Hmm. Taking these rules one by one:
1: don't open with weather: it's not specifically weather he's referring to here so much as atmospheric description in general. William Goldman says you can't open a screenplay with a courtroom scene because there's too much going on that needs to be described, and whoever's reading the script will get bored and give up. The trouble is, it's very hard to make an atmospheric description gripping. You really do need to be Mervyn Peake to get away with it, and a lot of people give up on Titus Groan early on because it's just too dense.
2: avoid prologues: errr... "Prologues are just backstory" -- well, yes, but backstory can be extremely important to the main plot, to the extent that revealing it through flashbacks or dialogue or scattered hints can make it unnecessarily hard to figure out what's going on, or can force the writer to shoe-horn backstory into a place where it doesn't fit. Probably too many novels have prologues, but sometimes a prologue is exactly what's needed.
3 & 4: bookisms & Tom Swifties: this should be obvious, but it isn't. "Never" is a bit too strong, but only a little bit.
5: exclamation points: yes, and this also applies to semi-colons. More so if you love run-on sentences.
6: "suddenly": Oy. I agree completely with this, and it's so hard.
7: dialect: Well, Irvine Welsh gets away with it, but he's an exception. And even Trainspotting has long stretches with no significant amounts of dialect.
8 & 9: descriptions of characters and places: Depends. Sometimes detailed descriptions are necessary, or at least desirable; sometimes they're not. (Again, I refer you to Titus Groan. Every character, down to the Grey Scrubbers, the servants whose hereditary task it is to wash the walls of Gormenghast's kitchens before the cooks arrive, is described in microscopic detail. Every room, every corridor, every speck of dust. It makes the book a slow read, but immensely rewarding.) I think Leonard's expressing a preference here, not picking out a universal truth.
And as for rule 10: different people skip different things. Some people skip the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings; some people skip the poetry; some people skip the scenery descriptions. If he's saying "write what you like to read", that is good advice, and surprisingly un-obvious. (If you can't stand to read it, why should anyone else bother?) But he seems to imply that everyone skips the same bits, which is Just Not True.
I think the Pat Holt Ten Mistakes that j blegaa mentioned is better, though.
Of course all of these lists of rules should include Rule #0: Follow the rules 99% of the time, but ignore them if breaking them allows you to do something wonderful.
Jon said: ...the problem with theories on how people should behave is that you don't have any control over how people are going to interpret these theories at a later time, in a different context with different expectations.
That applies to just about anything anyone says about anything. I think just about any statement, taken out of its context, misinterpreted, and given a bit of a spin by somebody who either doesn't understand it or understands it and wants to "improve" on it (in a specific direction, of course), can be dangerous, or in any case lead to consequences the original maker of the statement in no way intended.
aha said: Moral arguments give permission to polarize—to create good and evil in a world of grey—which in turn gives permission to kill.
Not if your moral argument leads to the conclusion that killing is never justified under any circumstances.
Morality is not the means to any end, but rather the reverse;
What does that mean? I can't make any sense of that. Do you mean that morality is an end in itself? If so, I agree; but given your other statements, I don't think that is what you mean.
it is an adaptive fiction—the result of natural selection.
Quite possibly. No doubt our ability to reason and weigh up evidence and arguments is the result of natural selection as well. Does that mean that reason is a "fiction"? Or that we should pay no attention to the conclusions reason tells us to draw?
You seem to have a very limited notion of what the word "moral" means. One of my favourite living philosophers, Jonathan Dancy, is a moral particularist -- that is, he denies the existence of general moral principles according to which we can or must regulate our behaviour. As far as Dancy is concerned, the real picture is more complicated than that: every individual situation has many elements which contribute to the rightness or wrongness of any given action. This is about as un-"black and white" a stance as you can get, but it is still a moral position. On this view, there is still right and wrong -- but you can never say in advance what the right action will be (unless you have perfect precognition, in which case it would be nice if you'd share some lottery numbers).
Fundamentalists, particularly religious fundamentalists, have survived because they make the best warriors.
It is not fundamentalists who survive, but fundamentalisms, and they don't so much survive as die out frequently and resurface a generation later in different clothes. Fundamentalisms are attractive, because they make life seem simple, and they are fragile for the very same reason: they often don't survive contact with reality. (See, for example, the rebellion led by Thomas Muntzer in Germany in 1525. Muntzer thought "the godless have no right to live", but he was the one who ended up being beheaded. Thinking you have God on your side isn't nearly as effective as actually having trained and properly-armed soldiers on your side.)
