9. Conclusion

There are no rules in writing, even if I've sometimes talked as if there were. Whenever someone says, "This is a rule," you can find a masterpiece that breaks the rule with wonderful results.

But even if there aren't rules, there are techniques you can learn...and some techniques have a better track record than others. For example, the approach I described for writing descriptive passages usually works better than simply listing one detail after another. This isn't always the case, but it's true often enough that you should add the given technique to your repertoire.

I've mentioned "repertoire" a number of times throughout this seminar. It's a useful concept. You never know what skills and techniques you may someday need in the course of your writing—maybe you'll need to write a fight, maybe you'll need to be funny, maybe you'll need to make a scene deeply tragic—so you want to extend your repertoire to include as much as possible. Be able to do everything; then if the need arises, you'll be ready.

In particular, you have to know how to string words together to achieve various effects. I haven't said a thing about developing plots or characters—maybe some other time. But having a great idea is useless if you can't express the idea in words and sentences and paragraphs. As my Great-Uncle Fred used to say:

It's not enough to know a joke. You have to be able to tell the joke.