Archive for 2013

The Rules by Padgett Powell

Believer: The Rules? I’m intrigued.

Padgett Powell: Rule 1 is The Gosling Rule. The story concerns the first thing the reader sees move. Rule 2 is that the problem, or the apparent and necessarily related problem, must appear soon, in the first paragraph if not the first sentence. Rule 3 is a complex function [wh = f(c1,c2,c3... + e + t)] involving withholding. Rule 4 is the bar test: everything must be said more or less as if you might say it to a stranger in a bar. Rule 5 is the doozie quotient. Rule 7 is the 3 Questions: Did it, could it, should it happen? Before any of these rules apply the writing must place itself unmurkily on the spectrum of credulity.

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posted in epigraphs by practice .

The essence of furniture is unstable…

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A page from The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. First published in 1934, translated from the original Polish by David Magarschack.