Tetragrammaton.

Tetrackermit. I was a reporter, newspaper man, in a first career.

The first thing that I got told by an editor was, these vivid verbs, not weak verbs,

like instead of walked, if I'm using tripped along, all of a sudden now I've got a very specific notion of the character right and so that was the first rule I learned about writing not a grammatical rule but a rule for once that I had a sentence that was grammatical how I could punch it up so that the reader would be persuaded to follow along and see something novel or interesting in it.

And so that one rule really got me going and really helped my writing for a long time.

And then gradually over the years, I picked up other rules, and eventually I had more than 30 of these rules that I had

collected over 30 or 40 years.

And I realized there are a whole lot of lists of rules for better writing.

Elmore Leonard has one.

Hemingway had a famous one.

Kingsley Hamas had one. all these, but they were usually

just eight or ten rules. Hemingway's case, I think it was four rules, right? And I was like,

yeah, but they're 30 of them. I mean, I know 30 of them. And I realized there wasn't a book that

had all 30 of them that I had noticed, right? And I'm sure there are more. And I thought, well, okay,

I've got this list. I wonder if I could turn it into a book. And what I did was for each one,

I just wrote a kind of stream of consciousness essay about the rule. And I ended up with,

I don't know, I think at first 18,000 words.

And I went to Annie and I said, hey, I've been working on this.

It's not a book.

It's just not long enough.

You know, it's a brochure.

I still think there's a book in here somewhere.

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