Graydon: your concept of power is strange. Why should power be concerned with "roads and schools and markets, research laboratories and public commissions and the enforcement of honest banking", and not, say, casinos, breweries, brothels and crackhouses? Why, indeed, should power have any determinate purpose at all? I was under the impression that power was a neutral concept. The stick of dynamite doesn't care whether it's used to unblock a mine and save trapped miners or to blow up a building in which children are asleep. What you are describing does not sound like power to me, or at least not power simpliciter. It reminds me of Starhawk's distinction between "power-over" and "power from within", but that's not quite it either.
That'd be a great argument if it weren't for the fact that MacLeod is stacking the deck in favour of his own position -- it's understandable, we all do it, but it should make us mistrust his conclusions.
Take this bit, for instance:
The writings of a great amoralist - a de Sade, a Stirner, a Nietzsche - can inspire a handful of murders in two centuries. Over the same period, the writings of a great moral philosopher - an Aquinas, a Kant, a Bentham, a Mill - can justify, if not indeed incite, the deaths of millions in just wars and just revolutions.
So, he mentions Nietzsche. Now, stop me if I'm wrong here, but didn't the Nazis really love Nietzsche? And the Nazis committed more than "a handful of murders over two centuries". Granted, they were most likely misinterpreting Nietzsche's works, and Nietzsche would undoubtedly have loathed them, if only because he thought anti-Semitism was vile and idiotic; but if you allow that concession for Nietzsche, you must be consistent and allow it for the moralists, who would be equally horrified at the uses to which their ethical systems were put.
Having said which, I would really, really like to know who has committed a single atrocity in the name of Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill. If you can name one... well, I won't eat my hat because it gets cold here in Edinburgh and I need my hat to keep my head warm. But I shall be very surprised. For Aquinas maybe you can make a case, though that's frankly dubious since anyone following Aquinas's ethics would undoubtedly be following the Church as well, and that makes the whole mess more complicated (religious killing is a different matter).
As for this bit:
Morality is an immensely dangerous and destructive force, which must be restrained by the strongest human passions and sympathies if it is not to break all the bonds of society.
Well, this is just silly. MacLeod talks as if morality and "human passions and sympathies" and "all the bonds of society" were in some sort of opposition, which is absurd. Morality is inspired, aided and informed by human passions and the bonds of society. (See, for example, Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: it's all about social virtues and the passions which lead us to act morally. The idea that morality necessarily opposes passion comes from Kant, but there aren't many people who agree with Kant on this.) And there are a lot of human passions which bloody well need restraining -- the passion for revenge, for dominance, for superiority; even the natural desire to do good for one's children can end in disaster if it is not restrained by a sense of the moral claims of others.
The last paragraph is dreadfully confusing -- and confused. I think what he's saying is that "morality" is just a mask for political ideologies, but after that he seems to contradict himself a couple of times. I'm not sure what he's on about, and his metaphors and embedded quotes make things worse.
Oh, and the beginning is just as bad, because of the conflation of politics and morality. He seems to take for granted that these two realms are identical, which just ain't so. They're related, of course, but the relation is more complex than that.
Gregorian "Brothers in Arms" is better than the original.
The thing about chant that makes it so odd to listen to, and so difficult to distinguish one kind or even one composition from another, is the complete lack of harmonies. Harmony is such a fundamental part of music nowadays (and has been for centuries) that music with no harmony sounds... strange. It's a taste worth acquiring, though.
My first ever rejection letter was... interesting. I had sent some poems in for a competition, and received a pleasant, polite letter informing me that, however good my poems were, they weren't quite good enough. What got me was that the letter was addressed to "Mr Farmar". I realised that I'd signed the cover letter "KR Farmar", and one of the poems was a love poem addressed to a woman. Naturally, the editor assumed I was a man...
I kept that rejection letter pinned up on my bedroom wall for years afterwards, as an encouragement to doing better in future.
Since then I haven't sent out much, but my rejection letters have been getting steadily less discouraging, from the agent who said my novel was "very odd... we don't think it's a strong enough story" (it wasn't) to the magazine who said "the story ends too abruptly" (it did) to another magazine who didn't say very much at all (but having reread the story and taken a look at the calibre of writing they normally publish, I'm more relieved than surprised -- it would have been an embarrassment if it had been published; as it is it can moulder in a drawer until I'm dead and my executors publish it as "juvenilia"), to an almost-an-acceptance-but-not-quite from Marvel Comics. (And I know for a fact that Marvel were undergoing internal problems at the time, which lessens the sting of their refusal to publish my script as it stood. Plus, the editor said I was talented. Just thinking about that gives me a warm glow.)
Of course, I've worked for my parents' publishing company off and on since I was 14, so my attitude is somewhat different from the norm...
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