the rules of story
ah! if you have ever wrestled with them, you must know. somewhere or somehow they exist. probably someone wiser than I has written them down, at least the ones which have pinned him and left him lame or with a withered arm. me? I still work inside them, at the edges of them, or trying to find which I can loop another way. some nights or early mornings I imagine them written in ink that flamed and burned itself into the parchment, so now you can still sometimes see a glowing coal winking from a rule, and know that there an "except" waits for some story-maker to pull it out and dance with it until the coal grows dark and the story-maker's hands are blistered and he takes what he has learned into whatever stories he writes next. I imagine them in a cave, a cave that moves from hill to hill, or mountainside to mountainside, so each time you find it by a new path. they lie there, page after parchment page of them inside a heavy leather cover, and you, brave fellow story-maker, heave open the cover and search reverently and in awe until you find the rule you have run up against. wrestle with the old language, wrest past the old-fashioned symbols and archaic grammar. somewhere in that rule is the life you need for your story, in it or in its exception.
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