I: An Introduction

In the summer and early fall of 2001 Allen Steele and I spent a fair amount of time closely reading the submission stories of several "prospective, new, and developing writers" who planned to attend a workshop just prior to ConSpec, a convention to be held that September in Canada.  In fact, I was at the computer on the day before my scheduled departure for Calgary cataloguing my so-called "Fiction-Writing Rules" (most in response to recurring flaws in the story manuscripts) when Jeri, my wife, called from work to ask if I’d been listening to the news on National Public Radio, as I often do.

No, I confessed, I hadn’t.

Jeri said that I might want to do so, or even go downstairs and turn on the TV.  An airliner had flown into a World Trade Center tower in New York City and other scary stuff seemed to be happening.  My heart and my stomach switched positions, and flip-flopped again — but, figuring that I could catch up on the news that evening, I stayed at my keyboard until the disquiet in my gut drove me to rise, jog downstairs, and snap on the television.

It was bad, much worse than I had imagined.  I saw video clips of airliners flying into the twin towers and, too soon, of the towers rumbling, buckling, and plunging in apocalyptic billows of gypsum dust, transfigured plastic, burnt paper, and who-knows-what-else as people fled in a real-life reenactment of feigned urban panic in a dozen or more sci-fi-cum-horror flicks, from King Kong to Godzilla, people running or hobbling at speed, the horror in their eyes as kaleidoscopically bright as tossed new pennies.

A little later, maybe during my TV watching, Jeri called to ask if I still planned to fly to Canada.  Sure, I told her, not from any surplus of boldness, but because it seemed highly unlikely to me that anything as extraordinary as these highjackings would occur on consecutive days.  And I’d worked hard to prepare for ConSpec and could not see myself declining to honor my invitation out of craven self-regard, leaving my inviters to fend with the last-minute inconvenience of my cancellation.  I wasn’t thinking clearly, though.  The government shut down airports nationwide, and the destruction and loss of life in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and an anonymous rural meadow in Pennsylvania led ConSpec’s organizers not to cancel, but to postpone, the convention.  For a host of reasons, of course, they acted altogether rightly.  And I turned to the news again, as did people all over the world.  However, I also selfishly rued the fact that my trip to Alberta had fallen through.

Eventually, the organizers of ConSpec arranged to piggyback — evocative verb — their convention on both ConVersion and Canvention in August, 2002, in Calgary, and Allen and I got to fly to Alberta, anyway, albeit almost a year after our scheduled appearances at ConSpec alone.  I met Derryl Murphy, Jena Synder, Holly Phillips, Peter Watts, and a host of other fine people face to face for the first time and had the good fortune to speak again with some Canadians whom I had fortunately encountered before, from Candas Jane Dorsey to Robert Sawyer to Timothy Anderson, and so on.  And I loved Calgary, a city both bustlingly decorous and breathtakingly clean, as I did a long but entertaining trip through gorgeous farmland to Drumheller and the Royal Tyrell Paleontological Museum.  Indeed, in Drumheller proper, Allen Steele and I stood in the mouth of a humongous T.-rex model, its teeth imprisoning us like stalactite bars and miles of peerless blue sky backlighting our plight.  Derryl took our picture.

Somewhere during this whirl of events, Jena or Derryl or both asked me about printing my list of fiction-writing rules in a future issue of OnSpec — actually, to be completely truthful, Jena had asked me by e-mail before, and I had waffled, or temporized, or something — and I agreed.  Back home in Georgia, I looked them all over, made a few changes, and zapped the document to Jena as an e-mail attachment, and it showed up, as promised, in the Winter 2002 issue.

II: Fiction-Writing Rules

1. Significant detail

Detail — concrete, specific, definite, sense-activating, particular details — ­make fiction come alive.  Without such detail, fiction dies on the page.  On the other hand, as Janet Burroway observes in Writing Fiction, "No amount of concrete detail will move us unless it also implicitly suggests meaning and value" (p. 57).  Detail for detail's sake devolves into listing, and the narrative clots.  Make sure that the detail you provide has some purpose other than mere cataloguing — that it contributes to action, theme, or mood.  Otherwise it will annoy and finally run off your reader.

