Writing Wednesday: A Few Handy Rules of Thumb (And Why You Might Not Use Them)

Here are some rules of thumb that I throw out when I am teaching beginning author's classes:

Say what your protag's age and name are on the first page, for instance.

Make sure that there is some conflict in the first chapter, even if it isn't the major conflict of the book.

Keep the number of viewpoint characters down to 2-3 for a YA novel and 5-6 for an adult novel, and only change viewpoint characters at the end of a chapter or at the very least the end of a scene.

Don't kill off major viewpoint characters in the middle of the novel, especially ones that the readers are rooting for.

Keep backstory to one paragraph at a time, especially early in a novel.

Keep the main action in the story within a limited time period, usually less than one month.

Introduce both (or all three) figures in a romance novel in the first 20 pages.

Make sure that there is only one main villain throughout the entire novel, to keep action focused.

Every character needs both virtues and vices to be realistic.

Write a sympathetic scene with the protagonist as quickly as possible.

The magic system must have rules and the protagonist must learn these rules gradually as the novel progresses.

Don't write a book from the point of view of an inanimate object.

Avoid teaching a lesson directly, or ending the book with an explanation of what it means.

Make sure that children solve their own problems in children's books, and don't have adults step in and fix everything for them.

Avoid happy endings that occur through luck rather than the hard work of the main characters.

But for each of these rules, I can think of an excellent book that breaks the rule. George R. R. Martin is constantly killing off characters the readers love. A lot of epic fantasy writers spend pages and pages explaining backstory and their readers love it. Plenty of children's books have very clear moralistic messages. My book Mira, Mirror was written as an answer to rule #12.

So how do you know if you should break the rules or not break the rules?

There's not really a way for me to answer this or not. In the end, you're going to have to decide for yourself if the rule you are breaking is a)essential to the story you are trying to tell and b)is broken is such a way that it feels “brilliant” to most readers. It isn't going to be a unanimous vote, either. Some readers are never going to like certain books that break rules. But if you can get a few reactions like “this is brilliant!” then you are probably on the right track.