8 Rules for Writing Fiction and 13 Writing Tips (.hack//DIVERGENCE Subplot)

Title: 8 Rules for Writing Fiction and 13 Writing Tips
Description: by Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk

Jpec07 - October 15, 2009 08:15 AM (GMT)

Here's something I stumbled upon that I thought worth reposting here. Enjoy!

QUOTE

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

EDIT: Another one! Here:

QUOTE

Twenty years ago, a friend and I walked around downtown Portland at Christmas. The big department stores: Meier and Frank… Fredrick and Nelson… Nordstroms… their big display windows each held a simple, pretty scene: a mannequin wearing clothes or a perfume bottle sitting in fake snow. But the windows at the J.J. Newberry's store, damn, they were crammed with dolls and tinsel and spatulas and screwdriver sets and pillows, vacuum cleaners, plastic hangers, gerbils, silk flowers, candy - you get the point. Each of the hundreds of different objects was priced with a faded circle of red cardboard. And walking past, my friend, Laurie, took a long look and said, "Their window-dressing philosophy must be: 'If the window doesn't look quite right - put more in'."

She said the perfect comment at the perfect moment, and I remember it two decades later because it made me laugh. Those other, pretty display windows… I'm sure they were stylist and tasteful, but I have no real memory of how they looked.

For this essay, my goal is to put more in. To put together a kind-of Christmas stocking of ideas, with the hope that something will be useful. Or like packing the gift boxes for readers, putting in candy and a squirrel and a book and some toys and a necklace, I'm hoping that enough variety will guarantee that something here will occur as completely asinine, but something else might be perfect.

Number One: Two years ago, when I wrote the first of these essays it was about my "egg timer method" of writing. You never saw that essay, but here's the method: When you don't want to write, set an egg timer for one hour (or half hour) and sit down to write until the timer rings. If you still hate writing, you're free in an hour. But usually, by the time that alarm rings, you'll be so involved in your work, enjoying it so much, you'll keep going. Instead of an egg timer, you can put a load of clothes in the washer or dryer and use them to time your work. Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dish washing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur. If you don't know what comes next in the story… clean your toilet. Change the bed sheets. For Christ sakes, dust the computer. A better idea will come.

Number Two: Your audience is smarter than you imagine. Don't be afraid to experiment with story forms and time shifts. My personal theory is that younger readers distain most books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter. Movies have made us very sophisticated about storytelling. And your audience is much harder to shock than you can ever imagine.

Number Three: Before you sit down to write a scene, mull it over in your mind and know the purpose of that scene. What earlier set-ups will this scene pay off? What will it set up for later scenes? How will this scene further your plot? As you work, drive, exercise, hold only this question in your mind. Take a few notes as you have ideas. And only when you've decided on the bones of the scene - then, sit and write it. Don't go to that boring, dusty computer without something in mind. And don't make your reader slog through a scene in which little or nothing happens.

Number Four: Surprise yourself. If you can bring the story - or let it bring you - to a place that amazes you, then you can surprise your reader. The moment you can see any well-planned surprise, chances are, so will your sophisticated reader.

Number Five: When you get stuck, go back and read your earlier scenes, looking for dropped characters or details that you can resurrect as "buried guns." At the end of writing Fight Club, I had no idea what to do with the office building. But re-reading the first scene, I found the throw-away comment about mixing nitro with paraffin and how it was an iffy method for making plastic explosives. That silly aside (… paraffin has never worked for me…) made the perfect "buried gun" to resurrect at the end and save my storytelling ass.

Number Six: Use writing as your excuse to throw a party each week - even if you call that party a "workshop." Any time you can spend time among other people who value and support writing, that will balance those hours you spend alone, writing. Even if someday you sell your work, no amount of money will compensate you for your time spent alone. So, take your "paycheck" up front, make writing an excuse to be around people. When you reach the end of your life - trust me, you won't look back and savor the moments you spent alone.

Number Seven: Let yourself be with Not Knowing. This bit of advice comes through a hundred famous people, through Tom Spanbauer to me and now, you. The longer you can allow a story to take shape, the better that final shape will be. Don't rush or force the ending of a story or book. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes. You don't have to know every moment up to the end, in fact, if you do it'll be boring as hell to execute.

