Hello.  I used to teach at Writers and Books in Rochester NY, and spent a couple of years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  This entry is for folks who are starting to write fiction and looking for advice and ideas to steal.   

Let's start with this: there are no rules in art.  That said, there are a lot of things that don't work.  These two thoughts live together.  They balance each other like yin and yang, like Lennon and McCartney, like liver and onions.  

But before we go further, a couple of disclaimers: I've published a book of short stories and a big novel, but for the past several years I've been working almost exclusively on novels.  So my examples and thoughts are most relevant for novel writing.  Much of that transfers to short stories.  Some of it transfers to non fiction.  Use what you seems useful and ignore what doesn't.  And feel free to challenge me on any of it.  I can't promise to answer every communication, but I'll do my best.  

That out of the way, I'll say it again:

There are no rules in art.
But there are things that don't work.  

For example, consider:
You open the door and the cool air washes your face.  Under the glow of the streetlight, three large angry white dogs are circling around Mrs Mazur.  You can see their wrinkled snouts as they pull their lips back to bare their teeth.  When Rockland said there was a coyote problem, you thought he was warning you to keep your dog inside.  You breathe a soft curse: the shotgun is in the back bedroom...

That narrator is going to get tiresome in a hurry.  After a few sentences you start resisting: I don't have a dog, I don't have a shotgun. If I saw a coyote, I'd yell my head off.  Stories written in second person rarely work.  Leave that kind of narrator for porn.  We could say it's a rule that you can't write in second person.  

But you know - somewhere in a semi-detached home in Scarborough, there's a tortured young man with terrible hair and toenail fungus finishing up a second person novel that's terrific.*  Rules in art are not so much things you can't do.  They're more 'break them if you want, but you better know what you're doing'.  Special handling is required.  

I'm pretty good at stressing this at the beginning of all my little talks on the process of artistic creation, but sometimes I forget.  That's why I'm putting it here.  if I forget later, at least I said it up front.

* If you found a second person story that works, let me know - someone must have done one.