olsen

Carefully follow what most handbooks on writing fictional tell you, and chances are you'll end up producing a nice, tight, well-crafted story that could have been produced just as easily in 1830.

You'll end up producing a story where language is transparent and fictive focus falls on your protagonist's psychology. Your character will be rounded, resonant, believable, and usually middle or lower-middle class. Your setting will probably be urban or suburban and rendered with the precision of a photograph. The form of your story will be so predictable as to be virtually invisible: it will have a beginning, a muddle, and an ending thorugh which your rounded resonant character will travel in a fairly limited amount of strictly structured chronological time in order to learn something about himself, herself, or his or her relationship to society or nature.

(Lance Olsen, Rebel Yell: A Short Guide to Fiction Writing, p. 3)