Here's a question I ask as an avid reader. It's rhetorical, which means you don't have to answer it. Which is convenient when you think about it, since I won't hear you. I'm not talking to you, I'm writing. The floor is all mine.

Why is it that when someone's in a fight, and someone hits them hard enough, bright lights always explode behind their eyes?

I've been clocked a time or two. Sows, boars, horses, falling objects, falling Michael, a baseball bat, a nightstick, footballs, basketballs, baseballs, kickballs, kung fu cousin, a bad neighbor, jaws of a leaping dog. And, never has light exploded behind my eyes.

What usually happens to me at that point of impact is sensory overload. I don't feel it when a hunk of metal pops me in mouth hard enough to split my lip and break my dentures and send them across room. (The dentures, not lips.) Sensory overload. Then a couple seconds later I see damage and think, "Dang, what happened?" But in books, it's always those darn bright lights exploding behind people's eyes.

My advice to authors, then, is this. Before you write a lot of fight scenes, ask someone to punch you a few times. No, I'm kidding. No lawsuits, please.

My real advice is, avoid cliches. Don't say "a snowball's chance in hell," say "a broccoli's chance in Bush One's White House." It's original, see? And if you're going to write about something you know nothing about, please do a bit of research.

As a student of Spanish, my goal was to think in Spanish. Skip word-by-word translation so I'd have necessary speed to speak and listen. I know words in Spanish that I'd be hard pressed to translate. Usually profanity, I confess. Chingow!

For years my students here in China have studied grammar, and know it better than you or I. They read. They write. But speaking involves moving faster than that. In conversation, we don't have time to write it first and make sure it's all grammatically flawless, then read it aloud, perhaps after a bit of rehearsal.

So, I try to give them a chance to practice putting words together on fly, rules be damned. The rules they've internalized will kick in and keep them comprehensible, which will build their confidence in their ability to keep creating conversation that way.

This is not unlike what we go through as authors. First we study rulebooks, perhaps take some classes, and conclude just about everything we're is doing is wrong. So many rules to memorize. We might dread sitting down to write with all those constraints.

But really, it's not about memorizing rules at all. It's about internalizing rules, following them (or not if you prefer) without being consciously aware of what they are. They're there, but in background.