10 Rules of Thumb for Writing

These aren’t hard and fast rules, but nonetheless are useful for most writing situations.

1. Tell us what your character wants as soon as possible. Make sure your character wants something and works toward getting it. I believe in some circles this is called making your protagonist protag. (If you’re writing a character who doesn’t know what s/he wants, good luck. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but you’ve set yourself up for a nearly impossible goal.)

2. Paint your protagonist with a full life, including friends, passions, an ambition in life—things that are likely completely different from the plot of the book, because the plot is what isn’t expected.

3. Don’t make up words for things that we already have perfectly good English words for. Also, only one new word (a really novel concept) per page.

4. Tell backstory in one paragraph chunks. Or, if you want to tell more than that, use flashbacks to set a full scene. But no flashbacks in the first chapter—too confusing.

5. Use your characters’ namea a lot at the beginning—more than anyone would in real life. Readers forget stuff like that easily.

6. If you have a group of friends or family members, think about cutting or consolidating them. More than 6 heroes is, IMHO, too many. In YA and MG, more than 3 is probably too many. In real life, we keep track of lots of people. In a book, it can be very difficult to make them all distinguishable.

7. Let us see your character’s emotions. Reading is largely about feeling vicarious emotions. If you don’t let us feel them, we will put down your book. Don’t say “he was sad,” but talk about how that is physically manifest.

8. Save the biggest event for the end of the book.

9. If you can, increase tension chapter by chapter from the beginning until the end of the chapter. Don’t let a chapter without tension go by, though it can be a different kind of tension.

10. Write your first chapter last. It sets up everything and rewriting it over and over before you’ve finished the rest of the novel doesn’t make much sense.