Rules of Writing

I love books. I can't live without them. To me, Heaven would be some kind of giant library with no late fees. Every time I see a book store my heart skips a few beats, I could live in one, surviving off words and coffee shop cookies. The only catch to this is that the book has to be written well.

I read a book (let it go unnamed) two years ago, this book had no plot until the last fifty pages (It was like six hundred pages long) and that plot was resolved by a small prank that was hardly related to the first five hundred pages and wouldn't really solve anything. This book violated my first rule: A book must have a catchy and relevant plot.

My second rule nixes out many other books: The plot and characters of a book must be original, or at least not extremely similar to another author's ideas. Have you ever noticed how after a novel sells extremely well and gets a large fan base many other authors write books with similar plots and characters? Take The Lord of the Rings for example, many fantasy novels have elves dwarves(Tolkien invented this spelling of the word) and hobbits fighting alongside humans, all of which were used in J.R.R. Tolkien's great work. Another book like this is Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling's novel was hugely popular, but soon after it came out a whole new wave of fantasy had wizards and witches battling it out. My last example is Twilight, though I have never read it, I have nothing but respect for the series. The same cannot be said for the many new vampire novels, they use Stephenie Meyer's type of vampire in their own romance novels.

My third rule is more for a case-by-case basis: swearing in books should be kept at a minimum, should be used only when necessary, and there should be limits: some language hurts the story rather than helping it. I am currently reading an anthology of short stories, the stories are well written, but the F-word just keeps popping up. This type of vulgarity makes me pop out of the story to think: "Did it just say that?", which makes me get lost for a few sentences afterwords. This is an example of going to far. Other word choices would be better