred.

Beware! If you do, your manuscript will be littered with the irritating rhyme "Fred said."