Kurt Vonnegut gives us these eight nuggets of wisdom (my comments interspersed):

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Don’t pander, or write down to an audience for money. Write every story as well as you can, with every intention of making the reader remember your book for the rest of his or her life.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

That doesn’t mean a character like them, or a character who only wants and does the right thing. See, for instance, Dan Wells’ character John Cleaver, a sociopath, a potential serial killer. Not a particularly relatable feeling for most of us (hopefully); is it possible to draw a reader in so they root for this character? Dan wrote an essay on this very topic, for John Scalzi’s Big Idea series. Read and learn.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Because wanting something is a motivation, and if you don’t have characters with motivation, what can they add to your story?

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

Every sentence. Not just chapter or scene or whatever. I’ll go one further and say every letter must advance or reveal. OK, not really.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

Have you listened to the talk about exposition? Don’t start your story trying to explain everything about your world’s setting or history or characters. Throw them into the fire (perhaps literally), and have us learn about the setting from the charred pile of dead unicorns in a square pit.

6. 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.

Help us care about your characters. If you give them no opportunity to show their heroism or bravery or self-control or fightin’ skills, we won’t care about them, because the story isn’t interesting unless they’re being tested.

7. 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.

See (1). Don’t write down in an attempt to gain readers, or try to jump into a popular market. Unless you had the vampire romance idea first.

8. 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.

But the story should be so awesomely written that they will run out and buy another copy and a can of Raid.

(8 points by Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.)

The abridged rules:

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
3. 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.
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. 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.
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of aparagraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
9. 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 plausably set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. 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.
11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

Twain, of course, sees Cooper as breaking each of these rules, and that resoundingly. Worth reading, and worth reflecting on the points as reflected in your own writing. Does your story accomplish something? Is the dialog irrelevant and unbelievable? Do your scenes and situations develop the work, or lead nowhere? Do you play “crass stupidities” upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest”?

Read the full essay here

(Abridged rules)

Exposition is the part of a book that sets the stage for the drama to follow: it introduces the theme, setting, characters, and circumstances at the story’s beginnings. (about.com)

It’s great advice on how not to bore your readers out of their minds, which most would agree is a worthy goal. You can recognize it when it’s done wrong (“As you know, Bob, two weeks ago the Orckin, a race of green monsters, swarmed down from their mountain homeland to attack King Jethro’s Fairland, and the only hope looks like this ancient prophecy concerning one ‘Bobe of the Greene Togae’, of whom nothing is known.”), but can you do it right?

(Rule #2: Parenthetical examples should not be longer than the original sentence. )

Tidbits: Your readers care about your characters more than your setting. They’re the paint on the setting’s canvas. Let the setting come through the characters, but make it about the character! Give them a strong opinion on what’s going on, contrast them with a different opinion. Your readers don’t have to know the ‘truth’ right up-front, just show them the conflict.

Listen to the ‘Exposition’ podcast here!

Dustin presents the basic plot line as follows:

• Beginning (Change)
• Main Goal (Question)
• Middle
• Goal Confrontation
• Climax
• End

Tidbits: To hook a reader at the start of your novel, you need to incorporate change.

This seems obvious, once considered: Who wants to read a story where everything’s happening the same as it always has? The change forces your characters to react, to show who they are, and places them in conflict (we hates change, precious), and that makes the reader identify with them (“Golly gee, what would I do if a massive whirlpool to another dimension opened in the next town over, swallowing the whole place?”).

Read the guide for more details on each stage of plotting!

[pdf] Working with Plot

He goes into great depth on the seven-point system he uses to plot all of his stories. The system goes like this:

• Hook
• Plot turn 1
• Pinch
• Midpoint
• Pinch
• Plot turn 2
• Resolution

This is really cool. Watch this, even if you aren’t an up-front plotter. If you aren’t, as Dan tells us, you’ll be doing something similar anyway, just during the editing process instead of before writing.

He also goes into the Ice Monster Prologue, Try/Fail Cycles, and Subplots.

Tidbit:

• Start with the resolution; then get the hook. There should be an arc here; if the character ends strong, should start weak (Batman Begins). OR in a complex arc, there’s a shift, from one kind of strength to another (Dark Knight).

You can read a post Dan wrote on the same subject here – http://www.fearfulsymmetry.net/?p=314 — in which he gives the plot of the first Matrix in this format:

1. Neo leads a sad life, trapped in a crappy job but always searching for something more.
2. Neo is contacted by Morpheus and learns that something weird is going on.
3. Neo is captured by the bad guys and sees that the mysteries are more dangerous than he thought.
4. Neo learns from Morpheus that human existence is actually an illusion prison called the Matrix.
5. Morpheus is captured, and Neo is left on his own.
6. Neo discovers an inner reservoir of power and belief, enabling him to control the Matrix.
7. Neo uses his power to defeat the bad guys and save the day.

Try matching this structure up to your favorite novel! But first, watch this awesome talk in 5 parts.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

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Crawford Kilian, in his Advice on Novel Writing series of essays, lays out some handy tips on developing your writing habit. Routine is a vital element in a writer’s day; if you don’t carve out some space and write in it come hell or high water, you’ll find that the free time you’re waiting for never comes.

Set aside distractions, don’t answer the phone, sit down, press keys (or press pen to paper, whichever you prefer).

Read the whole essay here

(With more advice on taking advantage of opportunity!)

Of course you don’t do any of these things, but if you happen to know someone who does, a casual acquaintance or wanna-be writer friend, tell them they need to outline their plot before they start.

“But the creativity, the spontaneity, the whatever/blahblahblah…!” I hear you say. Never fear — outlining a plot won’t kill your creativity. The outline can be the barest sketch of a structure, a jotting down of the major challenges in your book.

Caro Clarke wrote a great article describing the two methods, “To plot or not to plot.” She explains the core structure of the story with four bullets points:

• Opening challenge: What forces my protagonist to act?
• Chain of challenges: Ever-increasing tension as the protagonist wends his or her way through the book
• Resolution: As you may have guessed, this one resolves what the opening challenge began. The bad guy is killed/the killer is named/true feelings are revealed!
• Close-down (or “envoi”): The little bit at the end where the novel closes, leaving readers sitting for a minute with that delightful satisfied feeling, a little grin on their face as they meditate on the story they just experienced.

Read the full article here!