2. Adverbs

Use sparingly.  The right verb eliminates the need for an adverb; some­times, it eliminates the need for an entire phrase or clause.  Compare the sentences "Clifford sat down gingerly in his recliner" and "Clifford eased into his recliner."  The latter makes the same point as the former but in fewer words.  Phrases like shuffled slowly, furiously pumped his hand, sprang energetically, and shouted loudly signal their own redundancy.  So beware of adverbs.  Especially avoid using them in dialogue tags; the dialogue itself, should haul the freight of the speaker's tone of voice or sincerity.  [An exception?  "You son of a bitch," she said affectionately.]

3. Filtering

Don't use I watched, she saw, he heard, Larry noticed, or the alien smelled when you have already established the sentence's subject as your point-of-view character.  Doing so puts what Burroway calls a filter between the detail that you want to present and its apprehension by the reader.  Example: "Crystal hesitates before entering the living room.  She knows Mama will talk about her late husband, Stevie Jack's daddy."  Drop the words She knows in the second sentence because readers already understand that the author has placed them in Crystal's mind.  Example: "Soon I started noticing a dif­ference in the way Frank behaved toward me."  Change that sentence to read: "Soon Frank began acting differently toward me."  The error of filtering infects even the work of published writers, but most good copy editors correct it.  However, don't depend on someone else to recognize it for you.

4. Use contractions in dialogue

Not using contractions — won't, don't, couldn't instead of will not, do not, could not — makes your characters sound like Yoda wannabes.  Even aliens need not shun contractions, even if their "speech" represents a transcrip­tion of communication via means other than language: smell, touch, taste, or vision.  You may think you have a good reason not to use contrac­tions in dialogue, but — forgive me — usually you don't.

5. Do not use contractions in exposition

This observation is a corollary to Observation No.4.  Exceptions exist.  If you have a breezy first-person narrator, permit the use of contractions in the text as well as in the dialogue.  In nearly every other case, shun the use of contractions.  Example: "He couldn't quite grasp the concept of a society ready to arrest him for publicizing a scientific breakthrough."  Make this sentence read: "He could not quite grasp the concept," etc.  Why?  Traditional practice tends to dictate this approach.  (On the other hand, no one will shoot you if you flout this "rule.")

6. Use active verbs wherever possible

That is, shun linking verbs, passive-voice constructions, and the words there is, there are, there was, and there were.  They weaken your prose.  Every use of a linking verb, a passive-voice construction, or the words there and its place-holding siblings robs you of the opportunity to use an action verb.  Examples: "He was a Texas Ranger for nine years." / "He served for nine years as a Texas Ranger." / "He was canned by his boss." / "His boss canned him." / "There were grunts of disapproval from Bosley's brothers." / "Bosley's brothers grunted in disapproval."

7. Went

I recommend total eschewal of this verb, as well as its various forms in other tenses: go, goes, has gone, was going, etc.  But please shun went in particular.  Examples: He went to the store.  He went to the kitchen.  She went to China.  How blah.  Using went deprives you, every time you trot it out, of a more emphatic, more colorful, more informative action verb.  He skipped to the store.  He schlepped to the kitchen.  She island-hopped to China.  (For the same reason, avoid using linking verbs — any form of the verb "to be" — and the other constructions listed in Observation 6.  Usually, you can avoid these constructions; the writing gets harder, unfortunately, but the reading experience almost always improves.)

A caveat: use your judgment.  British novelist Kingsley Amis once com­plained that writer Martin Amis, his son, turned every sentence into a showplace for his snazzy style, metaphorically juggling, balancing on a ball, and eating fire at the same time.  Sometimes, the elder Amis said, a reader needs a simple sentence like She went to the grocery or He ate a sandwich to orient within the narrative and to stay with it.  Still, if a pas­sage needs punching up, the smart writer scrutinizes its verbs and opts for verbs that boogie, caterwaul, or slink — verbs that have a sensual as well as a kinetic dimension.

