Franzen by Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Jonathan Franzen is an author who is, shall we say, outside my normal reading circles. I primarily know him as a guy who loves to give boilingly hot takes that rile up every corner of writing social media. But in addition to several novels, Franzen also has a list of writing rules, putting him in the company of names like Kurt Vonnegut and Neil Gaiman, whom we’ve looked at before. I haven’t been especially impressed with similar lists of rules in the past, but maybe Franzen will be the one to break that streak. Anything’s possible!
The First Rule
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Darn. I was all set to snark, but this is actually something a lot of writers need to hear, at least the first two clauses. I have encountered a surprising number of writers, both published and not, who seem to view their audience as an enemy to be outwitted. This typically manifests as an obsession with subverting the audience’s expectations, regardless of what effect this has on the story. I’ve also encountered authors who wanted to kill a character off, not because it was the best choice, but because they knew the character was popular.
This type of behavior has always baffled me because I think the vast majority of writers want people to enjoy their stories, whether those stories are super light and fluffy or the darkest of horror. If you don’t want people to enjoy your stories, then Mythcreants probably isn’t for you – but neither is any other writing advice. For everyone else, it pays to occasionally remind ourselves that we are writing for the reader’s benefit. Twists and subversions can be great, so long as they provide a more satisfying experience rather than a less satisfying one.
Granted, I’m not sure what’s going on with that third clause. “Friend” and “adversary” are fairly exclusive, but a reader could easily be both a friend and a spectator. And from a literal perspective, all audiences are spectators unless you’re writing interactive fiction or running a roleplaying game.* More figuratively, it could be about making your story as immersive as possible, which is usually good advice. If that is what Franzen meant, then he probably should have saved it for a separate rule, as a story’s immersion level isn’t strongly connected to whether the author is at war with their own readers. Even so, we’re off to a great start!
Conclusion: Useful, with an unrelated bit at the end.
The Second Rule
Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
Well, it was nice while it lasted. Now it’s time to dive headfirst into the deep end of “what the heck does this mean?” Since writing a book isn’t typically dangerous to one’s health, I can only assume that Franzen is referring to fictional topics that the author doesn’t have much experience with and is nervous about. That’s certainly… a take I should have expected from someone who lambasted the Audubon Society for caring too much about climate change.
I hope it goes without saying, but in case it doesn’t, fiction doesn’t have to meet some threshold of fear to be artistically valid. Telling a good story is always a worthy endeavor, and one of the many ways to do that is by leveraging your existing expertise. A big draw for the Lord of the Rings is the way Tolkien used his skills as a linguist and classicist to breathe life into Middle-earth. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that speculative fiction is richer for his choice to do that instead of going for something totally unknown.
The last bit of this rule is especially telling. If your story is artistically bankrupt thanks to using your existing experience, then clearly its only value is money. That’s rich coming from someone like Franzen, who has made a whole lot of money from his books, but the problem is bigger than him. Despite the basic fact of writers needing to eat, a lot of people still think that asking for payment makes the writing less pure somehow. The sooner we drop that idea, the better. Writers deserve to be paid, as do artists in every other medium!*
Conclusion: Utterly worthless.
The Third Rule
Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
We’ve moved on from abstract pontification about the value of art and into an extremely specific rule about which words you can and can’t use for a conjunction.* Now, I’m a content editor, which means my eyes start to glaze over at anything zoomed in beyond the chapter level. But I pay attention to the more wordcraft-minded folks on this site, so I’ll do my best.
If it’s been a while since your last Schoolhouse Rock rewatch, a conjunction is a word like “and,” “or,” or “but” that connects two parts of a sentence. For example:
- Maybe I shouldn’t take this rule so seriously, but I am.
- I’m going to finish this list, and I probably won’t enjoy it.
Franzen really doesn’t want you to use “then” in place of the more common conjunctions, going so far as to call it lazy. It’s very hard to judge this rule because there are lots of different kinds of conjunctions, and for some of them, “then” works just fine. However, I’m guessing he’s specifically referring to coordinating conjunctions, the so called FANBOYS: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.
In that specific situation, it’s true that “then” will usually feel awkward. But for that very reason, I’m hardly convinced that there’s a plague of stories using “then” in place of a FANBOY, so it feels like a solution in search of a problem. Either way, Franzen is making a mountain out of the smallest of molehills, then we’re all getting worked up about it.
Conclusion: Useless pedantry.
The Fourth Rule
Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
I’ve met a lot of people with very strong opinions on third versus first person, but I’m here to let you in on a secret: there isn’t usually much difference between them. If you’re writing a limited narrator with an unfolding premise, then you’re using the narration to show the protagonist’s inner thoughts either way, and the only distinction is whether you use the “I” pronoun or not. That can make a difference but not a huge one. Mostly, having “I” at your disposal means less pronoun confusion but with the tradeoff that you can’t as easily deploy the protagonist’s name to break up repetitive pronoun clusters.
