General Notes

Don't rely on cool technology or aliens or other fantastic elements in your setting to carry the story. Even though your characters live in a world which is fantastic to us, to them it should be ordinary. Make ordinary things happen. A wise writer once said that it is better to write about mediocre happenings in a remarkable way than to write about remarkable happenings in a mediocre way.

One sure-fire way a beginning writer can set themselves up for rejection and a whole lot of emotional trauma is to write a "this really happened to me" story in the speculative world.

First of all, when you are too close to a protagonist or a situation it is all too easy to forget details that seem obvious to you, and to add things that are extraneous to the plot simply because they "happened." Writing fiction is not like writing non-fiction. Just because something happened doesn't mean it makes a good story.

One frequently occurring example of this is the "I turned my role playing campaign into a story" story. It very seldom succeeds, usually because the writers are not able to choose what to keep and what to throw away. My personal advice, if you MUST write this sort of story, would be to keep the main character (history and personality usually translate well) and perhaps a couple of the climactic points of the campaign. Do NOT keep the campaign. Come up with a plot based on the conflict-resolution principle, and then decide which of the other characters fit in with the plot. Make sure the POV is the most interesting character. If he isn't, change your POV.

Second, if you are writing about yourself you tie yourself too tightly emotionally to the story, and any rejection of it is likely to be taken personally. Writers need to maintain an emotional distance from their work when it comes to getting it critiqued.

This is not to say that you shouldn't care about what you are writing. You must care, else how can you make your readers care? Often, my best stories come out of events which I feel strongly about but not *personally*. I might see a movie and be incensed at the way a person is treated in it. I might hate the way it feels to watch helplessly while an injustice is done. I might hate the creator of a book or movie for an unhappy ending or event. That motivates me to sit down and write a different story, where events transpire in a way I find more satisfactory.

When I saw the movie "The Ghost and the Darkness" the scene where a major character's death is discovered by the other major character (those of you who've seen the movie probably remember that scene) was a source of major unhappiness for me. I couldn't get it out of my mind until I had rewritten the scene so it came out the way I wanted it to.

However, if I were to write a story about some traumatic event in my own life, especially one which I had not yet come to terms with emotionally, I would have to be very careful to distance myself from the story in some way. Change the circumstances, change the specifics, the descriptions of the players. Keep only the reactions of the character. Remember how you reacted, but remember as if you were watching a stranger react.

Also, be very cautious before writing about a *concept* that you feel strongly about; it almost always turns out preachy and few things are more annoying in a story than to be blatantly preached at.

Style is not as important as having something to say. There are too many beginning writers who think that a lot of poetic prose is all that is necessary to make a story enjoyable.

Your story must keep moving. Each scene should have a conflict to solve, a goal for the POV to gain. After it is solved another should appear, and it is best if you can have the next conflict/goal created by the solving of the last.

Mystery is another very important element in any genre. One author I greatly respect is a firm believer in ending each chapter with a mystery. There's good sense in this. The end of each chapter disrupts the flow of the story, and gives the reader the opportunity to ask "do I want to stop now?" Even if it is as minor a mystery as "who just hit the POV over the head?" the reader will be pulled into the next chapter to find out.

Mystery can be overdone. Don't beat the reader over the head with a mystery that goes on and on, never answered, never put away. That's not to say that answering a mystery is the end of it. I just read a remarkable book, The Shape-Changer's Wife by Sharon Shinn, which dragged the primary mystery all the way through the book. I thought I had it figured out in the first chapter, then again in the second, then twice in the third. By the time I hit the end of chapter four I had been absolutely *certain* I knew who the Shape-Changer's wife was at least six different times. I couldn't put the book down; it kept me in breathless anticipation of what she would throw at me next. The POV character figured out what was going on just a short while after I did, and the rest of the story was about him try to figure out what to do about it. Marvelous book.

If the readers figure something out, the POV should do so as well. It is very irritating as a reader to watch the POV blundering around blindly when it seems any man of sense would have figured things out already. Neither the POV nor his opponent should be stupid.

There are few things which give a reader more of a sense of satisfaction in a book than figuring something out from the subtle clues which a limited POV provides. That's why the advice Don't Overexplain is such good advice. If you have an action happen, then go on to explain what it meant you are insulting your readers.

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