8. Thing, anything, nothing, something

These words, if you use them a lot, hint that you need to work harder on either your vocabulary or your wil1ingness to use it.  These words, like there is, there are, there was, and there were, function as mere place fillers for the more particular words that you have failed to provide.  They have no more substance than do air bubbles in a pie filling.  They diffuse the pie's flavor, offer no satisfying resistance to the teeth, and provide little if any nourishment.

9. Participial phrases

Many writers have no clue that the action of the verb in a participial phrase takes place simultaneously with the action of the verb in the sen­tence's main clause.  For example: "Dreaming of Morticia, Leland constructed an elaborate fantasy of their future life in England."  This sentence works.  Leland's dreaming of Morticia occurs at the same time as does his fantasy constructing.  However, the following sentence does not work: "Slamming the door and removing its hinges, Morticia tossed the heavy oaken plank into her swimming pool."  The actions in the verbals slamming and removing cannot logically take place at the same time, and neither can occur simultane­ously with the action of the verb tossed.  Rewrite the sentence to read: "Morticia slammed the heavy oaken door, removed its hinges, and tossed it into her swimming pool."  The rewrite presents a logical sequence that the original sentence confounds.

10. Free-floating its and thises

Many writers use these indefinite pronouns without providing a specific identifying antecedent.  Marginally acceptable in dialogue, in the text itself this practice may signal laziness or fuzzy thinking.  Example: "This was lasting far longer than it should."  Context may afford a clue what this and it stand for, but the writer has not bothered to do so, and the sen­tence slips into vagueness.

11. Characters who sigh

Characters in category fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction, sigh more than their counterparts in other types of fiction.  Why?  Beats me, but — sigh — I find most of the sighing either unnecessary or uncon­vincing.  It serves as shorthand for a more subtle human response, one harder to observe and set down in words.  Yes, people do sigh in real life, usually to express quiet scorn or to readjust their mood, but, again, not so conspicuously or often as they do in category fiction.

12. Each other & one another

Each other has specific application to two people; one another applies to three or more people.  "Frank and Morticia loved one another" is wrong.  "Kirk, the first mate, the chief engineer, and the alien Sltjkzx raised their phasers and covered each other's backs" is also wrong.  I see a good deal of wrongness in student writing.

13. Ellipses (...)

Go easy with them.  They can breed like apostrophes in the representa­tion of a dialect, and, like apostrophes, they soon annoy.  (Corollary: Use a dash rather than an ellipsis at the end of an interrupted line of dialogue.  An ellipsis indicates a fading away of the character's voice, no an abrupt stop or an interruption.)

14. Realistic dialogue

Truly realistic dialogue contains lots of stuff most people don't want to read, namely, the expressions well, you know, uh, hey, like, and so on.  Use these expressions just enough to suggest character, and then tighten the rest of the speech up.  Dialogue has to advance the story just as straight­-ahead narrative does, and no one wants to read gibberish simply because a certain character speaks it.

15. Commas after but and and

Even if these contractions begin a sentence, they do not require a comma after them: "But, she was not ready to see Frodo" and "And, the infan­try arrived" are both wrong.  You need a comma after but or and only to set off a phrase intervening between it and another word: "But, heartsick and ill, she was not ready to see Frado."  And "And, laden with chocolate bars and Mickey Mouse ears, the infantry arrived."  (The same rule applies to the word yet.  Omit the comma in "Yet, he continued to love her.")

16. Tighten, tighten, tighten

You don't have to describe a character's every action to make a scene credible or vivid.  You must select.  In fact, describing every action in sequence can kill a page of prose faster than an electric paper shredder.  Wherever possible, fold sentences into clauses, clauses into phrases, and phrases into single words.  Delete words contributing no forward movement, essential information, or crucial suggestions of mood:

The house rested on a mountain of stony crags, as did the storage shed that shone red in the sunrise that washed over the Colorado landscape.