Of course, first and third person can diverge significantly in more specialized cases. First-person retelling is a type of narration where an older version of the protagonist is telling the story with the benefit of hindsight, and that would be very difficult to replicate in third person. Likewise, it’s extremely difficult to make omniscient narration work in first person, as it raises too many questions about who the “I” is and how they know so much. But even with these divergences, the two points of view can be extremely similar.
All this is to say that you shouldn’t pay too much attention when someone makes grand statements about which viewpoint is better, and that includes this rule. You can choose whichever one works for you, and you don’t need to hold out for the most distinctive voice imaginable to try first person. Experiment and see which one you like!
Conclusion: Totally useless.
The Fifth Rule
When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
I’m still scratching my head at how someone could think that research is less important because information is more freely available. If we accept that the internet has changed research’s importance at all, surely it would be in the other direction. It used to be that if you were writing about Australia for an American audience, almost none of your readers would actually know anything about the land down under. These days, any random hooligan can hit up Google and point out that the Emu War didn’t actually feature emus riding tanks.
It’s an open question whether the internet has actually made people more knowledgeable in aggregate, but regardless of the answer, research is just as important as it ever was. Most obviously, research helps you to avoid mistakes. If your book is set in Chicago, a Seattleite like me probably won’t notice if you get your Great Lakes mixed up, but residents of the Windy City will be on you in a hot second. Research can also help you avoid more serious mistakes, like using figures from Native American mythology and belief systems as urban-fantasy monsters.
Just as importantly, research helps you to make a story more immersive and grounded. A big draw of books like The Martian and The Calculating Stars is the complex detail they portray about the American space program. The Broken Earth’s magic system really comes to life when Jemisin unleashes her stores of geological knowledge. The Temeraire books wouldn’t be the same without Naomi Novik’s many tidbits of Napoleonic lore. And it’s not just for worldbuilding either! Can you imagine how much worse The Good Place would have been if the writers hadn’t done their philosophy research?
Naturally, there is a point where you have to stop researching and start writing, but that doesn’t seem to be what this rule is about. Instead, it reads like a lazy excuse. “Everyone has an internet connection, so I don’t have to do my due diligence anymore.”
Conclusion: Useless at best; technophobic at worst.
The Sixth Rule
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
This rule tells us how Franzen feels about autobiographies: extremely whimsical. So whimsical, in fact, that I’m having trouble decoding what this rule even means, which is becoming a pattern. On its face, it feels like one of those gotcha linguistic paradoxes like “this statement is false.” You must make a lot of stuff up to write an autobiographical story, but if you do that, then it’s no longer autobiographical. WHERE IS YOUR LITERARY GOD NOW?
Applying a more charitable lens, I think the idea is that if you want to tell a story based on your own life, you need to use really creative analogies rather than using literal events from your life. In this reading, Gregor Samsa turning into a huge insect is a metaphor for how Kafka felt in his own life, possibly channeling experiences of alienation from his family or from Bohemian society in general. I don’t know nearly enough about Kafka’s life to say whether that’s a fair reading or not; I’m just trying to give Franzen’s rule the best spin possible.
Assuming I’m right, that’s certainly a valid way to weave your personal experiences into a fictional story, but it’s hardly the only way, or even the most “pure” way. You could also incorporate details in a more literal manner, like the town you grew up in or the time a badger got loose at your school dance. A word of caution: unless you’re writing an actual autobiography, I strongly recommend obscuring personal details so it isn’t easy to recognize real people in your story, as that can lead to a lot of blowback.
With so many ways to incorporate autobiographical details into fiction, declaring one true way is reductive at best and nonsensical at worst. The purpose of this rule seems more to trip people up than to help them be better novelists.
Conclusion: Too whimsical to be a useful rule.
The Seventh Rule
You see more sitting still than chasing after.
This rule is less writing advice and more something you would find after googling your horoscope. Let’s see, I’m a Pisces, so that means my confidence will return to help me make correct decisions quickly, and I’m a novelist, so that means I see more sitting still than chasing after. It’s perfect! I can’t imagine why more people don’t phrase their advice this way.
Okay, fine, I’ll try to extract some meaning from this rule. After staring at it for a while, which might qualify as sitting still or chasing after depending on your definition, the best I can manage is that it might be advice to contemplate a problem until a solution comes to you rather than actively pursuing different ideas. I guess that could count as a rule if you’re willing to do some serious definition stretching.
