Rob’s Rules for Writing

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Rob’s Rules for Writing

(Image: Hannaford, used under Creative Commons)

Here’s how it breaks down.I don’t do writing advice; never have, never will. Mostly because all of it – with perhaps the exception of read lots, write lots, and finish what you start – is absolute bunk. Every piece of advice you get can be directly contradicted. Told not to use adverbs? The word forever is an adverb. Don’t start a story with your character waking up, or looking at themselves in the mirror? Who says? Why the hell not? If the story demands it, then it must be done. So the one thing you will never see on this blog are little lists of writing advice. Kill that noise.

But simply because I’m unwilling to give out advice, and unwilling to listen to any given to me, doesn’t mean that you can’t have rules. Rules are different. Rules are a rock you can stand on. Rules, by and large, don’t get contradicted – not in writing, anyway. These are, I should point out, rules that aren’t universal, although god knows they should be. Every writer will set their own, and it can often take quite a while to figure yours out. Here are mine. Some writers may be comfortable bending their own rules, but I never do. Here’s what works for me.

Rule #1: No comebacks

By which I mean: if I kill a character, they stay dead. Nothing annoys me more than a character, who we last saw with an axe through his face and a flagpole jammed up his rectum, make a shocking return at the end of the book, or in the next one. This is part of the reason why I really struggle to read comics these days. Why should I give the tiniest toss if Wolverine has died, when I know he’ll be back a few issues later? His clone was killed, or they brought his past self forward (see next rule), or Thanos altered reality and oh wait I stopped caring ten pages ago. His death means absolutely nothing now. Hand on heart, I promise that if I kill a character in one of my books, they will absolutely not be coming back. That includes the prominent character I heartlessly murdered at the end of Impact. They’re done. Finito. Goodbye.

Well… OK. There are corollaries to this rule. Characters will only stay dead if we see them die, or if there is no way in hell they could have survived. I’m OK with leaving a little bit of ambiguity, as long as it’s believable. It’s also totally fine if coming back to life happens to be a key plot mechanic – I haven’t used that yet, but I fully reserve the right to. Until then? Dead is dead is dead.

Rule #2: No time travel

Not ever. Not in a million years. That’s forward and backward. I swear by every deity in American Gods to never use time travel in a book. It constantly amazes me that writers keep trying. It is the Great No, the Universal Undoing, the Thing That Will Drive You Mad.

There are two reasons why I would never fuck with time travel in a story. One: it’s almost impossible to keep the story straight. You can’t take two steps back into the past without creating a thousand paradoxes and destroying the universe, and simply looking the other way and pretending such things don’t exist won’t help you. One of my favourite Stephen King books, 11/22/63, involves time travel, and dear old Steve dealt with the whole killing-grandfather problem by simply stating that his main characters would never do that. A Netflix show I enjoyed, Timeless, dealt with the problem characters of meeting their past selves by saying that they could not travel back to the past in which they already existed. Why? Who knows! It’s a mystery! It’s just how this time travel doohickey works!

Two: it’s boring. There is nothing that makes me groan more loudly than a writer introducing time travel. It has all been done. Virtually none of it has worked. Even the best time travel movie ever made, Looper, didn’t really work. Nuts to any of that. There are no corollaries to this rule. I do not have the energy or the brainpower to try and keep my story straight when the characters are wibbly-wobbling through time. I can barely keep them straight when things happen in a linear order. And I refuse to subject a reader to it simply because I couldn’t think of anything better.

Rule #3: No vampires

There’s nothing wrong with vampires, per se. I just don’t like them. They are almost as boring as time travel. I was really into Justin Cronin’s The Passage, and then it turned out that it was all about vampires, and I actually threw the book across the room. There is no type of supernatural being that has been wrung drier by current authors, and I want no part of it. I solemnly swear that there will be no bloodsuckers in any of my books.

Aliens, Bigfoot, Sasquatch, mermaids, demons…sure. But not vampires. They can fuck right off.

Rule #4: The reader doesn’t give a shit about my research

I love research. Looooove it. And not just as a technique to avoid actually writing. I’m a former journalist, and I get a real kick out of finding strange and wondrous facts, and wrapping my head around a tricky topic. I adore hunting out experts and firing impertinent questions at them. I do it to give my stories a little bit of veracity, to flesh out world I’m working in, and to make things believable.

But what I’ve learned, and what I will always and forever try to stick to, is that readers actually don’t care. They are not nearly as interested as I am in the height/velocity curve for a Bell 206 helicopter, or whether it could make an emergency landing at an altitude of 100 feet and a speed of 70 knots (spoiler: it can). They care not one whit about the exact dynamics of air and friction on an asteroid during re-entry, or whether a ship being towed behind the asteroid could survive this procedure. They just want to get on with the story. So my rule is: when doing research, only communicate exactly what is necessary. The rest can just bubble underneath it, like a beautiful, delicious stew under the crusty story cassoulet. Related note: never write a blog before lunch.

Rule #5: Never talk about it until it’s done

This started off as a suspicion, and very quickly became an unbreakable rule. When I first wrote Tracer, I told virtually no one about it. My wife knew, and so did the scientists that I contacted for research purposes, but that was it. I shared it with nobody. Didn’t tell a soul that I was working on it. It was only when I had a first draft that I actually asked some close friends to take a look at. One of them turned to me and said, “You kept that very close to your chest.” I took that as a serious compliment.

If I can get curmudgeonly here for a second: this is why I have zero patience for people who post lines from their current work in progress on Twitter, usually with the vacuous hashtag #amwriting. Stop that shit. I don’t care. And by doing it, you are all but ensuring that your story will take an age to actually get done, because you’ll be too busy watching social media feedback for that one clever line you’ve got. The only time a story is worth caring about is when it is actually complete. Yes, it may be a steaming pile of garbage, but it will be finished steaming pile of garbage, and who wants an unfinished steaming pile of garbage lying around?

To this day, very few people know what I’m working on until the draft is actually ready to go. That’s the way it’s going to stay.