Dear Aspiring Writers… 3: Dirty Tricks You Should Know

Probably the first thing you learn when you stop writing papers for Lit classes and start writing things for public consumption is that a lot of the lessons you learned there were bullshit. Things just read better when you sometimes break Big Important Rules like not stating a sentence with ‘and’, ‘but’ or ‘or’. Character dialogue seems artificial and stilted when everyone is speaking with perfect grammar. And no one outside of a classroom setting has ever cared about split infinitives.

Furthe...