I found this through 9rules, and I thought I’ll share it here.
Eight rules for writing fiction:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.
24 Comments
Great post, Eli. It’s especially true for online writers, who may only have one chapter or even one sentence to allow them to hook their readers. I can’t remember where I read it, but one thing that I always keep in mind is “keep the reader turning the pages”. In the blog world, this can translate to “don’t give the reader an excuse to stop scrolling down the page.”
Thanks, Scott. Kurt was a great author, and it was a real loss to us all when he passed on.
Hey Eli - thanks for the comment. It got published for all of about two hours, then vanished. I spent a lot of yesterday migrating from Blogger to Wordpress, and although my posts have moved just fine all the comments have disappeared up the server’s fundament.
^^^Hey, look at that - it does trackbacks automatically! Getting Blogger to trackback was like trying to get a cat to have a bath.
Ahh. That must’ve been a real headache, Bill. Glad to see the blog looking fantastic!
Great tips. I’ll have to remember these when I finally get my novel started.
Glad you liked it, Jenny.
Thanks for posting this. As an aspiring writer, these tips have helped quite a bit…even my fiction writing professor was pleased with these simple, yet useful tips when I showed them to him.
P.S.~They also work quite well for roleplay games that I write plots for now and then. ^.^
You can write roleplay games?! Wow.
It’s a play-by-post game. Basically like doing a back and forth story roleplay in Yahoo messenger, except on a larger level.
great tips
@Kaitlyn: that’s new to me: roleplaying games in Yahoo messenger.
@Rizki: Glad you enjoyed it.
Great information. I love Vonnegut.
Great advice! Being a sadist is probably the best advice for a writer. People love reading about sadness, loss, and feelings of despair since they are all a part of life. No matter how many people may not admit it, but people do enjoy reading about sadness.
Yeah, this list is a classic. My favorite, by far, is “start as close to the end as possible.”
Glad you enjoyed it, Writer Dad.
You Didn’t finish it, afterwords it reads
“The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”
Usually, I hate these types of rules that a writer must follow. But this list caught my attention, and I’m glad I read it. Nice job!
I’m usually against rules for writers, but with this particular set I think you hit the nail on the head. Great Job!
Thank you, all.
PS: @Masonspace: serious? But then again that last rule is common sense: Picasso learnt the rulebook inside out before he started breaking every one of them.
This is actually for Short Stories, specifically, but I suppose that they all have relevance to some degree on fiction writing in general.
Good advice. ;-)
@Lolita: really?!
@Viqi: Oh yes indeed. He is Vonnegut, after all.
;-)
Good advice (though being Australian I don’t think that I want people to ‘root’ for my character - I think I want them to be cheering for them, or something with less explicit connotations). I do kind of disagree with number 8 though, not so much as a writer, but as a reader. Author’s who give everything away bore me. I want there to be a logical surprise at the end, it does have to be logical though.
Thanks for the informaiton. Really helpful.
I comepletely disagree with the last one. Mystery is important and withholding information is entertaining to the reader.
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