At best, this is more whimsical process advice. Sure, plenty of people have good results from just sitting with their thoughts until they have a cool idea or see a new way to solve a vexing issue. Neil Gaiman is apparently a big fan of that strategy. But for other people, and I count myself among them, such stimulus-free contemplation just makes the brain buzz grow louder until it drowns out everything else. We need a little something just to keep us focused, whether that’s scrolling social media or actively considering how to interpret weird writing advice. One day, writers will learn that not everyone can use the same process, but it is apparently not this day.
Conclusion: Useless, even if you can decode what it means.
The Eighth Rule
It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Hey folks, I think I’ve figured out why Franzen doesn’t like doing research! If you’re not allowed to turn the wifi on while working, then research probably means a trip to the local library, which could involve meeting strangers or even making small talk with them. Gross. On the bright side, Franzen’s failure to use gender-neutral language means this rule only applies to us dudes, so anyone with a different set of pronouns is free to have as much internet as they like!
For the he/hims among us, this appears to be a hyperbolic admonition against spending too much time scrolling social media or binging the Mythcreants archives. And with Franzen’s general crankiness about the internet, I’m guessing “too much” equals any amount of time greater than zero, so we can safely file this one along with all the other instances of people shaking their fists at digital communication. Plenty of people spend more time scrolling than they probably should, but a blanket scolding isn’t going to help them stop any more than it helps to tell people they should “write better.” It’s also incredibly easy to get distracted and procrastinate even without an internet connection, though at least then you can sometimes parlay putting off your novel into a clean living room.
Taken literally, this rule is even more amusingly wrong. A number of successful writers are very online these days, either because they have to be for marketing purposes or because they enjoy it, and it doesn’t seem to have made their fiction any worse. I suppose those are all philistine genre writers and not high-culture literary authors like Franzen, which only makes them better company in my eyes.
Conclusion: Useless and reductive at the same time.
The Ninth Rule
Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
Did an interesting verb take your lunch money in middle school, Franzen? Is that what’s going on? The further we get into this list, the less effort appears to have been put into each one, though this rule does break the mold a bit by being extra self-contradictory, so that’s fun.
If we want to do a lot of extra work on Franzen’s behalf, this could be a warning against using more unusual-sounding verbs when they have a connotation you don’t want. For example, “saunter” is often listed as a synonym for “walk,” but you shouldn’t write “Erica sauntered across the room” unless you want to give the impression that Erica is making a big show of crossing the room. Sometimes new authors do reach for unusual-sounding words when they really shouldn’t, so this can be valuable advice.
On the other hand, sometimes an unusual verb gives exactly the connotation you want, and in that case you should have at it. Maybe Erica is feeling particularly dramatic or confident as she crosses the room in this scene, in which case “sauntered” is the perfect verb to use. Similarly, “sleep” is a serviceable verb, but sometimes you want to communicate that a character is sleeping deeply. In those cases, “slumber” is your friend. Picking the right verb can save you a lot of words that you’d otherwise have to spend describing a character’s action, making your prose much more efficient.
Giving writers a blanket warning against “interesting” verbs is very silly, and that’s assuming I’m even close to the mark on what Franzen meant by “interesting.” Maybe he has his own rubric for which verbs are interesting but also not interesting.
Conclusion: Too broad to be useful.
The Tenth Rule
You have to love before you can be relentless.
In this final entry, Franzen is determined to stick with his pattern of not giving us rules we can confidently define, which makes a cynical kind of sense. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Mythcreants, it’s that being specific only makes it easier for people to disagree with you. If you stay as vague as possible, your critics have nothing to grab for their arguments, and the only downside is that you never say anything important.
Anyway, back to this rule. My best interpretation is that it’s referring to the different states of mind required for writing a story versus revising one. For a lot of writers, it works best to love their writing unconditionally during the drafting phase, as that’s how they push past the blank page and get words on paper. Once the draft is finished, they can transition into relentlessly culling all the beautiful darlings that don’t serve the story.
That interpretation is all well and good, but once again, it’s the dreaded process advice. It might seem universally applicable for someone to write without any kind of inner censor, then turn on their editing brain later, but it’s not universal at all. For a lot of people, the revision process is so difficult that they have to do everything they can to minimize it; otherwise, all their stories will end up in the trunk. For people like that, it can pay to be selective earlier in the process, weeding out ideas until they’re left with the stories that will require the least revision. Giving these people a pretentious version of “write drunk, edit sober” doesn’t help.
And that’s assuming you even read the rule the same way I did. For all I know, this could be life advice to find a loving partner before relentlessly pursuing your career goals. Who’s to say?
Conclusion: Really testing how many ways I can find to say “vague and useless.”
Out of ten rules, only one is at all useful, giving Franzen a whopping 10% usefulness rating. That’s actually the worst so far, which is something of an achievement. Half the list is extremely vague process advice, while the other half is bizarrely strong opinions over minor issues like what kind of conjunction or viewpoint to use. Once again, Kurt Vonnegut remains the champion with his ability to give useful advice about half the time.
