One time, when I was eleven years old, four of us decided to play a game at Gramma's house. Clint, Dwayne, Barry, Michael. Whenever we got together, someone wound up losing blood, and it was always at Gramma's house.

In this game, which was safe by our standards, each of us had a different large plastic ball. We went into bedroom, turned off all lights, and threw them at each other. Something hit me in eye, hard, and I saw stars. Then we turned lights on, and I saw that I'd been hit by a kickball with stars on it.

Since there was no blood, we turned off lights and played some more. The next day, I had a black eye. "How'd that happen?" Mom asked. "I dunno. I think I fell out of bed." She didn't believe me, but she pretended she did.

To continue on with rhetorical questions, here's another one. Who cares? Note how I ended that with a question mark. Always do that. I see this one so much that I might add it to "Common Writing Mistakes" one day. I don't care how many times I see it. It's still wrong. I first had this argument in 1980 with two fellow busboys. I'll never back down. I'm edumacated.

Next week's rhetorical question... When ghosts appear in haunted house, how come nobody ever leaves? Okay, I know, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy have done that bit already, but my editor still busted me on that one in THE CHRONICLES OF A MADMAN. So, I changed it. The dude left house. If it were me, I would. Wouldn't you?

We don't always take time to say, "I've written ten active sentences in a row so maybe I'll whip in a passive one now" or "I need a beat for every X lines of dialogue." I published four novels and edited dozens more before I learned what a beat was. (It's a pause so reader can catch his/her breath.)

And, of course, since it is writing and not speaking, we can always go back and revise later. Then rely on editors to catch what we missed, or at least make us wonder why we wrote it this way instead of that way.

Some authors aren't even consciously aware of "the rules." They've never taken a class, never read a book about writing. They're simply avid readers who one day decided to write. But they've internalized rules as well. It comes from reading.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you want to write, you must read. If you don't like reading, maybe writing isn't for you. It's not about writing because you want to say, "I am a writer." It's about writing because you enjoy writing.

And, it's really nice when you've been writing for a long time to go back and read a book about how to write. You might find one or two things to tweak in your technique, as opposed to a daunting laundry list of flaws. It's much easier to internalize one or two new rules than 50 or 100!