NaNo Prep: Writing Rules III - Return of WriMo

NaNoWriMo is merely three days away, and in the spirit of preparation I revamped my Writing Rules again.  This time when I went back to review them I realized that they were a hodgepodge of thoughts with no form.  So I organized them and revamped them and added some new content.  As always I am open to suggestion if you see something wrong or something that needs clarified or plain just doesn't make sense.

This is kind of long and I have it posted as it's own page here.

A few years back a friend of mine asked if I could pass along some of what I’ve learned over the past couple of years about trying to write a book.  I’ve tried to distill that info here.

I am focused on novel writing, so all of these ideas may not apply to poetry writing or something other than Novels or Novellas.  Please feel free to add in some comments that will help refine this.  This is all from the perspective of a novice unpublished writer, but I have done my homework, and learned a few things along the way.  These so called “rules” are merely guidelines.  There are no hard and fast rules.

Writing Advice for the New Novelist (Revisited)

I decided to take a look at this advice to see if it was still valid after more than a year of learning.  I tweaked it a little and added a bit here and there.  If you have something you think I'm missing I'd love to hear it.

• Choose your voice for the story and be consistent.   I think most authors will tell you to avoid present tense, so past tense is the most common method.   Third person narrative is the most common, but books are also written in first person, Twilight by Stepanie Meyers is a good example, and second person, Halting State by Charles Stross is a good example of this form, but is fairly rare.  There also variations on how to use the third person in the form of omniscient, objective(primarily used for news reporting) and limited, which can lend itself to a narrator that is unreliable.  Unreliable just means you only see what the character sees and feel what the character feels, whether it’s a true representation of reality or not.  Third person works very well if you are changing the narrator.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_mode

Finding Your Voice

Point of view is a basic building block of writing a story.  It’s the vantage point from which a story is told.  When done well, it can really make your story pop.  First person is obvious; you are in the head of the main character and stay there.  2^nd person is a little strange, and rarely used in story form, but puts the reader into the story, referring to “you” instead of the “I” of 1^st person.   3^rd person is the most commonly used form for narratives and has many forms, from Omniscient, where you see into everyone’s head, to Objective, where you see into nobody’s head, to Subjective, where you have the point of view of a particular character.  Subjective seems to be coming into vogue, and to me, it gives you, the writer, a lot more options to do interesting things.   Limited 3^rd person POV falls in this category and I’m using it for my current WIP.  I started with the story in 1^st person, but I decided to bring in a second main character, so I needed to change up how I was writing it. 

What makes good writing?

      I downloaded a free version of Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper on my iPhone Kindle app. I read the entire series many moons ago when I was a young man and my recollection of the story doesn't match the reality I'm faced with reading it now. I remember the characters and the setting as being quite awe inspiring, and they are, but the prose are so heavy and overblown with description and obtuse phrasing that it's very distracting from an author's perspective.

      I am starting to get the feeling that reading now is going to be like riding on an airliner is for me. I fly large jets for a living and I'm not a great passenger now, as I know what every noise is. I really don't want the flight attendant to ask me if there is anyone onboard that can fly a jet. I find that spending the last couple of years writing and learning about writing has made me acutely aware of story and prose. I still enjoy well written books as much as the next person, maybe even more than before, but if the writing is marginal I have a much lower tolerance now.