I'm not actually much of a Kurt Vonnegut fan (nil nisi bonum), but a lot of people are.  Some "rules" he gave for short stories:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Over at the Freakonomics blog, there's a review of a new book about Mark Twain, and a discussion about whether art and money-making are (or ought to be) opposed to each other. 

The Twain book sounds especially fascinating to anyone who is interested in the twin arts of writing and money-making. I always want to sneer at people who sneer at writers who wish to actually be paid for their work. This troupe of sneerers seem to believe that writing is art and that art comes from the soul and that the fruits of the soul shall not be bought. Here, for instance, is Willa Cather on the subject:

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

To which I say: Feh. Or, to cite another master, Keith Richards:

Art? As far as I’m concerned, that’s just a shortening of “Arthur.” 

Consider it the analog to the Olympics vs. Professional Sports.  Is a great basketball player in the NBA any less of an athlete or any less to be appreciated because they make a zillion dollars a year in salary and sponsorships?  It's fine to admire Olympians who are in it for the love of the sport -- but not only does the love of the sport not exclude a fat contract, achievement even if motivated by a fat contract is achievement nonetheless.

I would argue the same is true for art, including writing.

De has been posting some nice material on writing in general, and writing mysteries specifically:

The Bare Minimum:

There's a bare minimum of what a story needs to accomplish: it has to allow the audience to suspend disbelief. A story doesn't even have to be entertaining to accomplish this. Entertaining is good, thought-provoking is good, original is good...but first, the story has to let you believe in it before it can do anything else. How you do you make a story believeable?

[...] There are two ways to screw up the meaning of a story. One, don't have one. Two, include stuff and meanings of stuff that have nothing to do with the meaning of the story. Oh, you can vary it: show what happens when people try to act against that meaning or when they do it only half-assed. But the meaning of your story is your story. If your meaning is "love conquers all" then don' t make the ending depend on robots (unless the robots mean love).

Note: The person telling the story goes with this, too. If the voice of that person doesn't fit in with the story, that's bad. Don't have Kafka tell a love story unless you want a Kafkaesque love story.

Plot Twists and Transformations:

In a mystery, there are two plots. The first plot is the one the reader sees. The detective hunts the murderer among a number of suspects, eventually discovering the criminal and ensuring he or she comes to justice. The second plot is the one the reader doesn't see, but guesses at -- why did the murderer do it? What does the murderer do to cover up the act -- more murders, concealing or destroying clues, etc. The second plot pokes up from time to time in the form of clues, but it isn't fully revealeduntil the end of the story

... at which point both the plots tie together, and the reason for there being two plots becomes clear.

Interesting, ponderable reads.

De offers some marvelous advice around her current project/assignment: writing short radio mystery scripts. Much of it sounds applicable to a lot of writing projects.

First, write down a one- or two-sentence description of your story--the mystery rather than the solution--as if you were writing the hook for a book-of-the-month club. Come up with a catchy title.

Then write down the names of the characters, drawing lines between the characters indicating their relationships. Each character has to have connections to at least two other characters. Come up with 6-9 characters. You don't have to use them all, but stretching the number of characters will help you stretch the possible relationships.

Decide what the solution to the mystery is. Because the characters are so intertwined, it should be easy to drum up a few red herrings.

Write a 1- to 2-sentence description of each character. Focus on relationships and conflicts, but include at least one trait: gentle, boisterous, mutters.

Give yourself 10 scenes. The first three scenes are the beginning; the situation must become much more serious by the end of the third scene. The next six scenes are the middle; the characters try to find out what's going on (or try to prevent each other from finding out). The last scene is the resolution. You will often find there are two mysteries. The first mystery is the who-dunnit, that is, who killed the victim, who stole the jewels, etc.

The second mystery is one that matters, and it's usually the reason behind the first. X killed Y because Y stole his fiancee fifty years ago. But why now? Because Y's wife, the former fiancee of X, told X that Y has been beating her for years. Both mysteries must be addressed in the last scene. The solution to the first mystery must be known to at least some of the characters: the truth brought to light, or hidden by choice. The solution to the second mystery should, if possible, retain a sense of mystery. What made X kill Y? Revenge? Love of the finacee? A sense of justice?

