One of my favorite recent finds online is TV Tropes. It’s a wiki which describes themes that are common in TV shows, but often these themes generalize to other forms of fiction. Germans Love David Hasselhoff has implications far beyond the Baywatch star, for example. That’s pretty interesting to me, since I’m fascinated by what I think of as the rules of art.

I’ve written before that there are some surprising similarities among the disciplines of software, literature, and progressive organizing. To the degree these disciplines are similar, it follows that the rules which govern one field should apply in some cases to the others. Techniques which work for writers may be helpful to software organizers and programmers and so on. So it is useful to ask: what are those rules?

There is relatively sparse writing about the rules of writing fiction. Kurt Vonnegut’s list of eight rules of writing is a classic example, as is On Writing by Stephen King. It may seem silly to compare these pillars of modern fiction with a volunteer-run wiki about an art form which can be worse than mundane. For better or for worse, TV Tropes is a fascinating artifact that because it’s a database of rules for fiction, and an accessible one at that. The best comparison I can find for a database of literary rules is the Dictionary of Symbolism, which is unfortunately rather limited in both usability and content. What’s more, TV Tropes usually does attempt to draw connections well outside the relatively limited world of TV fiction. If this list of “Germans love Hasselhoff” examples from the world of mythology and religion does not fascinate you, then you may be a lost cause!

I like to think that there’s more potential in a database of the rules of fiction, though I confess I’m at a bit of a loss to say what that potential is, exactly. In the meantime, I’ll say that it’s a pretty great rabbit hole to explore from time to time.