I don’t seriously intend to spend a year expounding upon the Guardian’s rules of fiction.

However, I do think some of them are worth revisiting. So, once in awhile, I will interrupt my reposting of Dr. Syntax and Bookslut anecdotes to discuss them.

Let’s start with rule number one from the first writer.

Elmore Leonard advises us, “Never open a book with weather.”

This rule is so obvious that we never mention it; and, because we never mention it, some people forget.

What’s the worst opening of all time?

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

There are several reasons this opening bites sidewalk. First, it’s redundant. Of course, the night was dark. It’s night.

Second, it begins with the most generic noun and verb in the English language.

Finally, the phrasing is predictable. You could jumble this sentence in almost any other order and it would be more interesting than, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

For example:
“The night was dark and stormy.”
“Dark and stormy was the night.”
“A dark night it was, and stormy.”

None of these openings will win you a Pulitzer, but they are all better than the original. (Maybe I shouldn’t say that. Madeleine L’engle won the Newbery Award with A Wrinkle in Time. Its first sentence: “It was a dark and stormy night.”)

But the worst thing about the weather is it doesn’t matter that much. You should never open with weather unless the setting is the most important part of your story. (Furthermore, your setting should never be the most important part of your story.)

It’s good to establish atmosphere, but it isn’t your first priority. No, your first priority is to build momentum, and you can’t do that with weather.

O. Henry doesn’t begin Springtime a la Carte with weather, but he opens with something just as bad. The only reason he gets away with it is because he apologizes. An excerpt:

It was a day in March.

Never, never begin a story this way when you write one. No opening could possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat, dry and likely to consist of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable. For the following paragraph, which should have inaugurated the narrative, is too wildly extravagant and preposterous to be flaunted in the face of the reader without preparation.

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare.

Most of us don’t have O. Henry’s flair for authorial admission, so we should save ourselves the trouble and avoid unimaginative, flat, dry and vacuous beginnings.

Leonard offers an exception to his rule. Barry Lopez, writer of Arctic Dreams, can write about all the ice he likes. I’ve never read Lopez, but here are the first few pages of Arctic Dreams.

There is a lifetime’s worth of material here.

The Guardian asked several authors what their rules for writing are. Sure, we’ve heard a lot of this advice before (adverbs and exclamation points, bad; thesaurus, good.) But it’s thrilling to hear some of these suggestions.

I mean, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar can explain his skyhook to you 70 times. He can demonstrate it, but you’ll never be able to imitate it. But that doesn’t make the explanations or demonstration any less thrilling.

Some of my favorite tips, though the entire article deserves to be read:

Elmore Leonard — Never open a book with weather. (Leonard’s advice is especially helpful because he notes authors that are exempt from his rules.

Margaret Atwood: Do back exercises. Pain is distracting. (I suspect she’s not being sarcastic.)

Helen Dunmore: Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.

Geoff Dyer: ­Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

Esther Freud: Cut out the metaphors and similes.

Here’s on for Tricia, from PD James: Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

Anne Enright gets the best line of all: The first 12 years are the worst.

This may be the best article on writing I’ve read since Tricia and I began this blog. If you are a writer or wish you were a writer or like reading or have 25 minutes to kill at work until your lunch hour, read this.

Laura Miller, a writer for Salon, added five rules of her own. I have nothing to add, though I might reiterate for the 400th time that writers write. If you only think about stories you want to tell, then you are not a writer. You are a thinker.

Finally, MobyLives has a pair of updates on the Google Books settlement.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com