by Peter Wood
Peter Wood reveals and explains his personal list of rules for good writing. Check out his latest story, “Murder on the Orion Express”, in our [November/December issue, on sale now!]
On Writing by Stephen King should be required reading. There’s not a bad suggestion in the book, and you’ll also get some really cool backstories to some of King’s iconic fiction.
I don’t have a writing advice book in me, and I’m no Stephen King, but here are some rules I try to follow.
Goldilocks
I edit a monthly flash fiction contest for Stupefying Stories with word limits of around one hundred words. You can find the stories here: https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/p/the-pete-wood-challenge.html. If done well, that format can pack quite a wallop. If done poorly, the story ends unresolved or just summarizes a much longer story.
The opposite end of the spectrum is never-ending cliffhangers. I enjoyed most of The Three Body Problem, the alien invasion novel by Cixin Liu. Alas, it ended like part one of a bad two-part episode of a 70s TV show. I gave up on the second book when it just kept meandering with a nonsensical opening scene that went nowhere. I might have put up with the drop off in quality if I knew the book might reach some sort of resolution.
A writer should neither summarize, nor pad. A story or novel or flash piece should not wear out its welcome or leave the reader hanging.
We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
Misguided experts tell writers stories should begin with the most exciting scene to grab the attention of the poor overworked slush reader, because they won’t have the patience for a more nuanced opening. I’m not sure this is true, but good luck finding any article on getting published that has different advice.
In a perfect world, a story could start out with an innocuous situation and then gradually become speculative. There’s a reason The Wizard of Oz doesn’t start in Munchkinland. Of course, writers shouldn’t dally too long in the mundane, but any speculative event that springs organically in the story can be rewarding. I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel without even reading the back cover. I had no idea it would soon evolve into apocalyptic fiction. What a ride.
Many of Stephen King’s novels start with the everyday and then gradually become fantasy or horror. The Dead Zone, for its first few pages, concerns an Average Joe teacher. Hints of the supernatural don’t pop up for quite a while and, because we got to know the characters first, we empathize with their journeys.
It’s hard to think of how one might read something speculative and not realize it. Some magazines that publish all manner of fiction might slip a horror or science fiction story past you. I read Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne in a collection of classic short stories and was pleasantly surprised by the genre shift halfway through.
But those instances are rare.
So, we also have stories that begin with a bang and then settle down and get really complicated. The television show, Lost, opens with a plane crash on an uncharted island, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Stand by Stephen King begins with the accidental release of the most lethal virus imaginable from a top secret government lab, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Who’d You Rather Spend Time With?
Characters in bad fiction are like relatives you have to spend an awkward afternoon with every Thanksgiving. In good fiction, the characters are your friends who flock together after the obligatory holiday meal.
Going back to The Stand for a moment here. It’s not a book about the apocalypse; it’s about Stu Redman, an easy-going Texan who becomes an epic hero, or Randall Flagg, the greatest bad guy in literature, or Frannie Goldsmith, a small town teenager who watches most of the world die. The book also has a couple of dozen other folks you’ll be glad you met.
Yeah, I know, it’s also a great speculative work, but an end of the world plague is not a new idea. Jack London explored the trope in The Scarlet Plague in 1912. So did George Stewart in 1949’s Earth Abides. Plots get recycled. There’s a reason most have never heard of those books. The characters are completely forgettable.
A story or novel that doesn’t begin and end with its characters is not something I want to read. I don’t care how great your gimmick is; if I don’t find your characters compelling I don’t want to read your story.
Characters, setting, and plot, are the holy trinity of good fiction in that order. Good characters will trump setting and plot every time. If your characters have no stories of their own before the big event, I don’t care what happens to them. I want to see fleshed-out characters respond realistically, not chess pieces moved around while stuff—no matter how amazing—happens around them.
Books with boring characters are, well, kinda boring themselves. There is not a single memorable character in Level Seven by Mordecai Rush. It might be about life in a fallout shelter after the bombs fall, but even blowing up the planet won’t compensate for milquetoast characters.
Characters, setting, and plot, are the holy trinity of good fiction in that order. Good characters will trump setting and plot every time.
Don’t Go Back In the Haunted House
Your story is your universe. You create the rules. Just follow those rules.
A work training session I had recently broke into a spirited conversation between me and the instructor about the Scream movies. We both loved the franchise, which honors and deconstructs the rules of slasher movies. We hated it when the killer murdered the most intelligent and charismatic character in the second movie in a pretty underwhelming fashion. The victim, a film aficionado, had explained the rules of slasher movies to the other characters in the first film. The Scream movies are a bloodbath and no one is safe, but knocking off the only character who understood “the rules” and could see a killing coming a mile away made no sense. The writer broke the rules.
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal has a hell of a premise. A meteorite hits Earth, spiraling the planet into a mini ice age in 1952, and the space program must figure out how to colonize the stars before the planet becomes completely unlivable in a century or two. I gave up for two reasons. One, the flat characters didn’t act like real people. Nobody had any sense of urgency or anxiety or depression about the apocalyptic events. Two, the author forgot about the ice age. Characters in the middle of a crisis sat around chilling in a cafeteria eating fresh fruit and vegetables. Where did that food come from? How did we still grow crops in the snow? Canned food or military MREs I could buy, but not that.
If your characters have to go back in the haunted house, you need a better reason than you have fifty pages to kill. I watched an interview with the two writers of Star Trek: Generations and one had never seen an episode of the original series. Sadly, Kirk became a Red Shirt in his own franchise.
There’s one Stephen King story I can’t stand. The reversed-engineered The Jaunt manipulates its characters to reach the rather shocking ending. King might break all of my rules in this story, but the travesty is that, even given the futuristic world King has created, the characters’ responses to teleportation technology strain credibility. From the workers at the teleportation station to the family teleporting for the first time, nothing makes sense. Granted, after the terrifying twist, the characters behave realistically, but it’s too little too late.
I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rules
I imagine you can come up with some classic story that violates my rules in some way. Fair enough.
The goal is to write a good story. And, however you do that, works for me.
From Earth to the Stars 