writing rules – Penstricken

Monday Motivation

Posted on 09/12/201907/12/2019 by Ndrw

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ATTENTION AUTHORS:

Every Tuesday, I post a new edition of Spotlight: a short post which shines a proverbial spotlight on a published novel or collection of short fiction. If you would like to have your book considered for a future edition of Spotlight, drop us an e-mail including a short synopsis of your book and a link to where we can buy it. Better yet, send me a copy of your book and I can include a mini-review.

I’m still looking to interview fiction authors here on Penstricken, especially new or indie authors. Whether it’s books, plays, comics or any other kind of fiction, if you’ve got something written, I want to hear about it. If you’re interested in having your work featured on Penstricken, be to sure to drop us an e-mail or message us on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest.

You can check out our previous interviews here:

Monday Motivation

Posted on 02/12/201916/11/2019 by Ndrw

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Monday Motivation

Posted on 25/11/201916/11/2019 by Ndrw

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Monday Motivation

Posted on 18/11/201902/11/2019 by Ndrw

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ATTENTION AUTHORS:

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Monday Motivation

Posted on 11/11/201902/11/2019 by Ndrw

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5 Mistakes To Avoid When Writing Fiction

Posted on 10/11/201909/11/2019 by Ndrw

Writing fiction is a funny old game. There are so many rules and conventions that you must absolutely never break, unless of course you want to break them [2]. It can be difficult to know for sure if there really are any hard and fast rules for writing than are universally applicable and must never, ever be broken, even if you as the author think it’s justified.

Nevertheless, there are some mistakes you can make which will almost invariably drag your pace to crawl, bore your readers to tears and perhaps even upset or anger some. If you’re writing a story, I’d suggest that you avoid the following:

Undercooked Characters

When a reader reads your book, they are stepping into an imaginary world of your creation. They will meet people who do not really exist doing things that have never really happened.

You’ve got to bring all this stuff to life in your reader’s mind using nothing but words. You need to make sure, therefore, that your characters are distinctive and portrayed in a way which brings them to life. Names and cosmetic descriptions alone will not suffice for this. Backstory; personality types; hopes and dreams; fears and pet peeves; distinctive voice and clearly established motives and goals all go into making characters who really stand out as believable people. Click here for more on constructing vivid characters.

Vague Settings

In a similar way to characters, your story’s setting must be brought to life in the imagination of your reader using only words. A vague setting will create the sense that the action is taking place in a vacuum. The characters might be walking about, but they go from nowhere to nowhere. They might be doing stuff, but they are interacting with a non-existant world. This can lead the reader to completely lose track of what’s going on in the story, as they struggle to to envisage if they are even supposed to be outdoors or indoors.

Moreover, setting helps to establish mood. Imagine if the famous ‘I am your father’ scene from Star Wars had been set in a fertile meadow on a bright spring morning instead of over a sheer drop at the heart of the Death Star. It would’ve spoiled the mood, right?

So remember, whenever you write a scene to consider the five human senses. What does the place look like? What sounds can you hear? What can you smell? Now you have your setting!

Click here for more on constructing a vivid setting.

Info-dumping

The thing about fiction is the reader comes at each story afresh. The reader knows nothing of your backstory, your characters or anything else you have created from your own imagination. This is especially true in high fantasy (though it can happen in any genre), where the entire world is made up from scratch.

But you need your reader to know all this stuff, so it can be very tempting to pile on the info in a long-winded, clinical sort of way. E.g.: ‘Madeupland was once a mighty empire spanning eleven continents, all the way to the Dragonsea. After the civilian revolts of 1203, the empire was fractured, and many kings arose to rule small communities throughout the Empire. King Sumwun, the forth child of a blacksmith, rose to prominence in the Wher’er District, wresting power from the legitimate governor seven years ago…’

I got bored writing that. You can bet your life your reader will bore reading it. Weave the facts through your story and allow your reader to become acquainted with your world by spending time living in it and experiencing it through the eyes of your character, rather than giving them a lecture.

