The third rule. In my humble opinion, the most important rule of all, as every teacher I ever had teaching creative writing made sure this one was drilled into me.....
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW!
I like reading Stephen King because he writes about areas in Maine that I can easily picture. I've been to some of those places.
I also like reading Sherrilyn Kenyon's books, mostly set in New Orleans. It's a place I've always wanted to go, and because she describes it so well, I HAVE been there, if only in my head. (And, luckily for me, I have friends who have been exotic places and volunteer descriptions for me..)
When writing, the places I've been visit my stories. They might be a little different from real life, with a little stage dressing thrown on here and there, but if you know someplace like I'm trying to describe, you'll throw in your own stage dressing in your head, and imagine something close to what I was seeing in my head when I wrote it.
Let me give you an example of how this rule plays into a book:
In "Night of the Tiger", there is a beautiful barn house overlooking a mountain valley in Greenville, Maine. The town is real. The mountains are real. The barn, however, got moved there from Exeter, Maine. In fact, the barn, in the real world, has technically been ash for a very long time. The layout for the magnificent home in the mountains is based on the layout of the dairy farm my grandparents had, but the barn burned flat and left the house standing. In the story, I reversed the way things happened, so that the house burned and left the barn behind. How else can an eccentric character have a one of a kind home?
So there you have it. The "big three" rules of writing.
1) Read a lot, observing how others write.
2) Write properly.
3) Write what you know.
Of course, who says there are only three rules?
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