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Looking for a little light reading/book chat/way to procrastinate whatever tasks are on your to-do list today? Head on over to the excellent Mother.Write. (Repeat.) blog, where I’ll be answering reader questions about all things books until 5pm. today.

If you have never participated in the Twitter feed #kidlitchat, you really ought to give it a shot. The discussions are always about smart topics and draw a wide range of commentators—both veterans and newbie writers, editors, agents, and the occasional gibbering weirdo. (I’m looking at you, @chrisrichman.) The tweets ratchet up the Twitter client in a fast and sometimes furious stream, so quick as to be nearly unreadable. Trying to follow the many threads of conversation is like watching three hundred tennis matches held simultaneously on the same court—there’s no way to keep the threads separate, and yet … you try anyway.

Last Tuesday night’s chat was a gem. You can read the transcript here, but the gist of the discussion was this: What qualities make a manuscript middle grade instead of teen/YA? How do you know which you have?

The answers were all interesting and, for the most part, valid. Some dismissed the categories as the joint creation of publishers and booksellers; others tied the categories to the age of a novel’s protagonist or a word count; still others quoted interesting takes from fine writers. (My favorite was Tobin Anderson’s assertion that for middle grade books, he writes to the target audience, while in teen fiction he writes from the vantage of the target audience.)

[I disagree with a simple "It's the age of the protagonist" saw, if only because there are so many examples of books that don't fit into the box. Here are four off the top of my head: Brian Hall's The Saskiad. Tony Earley's Jim the Boy. John Wray's Lowboy. Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone. The first two are definitely adult in terms of tone and interest level, while the latter two have a strong interest for teen readers and yet are determinedly adult.]

At any rate, none of the suggested criteria seemed to capture my take, which has to do more with a quality of the prose. How complex is the writing? The vocabulary? Does it spend more time on abstraction or concrete things? Does it rely more on the outward markers of experience, or is there an interiority to it? That is—is what happens to the characters’ ways of seeing as rich and interesting an element as what happens to the characters in the outward world?

[I know, I know—you're thinking, That is art, my friend—you should go into the business of creating informational visuals, because this one is about as clear as one of my Uncle Tommy's boozy stories about his time in the Navy and pushing that truck up the muddy hill and—oh, forget it.]

To my mind, there is a direct relationship to the sort of complexity I’m talking about and the age of the readership. In the chart I whipped together above, we have picture books in the lower leftmost corner (Harry the Dirty Dog, say) and in the upper right-hand quadrant, the most self-conscious post-moderni

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I was given a piece of advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. (And no, it is not to shamelessly rip off The Great Gatsby’s opening line; that I do all on my own.) The advice was this: Write a thousand words of your work-in-progress each day. No more, no less. Just a cool grand.

Here’s the why of the advice:

• A thousand words is a fair bit, to be sure. But it’s not so much that you can’t see the end of your target when you sit down to begin. It’s not so much that you can get lost in those thousand words. It’s not so much that you’ll have to set aside hours and hours of your day that really should be spent working for a living or cleaning the house or reading other people’s books or petting the cat. It’s just enough that you can do it in a good hour or so of work. That is to say, it’s eminently doable.

• A thousand words a day means you can draft the entirety of a seventy-thousand word novel in three months. Not in a NaNoWriMo blaze of ill-considered prose, but in a measured thousand-word bites.

• If you’ve noticed that my math is off in the above calculation, that’s because I’ve allowed for mistakes and blind alleys and pages that have to be burned. Did your characters lead you on a long digression that has no bearing on anything else? You can cut it easily and go back. Why? Because even if that bit is, say, seven thousand words, that’s only a week’s work, and you will quickly make up that lost time by your daily thousand words.

• After that three-month draft is complete, you can then revise the work three times in the remaining nine months of the year. Me, I rekey the entirety of the manuscript every time so that I weigh every line and nuance to make sure I want it. Other people find this tedious. But however you work, again revising only a thousand words a day, you can push through three serious revisions of your novel in the remainder of the year.

