Personal fiction writing rules
Eh, why not? I actually do have certain things I keep in mind while writing.
1.) Symbolic details. You can’t describe everything in every room a character walks into, nor do you need to. Nobody notices everything all at once. They notice the things that call to what they are feeling. Someone who is down is more likely to notice the drowned weed in the asphalt, while a cheerful person might notice the freshness in the air. Every detail = chaos. Certain details = mood. I usually try to pick a single color, or smell, or temperature of the air for a scene, and all my details call back to that. The scene I’m currently working on in Shades is near the climax, where Saeli is in the middle of trying to get this portal built. My color is indigo. The whole mood and feeling of that scene is in shades of shadow and indigo, and height. Open space. (They are in a tower that’s had a wall blasted away.) This particular scene takes place over the course of a sunrise, so my ambiance will follow the sun. The sunrise is even symbolic. Nobody up to this point except Saeli, Raphel, Mora, and Kaladan know about the portal, but by the end of the scene when the sun rises, everyone will know the secret.
2) Be a pair of eyes. Or a camera. Instead of describing the room to a reader, I try to describe the room as the character sees it. I can’t always do this, and I don’t think you have to for every description, but it can provide a focus for the longer, milieu descriptions that are a pain to write and boring to read. Otherwise, I pretend I am filming a certain space. How would I light the set? How would I arrange the props? Where would I start the shot? End it? What would I zoom in on? At what point does the character enter the set? Etc. A picture is worth a thousand words. Those words had better be coherent.
3) Pave the clouds. In other words, replace abstract details with concrete ones. Don’t just spit out general details about the world and its history. (My first draft is full of this 
) Weave that history into snapshots in your characters’ lives, and let the character relate them to each other (with their own spin, of course). Example:
Please Login or Register to view this.
Raphel is giving Saeli the same information both times, but the second time around, he’s also giving specific details about his own life. Telling the reader that the legend exists is not enough: tying it to a character the reader cares about is what makes that information relevant and interesting. A random legend from Verre, though relevant to the story and necessary information for the reader, is just not as interesting as Raphel relating a tiny slice of his past.
4) Walk, talk, and chew gum. My characters talk. A lot. A good half, if not more, of the major conflict in my story is played out through verbal sparring. In my first draft, my characters did a lot of sitting around and talking, which is kind of boring. This time around, I’m making them get up and do things. Move the talk around. Make it relate to what’s going on around them. Quite honestly, there’s still a lot of characters sitting around talking in Shades…but I try to break it up. Saeli might hang onto every word Raphel says for a few beats, but then she’ll pull back for a moment. Or something happens. Even if the characters are sitting in one place talking, I try to make it so that other characters are moving around them, and other things are happening in the same space.
5) Sharpen those stakes. Add characters with conflicting agendas. Add an audience. Add crappy circumstances. Make it so that the only possible solution to one problem is going to cause five other problems. Give characters choices, and make them all bad choices. Make everyone in the story an antagonist to at least one person. The whole Geris subplot evolved because I needed to give Raphel a major problem to deal with. I’m bringing in the whole Mantle remnant to watch Saeli finish the portal in the Temple. That means her caving into Raphel when he kisses her has witnesses…the very people she’d rather die than have them see that.
Just don’t make the problem impossible to solve, and write yourself in a deus ex mechina ending. Or one where you have to kill everyone.
6) Destroy the set. Any scene where a character is physically damaged, the environment had better reflect that. Make messes. Knock tapestries off the wall. Bring the roof down. Blow things up. Start fires. Peril, peril, peril. Peril is fun. It imposes time constraints on characters already under pressure. This is mostly a function of raising stakes, and partially a function of using symbolic details. I had Yuril blow a hole in the city Temple and knock down half the western tower, where Saeli is busy trying to build a portal. (Why? Because she hates anything connected to Scisaxar, and she’s pissed at Raphel, but mostly, because she’s a goddess and she can.) It raises the stakes on Saeli because 1) now the tower is a treacherous space; 2) Yuril and Raphel are now fighting on the Temple roof, which is far more treacherous ground than the balcony would have been; and 3) everyone in the whole freaking city can see what she’s doing. And…the Temple is the most sacred space in the city, and the city is Saeli’s home. Yuril’s action on the Temple mirrors what Raphel is doing to her heart.
7) Kill somebody. Okay, not really. Not every story needs a body count, but every story needs an element of sacrifice. Stories where characters are killed off in pointless and arbitrary ways drive me crazy. That’s not sacrifice; that’s slaughter. The point is that the main character needs to lose something precious to them in order to accomplish the story goal, and it needs to be something that they cannot fully recover. It can be something as ephemeral as innocence, or as concrete as their best friend. Any person “lost” by the protagonist does not always have to die, either…distance and circumstance can separate people as surely as death can. Saeli will lose both of her best friends by the end of the story. Brendan is killed. Cara lives to the end, but the friendship that she and Saeli shared just cannot fully recover from the events of the story. Both are too changed.
(If you write childrens and middle grade fiction, for the most part, disregard this. I think kids up to a certain age like it better if the ending is nice and neat, the good guys all win, and the bad guys all get what they deserve.)
8 ) Give the hardworking hero a treat. This becomes vitally necessary when the protagonist must make a giant sacrifice to win. Give the poor guy/girl something nice for making it through hell alive. Saeli sacrifices the life she knows, her best friends, her innocence, and very nearly her own life to save Verre (first from the war, and then from Raphel). Not to mention that she brings down Raphel by her own hands, and stupid or not, she did love him. Seeing the war end is just not going to be enough for her at this point, which is why I had to bring Naeth back from the dead. He is her unexpected reward. Another example would be in Star Wars. Luke accomplishes the story goal of bringing down the Emperor. He loses his aunt, his uncle, his mentor, his hand, a good chunk of the rebel fleet, and finally his father in the process. His unexpected reward is that his father repented before the end, and is at peace.
That’s all I have for now. If I come up with any others, I’ll post them.
Like!