Then start over...

Nice. It sounds like a fun (if exhausting) project.

Doyce points to a really, really nice article on writing non-linear plots, focusing on the Firefly episode, "Out of Gas."

I tend to do a lot of non-linear stuff in my writing -- flashbacks, asides, reminiscences, other out-of-sequence bits. I need to read this article. LIke, several times.

By an odd coincidence, I was mentioning this quote last night to Kate and Doyce (remembering it as "a painting") -- and this morning it was in a QotD section on my Google homepage:

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery

A nice analysis of the "Our Mrs. Reynolds" episode of Firefly, and how Joss pulls off the tired "She isn't everything she seems ... is she?" question.

What is so brilliant about the Joss in this episode is the way he uses the audience's understanding of TV to play with its expectations. This wouldn't be the first episode where we meet a naive, innocent girl who turns out to be more than she pretends. So his narrative problem is when we meet someone who says she's X, we expect there's going to be a reveal.

So Joss goes all out. He makes the entire episode be about Mal dealing with a naive, vulnerable, innocent girl who says he married her. He has the other characters poke fun at Mal. He has her naivete become a problem for Mal -- a problem for the entire crew. Her presence causes dissension. Joss hints openly that the episode is going to be thematically about the abuse of female sexuality in a paternalistic society. The unwelcome attractiveness of a submissive woman.

Usually what tips you off to a character being a spy is that there isn't enough story there if she isn't. There is a hole in the story -- a narrative vacuum that must be filled. You know instinctively that what you're seeing isn't the whole story because it would be too boring if it were the whole story.

Instead, Joss commits so wholly to the character's innocence that you are wondering if this will be an episode about Saffron inadvertently setting the crew at each other's throats. There is no vacuum to fill. There's a perfectly good episode there. Or maybe those bad guys out in space will capture Serenity and Mal will have to fight for a wife he never wanted. 'Nother good episode there.

Instead of which, Joss goes and throws a curveball, and suddenly the episode is about something entirely else.

Leading to the final conclusion, and a conclusion that stems from that:

The lesson, I think is: if you're going for a mislead, commit to it fully. Play the mislead as if it's really where you're going. Make sure you're describing the action in exactly the same tone as you would use if that were where you were going. Make sure there isn't a hole there that the audience is expecting you to fill. Don't hold back.

Incidentally, this is true in a broader sense in thrillers and sf when you're setting up your world and your characters but before you throw your plot into motion. If you're writing Night of the Iguanas and you're going to strand a whole bunch of characters in the Mexican backwoods surrounded by mutant carnivorous iguanas, be sure there's an interesting plot going on before the iguanas show up. Make sure your main character already has a problem, something that haunts him that he is actively trying to deal with. Make sure the drama and tension is already building. Then when the iguanas show up, the audience hasn't been irritably waiting for the other shoe to drop; they're actively involved. And, of course, in lulls between characters being eaten, you can watch them try to resolve their personal differences. And that's always fun.

"Life is what happens when you're making other plans," said Mr. Lennon, and so it should be with your plot. Plot is what happens while your characters are trying to get on with their lives.

Hugely important, it seems to me.

These are actually the "Top Ten Geek Business Myths" about going into business as a tech geek, but I strongly suspect that they apply (with a little tweaking) to getting published, as well.

Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.
Myth #2: If you build it they will come.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Myth #4: What you think matters.
Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.
Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business.
Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.
Special bonus myth (free with your paid subscription): After the IPO I'll be happy.

So take, for example, #10:

Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.

Reality: If you have no competition the most likely reason for that is that there's no money to be made. There are six billion people on this planet, and it's very unlikely that every last of them will have left a lucrative market niche completely unexploited.

The good news is that it is very likely that your competition sucks. The vast majority of businesses are not run very well. They make shoddy products. They treat their customers and their employees like shit. It's not hard to find market opportunities where you can go in and kick the competition's ass. You don't want no competition, what you want is bad competition. And there's plenty of that out there.

