Early in 2013, I’d reached a milestone; I’d written about a dozen books (my mind is going so I’m not sure quite how many), and the latest one was out there looking for a publisher. Despite my early success, the last five or six had been so far off beam that they hadn’t had a hope of finding a publisher. I decided to reteach myself the rules of writing, so I started to write down what I believed they were and stick the list up above my desk. Here, with some later refinements, is what I wrote. (You can believe the rules, or dismiss them as you choose; Rule 1 explains just how flexible they are).
1. The ‘Rules of Writing’ function like social etiquette.
a) The rules aren’t really rules, but until you indicate otherwise, the reader assumes you are well mannered and expects you to follow them. While you are following the rules, the reader will helpfully adding things you haven’t actually written, if they are generally expected.
b) Most of the best writing follows most of the rules most of the time. Controlled rebellion attracts the biggest crowd. Writing that follows all the rules all of the time is boring, and just as unattractive as writing that doesn’t follow any of them.
c) When you break the rules, people are going to notice and pay special attention. At that point, you’d better be saying something important.
d) Remember, in terms of social etiquette, the guys (boys or girls) we respect most are the ones who act like gentlemen/ladies until they get really passionate about things they want to say.
2. Real life doesn’t have a plot. Stories do.
a) At some level, a story needs to feel real, or at least, allow the reader to buy into its reality.
b) Just because something feels real doesn’t make it a story.
c) Stories have a clear chain of cause and effect. Part of the reason people read fiction is to get a look at a clear causal chain without the interference of random variables that always cloud the issues in real life.
d) It’s the author’s duty to balance 2a and 2c, avoiding 2b.
e) 2c is why you can do things with writing that you can’t do on film. In film, you’re forced to put a complicated image to every scene. In writing, you can focus on just a few intimate and important details that are the crux of the story. Good writing can act like a crucible that burns away all the stuff that doesn’t really matter. In this sense, fiction is truth.
3. Readers ‘anticipate’ the story they’re going to read.
a) Your reader will assume certain things from the opening (and the blurb on the back of your book) that allows you to use ‘shorthand’ appropriate to the genre you’re writing in. This allows you to leave out things that the reader will otherwise think of as boring (see Rule 1a). It also allows you to play with the reader’s preconceptions if you are clever.
b) If the beginning says ‘Thriller’ and you deliver ‘Comedy’, or vice versa, your reader will hate you, even if you’ve written ‘Bridget Jones’ or ‘Catch 22’. The same rule applies to mixing other genres and sub genres, and especially to authors who switch ‘genre types’ half way through. (For example, writing something that seems like its alternating the chapters of ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Ulysses’ won’t work, even though both of them are great books, and even readers who like both books won’t like yours. Their hatred will have nothing to do with your rampant plagiarism.)
c) Readers in the developed world have been brought up on stories that follow the pattern of the Hero’s Journey (see the work of Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler). They’ll be looking for deviations, even though they’ll probably be doing it unconsciously; you’d better make your deviations convincing and meaningful, otherwise you will fall foul of 1c.
4. Readers know who’s telling them the story.
a) Readers are sensitive to changes in point of view. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t change point of view, only that you’d better have a reason for doing it.
b) If you do use multiple points of view, readers hate it if one point of view is more interesting than another.
c) Point of view doesn’t just mean who is telling you the story, but in what context they are telling you. For example, if I’m telling you about my childhood, it matters not only how old I am in the story, but how old is the voice I’m using to tell you the story. Am I telling you in the present, a few minutes after the event, or on my death bed as an old man/woman? It also matters if I let you deep into a character’s mind one minute and then hold you at arm’s length as an outside observer the next.
5. Everything you write is part of the narrator’s point of view.
a) The narrator can’t see themselves smile (unless they are standing in front of a flat shiny surface, or they are an alien with eyes on long stalks). Neither can they see what’s happening in the next room, or what someone right in front of them is thinking.
b) It’s a very unusual narrator who smells the beautiful fragrance of lemon trees or spots the light dew on the grass whilst plunging down the slope of a ravine. Similarly, characters shouldn’t notice the wine-red spike-heeled Jimmy Choo’s on the woman who’s about to shoot them, unless the narrator is trying to make a very specific point about a character’s obsession with fashion, or the threatened shooting is part of some elaborate sexual foreplay.
