Thursday Writing Quote ~ Robert McKee

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form. ~ Robert McKee

Thursday Writing Quotes ~ Pixar

Pixar Story Telling Rules


#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#2: You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won't see what the story is actually about til you're at the end of it. Now rewrite.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You'll feel like you're losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

#8: Finish your story, let go even if it's not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

#9: When you're stuck, make a list of what WOULDN'T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you've got to recognize it before you can use it.

#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you'll never share it with anyone.

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it's poison to the audience.

#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What's the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That's the heart of it.

#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don't succeed? Stack the odds against.

#17: No work is ever wasted. If it's not working, let go and move on - it'll come back around to be useful later.

#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d'you rearrange them into what you DO like?

#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can't just write ‘cool'. What would make YOU act that way?

#22: What's the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

Thursday Writing Quotes ~ Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler's Ten Commandments 

1. It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.
2. It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.
3. It must be realistic in character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
4. It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
5. It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
6. It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
7. The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
8. It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or a passionate romance.
9. It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law…. If the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it.
10. It must be honest with the reader.

Thursday Writing Quotes ~ Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman’s 8 rules

1. Write

2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7. Laugh at your own jokes.

8. The main rule of writing is that, if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Writing Nuggets for March

      I haven't shared interesting links for a while. Here's a few I've found potentially useful.

If you're writing a crime scene and contemplating scene-of-the-crime evidence to help (or hinder) the character needing to solve the crime, this is a great place to start.

http://www.criminaljusticedegreesguide.com/features/10-most-incriminating-types-of-evidence.html 

Certain scenes are just as much cliches as tired phrases.

http://www.writersdigest.com/article/Beyond_Basic_Blunders/  

I'm not a big fan of "the rules" but this clarifies some of those "rules" that newbie writers tend to overquote, so it's nice to have an authoritative place to point them toward.

http://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/writerisms-and-other-sins-a-writers-shortcut-to-stronger-writing/

Have you run across any good places on the web lately? Care to share? 

The Rules - A Contrarian View

      I wasn't always a contrarian. As a child, I tried very hard to follow the rules and to do what was expected of me. In many ways, I'm still a rule follower. Now I just ferret out the rules that make sense to me. Is it my fault those rules often go against what the crowd will tell you is so?


That's why I was so delighted to discover Patricia C. Wrede's blog.

I've read Ms. Wrede's fantasy off-and-on for years, and no one has put together anything that remotely competes with her Fantasy World Building Rules. Of course, why would they? There's no sense in reinventing the wheel. And since she's sustained a career as an author for 30 years now, one must assume she knows something about her craft.

What she says about openings delights me:

It has become a truism in writing that one should always open a story with a “hook” - something that grabs the reader and pulls them into the story, forcing them to keep reading. The problem with this is that what “hooks” one reader will annoy or repel another, and this is seldom acknowledged by the advice-givers.

 I'm even more delighted with what she says about  ending every chapter with a cliffhanger

. . .  the cliffhanger - leaving the protagonist in the middle of some dire situation, so that the reader will have to keep reading in order to see how he/she gets out of trouble. This is the equivalent of the “hook” for starting a story, and it’s just as misguided. “How does the hero get out of this situation?” is certainly one possible place to end a chapter, but if every chapter ends with crocodiles snapping at the hero’s heels or a train bearing down on the kidnap victim who’s tied to the tracks, the story starts to look like bad pulp fiction or a cheesy action serial from the 1920s. Which is fine if you want to write cheesy action serials or bad pulp fiction, but not so good if you have other ambitions. 

And when discussing cliches, she makes the same point I've made about how some people want to enshrine "the rules" without any underlying understanding of them.

There are always folks around who have memorized a list of no-nos without understanding the reasons behind them, and they will complain bitterly if they notice you using anything on their list, regardless of what you’ve done with it or why. If this is going to bother you…grow a tougher skin. There is no reason to deny yourself a useful writing tool because some people loudly dislike it. 

It appears I shall be spending some time on her blog, acquainting myself with the specifics of her outlook, because she talks such good sense. Maybe I'll see you there.

Hm. I see she has a post about lightning and lightning bugs . . .

Because I Said So - The "Rules" of Writing

Any writer who's been around me any length of time at all knows that I don't want to hear "they say" in a critique of my writing. I've been doing this long enough that it makes we want to scream when someone pulls out some rule that often doesn't even apply because they don't know what the rule is meant to accomplish.

The "rules" will teach you to write well but to really get good, you need to understand the reason behind each rule. If you don't, then you'll never know when to break the rule. FREX, you'll be told not to used -ing verbs (progressive tense verbs). That's because too many beginning writers don't understand that this verb form implies continuing action. Used in a complex sentence, it can also imply simultaneous action. This creates problems when you see a sentence such as:

"Opening the door, she crossed the room."

Uhm. I think not. Not unless she has extremely loooong arms. (This rule, along with a number of others, is enumerated and explained in the Turkey City Lexicon which can be found at: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/)

There's also a "rule" about gerunds. (Gerund is a progressive tense verb used as a noun. e.g. Running is good exercise.) The "rule" says don't use gerunds (though I suspect this often comes from new writers who can't tell a noun from a verb and so are applying the previous rule wholesale.)

The real "rule" is that gerunds slow the pacing. Well, gee. Maybe I want to slow the pacing. Maybe this is a good place for a gerund. See what I mean? How would you know unless you understand why that particular rule exists?

I suspect that the codification of the rules happens because new writers tend to make the same mistakes over and over until more experienced writers are tired of explaining over and over why they need to change what they're doing. They become the writer's version of "because I said so." That makes them dangerous because new writers pick them up and share them among themselves, spreading their non-wisdom like the bubonic plague.

So my advice to all new writers is: whenever someone tells you "don't do that" but they don't explain why, ask. If the answer comes back as some version of "they say", stop and think about it. Does the advice make sense? Do published authors whose style you admire do this? If they do, is it only rarely?

Few writing rules are truly unbreakable, but you need to understand what they mean to accomplish before you'll know when to break them.

When it comes right down to it, the rules have a lot in common with the Pirate's Code; they're more like guidelines. You were never meant to follow them off a cliff.