Candy and Distraction

What is candy? 

Candy is when you give the reader something that they want and it doesn't really have anything pertinent to add to either character development or moving the plot forward.  There's a couple of reasons to add candy.

Stories Will Stop Surprising You

There's a piece of advice I heard somewhere once, long ago.

"Don't read a story about something you're an expert in."

Contrivance

There is a common complaint about fiction that you hear when someone has decided that a particular story is poorly explained, managed or otherwise unbelievable.

"It's contrived."

The thing about this statement.

It's true.

When talking about fiction, it is always going to be true.

If Things Are Going Smooth, Don't Tell the Reader

One of the best examples of this comes from the Dennis Quaid movie Undercover Blues.  Obviously this is something of a spoiler, so be aware.

Throughout the whole movie, the Blues portray themselves as in control of the immediate situation but still trying to figure out the larger picture.  Meanwhile they pepper the conversation with things like "(Morty) could be useful" which later turns out to be true.  You don't learn that they've been manipulating the larger picture all along until the end of the movie.

Things Never Go Smooth

One of the problems with the stories that are popular, things are always going wrong.  There's always some amount of unnecessary pain and fear and trouble in the world.  It's stuff that could probably have been avoided if it weren't for a handful of mistakes that the story makes painfully obvious.

The crisis can be personal, such as saying the wrong thing to a girlfriend and trying to spend the rest of the story apologizing, or it can be local, such as dealing with a bank robbery.  It goes on and on, with the mistakes being more obvious and seemingly extreme as you go further up the line.

But the matter is the same.

Mistakes were made and they have to be cleaned up.

Don't Explain the Hammerchlorians

There are two maybe three parts to this piece of advice.  And the first of these is quite well explained by the large, pear shaped individual that arrogantly spews his opinions of science-fiction and fantasy in the comic shop that's part of El Goonish Shive's world setting.

Probable Impossibilities are Preferable to Possible Improbabilities

The title here is a quote from Aristotle and should probably be one of the first things any author of fiction considers when deciding on plot direction and events.

The quote has been restated to me in the past in the following way:

"You can have the possible.   You can have the impossible.  But it has to be probable."

What this means is that the audience has to find the story believable within the framework of the world setting chosen.

Have Fun and Don't Worry About Message

Okay, you will see me wax philosophic and start to delve into deep and meaningful stuff here and there all over my blog in places.  I might even start delving into what I consider to be the big philosophical meanings and metaphors of my various works. Said discussions might get fairly complex, deep and insightful.

Most of them are things I come up with after the fact of writing the story and are more ways for me to analyze myself than to analyze my work.

Maintain Consistency

Consistency is a big part of any story, if you are not consistent then people are going to quickly get fed up with your story as it becomes harder and harder to relate things.

A lot of people might point to George Lucas when thinking of examples of inconsistency.  However, George's arbitrary decision to change some things in the Star Wars universe is not really a very major example of this situation.

Check Reality Before You Reject It

A lot of fiction can be called larger than life.  The Rule of Cool is repetively invoked in all manner of stories.  This is why the star-fighters in Star Wars make strange whining sounds and action heroes can outrun explosions.  This is why characters in movies and TV shows seem like they're experts in just about everything.  This is why the characters in romance movies can so flawlessly express themselves.  Fiction, even realistic fiction that says it sticks firmly within what is possible in real life, still seems to stick strongly to the mantra "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"

However, you should not simply reject reality when making your stories.  The first thing you should do when writing a scene and desiring to make something "cool" is to do the research as to the reality of the subject.  If you don't know precisely what is or is not possible or realistic, then you increase the risk of breaking the willing suspension of disbelief.

Try to be Predictable and Surprising

Predictability, very much like stereotypes, has a bad reputation amongst readers and writers alike.  To most people, predictable is the same thing as boring.  They want, or say they want, unpredictable stories that end in ways that they did not expect whatsoever.

"I did not see that coming."

That is one of the phrases that most people connect with a story that is well-written and surprising.

It is something of a misdirection.

Stories are not truly unpredictable.  The closest sorts of stories that can be called unpredictable are things like Looney Toons, Monty Python and Alice In Wonderland.  However, even in this case, the apparent randomness is expected by the viewers and readers.  Same with such humorous works as Discworld, with its mountain of puns.