Max's Musings

Max's Ten Commandments For Authors.

No, I've not been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. I've just read a bunch of stuff about craft, followed by reading a bunch of stories here on WDC. These "commandments" are just a summary of the advice I mostly wind giving when I write reviews. They're not divinely inspired. They may not even be 100% right in all circumstances. I've just found them useful, and I hope you find them helpful, too.

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Show, don't tell. This is harder than it looks. Be relentless. Check out

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Showing Why Showing is Important  (18+) Why showing is important in fiction #1970226 by Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈

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Point of View. Every scene should have one, and only one, point of view. Establish the point of view in the first paragraph, and in the first sentence if possible. Eschew the omniscient narrator.

I could write volumes about this. Oh, wait. I have.

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Just One Point of View  (E) Just one point of view on point of view #1992454 by Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈

Really Just One Point of View  (E) This essay discusses free indirect discourse, a refinement of third person limited. #2181006 by Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈

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Inside or Outside  (18+) Simple guidelines for creating effective openings for stories and scenes #1829736 by Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈

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Here and now. Start there. Stay there. End there. In that order.

Avoid unnecessary time reversals.

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Surprise. Be different. Let your inner weirdness shine. Foreshadow, but don't be afraid to misdirect.

If you must write the 10,000,000th zombie story, do something unexpected with it.

Don't forget you're writing for a reason: you're trying to reach your readers in some fashion.

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Meaning in Fiction  (18+) Does meaning matter in fiction? #1889783 by Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈

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Goals. Your protagonist needs to have a goal. Establish the goal early.

In fact, I'd agree with Kurt Vonnegut that every character should have a goal, but it's critical your protagonist have one.

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Establish the stakes: the protagonist's goal has to matter. That means that something bad happens if the protagonist doesn't achieve the goal.

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Obstacles. Something--or someone--stands between the protagonist and the goal.

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Tension is the energy that propels your story forward. You get conflict from the opposition between the goals and the stakes. The characters care about the outcome of the conflict because of the stakes. It's the combination of goals, obstacles, and stakes that gives rise to tension.

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Rising Action. Increase tension by expanding the goals, increasing the obstacles, raising the stakes, or some combination of the three. The plot is how you do this.

Keep in mind Billy Wilder's summary of the three act structure.

In the first act of a story you put your characters up in a tree, in the second act you set the tree on fire, and then in the third you get them down.

See this essay for a more detailed discussion, including an outline of the plots of Finding Nemo and North by Northwest.

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Finding Plot  (18+) How Structure Makes Compelling Stories #2020248 by Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈

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One way or another, the tension dissipates at the climax. Don't hang aronund afterwards.

Any list of ten commandments for authors will be incomplete. Other people will have different priorities, and so produce different lists. I've looked at lots of "rules for writing," and mostly gleaned my ten from other, more skilled, authors. Commandment X, for example, comes from Edgar Allen Poe, the first and, in some ways still the most perceptive, critic of short fiction. Some of my inspirations are below.

I like Elmore Leonard's list  , for example, for its specificity.

Dashiel Hamment has a rather specific list   for authors of detective stories. Raymond Chandler has a more general set of ten rules   for authors of detective stories. Both are useful, in their own way.

It's hard to argue with Kurt Vonnegut's list   of eight rules for writing a short story.

Anyway, I hope this little compendium is useful to someone...

Max