I do not consider myself a particularly good writer. Like many, I’ve dipped my toes into the water once or twice, but never managed anything cohesive more than 5,000 words long. However, I have read quite a lot—and, increasingly in recent years, I find myself drawn more towards the hobbyist sides of writing. The web novels, the first books and yes, even the so-often-maligned fanfictions. Part of my reasoning is simply the price of this reading material, which usually ranges from very cheap to outright free. There is, however, a certain quality to these writings that draws me in, beyond their price. I find that younger writers can achieve a certain level of creativity and honesty that you rarely find in an author’s third or fourth book. Part of this is doubtlessly the nature of any hobby—unbound by concerns over how well the book will sell, the amateur writer is free to experiment, to try new and daring things, to break the rules. But sometimes, you don’t break the rules on purpose, and often, breaking those rules doesn’t result in anything good. This is what I’m here to discuss. I claim no special insight into the nature of words or sentences—this is simply a compendium of common mistakes I see and frustrations I have with other people’s creative writing. Some of my points will likely be blindingly obvious. Some of them, you will think, are total nonsense. That’s fine. Everything I say here is simply a rule I have constructed for my own personal use, a standard by which I measure my own work. If you like anything you see, if you think one of my rules might be useful or interesting, feel free to steal it for yourself. If you think my rules are stupid, then you may leave them where you found them—on this page. With all that said, I present:

Rule 1: Don’t give the protagonist (too much) plot armor.

It can be tempting, when writing any conflict of any kind, to tip the scales in favor of your chosen heroes. To shield them from the harms and pitfalls that might naturally occur, should the scene in question play out without interference. The fact that this is a bad thing—that your protagonists should win or lose on their own merit, and not the guiding hand of authorial intent—is no great revelation. Rather, what I want to argue here is actually that some plot armor is fine, as long as you do it right and don’t go too far. In nearly every story, the antagonist will be more dangerous than the protagonist. This is simply the nature of things—if it weren’t true, the protagonist would win easily, and the story wouldn’t be interesting. With this in mind, we must ask—how can we keep our villains scary, but still allow the heroes to triumph in the end? There are lots of ways to go about this, but most of them involve—subtly—placing your hand on the scales, and tipping things in the hero’s favor. Whether that takes the form of some clever plan, or an ancient artifact they stumble upon, or just blind luck, is up to you. The point is that plot armor is not an inherently terrible thing, but you should be aware of when and why you use it, and never use more than is strictly necessary.

Rule 2: Don’t give the antagonist (any) plot armor.

Giving your protagonist plot armor can, in the right circumstances, be alright. Giving your antagonist plot armor, on the other hand, is a totally different beast. The reasons why you, as an author, might want to tip the scales in the villain’s favor are the same as for the heroes—you’ve already planned out the plot, but things didn’t go quite right and now you need to give your characters a nudge to get back on track. However, there is a fundamental problem that comes with giving this nudge to the villains instead of the heroes. Your readers, if you’ve written a good story so far, will want the heroes to win. Therefore, they will be willing to tolerate a certain level of shenanigans, willing to suspend their disbelief a little, if it means seeing that goal fulfilled. Your villains will not be given the same grace. Most readers will sniff out an unfair victory for evil in an instant, and will not be much pleased with it. Even worse, this will, in part, destroy any notion of your villain being scary or competent. The more you artificially empower the antagonists, the less your readers will be intimidated by them and the more they will be frustrated with them, seeing as the threat they pose comes not from personal competence or power, but from an outside meta source.

As a final note—remember that good villains should be powerful! They should be more dangerous than the heroes! If you find yourself constantly needing to give your villain unfair advantages, chances are you need to go back and make them more competent to begin with.

Rule 3: Mary Sues are bad and you should avoid them.