6. Real characters rarely talk in the same style as the narrator writes.
a) This rule applies even if the narrator is the character talking (unless –of course – the narrative style of the book is also supposed to represent the author talking directly to the audience; for example, as it does in ‘Catcher in The Rye’.)
b) Real characters don’t talk like other real characters either. They each talk differently with their own pattern, accent, and favourite phrases.
c) Real characters don’t always talk in full sentences, and the more stress they are under, the less coherent they become (See 8e).
7. People don’t hear dialogue at the same speed as they read it.
a) Generally, people reading books (or watching movies, for that matter) tend to compress their sense of time. This means that conversations feel much, much longer to the reader when they are written down. If you want to make your conversations feel natural to the reader, you have to make them shorter than they are in real life.
b) A corollary of 7a is that, if you write down what real people might actually say, readers will think it both unrealistic and boring. They’re 50% wrong, but they’re the customer and being accurate isn’t going to get you published unless you pay for it yourself.
8. People in conversations usually have their own agenda.
a) Real people don’t often answer the question or address the point that the other person is trying to ask or make, so don’t have your characters slavishly answer questions that are put to them directly, unless the answer they give is unexpected or absolutely necessary for the plot. (For example, to the question ‘how old are you?’, ‘I am fifty-three years old’ is a boring answer to get in a book. Why did the author bother to write it out in full? On the other hand, ‘I am fifty-three centuries, two years, eleven months and 3.2763 seconds’ is not a boring answer, even though it’s considerably longer, because it says something important and unexpected.)
b) Real characters often give a more telling answer by answering a question with a question (For example: ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Why the hell would you ask that?’)
c) Don’t shy away from having a character change the subject in the middle of a speech (if it’s appropriate to their agenda), or begin a speech addressing a completely different subject from the one the last speaker was talking about.
d) If you are clever, you can play with this misalignment to make subtle points about your characters, their own objectives and motivations, and about their relationship to the other person or persons in the conversation.
e) If you are tremendously clever, you can even use changes in a character’s responses and speech patterns to convey their current mental state (e.g. rational vs. irrational; ‘attentive to the other person’ vs. ‘away with the fairies’).
9. Your readers have an imagination and they want to use it. Only stop them if you have to.
a) Don’t describe your characters more than is necessary to establish them as individuals (For example, a wart on their nose or the slight asymmetry of their eyes is often enough.)
b) Only add more detail if it’s important to the plot or the theme. If someone’s physical beauty is important to what happens to them, or who falls in love with them later on, then describe it; if it isn’t, don’t. (For example, Fitzgerald gives extended and often-beautiful physical descriptions of nearly all the main characters in the Great Gatsby, except the mysterious Gatsby himself.)
c) Features you don’t mention when the reader first meets a character are like facts you don’t mention to the police when they first arrest you. They are very prejudicial if introduced later on. If Joe appears on Page 1, your reader will know exactly what Joe looks like before you mention his wavy hair on Page 10. This will only prove to the reader that – as author – you have no clue what Joe looks like.
d) 9c often gives you a problem. You don’t want to slow down your opening with a long description of your main character, but on the other hand you want your reader to have some idea what he/she looks like. Tough! You have to make a decision on this.
10. Pace matters.
a) The climax of any book (or scene) tends to happen faster than the rest. Therefore, describing it in more detail because it’s important tends to be a mistake, unless you’re trying for an effect similar to the slow-motion scenes in ‘The Matrix’.
b) The climactic parts of the story tend to work best with shorter sentences, faster chops between subjects, and even – dare I say it? – a suspension of the normal rules (see point 1c).
c) It’s often a good trick to have described any place you are going to use in the climax of the book earlier on. (You’ll see, in many published books, that you get taken somewhere in an early chapter and that the ‘somewhere’ is described in unusual detail; this is often a big clue to where the climactic scene is going to be located).
d) There’s nothing wrong with having a slower scene just before or after a climactic one; it’ll make the climactic scene seem better, but be careful you don’t overdo it (see 10e).
e) Finally (and, yes, I stole this one from Elmore Leonard), try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.