Low Stakes or No Stakes

Reading a book takes time and your readers are busy people. They won’t sit through a 90,000 word novel unless they care about what happens, so be sure to raise the stakes a bit. If you write a story in which failure or taking no action is an option for your protagonist, it really won’t be worth the reader’s time reading it.

High stakes doesn’t necessarily mean the entire universe is in danger of destruction or that an evil sorcerer will take over the world (though those motifs are popular for a reason; the stakes are high). It could be as simple as Bob being secretly in love with Betty but now Johnny Sparklepants has proposed to her and she’s ‘thinking about it.’

Boom! There you go, high stakes! Without Johnny’s proposition, Bob’s story about secretly loving Betty would be stagnant and boring. But now Bob’s about to lose the love of his life if he doesn’t act quickly and decisively. Make sure your protagonist is facing some kind of crisis, where inaction is not an option and failure would spell disaster.

Soapboxing

So you’ve got something important you want to say with your story: a real life theme you’re passionate about, with a core belief you want your audience to understand and perhaps even accept for themselves.

Good for you. I’m all for that. But you need to be careful not to make your audience feel preached at. That can feel patronising, even if the audience happens to agree with your message. It will also drag the pace of your story to a slow crawl if you’re constantly detouring into political, religious or ethical treatise. ‘Instead,’ to quote myself, ‘focus on telling the story. Make it as true as you can and fill it with believable, sympathetic characters to whom your reader can relate. They’ll start to understand what it’s like to be in that position and will begin to think. And that’s all you can hope to accomplish as a writer: provoke thought.’

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you enjoyed it, don’t forget to ‘like’ this post and also follow us so you never miss another post. You can also follow Penstricken on Twitter, Pinterest and like Penstricken on Facebook.

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ATTENTION AUTHORS:

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Monday Motivation

Posted on 04/11/201926/10/2019 by Ndrw

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ATTENTION AUTHORS:

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5 Hashtags Every Writer Should Know

Posted on 03/11/201902/11/2019 by Ndrw

I remember when Twitter was getting started. I avoided it like it had a horrible disease. I especially despised the way #hashtags began to creep into every area of life (I still despise it when people include hashtags at the end of texts, e-mails and in verbal conversation). Somewhere along the line, however, Twitter has become a part of life and hashtags have wormed their way into most mainstream social media. I, myself, now fully embrace the hashtag (#NotInVerbalConversation) and use it to network with relevant people: readers, authors, publishers and so on.

So, today I’m going to give you a brief list of some essential hashtags for fiction writers. It’s certainly not an exhaustive list (there are bazillions out there!) but is, rather, a selection of those hashtags which I find the most useful as a writer.

#WritingCommunity

Writing can be a solitary business. If you want to be part of a supportive community of like-minded people but don’t want to leave the comfort of your desk, you could do a lot worse than searching for the #WritingCommunity hashtag. Writers from all over the world use it to share their progress, ask for advice and generally connect with other writers. Apart from the odd troll, the #WritingCommunity tend to be a pretty decent bunch so don’t be shy. Send us a tweet and introduce yourself!

#AskAgent / #AskPub / #AskEditor

You might be confident writing stories, but do you know what to do with your story once it’s finished? The world of publishing can be complicated for the uninitiated and a giftedness in the areas of language or story-telling certainly isn’t synonymous with an understanding of the processes or etiquette involved in getting your work edited, represented, published and marketed.

Fortunately, help is at hand. Twitter is full of people who do this stuff for a living. While I wouldn’t recommend DMing or otherwise harassing individual agents, editors or publishers with your questions, you can send a general tweet which includes one of these hashtags (depending on whom you want advice from) and then sit back and wait for the replies to come ~~flooding~~ ~~seeping~~ trickling in.

#writetip / #WritingTip

Got a juicy nugget of writing wisdom to share? Include a #writetip or #writingtip hashtag so people hunting for writing wisdom can easily find it.

Looking for juicy nuggets of writing wisdom? Just search #writetip or #writingtip and waste the next few hours of your day sifting through all the gold and dross Twitter’s vast array of users have to offer on how to write a killer story.

This hashtag is especially useful for if you routinely blog writing tips and share the links on Twitter (like I do!), as links to your blog will be included whenever someone searches for the #writetip hashtag.