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Geez, that makes me think I should write down my rules of writing, too.
1. You need to be a reader before you become a writer.
2. Don’t try to write books in a genre you don’t like.
3. Experiment until you find the process that works for you, but never think it’s going to stay that way forever. Things change.
4. Wordcraft is important, but should play the second fiddle to the story.
Haha! Better than Vonnegut’s!
That’s good. Regarding 3, Ramsey Campbell has a different process for writing fiction and nonfiction – hardly surprising – but there was one story of his (A Street Was Chosen) that wouldn’t come together until he applied his nonfiction process to it (it was written in the manner of a report summing up some very unethical experiments).
Maybe another rule should be “Don’t emulate SunlessNick when it comes to sentence length.”
My 3. comes from the fact that I used to be a discovery writer who couldn’t put a story down if she’d planned it out in advance, but now is doing a tight plotting for every scene before she starts writing a story. Writing processes can change as your skill level does and it pays to remember that and check the process over every now and then.
Certainly better than the ones we’ve been looking at!
Good start.
These articles have me preemptively plotting my own list of writing advice so that if I ever get well known enough to be asked for one, I can ace the eventual review here. :P
It’s always good to be prepared
Let’s try a rule that applies to stories in general: Every story worth telling must have a believable problem for the protagonist to solve. The protagonist must struggle with that problem throughout the story.
And from a literal perspective, all audiences are spectators unless you’re writing interactive fiction or running a roleplaying game.
This seems like a death of the author reference to me.
If your story is artistically bankrupt thanks to using your existing experience, then clearly its only value is money.
It also has a nasty implication for marginalised authors who write stories deriving from their experiences.
These days, any random hooligan can hit up Google and point out that the Emu War didn’t actually feature emus riding tanks.
The emus still won though.
All audiences are spectators, all authors are specters (cause they’re dead)
Wow. What a load of crap.
Being generous, I can also interpret rule #10 into some semi-useful advice about characters: getting to know them, making them memorable and deep, building attachment to them before you make them suffer just for angst. But Franzen said nothing about characters in his other rules, so that’s probably a stretch.
And with everything going on in the world today, any “anti-research” or “anti-information” stance just makes my eyes roll.
telling people to research less is a major WTF moment in this list.
It rather sounds like he’s been snobbish about research and access to information; it’s less valuable because more people can do it.
It’s not even a rule. It’s an opinion that doesn’t even automatically suggest a course of action, like many of his “rules”.
Well, it’s not Leonard’s rules, so at least Franzen doesn’t expect us to look up one particular author we’ve never heard of to try and figure out how they defy the rules and write good fiction despite *gasp* HAVING AN INTERNET CONNECTION.
Did he…. seriously just forbid doing research for your writing? That might be some of the absolute worst advice I’ve ever heard. Worse than “Said is dead”.
He’s certainly not fond of research.
Regarding #2, I’ve never understood why “safe bets” are so often vilified. If an author writes something following patterns of what’s reliably popular or has a well-established audience, rather than something bold and experimental, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re writing without passion or sincerity and are solely interested in profit. Sometimes I write stories I’m confident will have an audience simply because – brace yourself, this is pretty shocking – I think people will enjoy them.
#3 is a weird one to include as a rule for novelists. As you pointed out, using “then” in the egregiously awkward contexts is probably fairly rare since it’s as awkward as it is – it comes across more as a personal pet peeve than as a basic rule. Like, it annoys me every December when people talk about “Santa Clause,” not realising that it’s only spelled that way in the context of a movie where it’s a pun, but I wouldn’t include it in my top 10 pieces of advice.
What really bugs me about #4 is that it seems to imply a distinctive voice is only necessary for a first-person perspective. Guess what, if you write in the third person with a bland, artificial voice and without any differentiation in narrative voice when focus shifts between characters, that’s going to be bad too.
#5 seems not only useless, but profoundly backwards. Logically, the free and readily available wealth of knowledge accessible to everyone should raise pressure to do at least basic research, since there’s no excuse not to. Part of the reason Shakespeare loved to use foreign but still European locales as settings for plays, such as Illyria, Venice, Verona, Denmark, etc., was that most people would know nothing of these places, thus he didn’t need to worry about accuracy. That wouldn’t work today, because many people would know at least a little about these places, so if you get something profoundly wrong, not only are more people likely to notice, there’s also really no excuse.
#8 could be interpreted as an admonition against procrastination, but if so, its wording is very inaccurate. It’s absolutely true that when I have fewer opportunities for distraction, I get a lot more writing done. However, I don’t think it’s better or worse than when I write with more distractions or procrastination – it just happens more quickly. “A writer is defined by writing, not by checking Facebook” might be a more precise reminder, but still pretty unhelpful.