The same is true for writing. If there's nobody out there who's getting published writing what you're writing, it's not likely because you've invented a brand-new creative niche, a new genre, a radically new way of telling a story that the world is dying to hear. It's probably because nobody wants to buy and read stuff like that. That's not to say that writing for the sake of your own Muse isn't a fine thing to do, but that's not necessarily the same as writing to get published (especially, I'd imagine, in a first book). You want to find something where you can be authentically creative and be competitive against the other creative voices out there clamoring for attention, especially the ones already getting published. "You don't want no competition, what you want is bad competition. And there's plenty of that out there."

The rest can be similarly tweaked, because they're rules of business, and publishing (along with manufacturing) is a business -- driven by both creativity and marketing. Folks on both the business end and the creativity end who forget that do not, I suspect, last long.

Quoth Real Live Preacher:

If you want to write you must have faith in what is. You must respect what exists, because it has earned the right to exist. Of all the possibilities, of all the things that might have existed, this thing exists and you should write about it. Be fearless. Explain nothing. Justify nothing. See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear. With the right kind of faith, you can be at peace with people knowing things about you and passing judgment on you. And they will judge you. Those who will never dare to write and who will never bare their souls in words will pass judgment on you. And the more hidden they are behind masks of lies and pretense, the more eager they will be to turn the spotlight on you. You will be a scapegoat. You will speak our sins, and they will lay hands on you and drive you into the wilderness.

This is old school. This is primitive. This is the way things are. We look for someone to bear the burden of our sins, then we drive them away so that we don’t have to look at them and can go back to our sinning with peace of mind.

But if you can live with all of this, if you can let people know things about you, keep your eyes on the ball, and keep moving forward, living hard and straight and writing about it, then you can be a writer. And maybe a writer is something you want to be.

The elements that go into designing the exterior of a hardcover book -- and how many of them are left over from the Old Days.

It’s a constellation of little details, most of which hark back to ye olden days. A dust jacket used to be just that—a wrapper to protect the book in the store; the buyer would throw it out before shelving his or her new acquisition. So the spine die and case stamp would be on display during most of the book’s working life. Now collectors put plastic wrappers over the dust jackets to preserve them from harm. In Jane Austen’s time, the pages of a new book would still be joined together at the edge, where they’d been folded; the first reader would use a paper knife to cut the folds open. The edges would be uneven, a look mimicked now by an artificial deckle edge.

Today these conventions are invoked to impress the buyer/reader; to complement the inside and outside design; to make a book seem fancier, more covetable. You may not consciously note whether a book has colored endsheets, but the detail probably influences your perception of its value. Will you ever see the spine die or case stamp on 90 percent of your books? Probably not, unless you’re like me and take the jacket off so you can carry the book on the subway without shredding it. (Then you might wish there wasn’t a spine stamp, so the rest of the passengers couldn’t tell what swill you were reading.)

It is ironic that those under-the-dust-cover elements never show up.  I actually like the look of non-dustcovered books, but I like the jacket artwork, too, so I hate to get rid of the latter to show off the former.

It's a lot more complex than it seems.

When I’m designing a book now, the most important thing I have to do is make castoff. This means figuring out a way to fit enough words on a page so that the book comes out to the number of pages that were budgeted for. The page count is determined very early on, by people who’re more concerned with profit and loss than with beauty, and it’s intimately tied to the price of the book and the projected sales. Some books need to be stretched so the publisher can justify charging a certain price; many, many more need to the crammed so that they don’t cost more to produce than sales are likely to recoup. I do not have any input into this decision-making process. I just receive a stack of manuscript and a standardized worksheet showing how the page count was estimated. This worksheet shows not only the total number of pages but also the number of characters per page that will be needed to hit said length.

Because of the way printing is done, pages ideally come in groups—signatures—of thirty-two. Theoretically you can tack a sixteen-, eight- or four-page signature onto the end of a book, but it costs more to print 8 pages than to print 32, so many publishers won’t allow it. So a book might have 304 or 320 or 352 or 384 pages, but not 316. And most publishers avoid leaving more than four blank pages in the back, because blanks make the buyer think he’s being cheated. There are certain pages in the front of a book that can be added, reshuffled, or deleted in a pinch, but the goal for the designer is to make everything fit just so without reorganizing anything.

