Should a certain writing style be pushed by authors and teachers as embodying good writing and equivalent to following grammar rules? This week’s Culture Alliance Fiction Friday newsletter featured some very different opinions on this topic.  Numerous notable authors, including Richard Ford, Neil Gaiman, Roddy Doyle, and P.D. James, provide writing “rules” inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. Elmore’s Rules begin with: 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

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