#1 is solid advice, the problem with #9 is obvious in its oxymoronic phrasing, and I really can only guess what the rest even mean.
Having observed some patterns, I now give you…
ROSE KEITH’S RULES FOR WRITING WRITING RULES
1: Never sacrifice clarity for brevity. Advice isn’t useful if people have to debate what it means, no matter how snappy it sounds.
2: Make clear distinctions between subjective process advice and universally applicable rules; both can be useful, but it’s important to clarify which are essential to follow and which are simply something to try.
3: Refrain from stating the obvious without anything new to add. If someone is at the stage of looking for writing advice, they probably already know not to keep a thesaurus right beside them so they never use the same word for “said” twice.
4: Prioritise. If you’re doing ten rules or fewer, ask yourself if each one is really important enough to be on the list. Minor nitpicks are generally out of place.
5: You should usually avoid saying “always” or “never.” Most rules will have some exceptions, and the broader the rule, the more frequent the exceptions.
6: Sometimes you can’t really figure out why your writing works, or at least not how to put it into words, and that’s okay. It’s better to be honest (and in the process serve as a little lesson on the subjective nature of the writing process) than to make up fanciful-sounding stuff which doesn’t work and makes you sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Sometimes the smartest thing you can say is “I don’t know.”
I think #3 is mostly there because its one of Frazen’s bugbears and he didn’t want a chance to complain about it to slip by. The idea that the third most important thing to know about writing is what conjunctions annoy this one guy is kind of funny though.
Rose Keith —
I think you’re absolutely right with #6. Sometimes successful writers — successful anythings, really, don’t know why they’re successful.
The best players don’t always make the best coaches. The best actors don’t always make the best acting teachers.
I see it all the time in the business space. People luck into one or two good decisions, and now think they know something important about business. And that all their other decisions about business are also going to be good.
I’ve been reading a lot of writing advice recently (Mythcreants being by favorite by far!) and also writing a lot of book reviews, focusing on sci-fi and fantasy. In the past, I used to only read — and review — books that I liked. But for the past few months I’ve been doing the top ten list on Amazon’s free sci-fi and fantasy shelf every single week. So these books are popular. Popular enough to make it to the top ten list. Some of those authors are on this list regularly. And the books break all the rules. All the books break all the rules all the time. If an author does follow a rule it seems to be almost like a coincidence.
I used to think that I could tell the difference between a “good” book and a “bad” book. But now I’m starting to feel that the best I can do is tell you whether I like a particular book or not. And, more than that, whether I like a particular book RIGHT NOW or not. Because tomorrow I might change my mind.
In particular, I’m noticing that when I dislike a particular book, I’ll explain that I don’t like it because it breaks basic writing rules. But then the next book might break all those rules, and I’ll like it anyway, and then I’ll come up with some other reasons why I like it.
I don’t like “The Three Body Problem” because its too slowly-paced and the stakes aren’t clear. (Lots of people like it, though, and think it’s an absolutely great book, so clearly I don’t know what I’m talking about here.)
But then I’ll pick up another book — say, a cozy murder mystery where the murder doesn’t happen until half-way through and the stakes are ridiculously low — and I can’t get enough of it and read all 20 books in the series.
The other week I read 11 books in Michael Anderle’s Kurtherian Gambit series. The characters are all identical, never face any serious opposition, and the women are written as though the author has never met one (though he thanks his wife for her help in the author’s note, so I guess he must have). These books probably break every single rule of writing novels anybody’s ever come up with. The main feature of them seemed to be that the protagonists got to buy lots of expensive things and wear brand-name clothes. I couldn’t stop reading them.
Then there are books like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Gray that I find completely unreadable, and would have advised their authors not to even try selling them. Clearly, nobody should ever listen to anything I say ever again.
Does writing advice even matter? Is there even such a thing as a “good” book or a “bad” book? Or any way to know if a book is even going to sell, or not going to sell?
In Hollywood, we regularly see examples of studios spending millions of dollars and putting their best directors and actors into projects that are total flops. If they can’t figure it out, with all the resources at their disposal, how can anyone else?
Is there any hope at all for writers? Is there even such a thing as good writing? How do you tell? And what difference does it make? Critically-acclaimed books don’t necessarily sell better than ones that are universally planned. And critics themselves are notorious susceptible to trends, biases, peer pressure and other irrelevant factors.
I’m an editor at my day job (I edit news, business and technology journalism mostly) and I don’t have this issue with non-fiction writing.
But with fiction I’m at a stage of throwing up my hands and saying, “Nothing matters. It’s all meaningless. Nobody knows anything.”
Oren — How do you guys deal with this? Is there an answer?
Thanks!
So the answer is that stories get popular for any number of reasons, and if you understand how storytelling works, you can usually drill down and see why.