Interesting stuff.

Real Live Preacher on bad writing days.

These are the mind games you play.

[...] There are days when I want to hurt people. No, that’s not true. Let me think about this. Okay, I’ve got it. There are days when I like the idea of hurting people. I give them such a tongue lashing while I drive to the coffee shop. Before I arrive I set everyone straight, establish my boundaries, and confront the enemy. And because I’m a writer, somehow I believe it’s all real.

Here is another tip for you: You need to win a battle before you write. So win one - even an easy one - and get all that stuff out of your mind.

(via Doyce)

Kinda-sorta.

Writers who use long words needlessly and choose complicated font styles are seen as less intelligent than those who stick with basic vocabulary and plain text, according to new research from the Princeton University in New Jersey, to be published in the next edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

This implies that efforts to impress readers by using florid font styles and searching through a thesaurus may have the opposite effect.

Study author Daniel Oppenheimer based his findings on students' responses to writing samples for which the complexity of the font or vocabulary was systematically manipulated. In a series of five experiments, he found that people tended to rate the intelligence of authors who wrote essays in simpler language, using an easy to read font, as higher than those who authored more complex works.

Speaking complex ideas clearly is more impressive than speaking them floridly. And folks definitely don't like being talked down to, or writers who seem to be trying to impress. If you have to try to impress, you're probably not impressive.

The full cite (worth repeating just because of the lovely title): Daniel M. Oppenheimer, "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology 2005, DOI: 10.1002/acp.1178

This is not to say (I hope) that long words are, per se, bad. Sometimes more complex speech and vocabulary is necessary to convey particular nuances of meaning that are important. But sometimes long word and elaborate construction are meant to impress as much as communicate, and, in that capacity, it appears they fall well short.

(via collision detection)

There's debate in the writing field about how best -- if at all -- to deal with writing characters different from onesself: men writing about women, straights about gays, whites about blacks, old about young, Americans about French, etc.

I think some of the debate is overblown -- in a very real way, anyone who writes can and must write about people who differ from them in some important but believable way. Indeed, part of the human condition and maturity itself is being able to relate to the Other.

That said, though, writing credibly about folks with very different backgrounds and belief and thought systems can be a challenge, especially if you're concerned that you might end up offending people by howyou do it (bearing in mind that some people will be inevitably offended that you did it at all).

So this book sounds interesting:

Volume 8. Writing the Other:
A Practical Approach by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

During the 1992 Clarion West Writers Workshop attended by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, one of the students expressed the opinion that it is a mistake to write about people of ethnic backgrounds different from your own because you might get it wrong, horribly, offensively wrong, and so it is better not even to try. This opinion, commonplace among published as well as aspiring writers, struck Nisi as taking the easy way out and spurred her to write an essay addressing the problem of how to write about characters marked by racial and ethnic differences. In the course of writing the essay, however, she realized that similar problems arise when writers try to create characters whose gender, sexual preference, and age differ significantly from their own. Nisi and Cynthia collaborated to develop a workshop that addresses these problems with the aim of both increasing writers’ skill and sensitivity in portraying difference in their fiction as well as allaying their anxieties about “getting it wrong.” Writing the Other: A Practical Approach is the manual that grew out of their workshop. It discusses basic aspects of characterization and offers elementary techniques, practical exercises, and examples for helping writers create richer and more accurate characters with “differences.”

I might have to add it to my wish list in some fashion.

(via BoingBoing)

A guide to writing SF, by Jeffrey A. Carver. Haven't looked at it much, but probably worth a gander.

(via BoingBoing)

Some great advice (and a bit that's a tad finicky, too).

I certainly (at least at work) need to work on the brevity bits. Others need a lot of work on coming up with succinct but informative subject lines.

Fascinating article on kids, make-believe, imaginary friends, fantasy, self-hypnosis, myth -- and, tangentially, fiction writing.

