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Gina's Idiosyncratic Commandments for Good Fiction For all I know, I could be sabotaging my fic by trying to stick to these rules. Nevertheless, they're mine and I love 'em. I. Don't Be A Tweaker Tweakers are authors who polish their sentences beautifully ("phrase tweaking") before they get around to correcting major flaws in story structure. Tweakers spend hours perfecting a single scene, then do their major revisions and discover that that perfect scene is unnecessary, even a hindrance, in the overall scheme of the story. Tweakers need to work on the order in which they do the different kinds of revision, otherwise they live frustration, tragedy, and hard choices. (I should know.) II. Write Horrible Rough Drafts Trying to make your rough drafts good moves you along to the tweaker side of the Force. Furthermore, putting too much pressure on yourself can cause writer's block. Play, dammit! Rough drafts are like mud pies; your audience won't want to eat them, but they're a great lead-in to sand castles. III. Always Leave Room for Audience Interpretation The writer should be happy as long as the readers are happy, and not worry too much if they think the hero got the lady when the writer thought he got the tiger. The writer must get over herself as the final arbiter of fact, truth, and meaning. Writers who try to control the audience's interpretation of the story tend to make the famous mistake of telling-instead-of-showing. However, there's another mistake possible: describing something at such length and complexity that the scene grinds to a halt, and the readers can't visualize what's going on. One detail can be far clearer than fifteen details, as long as the one is the *right* detail. Make friends with ambiguity. Allow your audience to form their own opinions, and then be at ease with the consequences. IV. Don't Try to Tell the Audience Anything the Viewpoint Character Isn't About to Act On I was going to say, don't tell the audience anything the viewpoint character doesn't know. This is a good rule, because breaking it involves violating your established viewpoint, but, as with Show-Don't-Tell, the usual rule doesn't go far enough. Character actions depend on motivation; motivation depends partly on the character's interpretation of the facts. Your character may have all the facts necessary to reach a certain interpretation, but you may need to avoid letting him/her formulate the facts in such a way as to achieve that interpretation. Why? Because the moment that you allow the character to get within arm's reach of that interpretation, the character then has motivation to do something you're not ready for him/her to do yet, and the audience starts wondering, "So when is s/he going to fix this situation?" It's even worse when the character is considering a situation that happened in the past and went on for some time; the audience thinks maybe the character had this interpretation all along, so why didn't s/he fix it before now? Ask yourself, what story is your character telling himself that makes him want to act the way he's about to act? That's the version of reality that you should share with your readers, even if the character is totally wrong. V. Establish a Direction, Then Go Against It Movement, movement, movement. Long paragraphs drag. Wake up the audience by throwing in a one-sentence paragraph that breaks away from the direction, mood, center of attention, and/or style of the previous passage. VI. When You Read Aloud, Do It Badly There's a difference between a piece of literature meant to be read and a piece of literature meant to be performed: The performance piece tends to be incomprehensible when read without acting skill. (See HAMLET) Your stories are meant to be read by anyone, not just by actors. You should read them aloud to check for grace of sentence structure and realism of dialogue, but remember -- don't get too attached to reading with certain tones of voice! Your reader will not know where the emphasis is supposed to go, and *asterisks* often don't do the trick -- they can be rather like telling-instead-of-showing. Read aloud in monotone, find the sentences that lose all meaning, and rewrite them. VII. Play to the Audience ...or play *with* the audience. (This is, of course, predicated on the notion that you know who they are and what they want.) If it doesn't interfere with your story to tease the hair fetish crowd, then go ahead, slip in a sentence about Blair's curls tickling Jim's flushed and burning etc. VIII. Reward Folks Who Re-Read Remember in "The Matrix" when one of Trinity's companions calls Keanu Reeves' character "Coppertop"? and then later Morpheus explains why humanity is enslaved? Maybe you remembered the nickname and caught the reference immediately. Maybe, like me, you didn't, and only noticed it the second time you saw the movie. This is why some of us like to see/read a loved movie/story more than once: You get the general idea of the story the first time, then pick up on the details the second time. Details that make more sense in retrospect. It's fun because the readers feel clever for noticing, and they notice the author's cleverness in making it possible. However, it's only fun if the details are there. Rule VIII is actually a subset of Rule VII. Play to the audience that looks for the things that contribute to the story in ways that are not immediately apparent. The writer always knows more about the story than the first-time reader. Take full advantage. Some of your first-time readers will catch on, too, so it's not just for re-readers. IX. The Key to Dialogue Is What You Leave Out Nobody says what they really mean. Language is too malleable and ambiguous, and humans too complex and defensive. Never let your characters say what they really mean except when it doesn't matter, or at the climax when they solve the central problem of the story. When they do solve the problem, pare the dialogue down so that their actual words don't obscure the Aha! moment. Allow your characters to hold back, imply, evade, sidetrack, ambush, and otherwise work at cross-purposes in dialogue. Fluff up seemingly casual interactions with undercurrents of not-casual. Finally, delete everything that doesn't lead to anything else. X. Never Try to Make the Aha! Moment Last

Miscellaneous index Gina's addy

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