"Fiction that isn’t an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money."

That's Rule 2, my favorite of Jonathan Franzen's "10 Rules for the Novelist" — an excerpt from his new collection of essays "The End of the End of the Earth," which is one of the books I'm reading these days.

For some reason, I always read Jonathan Franzen's essays, but I have never read one of his novels. The main novelist I've read in the last year is Haruki Murakami. I've read 4 of his novels this year (plus a short story collection). Franzen's Rule 2 sounds very much like what Murakami does, something I like.

Anyway, Franzen's "10 Rules" — published at lithub, linked above — has been "gleefully trolled on Twitter" according to The Guardian. None of the trolling is good enough to quote, but obviously, one idea is to produce your own list, but since you're on Twitter, you won't have enough room to write a list of 10. And most of what passes for trolling is writers showing they're hostile to (i.e., envious of) Jonathan Franzen.

Most of the "trolls" (i.e., irritated, envious writers) don't really get the spirit of the 10 rules, which I presume are inspired by the famous "10 Rule of Writing" by Elmore Leonard. The titles are not identical. Leonard has "of" where Franzen has "for." That slight difference makes it slightly less likely that Franzen was directly appropriating Leonard's idea. Oh, no, wait. It's more different. Franzen's title is "10 Rules for the Novelist." That explains the "for" instead of "of." Franzen is offering rules to a type of person. Leonard sees rules arising from and inherent in the activity.

Franzen has spoken positively about Leonard elsewhere, in a lecture "On Autobiographical Fiction" ("Farther Away: Essays" (pp. 129-130)).

The point at which fiction seems to become easy for a writer... is usually the point at which it’s no longer necessary to read that writer. There’s a truism, at least in the United States, that every person has one novel in him. In other words, one autobiographical novel. For people who write more than one, the truism can probably be amended to say: every person has one easy-to-write novel in him, one ready-made meaningful narrative. I’m obviously not talking here about writers of entertainments, not P. G. Wodehouse or Elmore Leonard, the pleasure of whose books is not diminished by their similarity to one another; we read them, indeed, for the reliable comforts of their familiar worlds. I’m talking about more complicated work, and it’s a prejudice of mine that literature cannot be a mere performance: that unless the writer is personally at risk—unless the book has been, in some way, for the writer, an adventure into the unknown; unless the writer has set himself or herself a personal problem not easily solved; unless the finished book represents the surmounting of some great resistance—it’s not worth reading. Or, for the writer, in my opinion, worth writing.

Ah, you see: There's the idea in Franzen's Rule 2. Right next to the name Elmore Leonard. I'm 99.9% sure that Franzen's "10 Rules" is his variation on Elmore Leonard. It even tracks Leonard's combining big rules and small rules. Franzen's Rule 2 is a big rule, but he also has a small rule, Rule 3: "Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose...." Leonard's smallest rule is #6, "Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose.'" A big Leonard rule is #10, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

I've written about Leonard's rules before. Here's my "Suddenly, 10 things."