With a tip of the hat to Elmore Leonard and The Guardian, we asked the writers of the eight books on our 2010 Canada Also Reads list to provide us with their own personal rules for writing fiction. To start the series, Leon Rooke:• Overcome your fear of the page.  The bare page is your best friend.• Slam a first line onto that page.  Insure that this line invites a second and that  the second invites a third. By this time you should be grasped by the lure of what is to become “the story.” • Observe that most story masterpieces, in one form or another, are faithful to  journalism’s “Who, What, Where, When, Why” approach.  (“Mother died yesterday.  Maybe it was the day before.” – Camus.)  Most of these are struck in the opening paragraph.  The “How” might be viewed as the manner in which the story unfolds.• Throw out any lore you might have received about writing “what you know.”  This is deadly, crippling advice.• Characters you have invented are willing to help you advance your story, if you will allow them to.  (“Good morning, Ms Character.  How was your night?  What do you want? Why did you get us in this predicament?”)• Yes, it is nice if you develop a style recognizably your own.  But before this transpires you should have within your arsenal the ability to lay down reams in the style of a Faulkner, a Saramago, a Hemingway.• Avoid clichés in language, subject matter, and delivery.• Kafka wrote a perfectly fine beginning to The Castle, then threw it out for a better one.  So can you. Revise.• If you are a novice writer there is no reason you can’t write 25 story beginnings before you go to bed tonight.  Or complete full drafts of three radically different stories tomorrow, or another six the next day.   Leon Rooke's The Last Shot (Thomas Allen Publishers) is available now, and will be defended in The Afterword's Canada Also Reads by Jacob McArthur Mooney.