Ah, the Mary Sue. The death knell of a thousand bad fanfictions, the boogeyman of any inexperienced author. I don’t think I really need to explain why Mary Sues are bad, so instead, I’m just going to spend this section discussing exactly what they are—as, for a term so often heard, they are rarely defined. You can imagine every character in a story to be like a stellar object, exerting gravity on the narrative around them. Your main characters are like stars, bending the world to suit their adventures. Your hero needs some ancient artifact; it just so happens to be located in a place where they can get to it, but not without a perilous quest. They walk into a bar, and just so happen to run into the villain’s henchmen, starting a fight. These things are obviously unnatural, but we tolerate them anyway, as the necessary building blocks of a good story. Your side characters, in comparison, are like planets orbiting a star. They exist mostly in relation to the main character, but generally have little sway over the narrative itself. If a main character takes a night out on the town, they are bound to run into some adventure or danger. If a side character does the same, they will likely have a peaceful, fun night. So where does the Mary Sue fit into all this? They are, in essence, a narrative black hole. A Mary Sue is created when the author stops bending the story just so to make it interesting, and begins instead breaking it wholesale for the purpose of pleasing or empowering their favorite character. This results in a number of obviously unnatural and contrived interactions with the world around them, but one of the worst is how they tend to interact with other characters. When a main character and a side character interact, there is generally an acknowledgment made by the author that the side character is, indeed, a real person with their own life goals. Realistically, they only exist for those moments when they are interacting with the main character, but it is a part of the author’s job to give them a simulacra of life outside of that. Part of this means they generally won’t care too much about the main character unless they are already their friend or have had many interactions with them beforehand—because, realistically, most people don’t actually care much about the strangers they meet on the street, no matter how much a hypothetical, invisible, omnipotent narrator thinks they should care. A Mary Sue, on the other hand, will inevitably grab those same characters and drag them in, instead of allowing them to pass by or orbit peacefully. A Mary Sue is always instantly loved or hated by those they meet—no indifference is allowed. Their allies always support them unquestioningly, without doubts or hesitation. Their enemies always hate them and fear them in equal measure, never allowed to see them as anything less than of paramount importance. This is only one of the many ways in which a Mary Sue will bend the story around them, creating dissonance between what should realistically happen and what actually does happen.

I’ve used a lot of fancy metaphors here to try and illustrate the underlying principles behind how characters interact with a narrative, and how a Mary Sue breaks that interaction, but the point at the center of this is actually fairly simple. A Mary Sue is a character who is loved too dearly by the author. A character that the author will shield from all harm, protect from all failure or defeat. Real characters need real interactions with the world, real defeats and real victories. Don’t get so invested in your characters that you won’t let them fail.

Rule 4: A hero should not be like you and me.

Making your main character too dull and unimportant is a bit of a weird mistake, and one I think most authors instinctively know to avoid, but it’s an all too easy one to fall into nonetheless. I’ve seen this done several times, and the result is always the same—a good story frustratingly wrapped around a character I couldn’t care less about. And make no mistake, I can see the temptation. Any good hero must be, on some level, relatable. They must be someone you can empathize with, someone you can feel for, someone who, to a certain extent, you can see yourself in. But herein lies the problem—a hero must be like you and me, in some ephemeral way that makes them likable. They must be the kind of person you can root for. However, they also must not be like you and me. Obviously, I can’t speak for the reader of this article here, but at least for me? I’m no hero. I lack the strength of will, the foresight, the physical power to save kingdoms or slay dragons. This is not a condemnation, merely an observation. A hero who is too much like me would not be a hero at all. Furthermore, I already know me. A story about someone like me, but simply in a fantastical situation, is bound to be boring. There is nothing there to stoke the spirit. A story about someone like me or you would be less like being transported to another world and more like looking in a mirror—boring and ordinary. Therefore, while a hero should share some qualities with their audience, some grounding in reality; they should not actually be a representation of their audience. Rather, a hero should be an inspirational figure, a magnification of all the best—and in some cases, some of the worst—traits of humanity. This is a fine tightrope to walk, but one every author who wishes to write a heroic character must straddle. Too far on one side, and your hero becomes an unapproachable demigod, too untethered from humanity for the audience to ever care about. Too far on the other, and your hero becomes a warped mirror, a twisted reflection of the self, something vaguely pathetic and completely uninteresting, serving only to show how the reader might fail to survive in a truly dangerous situation. Heroes should be the best of us, not simply average.

Please note that while I’ve conflated main characters, protagonists and heroes often in this piece, I do understand the difference. I am merely choosing to ignore it here, as this is a piece about traditional fantasy, not newer or more exploratory things. There is certainly a place in writing for the every-man protagonist, for the mundane hero whose accomplishments include getting out of bed every morning and getting a B+ on his math exam. But before you write a protagonist like that, I would urge you, carefully consider the story you are writing and what it needs. Is the main character you have chosen truly the right one for the job?

Rule 5: That interesting piece of lore can be explained later, actually.

The infodump—the favorite tool of many an author and bane of every reader. It can be tempting, when the opportunity arises, to sit your main characters down and speak through your chosen vessel about all the really cool stuff you’ve made for your world. The intricate magic system you spent so many hours crafting, the nations and cities you spent so many nights sprinkling across the map, the awesome monsters you came up with. Whenever you feel this urge, this desire to spend the next four thousand words expositing about stuff that’s really not that plot relevant, I urge you to ask yourself this question:

Is this really something that needs to be explained right now?

