Happy New Year! Since I have the honor of welcoming in the glorious new annum I thought I might provide some Resolutions for Writers. Not for me, of course. Perfection is for the gods alone and I already come so dangerously close I could be accused of hubris. These tips are for the rest of you.
* None of my characters will be shot in the shoulder and act as if it were a mosquito bite.
* None of my female characters will use their Feminine Wiles to get information they could have received just by asking, unless such behavior is one of their characteristics.
* None of my stories will switch from present to past tense and back again, or first to third person ditto, without a good reason.
* None of the following words will appear in the final draft without being savagely interrogated and forced to defend their existence: suddenly, very, just, had, got.
* Villains will not explain their evil plot to captured heroes without a damned good reason.
* None of my characters will smile, smirk, or grimace their dialog, because those words describe facial expressions, not ways of speaking. (Sneer gets a pass.)
* No headhopping. "George thought Frank was lying. Frank wondered if George thought he was lying. George wondered what Frank was thinking. Alice wondered why the narrator didn't pick a goddamn lane."
* My hero will not be knocked unconscious at a convenient moment.
* My characters will not hiss a sentence with no S in it.
* A supernatural event in my story will not have a rational explanation - and then be Overturned By Something Spooky, The End.
* If I have five characters I will not name them Mary, Marv, Mark, Mike, and Mickey.
* I will not let a day go by without doing something to promote mystery short fiction, my own, or others.
By the way, I have committed at least two of these abominations, but I swear I am reformed now.
Any additions?
Happy New Year, Robert & all SleuthSayers!
ReplyDeleteExcellent rules, Robert.
Laff! Rob, this would make a terrific class list for my college courses. I really poke fun at the 'evil guy explaining himself in the last scene' in one of my short stories. He starts to, and the heroine goes BAM with the gun. "I can't stand it when they..." Thanks for the smiles today!
ReplyDeleteI like your heroine. It reminds me of the scene in Austin Powers insists on setting up the most overcomplicated, uncertain, method possible of killing the hero. His son says "Why not just shoot him?" And Evil is disappointed in the younger generation...
DeleteHappy New Year to all!
ReplyDeleteA great list - another abomination is the person, all by themselves on a dark and stormy night in an upstairs bedroom with the power out, hearing a spooky sound and getting up without a flashlight or candle or weapon of any kind, and going down to "check it out." No, no, no, and No.
Yes indeed, no no no. It's like the old trope "We're alone in the house with a murderer. Let's split up!" Thanks, Eve.
ReplyDeleteWhooops. Anon was me
DeleteI suggest a few extra words that require justification. 'Some' comes to mind. One of our SleuthSayers… perhaps Steve Liskow? – suggested 'the' as a candidate. I'd not encountered that before and I'm more conscious of it.
ReplyDeleteI'd be hard pressed to justify switching before 1st and 3rd person. Good New Year list, Rob.
Agreed that is better than using facial expression as a saidonym. But I want to share a word from today's Frazz: resolutionary.
ReplyDeleteScrewed up by the parser. My comment included the word sequence: He grimaced."That hurt!" between the that and the is, but I delimited it with French quotes and it mustabin taken for an HTML instruction.
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