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.”

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.

Great tips. I’ll have to remember these when I finally get my novel started.

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. ^.^

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 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.

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!

Good advice. ;-)

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.

This is the first time I’ve read rule 6 “Be a Sadist”. I actually find that idea rather profound, a provocative idea that I immediately ‘felt’ the rightness of. Those two sentences in that rule taught me something that has never occurred to me before but I believe I will never forget. With what I’m writing right now, half a dozen ideas popped into my head immediately. After I finish this comment, I am going to print out these rules, put them on my corkboard at my writing desk and start writing, even though Saturdays are usually the days I don’t write. When a simple two sentences, or a simple idea, motivates me like that, I know I’ve come to the right place.

It’s actually 8 rules for writing a SHORT story. Maybe they should be applied to the Wheel of Time series, though.

You can give your reader all the information they need to figure out a story (or even a novel) way before you make the reveal and still keep the mistery. You just have to make it look as trivial as you can or introduce something much more exciting to make it look dull. Most readers won’t notice and even the most dedicated readers will pass one or two things. Making a reader say “it was there all along! How could I have missed it?” is very satisfying.