While you may be excited to talk about all the cool stuff you’ve built, realize that the reader probably doesn’t care that much, especially if this is near the beginning of the story. Now, make no mistake—part of making your reader care is including some interesting little tidbits here and there. Just not everywhere and not all at once. Instead of explaining your world in one big dump of information, it is better to show them your world, piece by piece, as it becomes relevant. Instead of having the obligatory smart character tell your heroes about all the alien creatures you’ve put in the woods and the entire ecosystem you thought up for them, let the heroes observe those same creatures on their own time, and leave hints as to how they all fit together into one coherent circle of life for any reader careful enough to notice them and invested enough to care. Instead of drawing out a map and detailing all the trade routes you designed, have the protagonists travel said map and see those trade routes in action themselves. Scattering your world out like this in bits and pieces is undoubtedly annoying, at least if you get as invested in your worlds as I do, but I think it produces much better results in the long run. By feeding your readers lore as a trail of crumbs instead of a heaping pile of them, you both make each piece of information feel more special and unique and also make your lore far more memorable.

Rule 6: Be careful when writing about things you care deeply about.

Every author wants to write about something they care about. There’s nothing wrong with this; in fact, it’s generally a good thing. We can put the most passion into our works when we feel that passion ourselves. But you must be wary—good writing requires a somewhat unbiased, objective lens, and if you write on something you are too passionate about, you risk breaking that objectivity.

The heart of this problem is the question of why good writing should be unbiased. Make no mistake—I’m not talking about journalism here; there is no necessity to report the truth. Rather, good writing should be unbiased because good writing needs to have some basis in reality, or at least be consistent with the reality you construct. It’s fine to write fantastical things, but if you write a world where, say, all birds fly west on Sunday, then you need to stick to that rule—you can’t just ignore it when it becomes convenient; that will break your reader’s immersion and take them out of the experience. If you care too deeply about a part of your story, you may find yourself wanting to break the rules to favor that part. To continue my example, let’s say you write a story in this weird world where all birds fly west on Sunday, but your main character is also a bird, and you want them to go somewhere other than west on a Sunday. You can’t do that, at least not without a very good reason. You’ve set out a rule—now you have to follow that rule. This kind of comes back to the whole Mary Sue rule, only expanded to encompass more than just people. Any part of your story can end up out of whack if you care too much about it.

Rule 7: Do your best to write only on topics you have some knowledge of.

As an author, it is extremely common to write about things you have never personally experienced. There’s nothing wrong with this—if we didn’t do it, very few people would be able to write stories with high stakes or adventure, and fantasy as a genre would all but disappear. However, there are two things I think are important to remember when writing these kinds of stories.

First of all, don’t be afraid to do research. On some level, this is a really obvious tip. However, I think a lot of people don’t quite grasp the scope of what research can entail and when it should be used. Searching Wikipedia is a good start, but if you’re serious about writing? If you really want to make a published book? That should only be step one. Interview people. Find personal recollections online. Drill down into not only the physical reality of what people experience in a given situation, but how they felt, how they thought, what went through their mind. Personally, I believe this kind of thing is just as important for fiction as nonfiction. No matter the situation, people are people, and the more you can collect the emotions and thoughts and feelings of humanity and imbue them into your book, the more real your writing will feel.

(For those wondering, I have not personally interviewed people for my own writing before. This tip actually comes mostly from my mom, who is a published author and loves talking to people about their experiences.)

Secondly, consider both the material world and the soul of what you are writing. As I said previously, people are people, and our experiences and emotions are often universal, even if the world around said people can change radically based on the author. Just because your setting is fantasy, that doesn’t mean what your characters go through is untethered from reality. If you are writing a love story set in a fantasy kingdom, then collect people’s experiences of being in love—they’re just as relevant to people in a magical city as to people in a modern one. Same thing for any other kind of story. My point here is that you shouldn’t be blinded by the nature of your setting. Don’t think research isn’t important just because you’re writing fiction.

Rule 8: Do not insert flashbacks, POV changes or interludes in the first ~20,000 words of your story.

So after all those high and mighty words about greater concepts and the nature of the narrative itself—let’s have a somewhat more technical rule. While this varies somewhat from book to book, generally speaking, the first 10 to 20 thousand words in your story will be where you establish the main character and the main plot and try to convince your reader to care about them. This is your hook, the part where you assume the reader isn’t interested in any of this and try to draw them in. And the absolute worst thing you can do with this time, with these all-important first few words?

Go on a tangent. Remember, you are trying to establish the main character and why the reader should care about them. If you suddenly introduce a side plot or switch to a different story set in the same world (even if that story will eventually be relevant to the main plot) or try to introduce a new main character, you’re doubling the difficulty of keeping your reader interested. Suddenly, you have to make two things interesting and engaging, not just one. Suddenly, you’re dangling a new shiny thing in front of your readers and trying to make them interested in it, when those readers are still deciding if they want to be interested in the other shiny thing.

To be continued …