How Not To Write A Book by Chris Newton

Author:Chris Newton [Newton, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: An insider's guide to successful writing and publishing for beginners
Publisher: Memoirs Publishing
Published: 2016-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

It’s clear that a lot of people who launch themselves into writing in these genres have abandoned the basic requirement of the novelist to be original. Science fiction fans and Tolkienists may get away with this, to an extent; the sales figures for works in these categories indicate that even highly-derivative stories can find followers if the adventures are well told and the settings exciting and compelling.

Nevertheless, exactly the same rules apply. Your characters should be people, not caricatures or clichés. That means they must be believable; neither too fearless and heroic (the goodies) nor too unremittingly evil (the baddies).

The story has to be credible – you need to be able to suspend disbelief. Fantastic and impossible things may happen, but they must follow a consistent set of rules. Look at Gulliver’s Travels; the basic idea of the main part of the story, that a man travelling the world might come across lands where the people are vastly bigger or smaller than he is, is plain ludicrous, and would have been equally so in the early 18th century. But it’s an entrancing novel, thanks in large part to Swift’s considerable skill at story-telling, and it has been reprinted (and more recently filmed) down the ages. It would have gone wrong, however, if Swift had continued to pile improbability upon improbability. As it is, everything that happens in each section of the book is a logical outcome from just one whopping improbability. The writer explores the question: imagine what would happen if a normal human encountered a race of otherwise normal people who are only six inches tall. Gulliver is an early example of a high-concept story - one based on a simple big idea.

If you’re writing sci fi or fantasy you will have to work at your settings, because unlike authors of conventional fiction, you won’t be able to write ‘a wet Saturday morning in Oxford Street’ and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination. I have seen many submissions which failed to invoke any sense of place. You read a few paragraphs and find yourself thinking, Where the hell are we? What does this place look like?

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