Rules for Writing Fiction

[qcrisp]

Quote Originally Posted by Bleak&Icy

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp One writer's choice in the article linked to of The Temptation of St. Anthony as a bad book (a book I've been meaning to read for a long time) only makes me want to read it more. I thought you might enjoy Lovecraft's opinion of Flaubert: "Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic phantasy like The Temptation of St. Anthony, and but for a strong realistic bias might have been an arch-weaver of tapestried terrors." -- Supernatural Horror In Literature

Yeah. I loved Salammbo, too, which the guy I mentioned also disparaged to a degree. So, I'm with Lovecraft here to some extent, but, I have a feeling that Flaubert's more realistic pieces were him playing with realism. Personally, I like that idea. It's too late for me to be articulate about this, but I really love artists who are able to take some delight in their work as a kind of artifact in itself, like the idea you can produce 'realism' as an artifact...

As I said, too late to be articulate.

[Mamatas]

Quote Originally Posted by Evans

It is when the self styled "up and coming" suddenly start saying every writer must now start experamenting with devices like cut up sequences and non-linear time (in short trying to be the next new thing, the next "Burroughs" as it were) or risk being considered boring and old fashioned.

Does this actually happen?

[Karnos]

Well I'm not a writer. I have attempted to write some ideas down, but I am ridiculously self critical about what I am writing and the way I am doing it, so in the end nothing gets finished. I know it is a character flaw and I know I need to fix it if I want to get things done as far as literature is concerned.

However I am an architect, so I am inside the creativity wagon along with writers and artists.

The way I see it, there can't be any such thing as a set of rules that need to be observed and religiously followed in order to craft a piece of creativity. What there is to be found, however, are tips to get things done.

Tips. That's it.

A successful musician simply cannot tell you with a straight face to follow a set of 10, or 20, or 100 rules to create an emotional piece of music, nor can a painter tell you to observe some five golden rules for painting a beautiful image. Not a single architect and designer I have met has given me hard, stone etched rules that are critical in order to get something done (other than the basic rules of construction, sustainability and all of that jazz, but this is not what I'm talking about). They all have given me tips, and some of them are in contradiction with tips given to me by others.

In the end, one as a creative person takes what works for him/her and then can build up from there.

And I don't think that observing certain aesthetic/compositional aspects counts as rules; they're just other manifestations of a personal vision.

I do agree with Quintin and others about the importance of discipline. I've learned the very hard way just how important discipline is in these fields.

[Nemonymous]

Whether there are conscious rules or not, I feel there are instinctive rules - sometimes seen in hindsight as serendipity or synchronicity. And one needs to question whether it is the conscious or instinctive rules that best generate what I have long called 'the parthenogenesis of reality from artifice'.

In a strict sonnet form, the answer to the question may be different from that in some form of automatic writing - and upon the long spectrum between thiose two extremes.There is probably no rule for answering this question about a question.

[Joel]

"Too late to be articulate" – I'm not sure you meant this the way I read it, Quentin, but it's the truth, in terms of our own lives and the world in general.

Don't let that put you off however.

[Stu]

Just read through the thread and thought I'd throw out some random musings:

• Elmore Leonard is probably used as the starting point of the article 'cos he's well known and his list of rules has been around for awhile. The journalist probably just found it on the internet and said, "Hmm, I wonder what rules other writers use."

• I've not read Michael Moorcock for ages but I really enjoyed Colin Greenland's book-length interview with him, Death is No Obstacle, in which he talks about his writing; covering such topics as the Lester Dent Master Plot. I found the whole book facinating and very helpful with my own writing.

• Along with pretty much anyone else who has commented on Neil Gaiman in this thread I love Sandman but am underwhelmed by his prose work. That said, I am toying with the idea of purchasing his second short story collection Fragile Things as I've been told it marks a turning point in his prose style.

• Normally I try to avoid using "uttered", "muttered", "exclaimed" etc. I also try to avoid using "said". Just the dialogue, plain and unadorned. Comes from personal preference and trying to keep short stories as tight as possible so I don't exceed the word count. Obviously there's nothing wrong with the above words and I do use them on occasion. Offhand the only writer I can think of who successfully eliminated all dialogue tags was James M Cain but I'm sure there are others.

• I find that my own "rules" for writing can be very helpful on occasion but other times they can be quite stifling and even quite damaging to my stories if I try applying them in situations where they're not really applicable. That over-reliance on rules also spills over into my reading -- if I've spent ages formulating a a specific technique to overcome a particular problem and am now completely convinced that it was the best solution then I feel everyone else should use the same technique. It gets to the point that if I see another writer apply a different technique I find that instead of saying, "Oh, they found another way around that problem. Good for them" I tend to scream, "They've done it wrong! How can this other technique possibly work when I've spent so long deciding that it doesn't? This person isn't a real writer, they're a charaltan! All their books should be burned! Indeed I shall start with this very copy that I hold in my hands!" Which probably explains why I've been banned from my local library.

[rhysaurus]

-- There's always the European way of avoiding "said".
-- What's that then?
-- Using a dash before any line of speech.
-- No quotation marks you mean?
-- None.
-- I say, that's a bit daring, isn't it?
-- Nope. It ain't.
-- Yes, it is. A bit avant garde, a bit Joycean.
-- Care for a cup of tea?
-- OK. Ugh! It tastes like melted robot thumbs.
-- Well, that's a shame.

[Auditor]

I've just finished the first draft of my first novel. After maybe seven attempts, I finally rode one to completion. It is short right now, only 42k words. I guess I'm probably an "expander" rather than a "truncater" when it comes to revisions (we'll see...).

Does anyone else who writes usually have to add instead of subtract on subsequent drafts?

[symbolique]

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