With The Three Body Problem as an example, the thing people really seem to like about it is the portrayal of its aliens. And fair enough, they’re very weird and different compared to the aliens in most popular stories, so their novelty is very high. The mystery of experimental results coming back wrong also seems to have resonated with a lot of science enthusiasts. And since most people aren’t storytelling experts, they transfer their enjoyment of those elements onto the other parts of the story, assuming that if the aliens are good, the slow plotting and low urgency must be good too.
You can see this pattern with most “bad” stories that become popular. Usually there’s one or two specific things about them that people really like. For all its faults, Twilight does a good job channeling the weird emotions of a teenager’s first obsessed love. Red Rising appeals to both people’s general desire for revolution and white dude’s ever present desire to be better than everyone else, which is enough to make it popular despite a laughably weak plot. In other cases, a book just happened to come along when demand for it was really high. Often, these factors combine.
Writing advice is important because there’s no way for writers to plan for that kind of success. It’s extremely unlikely that most storytellers will be good enough at one aspect of storytelling to make up for weaknesses in others, so the best path is to be better across the board.
>a cozy murder mystery where the murder doesn’t happen until half-way through and the stakes are ridiculously low
The thing to remember about a cozy is that since you know there will be a murder you’re already gathering clues, and you have the tension about knowing that someone WILL die
As for low stakes, as long as you like the characters and/or are invested in solving the mystery, that’s all you need. In fact, higher stakes might ruin your enjoyment
Midpoint murders are also not unusual in classic and cosy mysteries. Tension comes as much from wondering who will die and who will have done it as it would come from investigating the actual murder.
Having thought for a while, I have come up with my own sets of rules for writing that I have decided to mercilessly steal from Mythcreants(and Star Trek). I call them… The Vulcan Dictates of Poetics.
1: Each character’s major actions must either flow inexorably from their established motivations or aid in establishing such a motivation.
For example, a dedicated research scientist’s actions upon discovering a new species of sentient alien should either involve attempting to learn as much as possible about their culture and biology, thus reinforcing their established motivation of learning, or said actions should introduce and support a different motivation, such as courting favor with their leader in order to escape the grasp of the scientist’s tyrannical monarch.
2: Each character must have a balance of candy and spinach. This balance manifests as an approximately equal distribution of positive and negative traits(although you must take care when assigning negative traits, as you want your characters to be likable), as well as successes that truly move the plot forward and failures which actually cause setbacks as are appropriate to their skills and motivations.
Thus, a skilled knight might fail in defeating her sworn enemy in a duel, thus losing her right to command her castle and guard. Later, however, said knight may challenge her sworn enemy to another duel and, using information gleaned during and after their last duel, defeat her enemy and take back what is hers.
3: Each character must have and/or be actively developing at least one skill that is directly relevant to the plot of the story.
Thus, in a story of wizardly political intrigue, a massively physically strong trained warrior with few social skills would likely be out of place unless it was established that said character was training to become a wizard and/or a politician, and thus is developing a skill set that is of use to the story. There are, of course, other ways to render such a character of use to the story, but this is, I believe, the easiest.
4: Each story must involve characters of all or most societal groups, including, but by no means limited to: women, persons who do not identify with the gender and/or sexuality that society expects them to, persons of color, persons of Asian or Pacific Islander descent, persons who lack money and/or a consistent home, persons who are neurodivergent, and persons who are physically disabled in some way(these people should not spend the story searching for a cure for their disability). This is in the interest of equalizing the power imbalance that exists between such people and the white, male, fully abled, cis-straight, neurotypical persons who have the majority of power within society as it is.
Thus, a band of heroes coming together to free the land from the rule of an evil lich might be composed of: an ADHD knight who is a female person of color, a lesbian wizard in a magical flying wheelchair, a dashing trans-man rogue and his husband, a Pacific Islander who is an expert in medicine.
5: Your villain may either be sympathetic and potentially redeemable or they may be utterly ruthless and terrifying, killing and capturing anything they can, so long as it is in their best interests. They may not be both. A villain who kills a helpless and/or innocent character, or who commits a major atrocity such as mass murder, or who commits a crime such as rape(although it is best not to include such crimes at all) is irredeemable. Such a villain might survive the story, but must be fully defeated by the conclusion of the story.
For your villain to be redeemed, they must have a reason to be redeemed. Perhaps General Quickmarch believes that they are doing the right thing by attacking Citytownvillageton because they believe that it is a stronghold held and controlled by villains and by attacking and killing the protagonists and their friends, they will be liberating the populace of Citytownvillageton rather than dominating it. Therefore, to redeem General Quickmarch, you would first have them realize that their course of action is wrong. Then they would take action to stop the siege, and rebuild the town, along with issuing a sincere formal apology, in which they offer no excuse for their actions during the siege. Afterwards, they work with the leaders of the town to prevent something similar happening again. Thus, they are redeemed, in the eyes of the audience at least.
