1 Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”

3 Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”.

5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”. This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

According to a 2008 study in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, older patients do not do as well as younger ones.  The study found that 63 percent of patients over 55 were still alive five years after their transplant, 48 percent survived a decade, and 35 percent lived 15 years.  Younger patients’ survival rates are higher.

This is controversial enough, but then the political pundits jumped in.  Someone asked whether Cheney had a heart to start with, and another person wondered who would want to donate it.

According to Kent Sepkowitz, an infectious disease specialist writing for The Daily Beast, Cheney’s surgery was performed at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia, where Cheney had had previous surgeries.  Sepkowitz points out that different medical centers determine their own criteria for transplant candidates, and that advanced age might exclude a person at Inova.

According to available, federally mandated records, (see http://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/organDatasource/centerDataSelect.asp), we can see that as of March 23, 2012, 31 people are on Inova’s heart transplant list.  Of these, 3 are over 65. You can also see that in 2011, two of the 19 people transplanted were at least 65 years old.

Cheney waited 20 months for the transplant, so who knows whether he leapfrogged other, younger patients.  His health was rapidly deteriorating.  What do you think?  Do you think Cheney’s surgery reflects well on health care in America?

Hang in there while I learn this system.  I’ll have plenty of things to say in a short while.  Meantime, send me comments about the best books you’ve read so far this year.  I’m finishing Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, and I love it!

A hui hou,

Debby