(via Mind Hacks)

From Paul Graham, a very good, very short essay on writing. The advice is geared toward writing essays, but nearly all of it applies (IMO) to fiction.

Indeed, a writer could do worse than bulletize, print out, and hang these suggestions on a wall.

Assuming, of course, they ever got around to doing any of their desperately-neglected writing ...

(via Kottke)

Ursula K. Le Guin's BookExpo America Speech on the state of genre fantasy. Good stuff.

Some assumptions are commonly made about fantasy that bother me. These assumptions may be made by the author, or by the packagers of the book, or both, and they bother me both as a writer and as a reader of fantasy. They involve who the characters are, when and where they are, and what they do. Put crudely, it's like this: in fantasy, 1) the characters are white, 2) they live sort of in the Middle Ages, and 3) they're fighting in a Battle Between Good and Evil.

(via Stan)

Memo to self: good advice here on NPCs/supporting characters.

Suggestions from Elmore Leonard on writing: "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle." All good stuff, if nothing new. I have a particular weakness in #6 (I blame comic books), but I'm doing better, I think, in #3-4, having finally overcome the advice I got repeatedly in high school to do find synonyms for "said" whenever possible.

Certainly, at the very least, a checklist to vet one's work against.

Here's a fascinating tale of manuscript rejection -- why editors reject books, and why writers are often irrationally irked by this.

At the very least, assuming self-examination is possible, the litany of reasons to reject items from the slush pile is a good checklist to examine one's own writing against:

(via BoingBoing)

The hubristic perqs of being being a best-selling author:

After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.

"Let her edit cake."

Interesting interview here with Joe Straczynski on writing and stuff.

I've actually been getting some writing done recently. Not a lot -- not all that I'd like -- but at least some.

I do the daily Oneword (as you've all suffered through). That's an interesting exercise to keep the juices flowing.

I've been trying to keep up with Catspaw, too, with the not-so-subtle flogging encouragement of certain friends. I've not been doing as much as I could, but I'm trying to keep up via a modified Zelazny Method:

I try to write every day. I used to try to write four times a day, minimum of three sentences each time. It doesn't sound like much but it's kinda like the hare and the tortoise. If you try that several times a day you're going to do more than three sentences, one of them is going to catch on. You're going to say "Oh boy!" and then you just write. You fill up the page and the next page But you have a certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say "Hey I wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each sentence is maybe twenty word long. That's 240 words which is a page of copy, so at least I didn't goof off completely today. I got a page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I've moved as far as I have.

I have an alarm set twice a day during weekdays (9 and 2, to be exact) to write something in Catspaw. If it rings, and I say, "I'm too busy," then I try to respond, "What, to write three whole sentences?" If I say, "I'm too uninspired," then I try to respond, "What, to write three whole sentences?"

If I hit the snooze on the alarms, though, I'm doomed. You can monitor my successes by watching the Catspaw button on the blogroll bob up (or not) each day.

Through that method, at least, Catspaw has been progressing by a few hundred words or so a day. Which feels nowhere near as exciting as it should be, but there you go.

The last writing I've been doing to any length have been Sian's game journals for Doyce's Nobilis try-out short game campaign, Chrysalis. It's not great literature (as if anything else I do is), but it's been entertaining and even a bit fulfilling (in an exploring-the-character way) to me. The most recent effort went up last night.

I suppose, as long as I keep banging on the keyboard for something other than memos and e-mail, I should be satisfied ...

For those aspiring writers out there (NaNoWriMoists or not) Dark Passage is a faboo site that details (sometimes with just pictures, other times with text) explorations of abandoned buildings, subways, and structures.

Marvelous narrative fodder for spooky, depressed, or dangerous scenes. And just plain fascinating for those of us who find the cracks in the concrete of the world around us to be just as interesting as the slabs themselves.

(via BoingBoing)

This week's RPG WISH:

What do you think about cross-gender characters (i.e., men playing female characters and women playing male characters)? What about GMs playing them as NPCs?

UPDATE: Doyce, not surprisingly, does a great job looking at different styles of doing this, including Yours Truly and Wife. Everything else he says about folks there is true.