7 Rules for Writing

To my amazement (and delight), Malcolm Gladwell has selected Drive as the March pick for the New Yorker Online Book Club. And as a way to gear up readers for the discussion, the magazine asked me a few questions — including whether I had any "rules" for writing.

I'd actually never thought about that. But it turned out that I did — in a kinda, sorta way — have some rules for hacking out sentences in the hopes that they grow into paragraphs and eventually coalesce into pages and books.

I'm...