#writerslift

Not got quite as many followers as you might like? Try taking part in a #writerslift. These are tweets, generally aimed at writers with a specific number of followers or less, which encourage the struggling writer to comment back (usually with some fact about their writing project, or sometimes just a funny gif) to quickly reach a wide audience.

#VSS365

You might occasionally see this strange little hashtag attached to little single-tweet sized microfictions and wonder what the heck it means. Basically, it’s a fun writing exercise which has become very popular, in which writers publish a full story in a single tweet, based on a daily prompt.

To find the daily prompt, just search for the hashtags #VSS365 and #Prompt. It will usually be the first result that appears and is easily identifiable. More on this Twitter trend here.

honourable mentions:

#Amwriting – Used mainly by people who should be writing but are tweeting.
#Amediting – Similar to amwriting, only for people who should be editing.
#Writerslife – Used mainly to reflect on the strange lifestyle of writing.
#IndieAuthors – A community for indie authors. Essential for getting the word out about your book.
#WordCount – Used mainly to share how well we think we’re doing based on how many words we’ve written.
#WIP – stands for ‘work in progress’, used mainly to talk about how our current projects are going.
#FF / #FollowFriday – Similar, though not identical, to writerslift. Used on Fridays.
#MustRead
#BookGiveaway
#Novelines – a hashtag used when sharing excerpts from one’s own novel.
#ASMSG – Authors Social Media Support Group
#SCBWI – Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators #SciFi
#Romance
#Fantasy
#Horror
#Erotica
#Suspense
#NaNoWriMo – Comes but once a year. More on this here.

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Throwback Thursday: 5 Sci-Fi Tropes I Could Live Without

Posted on 31/10/201926/10/2019 by Ndrw

First published 29/10/2017

Among the many styles and genres of fiction which I enjoy, I must unashamedly confess to a particular fondness for popular sci-fi and fantasy. Yes I know it’s all just unrealistic escapism into a nonsense world of space adventures, suspiciously human shaped aliens and humanity being conquered by the very robots we built to help us but still… it’s fun. And you know… fun’s allowed, even if you like serious literature.

All the same… there have to be limits. But for some reason, sci-fi is just chock full of certain clichéd tropes, some of which are so very ridiculous that it frankly beggars belief that they ever became clichés. The others are just plain done to death. What follows are some of my (least) favourites.

The Holographic Hook

You’ve got to write a space opera and are struggling to come up with an exciting opening scene to draw the audience in from the very beginning. Solution: an exciting space battle! Ships firing at one another, hand to hand combat between aliens and humans, lasers, explosions–

Then an admiral calmly walks onto the scene and ends the simulation. It was all just a holographic training exercise!

This kind of scene, made famous by the Kobayashi Maru scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (and then repeated time and time again in one form or another), gives the audience a burst of excitement that has very little bearing on the story which is to follow. The best it can do is foreshadow some internal conflict the protagonist may face later on in the story.

Please… it’s been done too often. Put some effort in and come up with a proper hook for your story.

Is That You Clive?

You’re alone on an abandoned space station or a spooky castle. Or maybe you’re just home alone, meticulously colouring in your colouring-in book on a dark and stormy night. Suddenly you hear something… something rattling, hissing, banging… perhaps even a sinister inhuman voice whispering your name.

You spin around wildly.

‘Is that you Clive?’

No. No, it’s not Clive. It’s never Clive. And really, ask yourself, is this the sort of thing Clive normally does? If it is… you need to dump Clive and get yourself some nicer friends. Just saying.

Just once I’d like to read or watch something where the victim doesn’t automatically assume that the scary noise is their friend pulling a cruel prank on them. Or better still, just once, I’d like it to really be Clive pulling a cruel trick. At least I’d be surprised.

Hey Clive, Are Those New Horns?

Something terrible has happened to Clive. He’s being controlled by an alien or replaced with a robot duplicate. His behaviour is erratic. His speech has become strange. His eyes have turned luminous green and he has grown horns.

And no one really notices until it’s too late.

My personal favourite example of this occurs in the Doctor Who episode, Rose. Rose returns to her boyfriend’s car to find he is now made entirely of plastic and is talking funny. And what does she do?