6: The tone of your story shall be consistent with its content.
Thus, a story similar in tone to the original Star Wars trilogy shall not have explicitly shown decapitations, eviscerations, and other forms of extreme physical violence. Nor shall it have images such as piles of dead bodies or deceased young children shown. Such images are inconsistent with the tone of the story and thus injure it.
No story shall have rape, at all.
7: Follow ye not any rules for the writing process. It is not for others to dictate to you what processe you follow when you take it upon yourself to write a story. Your process matters not, so long as the writing is completed.
Have an absolutely fantastic day,
The Doctor
It’s very important that we spread the good word of the Vulcan Dictates of Poetics!
Here’s my more charitable interpretation of rule five: Back in the day, before the internet, you could easily IMPRESS people by writing a novel set in historical times, or in a country far away, or maybe about some science stuff, where you showed off that you clearly had read many books and done a lot of painstaking research for the novel. People would be like “wow this is so well-researched” and be willing to overlook lots of literary weaknesses because of it.
Nowadays, people aren’t impressed by research the same way, so you better remember that no one is gonna like your novel merely because you put research into it. You gotta have more to offer.
I think there’s a general trend in these articles where you snark about famous writers’ writing advice of not exactly doing the most charitable interpretations of their rules. BUT I also think it’s perfectly valid to criticize writers giving advice for not stating in clear and unambigious terms what they mean.
I will follow #3 to a t in my book. I’ll never use then as a conjunction. Neither an and, for i write in spanish.
I just learn that in spanish “strong verbs” are how irregular verbs are called sometimes, so it’s hard to find a list of “strong” or interesting spanish verbs. The most i can do is looking for sinonyms and find out what each mean, to get the desired connotation.
Okay, this is another awful list of rules, and I appreciated reading the breakdown! But I’m gonna tentatively and loosely agree with rule number four. At least from a place of my own subjective opinion.
To me, the difference between first and third person, at least when referring to limited third, is the impression that the narrator is aware of the audience’s presence. So it feels like a third person narrator doesn’t know we’re in their head with them, but a first person narrator is choosing to tell us their thoughts. And that can sometimes (not always!) make a first person narrator come across as sort of…egotistical? Even when they’re not supposed to seem that way. So I feel like first is just harder to pull off than third.
I’m honestly not sure what the difference is between the first person narrators that feel that way and those that don’t, but it’s just something I’ve noticed as a reader.
I never trust a first person narration, as is the easiest to be an unreliable narrator one (which are being becoming a trend) the same way i don’t trust any story that start with a dream, cause there are a lot of chances for it all to be a dream.
I’d say the difference between your two first-person narrators could be really being in someone’s head and someone telling the story later. In someone’s head, you’d have their feelings as well, while someone who tells a story might cut back on what they felt (or not really remember it any longer). I know I did that with a story which is, essentially, framed as a memoir written long after the things in the book happened.
Hey Chameleon, what you’re describing is the difference between a first person unfolding narrative and a first person retelling narrative. In a retelling narrative, the first person narrator is aware of the audience, in an unfolding narrative, they aren’t. For example: The Hunger Games is an unfolding, first person narrative. Katniss doesn’t know she’s telling a story. By contrast, the Dresden Files are a retelling narrative. Dresden knows he’s telling a story, and occasionally uses that in the narration.
I’m glad I could catch up with you; I was reviewing my cover letter to evaluate what should be done next time when I noticed some errors that could stand be corrected as well as just areas of experience that may require more explanation. I will have a corrected sample in your inbox before noon of February 23.
Kyle, we have already given you all the information we have to give on the application process. Please do not contact us about it again, I promise we will update you and everyone else when we have something to tell you.
Going to go out on a limb and offer a different interpretation of rules #2 and #6, cause they touch on something that’s been on my mind.
I’m wary of making bold statements, but fact is that **I** can only write from experience. That’s something weird to say on a specfic website (how would I write about spells and aliens?), but what matters is not really the things of the story, but how the story itself and the characters react to them. I have not experienced magic spells, but I can write about them in terms of the fascination with bending the world to better suit your needs. I have never seen aliens, but I can write about them in terms of concurrent fear and fascination with the unknown.
That is to say: **I** can only write convincing, entertaining, intimate and passionate fiction about things I am personally passionate about.
So when this guy says “Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money”, he is advocating for writers to write about things they are personally fascinated with, things frighten or entice them and therefore must be explored.
Problem is he gives out this advice in very indirect way, and also forces upon the same rule his convictions about “only challenging literature is art” and “art can’t make money”.
