Rules of Writing? Rubbish

I have found in several how-to-write books statements such as, "Your novel should begin with a one-sentence paragraph," "No paragraph in a story should contain more than four sentences," and so on. Rubbish! Such "rules" originated in periodicals printed in columns - newspapers, pulp magazines, The New Yorker - which really do have to break the fight grey density of the print with frequent indents, large initial caps, and line breaks. If you publish in such periodicals, expect to let the editors add breaks and paragraph indents. But you don't have to do it to your own prose.

"Rules" about keeping sentences and paragraphs short are mechanical spin-offs from journalism and a highly artificial school of "action" writing. If you obey them, you'll prob-ably sound like second-class Hemingway. If that's what you want, that's how to achieve it. To me it's only worse than sound-ing like first-class Hemingway. But then, it takes all sorts.

from Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew by Ursula K. Le Guin