The house rested on a craggy mountain, as did the storage shed shining red in the sunrise over Colorado.

The house and the sunrise-red storage shed rested on a craggy Colorado mountain.

These sentences get tighter, with no loss of essential information, from one revision to the next.  Perhaps you can find aesthetic reasons for preferring the first sentence to the sentences that follow, or the second sentence to the third, but the writer has pared his first sentence nearly to the bone — maybe he could drop "craggy" — and the pace of his story speeds up.  Therefore I reiterate: tighten, tighten, tighten.

III: An Afterword

I enjoyed the Winter 2002 issue of On Spec, with its theme "O for a muse of fire . . . ," and especially enjoyed the privilege of having a piece of my own in the issue.  My delight at the appearance of "Fiction-Writing Rules" in such a heady gathering of art, editorials, and stories modulated to only mild glee.  Why?

Well, first of all, "Fiction-Writing Rules" sounds pretty damned self-assured and pontifical, even if I do include a couple of statements of qualification and demurral in my text.  If I were sending this piece in today, I’d call it "Fiction-Writing Tips," or "Tentative Episcopal Pointers," or "A Few Modest Literary Proposals," or War and Peace.  I’d stress (as most people, I hope, would quickly deduce) that nothing in my catalogue borders on holy writ, and I’d confess that in the "rule" headlined "Tighten, Tighten, Tighten," the long complex sentence that I whittle down to a simple sentence in two steps has more grace than the ostensible paragon of succinctness with which the process concludes.  In other words, tightening one’s prose offers obvious benefits, but in some cases the loss of imagery, rhythm, and/or mood doesn’t fully repay the result.  Still, beginners more often over- than underwrite (even if they’re not insurance agents), and the suggestion to tighten has genuine experiential soundness to commend it.  Usually, if a writer can cut out an extraneous word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or even chapter, only a doting parent should think about restraining that impulse.  And who cares what clueless Mom or Dad thinks, anyway?

Finally, at least for this go-round, I would add one more tip to the sixteen in the original document, namely, an item called "Get the Would Out," in which I urge writers to avoid using the helping verb “would” in describing a recurrent or habitual past action.  Unfortunately, many fiction writers automatically use this tense: "We would get up early, and Grandpa Pedro would fill our socks with rocks.  Then we would go to town, where I would clock Billy Joe with my sock."  My modest proposal?  Avoid using the conditional tense.  Simply indicate the time and use the past tense: "In those days we got up early.  Grandpa Pedro filled our socks with rocks.  Then we went to town, where I always clocked Billy Joe with my sock."  Too much would in a memory passage topples the pile.

Am I likely to come up with more of these helpful tips?  Not unless I get a brand-new slew of creative-writing students who stagger me with repeated instances of highly original errors.  And I am sometimes just as likely as a raw beginner to commit one of the “errors” of which I warn and then to fail to recognize my mistake until it has achieved the embarrassing conspicuousness of publication.  Indeed, some of the tales in the Winter 2002 of OnSpec contain examples of my alleged sixteen errors and yet do not appreciably suffer.  And why not?  Because their authors deploy the English language in such a way that their violations of the sixteen rules strike me as natural and thus justifiable.  On the other hand, another story or two showcase errors that seem more than merely alleged because the writers could have chosen a more felicitous mode of expression.  That’s what makes writing a continual challenge, and why I have little doubt that I will wrestle daily with the task until I no longer have the strength or the mental acuity to do so.

One of these days, I wouldn’t mind wrestling with that task in front of a yellow legal pad, or an old-fashioned typewriter, or a new-fangled laptop in a cabin, house, hunting lodge, hotel, or high-rise somewhere in Canada.  You have a lovely country and even lovelier people.