If you’re anything like me, you’re always on the qui vive for a way to help you over your second act hurdles, or enliven your stilted dialogue, or punch-up some punchless characters. In brief, you’re a sucker for any article you stumble upon with a title such as:

“Five Rules for Creating Suspense (Doled Out One Day at a Time)”

or:

“7 Things the Fiction Writer Can Learn from the Pre-Socratic Philosophers”

There’s just something irresistible about an article that promises to deliver the Long Lost Secret of the Incas in a handful of bullet points.

Speaking of the Long Lost Secret of the Incas, David Mamet claims to have definitively located the Long Lost Secret of the Incas–that is, the secret to writing successful fiction–in three simple questions that any author must answer for himself:

Who wants what from whom?

What happens if they don’t get it?

Why now?

These questions are as good as any I’ve found. But the problem is, answering them is notoriously difficult, and so I often find myself running back for help in some “How-to” article. I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with this. After all, I’m sure even Shakespeare nicked one or two useful items from

“3 Things To Do with Your Melancholy Protagonist When He Refuses To Perform His Princely Duty and Knock-Off His Usurping Uncle”

1. Get him monologuing

2. Introduce a play-within-a-play

3. More monologuing

But bullet points, just like bullets, can be taken too far. Fiction does have its rules–or better, principles, as Robert McKee calls them in his book, Story. But because fiction is an art, the closer the practitioner stays to the “stuff” of his craft the better. Discussion of principles in the abstract must always be balanced by the study of actual specimens.

That is why I love the approach in novelist David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction. In these fifty short pieces, originally published in The Independent on Sunday in the UK and The Washington Post Book World in the U.S., Lodge teaches the art of fiction by putting before the reader specimen after specimen as illustrations of one or other aspect of the craft.

For example: Jane Austen and Ford Madox Ford on “Beginning”; George Eliot and E.M. Forster on “The Intrusive Author”; Thomas Hardy on “Suspense”; James Joyce on “Interior Monologue”; Henry Fielding on “Showing and Telling,” et cetera.

The result is fifty master classes that show the principles of excellent craftsmanship embedded in their proper context.

Indeed, Lodge’s approach is so good that I think I’m going to steal from it here at The Comic Muse. Why should Lodge have all the fun?

Oh. And as for the “10 Simple Ways to Eliminate Simplistic Rule-Following from Your Writing,” they’re right there in your hands. Use those ten digits to order, or to pick up again, Lodge’s delightful book.