Why I Love Mark Twain

In an essay ripping Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, Twain wrote a long list of writerly do’s and don’t’s (“offenses against literary art”). Here are a few, abbreviated.

Some are helpful, some are just funny.

Take note, all.

The Rules of Writing (or the “Rules Governing Literary Art”) require

• That the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
• They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
• They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
• They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
• They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a… minstrel in the end of it.
• They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
• They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the “Deerslayer” tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
• They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

• Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
• Use the right word, not its second cousin.