Number Eight: If you need more freedom around the story, draft to draft, change the character names. Characters aren't real, and they aren't you. By arbitrarily changing their names, you get the distance you need to really torture a character. Or worse, delete a character, if that's what the story really needs.

Number Nine: There are three types of speech - I don't know if this is TRUE, but I heard it in a seminar and it made sense. The three types are: Descriptive, Instructive, and Expressive. Descriptive: "The sun rose high…" Instructive: "Walk, don't run…" Expressive: "Ouch!" Most fiction writers will only use one - at most, two - of these forms. So use all three. Mix them up. It's how people talk.

Number Ten: Write the book you want to read.

Number Eleven: Get author book jacket photos taken now, while you're young. And get the negatives and copyright on those photos.

Number Twelve: Write about the issues that really upset you. Those are the only things worth writing about. In his course, called "Dangerous Writing," Tom Spanbauer stresses that life is too precious to spend it writing tame, conventional stories to which you have no personal attachment. There are so many things that Tom talked about but that I only half remember: the art of "manumission," which I can't spell, but I understood to mean the care you use in moving a reader through the moments of a story. And "sous conversation," which I took to mean the hidden, buried message within the obvious story. Because I'm not comfortable describing topics I only half-understand, Tom's agreed to write a book about his workshop and the ideas he teaches. The working title is "A Hole In The Heart," and he plans to have a draft ready by June 2006, with a publishing date set in early 2007.

Number Thirteen: Another Christmas window story. Almost every morning, I eat breakfast in the same diner, and this morning a man was painting the windows with Christmas designs. Snowmen. Snowflakes. Bells. Santa Claus. He stood outside on the sidewalk, painting in the freezing cold, his breath steaming, alternating brushes and rollers with different colors of paint. Inside the diner, the customers and servers watched as he layered red and white and blue paint on the outside of the big windows. Behind him the rain changed to snow, falling sideways in the wind.

The painter's hair was all different colors of gray, and his face was slack and wrinkled as the empty ass of his jeans. Between colors, he'd stop to drink something out of a paper cup.

Watching him from inside, eating eggs and toast, somebody said it was sad. This customer said the man was probably a failed artist. It was probably whiskey in the cup. He probably had a studio full of failed paintings and now made his living decorating cheesy restaurant and grocery store windows. Just sad, sad, sad.

This painter guy kept putting up the colors. All the white "snow," first. Then some fields of red and green. Then some black outlines that made the color shapes into Xmas stockings and trees.

A server walked around, pouring coffee for people, and said, "That's so neat. I wish I could do that…"

And whether we envied or pitied this guy in the cold, he kept painting. Adding details and layers of color. And I'm not sure when it happened, but at some moment he wasn't there. The pictures themselves were so rich, they filled the windows so well, the colors so bright, that the painter had left. Whether he was a failure or a hero. He'd disappeared, gone off to wherever, and all we were seeing was his work.

Stane - October 15, 2009 07:03 PM (GMT)

QUOTE

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

That's the rule I take most to heart - bundled with the one about wasting readers' time. Good list.

Wren - October 15, 2009 08:27 PM (GMT)

QUOTE (Jpec07 @ Oct 15 2009, 01:15 AM)

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

First, I'd like to say that I agree with most of the rules in the first 8. I think they're great things to keep in mind when writing your stories. Much of these 8 rules have been reiterated in books on writing and by English composition and creative writing teachers across the nation. Good advice is most oft to be repeated, and ought to be.

Second, I haven't had time to go over the second section in its entirety, but I'll probably get to that tonight after class.

Now, these last two rules that I've quoted above I take some issue with. I guess I'll go in numerical order to preserve sanity. "Write to please just one person." While, as far as the stratification of writing genres goes, this is relatively sound advice. If you're going to write a fantasy novel, stick somewhere within the precepts of the fantasy genre, if you leap in to a pacing reserved for drug-store romance novels, or start introducing those kinds of characteristics, you're liable to alienate your reader.

However, as a general rule for writing fiction? I disagree. If you write to only please one 'brand' of person, you're only going to get that one audience. Genre-crossing can be a good thing. You can have a murder-mystery within a fantasy setting, and still call it a fantasy novel. Or you can include political intrigue, akin to Tom Clancy, but within a fantasy world with many other characteristics. Should you want to write a suspense/horror novel, what would be more satisfying than setting up a romance amid all the mystery suspense only to axe one of the characters near the end (remember a previous rule? Be a sadist)?

