Today’s panels were The Rules of Writing, Historical Research, Characterization and Writing Mysteries. Here are Michael Stackpole’s suggestions.

Rules of Writing:

1. Show, don’t tell. If you say “Bob was angry,” the reader is not engaged. If you say “Bob’s face reddened and he slammed his fist on the table” the reader must figure out what emotion is. Tell the trivial, show the significant. “On the road” chapters are pure crap (“Crap is a technical term” says Stackpole). Expand your work in the trivial sections if you need to.
2. Write before you rewrite. You can have one chapter you have revised 24 times – or you can have 24 halfway decent chapters. You only become a novelist when you finish a novel – and only a novelist can edit a book. There is no such thing as a chapterist. The end of the novel will tell you where the novel begins. Just keep pushing forward. Take notes – keep a notebook for each novel. Correcting is OK – revising is not.
3. Never settle for an easy way out. If you can say “I’ve seen this before” then make it tougher and nastier. “Cookie cutter books” are like eating potato chips – it beats not reading, but it’s just salty junk food.
4. Double-duty scenes. Every scene should do more than one thing. Characterization plus ___. “I don’t need to know you know all the colors in the crayon box.” Description should be only a couple of paragraphs to give character an emotional response. Craft materially and content dense stories. This allows readers to get totally engaged. Readers are thinking “I know how this book ends” and the author says “No you don’t.” If the author succeeds in a logical manner, the reader will come back. Toss out vital clues during an emotional scene – you can’t be logical when you’re being emotional.
5. Continuity Bolts. Llook for things you can reuse to save space for more emotion/action/etc. You can also compare new places to old places – “it was exactly like my usual bar only it had ferns.” Make the readers do all the work.
6. Dealing with “he said,” “she said.” It’s a waste of space. “They act like a big fat comma to slow things down.” Make sure each character has a unique voice. Children speak in sentences that contain roughly as many words as their age in years. Professionals develop jargon. Educated characters use long sentences and long words of Latin derivation. Uneducated characters use short sentences, cursing, of German derivation. You can have characters name each other (“Well, Mr. Wolfe…”) You can also use descriptors – “John wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘I didn’t think you’d meet me here.'” The only time you use tags is to slow down the action. “I’m glad you made it out of the sewers,” HE SAID, “because the city’s on fire.”
7. Conflict is the engine of the story. There are 5 basic conflicts: Man vs Self, Man vs Man, Man vs Society, Man vs Nature, Man vs Supernatural or Technological. (Nature has no intelligence behind the force; Supernatural has intelligence)
8. Research everything, Choreograph everything. You know you’ve done enough research when you’re using it to avoid writing. Just jot down “Explain how engine works here” and keep writing. Research includes interviewing people. Everybody wants to be in a book! They’ll tell you things they shouldn’t, too.

Characterization:

People read for characters. It’s not Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries but Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

Characterization Techniques. Stackpole says, “None of these techniques is ‘The right one.’ It’s usually a mix and match of several.”

1. Modeling: chose a real person as a model for your character (friends/family/famous person). A subcategory is physical modeling – just using a physical description of someone. Problems: a) unless you are actually writing “roman a clef” (every character is modeled on a real person but names are changed to avoid lawsuits), you may pick the wrong model for your story; b) you may adhere too rigidly to the model and stunt character’s growth; c )internal consistency suffers because you can’t tell what is in someone’s mind – people lie to themselves; d) you might hit too close to home with friends and family; e) if the model is recognized,the reader will be distracted or thrown out of story – or there might be lawsuits!
2. Archetypes: like a casting role. This is very easy to create interactions (Black Hat vs White Hat) between characters. Problems: a) inherently shallow and you have to work very hard to develop characters; b) because archetypes are so familiar, you might not push yourself hard enough to develop the characters as unique individuals; c )if the archetype is recognized, the reader will be distracted or thrown out of the story.
3. Compositing: a little bit of both of the above. Gives more depth to the characters, with strengths and weaknesses; more flexibility than strict modeling. Also good for modernizing historic figures. Problems: a it )might just not work (the mix of traits just might not logically flow, like Patton, the Drag Queen); b) you might have so much stuff that you put too much onto the page; c) you have the same problems as with modeling
4. Organic Development: character grows as story grows. The character is a good fit for the story and progresses logically. Problems: a) inherent development eats up a lot of words – you’re feeling your way through. (You’ll either have to take out all the crap or figure out how to carry it forward); b) characters may go off in different directions than what you imagined; c) sometimes a secondary character hijacks the story -you can I) accept it and write the new story, II) save the character for a different story, III) use that character to knock some edges off the main character; d) a lot of their conflict tends to be internal and you need external trigger or ways to represent conflict (have the characters react and vent).
5. Deliberate Design: these characters fit well into the story and conflicts are a lot sharper; they are highly internally consistent. Problems: characters may be too perfect – no room for growth (write the story of how they became perfect)

A Quick Technique: write two statements about the character that run in one direction, then write one statement that runs counter to those. “Blitzkrieg Characterization.” This creates an enigma and sets the hook. (“Bob always had a good word for everyone. He shook everyone’s hand and smiled. But you didn’t want him to take up the church offering.”)

The less the reader knows about the character, the better – they like discovering details. Also, don’t lock yourself in with too much detail.

Stackpole also says, “Forget the ‘fatal flaw’ – give your characters challenges instead.”

I thought you might like reading a few of the “Rules for Writing” by some of the great writers. I got a lot of these from various workshops I’ve attended through the years.

Robert Heinlein’s Rules for Writing:

• You must write.
• You must finish what you write.
• You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
• You must put the work on the market.
• You must keep the work on the market until it is sold

 

Mark Twain’s Rules for Writing:

• A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
• The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
• The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
•  The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
• When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
• When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
• When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.
• Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
• Events shall be believable; the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
• The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
• The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

 

Kevin’s Eleven: Rules for Writing from Kevin J. Anderson

1. Shut up and write!
Real writers don’t sit around for hours whining about how they’re going to write that
book once they get time
2. Defy the empty page.
Put something down … anything!
3. Dare to be bad.
Just put something on the page, darn it! Even if it’s “insert description here”!
4. Turn off the editor in your head.
Write the scene; edit it once the entire thing is done! If you can’t think of a
word, put “XXX” and fix it later!
5. Try working on different projects at the same time.
Not everyone can, but if you get stuck on one thing, sometimes it helps just to switch
over and do something else. This does NOT mean switching from writing to video games!
Go from writing to editing or proof-reading galley sheets or another project
6. Use every minute.
Write whenever you have a minute to spare; don’t whine that you don’t have the time.
Write on the underground, in the doctor’s office, or while waiting for the children to
finish their piano lessons.
7. Set realistic goals and stick to them.
Not “I am going to write 3 chapters a day” but “I am going to write X sentences or X
pages” — and then hold yourself to that promise before you go to bed!
8. Try different writing methods.
Pen and paper; talking into a recorder; computer; typewriter; whatever works!
9. Create a good writing environment.
This includes a desk/computer set-up that does NOT result in you hunching over and
getting carpel-tunnel syndrome from a poor physical design — in addition to whatever
you need in order to write (Kevin likes rock music; Rebecca likes total quiet).
10. Get inspired.
This does not mean “wait for your muse to smack you upside your head” but “go out and
learn things that will make you want to write.” The more you know about, the more you
can write about convincingly!
11. Know when to stop.
You can’t keep fiddling with the thing forever — send it out!