For this week’s podcast, I take a break from my reading of my 2009 novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, to read aloud my latest Locus column, Rules for Writers. The column sums up a long-overdue revelation I had teaching on the Writing Excuses cruise last fall: that the “rules” we advise writers to follow are actually just “places where it’s easy to go wrong.”

There’s an important distinction between this and the tired injunction, “You have to know the rules to break the rules.” It’s more like, “If you want to figure out how to make this better, start by checking on whether you messed up when doing the difficult stuff.”

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