There are many books that fall WITHIN a genre that have elements from other genres, and appeal to a broad audience. Similarly, what about the so-called "Great American Story"? There are plenty of novels out there that appeal to a wide, wide variety of people from all walks of life. They're written for that broader audience, and many different people can connect to the story and characters in different ways. It's specifically written that way. That's almost the definition of a classic story: one that has broad appeal and such a fundamental connection with readers that it can be re-read far in the future and still hold its context.

There are many different people in the world; there are many different tastes. No one person has one and only one taste. So perhaps it's impossible to follow this rule? To write to just one [type of] person would mean writing a novel with such an amalgam of genre characteristics that it would most likely literally appeal to one person.
You.
You might as well copy that story to a floppy disk and shove it in the top drawer of your desk. Nobody will read it, or much less buy it, but you'd at least be following that rule.

"Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible." I'm going to distill this rule down to just that one sentence. Now, you could argue the definition of "as much ... as possible as soon as possible," until we're both blue in the face. I'm going to take the definition of, "tell them everything that's relevant just before or just as it becomes relevant." I think that's a fairly good interpretation, and based on the sentences that follow the first in this rule, it seems to strike the heart of the author's intention.

The main problem with this is that you cannot build tension or suspense this way. Sure he says to forget suspense. Nonetheless, you're in a constant fight with your reader. They're giving you their time, and in turn you must give them a reason to turn that page! If you're going to bombard them with facts and information and descriptions, especially descriptions of small, seemingly-insignificant things that may prove relevant later (and by the way, by taking the time to go to an in-depth description of something you draw attention to it, thus underlining its importance later. If you want something to go unnoticed, dedicate little time to it), you're going to bore your reader in to another book, or worse, in to television.

Sure Charles Dickens did it. The first fifty to hundred pages were laborious descriptions of characters and scenes that the story would take place in. But, let's be honest, you're not Charles Dickens, are you? I didn't think so.

There's no interaction with your story on the part of the reader if you spoon-feed them information. I don't know about the rest of you, but many of the best books I've read have left a lot unsaid, relying on the reader to put the pieces together for themselves. It is that hint of discovery that makes the book fresh and interesting, and worth a second, or third, read.

For example, Stephen King's The Dark Tower series (yes, yes, I know. Some of you hate King. Deal with it). It takes several reads to understand everything going on in those novels. There's much foreshadowing in early novels to events in later ones. There are a lot of mysteries proposed that are never quite answered, only hinted at repeatedly throughout the books. Only the diligent, critical reader will figure them all out. Personally, I also derive the most joy from these little discoveries. Just the fact that the author can hint at something, and then hint at it again, only for me to figure out what's going on just before it happens, or as it happens; it puts you on the same page as the author, connects you. It's an electric experience, surely. If you don't hint at, but show or tell, all the the information, you're doing your reader a disservice. They are people, they can think for themselves.

Let them.

Those are just my two cents on the matter. You are, as always, at liberty to decide for yourself. ^_^

Sekai - October 16, 2009 03:30 AM (GMT)

QUOTE (Jpec07 @ Oct 15 2009, 01:15 AM)

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

*cackles*

...what? Don't look at me like that, I'd never torture, inflict harm of any kind, be a sadist to any of my characters. Ever.

Might not wanna stand by me next time I'm outside, pretty sure that qualifies me for the Lightning Bolt from God category on that one.

QUOTE

Number Five: When you get stuck, go back and read your earlier scenes, looking for dropped characters or details that you can resurrect as "buried guns." At the end of writing Fight Club, I had no idea what to do with the office building. But re-reading the first scene, I found the throw-away comment about mixing nitro with paraffin and how it was an iffy method for making plastic explosives. That silly aside (… paraffin has never worked for me…) made the perfect "buried gun" to resurrect at the end and save my storytelling ass.

I did this last night and realized I didn't actually give those who read what had been written any confirmation on a rather key point in something I worked on. Adding to that in the form of it being a rather key and irreplaceable part of the characters in question development and story wise? That was a pretty big "Whoops" and "Hey... that could be used later on. Epic." realization for me. Sometimes rereading things will give you more ideas than trying to force a concept on the characters.

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