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Rule #6 is probably going down the same path, what he’s trying to say is that an author’s identity comes through the most intensely in their fiction concerned with topics they’re passionate about, not in a fact-by-fact accurate nonfiction autobiography.
I, personally, am fascinated by T. H. White’s life and how much of it seeped into The One and Only King, to give a real world example.
Either way, this man could certainly have worded his rules more clearly, especially being a successful author.
People tell me that my tarot readings are vague, but this ascended literary troll gets away with pieces of non-advice?
Once you sell enough books, they kinda let you say whatever you want unfortunately.
Ok, I’m trying this too. Blatantly ripping off mythcreants’ advice.
0. Storytelling is a craft that can be studied, analysed, learned and improved. It is not indefinable magic or purely subjective talent, but there is ample room for personal tastes, creativity, innovation and a variety of different goals. This means that a lot of my tips will be mere starting points you can use for your own research, practice and improvement. They are about what your story should have in the end, not about how to get there, as the process is too individual to give general recommendations.
1. Find and center your darlings to avoid having to kill them. Ask yourself what interests you about your story, what are you passionate about? Then make that idea, message, character, relationship, event, setting element or quirk of wordcraft or whatever it is central to your plot.
2. Avoid bigotry or promoting oppression, even by accident. Have a diverse cast and research how to depict them respectfully, without tokenism, stereotypes, harmful tropes or cultural appropriation. To stop normalising oppression, avoid depicting it unless you’re actively pushing back against it and doing it with the necessary care and passion.
3. Your story has a message. You can’t get around that. So bring it out intentionally and communicate it clearly. Use the advantages of your medium and format and build the message you want to send into your throughline.
4. Have a strong throughline. This is your main plot that starts at the beginning with a problem or hook, builds tension throughout, has a turning point in the climax of the story and is resolved (happily or tragically) at the end. Make everything else part of your throughline or related to it or cut it out.
5. Don’t include prologues, interludes, long tangents, side quests or “twenty years later” epilogues or meta mysteries where you make the readers wonder about something the character knows. They only dilute your throughline and what is actually good about your story. For the same reason, beware of flashbacks and dream sequences – only include them if they advance the plot.
6. Your plot is fractal. The “problem, turning point, resolution” structure works for flash fiction as well as novel series. It can even be used in paragraphs. Nestle as few or as many of these child arcs into your biggest throughline as applicable, typically one for the series, one for each book, one for each chapter or scene and smaller ones for extra spice.
7. Whatever format, genre, tone, premise (epistolary, character retelling, omniscient, etc), pronoun (first person, third person, even second person), tense (past, present or, rarely, future), narrative distance or length you use – they all have their pros and cons. All can be used well or badly, so look into the strengths of your chosen format and use them wisely while dodging typical pitfalls.
8. Most stories, even novel series, don’t need more than one point of view. If you do include more than one, for example in a romance story, make sure it is strongly linked to the throughline in a way that is intuitive to the readers. Don’t make them wonder if what they’re reading will ever matter. Be aware that attachment might suffer if you have multiple POVs and that a given reader likely only cares for one of them.
9. ANTS are the four elements that make stories engaging: Attachment, Novelty, Tension and Satisfaction. Attachment to characters increases with selfless, sympathetic or novel traits, motivations and goals. Novelty works fast but also fades fast. Tension and stakes can be relatively low or really high, but even a low tension cozy bedtime story has a better structure and more satisfaction if there is some uncertainty over achieving the goal.
10. Twists, reveals and subversions can be fun but aren’t necessary. If you do include them, make sure your readers get more value out of your story than they would without the twist. Disappointment and confusion are surprising too, but not in a good way. Shocking your audience is not a goal in itself.
11. Don’t let anyone tell you when you are or aren’t a real writer. Whether it is your sole source of income or a labour of love, whether you write a lot or a little, sporadically or regularly, for mass market appeal or a niche intellectual audience, original or fanfic – set your own goals and strive to achieve them.
There is so much more to writing of course, like pacing, characters and their goals and motivation, worldbuilding, description and wordcraft, how to stay motivated or what process to use, how to edit and how to market your work or cater to a specific audience… No list of eleven tips will ever be exhaustive (even if you cheat and use a 0th one). Use the writing advice that clicks with you and helps you improve.
These are super fun to read! I’m glad to have inspired people to think so deeply about storytelling.
Thinking is fun!
But you’re right that condensing storytelling into a handful of rules or tips is really hard. Mainly it felt like saying “Here’s a bunch of words to go look up, have fun.”
I’d enjoy reading a Mythcreants review of Pixar’s “rules for storytelling.” I’ve seen that list floating around on the internet a few times now. I think it’s kind of a long list though.
Yeah it’s got 22 points. Could make for a decent two parter though.
I for one would also like to read those articles. Who knows, maybe more than half of the rules will actually turn out to be useful this time…