Goes out for dinner with him. She suspects nothing until the Doctor fires a corkscrew straight through his skull without injuring him. And she’s supposed to be his girlfriend.

Sigh.

We, The People of Earth…

So it finally happened. Aliens have made contact with humanity. They may have come in peace or they may have come laser guns blazing, but one way or another, it’s first contact day for the people of Earth.

You know Earth, don’t you? Seven-point-four billion different versions of the truth, spread across one hundred and ninety five independent sovereign states (to say nothing of those who want to break away and start their own nation or conquer others) all gathered together on one planet, unable to agree on even the most trifling of matters?

A whole host of different political ideologies, systems of government, international treaties and religious beliefs, and yet when the aliens finally come, humanity all rallies around a single leader, or at the very least, sets aside all their differences. Usually it’s the President of the USA, except in Doctor Who where it can be just about anyone except the President. In any event, I have a sneaking suspicion that if aliens did make themselves known to us today, humanity would not respond with a single unified voice, or even two or three differing voices. Call me cynical but I think it would probably be chaos.

Ask yourself this. If aliens landed on Earth today:

How would Donald Trump respond?
What about Kim Jong-Un?
What about Angela Merkel?
What about ISIS?
What about the Pope?
What about the World Health Organisation?
The Scottish National Party?
The British National Party?
Richard Branson?
Kim Kardashian?
The writers of Doctor Who?
The guy that sells the Big Issue in the town centre?

You get the idea.

Magical Alien Artefacts

I don’t really have a problem with functioning magical artefacts if you’re writing a fantasy, set in a world of magic and myth, rather than a sci-fi set in space and/or the future. At its core, sci-fi (even silly popular sci-fi) tends to speculate on the advancement of technology and science, rather than the possibility that magic might actually work. If we are assuming that magic is not real, as sci-fi tends to do, we have to ask some serious questions about why it would work on an alien planet.

‘Ah, but, you see, it’s not really magic!’ I hear you cry. ‘It’s just technology that seems like magic!‘

But if it’s just technology… why dress it up like magic? Star Trek is very guilty of this. Whether it’s the legend of the Tox Uthat (a quantum phase inhibitor which appeared in TNG: Captain’s Holiday), or Vulcan mythology concerning the psionic resonator (TNG: Gambit), there just seems to be no end of magical artefacts in space which are actually just very clever technology. Technology made of stone. Stone technology that does magic. Heck, some even involve meditating and muttering incantations.

Dishonourable Mentions:

Everybody knows how to fly every kind of spaceship in the universe, even if it is of completely alien design.
Everybody knows everything about science.
Rough alien taverns. Just once, give me a classy alien wine bar.
With just a slight modification to the engine/shields/BBQ grill, we can do some sci-fi magic to save the day!
The bad guys believe emotion is a weakness and that is their Achille’s heel.
Love conquers all (exemplified in the Doctor Who episode Closing Time, where Craig is turned into a Cyberman then somehow manages to turn himself back into a human simply because he hears his baby son crying… as if he was the first parent the Cybermen ever upgraded. Seriously, I preferred it when the Cybermen’s greatest weakness was gold).
Universal translators.
Legendary technology, planets or lifeforms which really do exist.
Having a weapon of mass destruction called ‘The Weapon’. By all means call it the Super Zappy Death Ray, but don’t call it The Weapon. Use your imagination and give it a name.
Shooting the control panel/monitor shuts down everything on the entire spaceship, unlocks every locked door and/or disarms the Weapon.
Snippets of news reporters telling the general public how to survive the alien invasion. I repeat, do this to survive the alien invasion!
Jeanie who works at the shop is actually THE PROPHESIED CHOSEN WARRIOR QUEEN OF ALL THE MULTIVERSE and she doesn’t even realise it.

Well that was a far from exhaustive list but I’m glad to have got it off my chest anyway. Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Be sure to leave us a wee comment below and don’t forget to ‘like’ this post and follow us so you never miss another post. You can also follow Penstricken on Twitter and like Penstricken on Facebook, if that’s what reverses your polarity.

Until next time!

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