The Rules According to Aristotle (Derived From Poetics)

1. Do not try to make an epic into an essay or short story.
2. Every story must necessarily fall into two parts—complication and unraveling or dénouement.
3. The writer must avoid the two essential faults of creative writing—those that touch its essence (incompetence) and those that are accidental.

4. The plot should have a beginning, middle, and end, and thus resemble a living organism in all its unity.

5. The beginning and end of the story must be capable of being brought within a single view or theme.
6. Plot should be arranged on the complex plan, one in which change of fortune takes place through reversal of situation, recognition, or both and includes scenes of suffering.
7. The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but from good to bad.
8. Plot can consist of either a single thread or double thread in which an opposite ending occurs for the good and bad characters.
9. Characters and action should be the mimesis of a praxis, and therefore, must of necessity imitate one of three objects: things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be.
10. Plot should imitate actions that incite pity and fear—pity as aroused by unmerited misfortune, and fear by the misfortune of a character like ourselves.
11. This character must be someone who brings misfortune on themselves, not through vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.
12. First, sketch a general outline, then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
13. The writer must focus on the action in the story and the part taken by the characters and not drift off in several lines of action carried on at the same time.
14. The writer should put the scene before his or her eyes, as if he or she is an actual eyewitness to an event happening while writing.
15. The writer should act out his own story to the best of his power.
16. The element of the wonderful is required in tragedy.
17. Absurdity should be veiled with the wonderful.
18. The writer should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.
19. Do not obscure character and thought by over-brilliant diction.
20. Above all, the writer must remember that story is an imitation, not of people, but of action and life, of happiness and misery; without action there cannot be story, although there may be one without character.

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