Agentese

Having worked for a couple of years in a literary agent's office, this gives me a warm feeling of nostalgia (or perhaps that's just my mouth filling with blood).

Actually, that entire site is filled with things that got said pretty much every day, as the mail got opened. The most important thing a writer needs is a clue. Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.

Oh, and know that the best way to get your foot in an agent's attention is to work for one for a while. (Crosses self, says a prayer of thanks, knocks on wood, throws salt over shoulder...)

Speaking of advice, I came across this, Elmore Leonard's rules for good writing. Most of them are the standard, "don't be one of them lit'rary types, and no showin' off" kind of thing. The same kind of thing (and in a couple of cases, the exact same advice) that Stephen King gives here and in On Writing. On the other hand, I really liked Leonard's quoting one of his own characters, a writer of historical romances who says she writes books full of "rape and adverbs."

I immediately thought that we do that kind of thing a little differently in Canada: most of our earnest, middlebrow, "major" novelists keep the adverbs but lose the rape.