• And why stop at a thousand? This is the question I most hear from people. “I’m writing in a white heat! I don’t want to stop! I want to finish this section!” But that is precisely when you should stop. Why? Because the next day, you will know what comes next. You’ll sit down to your work and know the next page or two because you already had them in mind. And by the time you reach the end of what you’d had in mind yesterday, your head and momentum will have given you the beginnings of new material. Stopping after a thousand words ensures that you never write to the end of your inspiration and face that dreaded blank page. You leave your desk having prepared yourself for the next day’s work.

A thousand words is kind of an arbitrary number. It is the number my long-ago advisor chose, but you can adjust it to suit your needs. Graham Greene wrote exactly eight hundred words and boasted that he would stop mid-sentence when he’d reached that number. (He had a finely calibrated internal word counter, apparently.)

But he wrote every day—the set number of words—no matter what was going on in his life. Writing every single day makes it easier to beat a path to the well, makes it easier to re-enter the fictive dream of the manuscript as though the preceding 23 hours haven’t intervened. And that piece of advice—”Write every day”—is why today’s post is Rule #2.

Do you all write to set word count? Does it work for you? Or do you sit at your desk for

I was fortunate enough last summer to speak with Bruce Coville at an SCBWI event in Orlando. (He’s an amazing speaker—truly amazing—and if you catch word that he is speaking somewhere, by all means go and see him.) Bruce mentioned something he called “The Rule of Twenty.” He doesn’t recall where he picked it up—a business article? a self-help book? a primer on original thinking?—but wherever it came from, I have since relied on it and relied on it often.

What is it? Put most simply, it is this: It is only when one reaches the twentieth or so idea that one starts entering the realm of the truly original idea.

The first five or ten? Those are the obvious ones that the brain goes to along its well-traveled paths. Most people’s heads will go that way and think of that thing. (Are you disappointed when you can see the plotline of a movie from a mile away? That’s thanks to the filmmakers working the shallows of the Rule of Twenty.) In the teens, you are starting to bushwhack into uncharted territory, where most people’s brains rarely go (because they are not as focused on craft as, say, a writer is). But by the time you hit twenty, you’ve likely discarded all the obvious and nearly obvious, and now you are working in a territory that is peculiarly yours. Those ideas you’ve worked toward will have the snap of the real and a complexity that speaks volumes.

Bruce was talking about the naming of things—characters, realms, books, what-have-you. Names are hugely important in fiction, of course, and our most beloved writers are masters of naming. But naming is about much more than simply giving a place or a character a telling handle, it is also the way the writer establishes his or her authority, where the writer becomes the author, if you will. Is the name too simple? Too easy? Too telling? Does it have hidden qualities?

Can you imagine Dickens without Magwitch or Havisham or Pecksniff? Rowling without Hogwarts or the Weasleys or Snape or her latinate spell names? Dahl without Trunchbull or Augustus Gloop? Pullman without the aletheiometer or Iorek Brynison or places like Bolvangar? The naming here does important work—so much so that a lot of exposition can be left out. Thanks to etymology, we know that “panserbørne” in The Golden Compass means more than simply “armored bear” (the Danish translation)—we hear echoes of Rommel’s panzer division, and there is an instant military air to the term. (That children won’t necessarily hear that, but that’s okay—the name is dark and rich and has extra dimensions folded within it.)

But naming is only one part of it: The Rule of Twenty can and should be used to consider plot twists and any other part of writing a story when you suspect you may have taken a too-easy route. Chances are that you have. So push yourself, reach that twentieth idea that is yours and yours alone, and see what you end up with.

Are there other rules that you use to ensure you’re being as original and creative as you can be? What are they? I’m going to try and add regular posts here under the rubric “The Rules” that collect some of the most useful ideas, and we can all use the help!