Ringo's Rules

Three pieces of writing advice.

1. All characters should have a character trait.
2. There should be a sensory word on every page.
3. In an adventure/thriller story, there should be a crisis every thousand words.

If you actually manage all three, you're a cross between Lois Bujold, Poul Anderson and David Drake.

Vonnegut's rules for writing

From Thought Capital (hat tip: TomB), here are Vonnegut's rules:

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.

Self editing

From Five Secrets to Freelance Success:

It’s almost impossible to proofread your own work, but you also want to submit the best copy or article (or report to your boss) that you can.

Here’s how I get around that:

If I have an assignment due Tuesday morning, I take one last look at it Monday night, then sleep on it.

On Tuesday morning, I open the Word doc and immediately change the size and type of the font.

If I wrote the article in Verdana, I change it to a serif font like Times, then bump it up two sizes.

I may even switch the text to blue, green, or red.

This tricks my brain into reading the piece as if for the first time.

Faces of Fantasy

An essay by Neil Gaiman

THESE ARE NOT OUR FACES.

This is not what we look like.

You think Gene Wolfe looks like his photograph in this book? Or Jane Yolen? Or Peter Straub? Or Diana Wynne Jones? Not so. They are wearing play-faces to fool you. But the play-faces come off when the writing begins.

Frozen in black and silver for you now, these are simply masks. We who lie for a living are wearing our liar-faces, false-faces made to deceive the unwary. We must be- for, if you believe these photographs, we look just like everyone else.

Protective coloration, that's all it is.

Read the books: sometimes you can catch sight of us in there. We look like gods and fools and bards and queens, singing worlds into existence, conjuring something from nothing, juggling words into all the patterns of night.

Read the books. That's when you see us properly: naked priestesses and priests of forgotten religions, our skins glistening with scented oils, scarlet blood dripping down from our hands, bright birds flying out from our open mouths. Perfect, we are, and beautiful in the fire's golden light...

There was a story I was told as a child, about a little girl who peeked in through a writer's window one night, and saw him writing. He had taken his false-face off to write and had hung it behind the door, for he wrote with his real face on. And she saw him; and he saw her. And, from that day to this, nobody has ever seen the little girl again.

Since then, writers have looked like other people even when they write (though sometimes their lips move, and sometimes they stare into space longer, and more intently, than anything that isn't a cat); but their words describe their real faces: the ones they wear underneath. This is why people who encounter writers of fantasy are rarely satisfied by the wholly inferior person that they meet.

"I thought you'd be taller, or older, or younger, or prettier, or wiser," they tell us, in words or wordlessly.

"This is not what I look like," I tell them. "This is not my face."

Subplots

Howard "Schlock Mercenary" Taylor, on Subplots

Garden pool

The hill was wooded, but the woods had been cleared of brush and made into parklands. It was open and airy, which looked pretty but was worrisome; he dared not be seen here. He wouldn't have to rustle through thickets, or keep his bow from catching on brambles, which was good; but if there were guards and foresters here, they could be equally quiet, which could be very bad. Nothing he could do about that, though; he couldn't even be as careful as he'd like, because going slowly was just as likely to get him trapped as going noisily. Down the slope from the crest he found a spring, a good sign. A little rivulet flowed from it; he followed it down, stepping from stone to stone, hoping the noise of the water would mask his steps. Within a hundred yards, two other streams had joined it. Past floods had carved the banks waist high; if he kept low and avoided loose rocks, he could stay hidden.

He stepped carefully, testing each stone to see whether it would slither out from under his weight. The banks were moss and roots and raw red earth; the stream ran over quartz sand and smooth stones. The woods thinned out as he went farther down. There was a line of white flowered trees ahead, at the edge of a cliff, and the rush of a waterfall plunging into water. He crept into the shadow of the broad limbed white trees and looked down. The rock face was only ten or twelve feet high. At the base was a paved pool, set in a meadow; and in the pool was an unclothed woman.

He settled his back against the tree trunk, and looked away from her long enough to search for other watchers. The pool was a circle cut by the cliff, twenty yards wide and walled with pink stone blocks. The area surrounding was a manicured lawn, edged with rose bushes. No one else in sight except the woman.

He let his eyes rest on her. Her hair and eyes were dark, her skin was the color of a fawn. The water was waist deep on her. She glided smoothly back and around, her fingertips trailing through the water and the white petals. He watched her for a long time.

Writing a character

Don't put yourself into your character's situation. Put your character into your character's situation, and let him do what he would do.

If the character goes into the basement of the deserted house and finds it full of rats, I would leave. But the character might get a crowbar and wade in. Or he might get a shotgun out of the back of his car. Or he might burn the house down. Or hire someone else to go open the door at at the bottom of the basement. Might get a 55 gallon drum full of cats and roll it down the stairs. But if you write what you would do, and you aren't the protagonist, then you're going down the wrong path and wasting your typing.