Attack of the Mamets

This is great:

David Mamet's Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit

What's interesting to me is that he's just restating the same rules of writing we've all heard before. New writers hate these rules. Just a few hours ago, I was reading a discussion elsewhere on the web where an established screenwriter was advising most dialogue needs to be trimmed down. Within seconds, he was hit with lots of new writers saying that Woody Allen and Tarantino write long passages of dialogue, so how come only new writers have to obey the 'rules'?

I've got no problem with the rules. The rules are based on thousands of years of trial and error by the writers who came before us. And yes, the first thing anyone genuinely creative wants to do is to break the rules. Which is great, if you can find a way of breaking the rules that's revolutionary and inspired. But most of the time your rule-breaking manuscript is actually just going to be boring rubbish, because the main point of the rules is to stop you making an eejit out of yourself. In fact, if you condense all the McKees and Fields and Mamets down to a single aphorism, what you get is this:

'Don't be boring'

And good luck to you if you think you can get around that rule.