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Three Unofficial Writing Rules.

Evan Fleischer
2 min readJan 28, 2024

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Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
  1. “If this is true, then what else is true?”

I have found this to be an exceptionally useful generative question. Consider — as an example — a random sentence like, “Today’s the day.”

If that sentence is true, then what else is true?

Answer: it’s clearly an important day, but what kind of important day? Is it a wedding? Is it the day of a big high-fantasy-styled battle? Is it the day of a heist? Is it … all three?

If we accept all three answers as true, then what else is true?

Answer: the person has a busy day ahead of them.

And so on. We begin with a simple sentence that quickly transforms into a story-in-progress.

2. “Act as if you’re talking to a well-meaning friend who knows nothing about nothing.”

We have all told stories before. When we tell a story to a friend of ours, we do it in a certain way — and we’ll sometimes explain our stories depending on who our friend is, too, i.e., — ‘You know him, he’s the one who has the ice cream store that looks like a haunted mansion.’ (Or whatever.)

Whenever you sit down to write, one easy way to establish your authority as a writer is to act as if you’re telling this story to a well-meaning friend who knows nothing about nothing. People won’t…

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