Fiction Forge Indy: Plot Flaws: Break the Rules.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Plot Flaws: Break the Rules.

So, I've talked about a bunch of plot flaws, and in the end, they are really more like tools for the proverbial toolbox.

When the professionals (no, I'm not putting myself in this camp) use them well, we sit back and enjoy the clever manipulation. It's a beautiful discovery how they use the tools and break them.

What I find so interesting is something I discover and rediscover in writing: all the good writers break the rules. And when they do it well, we enjoy it.

How do we do it?

I think the only way we can learn how to break the rules is to learn the rules. Love the rules. Study the rules.

And then break them. Not all at once in one swoop, but one at a time, finding the balance between the expected and the unexpected, the novel and the formula.

So I'm going to end this series on plots!

Break rules like not using no exclamation marks!!!

I'm practicing breaking rules!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Mike

Hi. My name is Michael Moir and I'm a writer.

I don't know when I became addicted to the printed word, but over time I have found that I can't put it away from me. My therapist says it has to do with the little yellow books that were forced upon me in Kindergarten (See Spot Run...Run, Spot, Run! RUN!!!), but in the depth of my soul, I know it is deeper than that. I was born with this in my very DNA. Phrasing, grammar, and plot structure are as sure in my being as cytosine is to guanine. It is a dark and wildly fantastic creature that gires and gimbles in the shadowed places of my soul. I have been told that I must find a way to purge the wordful animal within (my therapist recommended me to a witch doctor in the Andes), but I have decided to learn to live with it. This desire, this compulsion, this demon that is writing is me and I am it.

I call him Steve.

Randy

Hi! I am Randy. I'm pretty sure that I started writing when I held my first crayola. Unfortunately, I grabbed the white one which left little proof of my brilliant earlier works! I write fiction that's often centered on gay characters - but sometimes off-centered gay characters, too -Ha! Because of the poor recording or admittance of such affairs due to prevailing political and religious views, such historical possibilities of gay relations are difficult to accept, let alone imagine. But, of course gay relations occurred, and much more often than the historical records dictate. I like to give honor to my gay brothers and sisters of our hushed past by conjuring such situation backdrops of history and breathing life into what I cannot know really occurred, but what I feel is closer to reality than it is to fiction.