Rules of SF/Fantasy to Break

[Malik]

Third omni is hard. I do believe that it should be avoided by beginning writers because when it's done badly, it's painful.

To really make third omni work, you have to have your own, individual narrative voice (and a new one for each book or project!), plus you need to have individual and distinguishable character internal monologues and voices. If you're doing third omni right, the audience should be able to tell whose eyes they're looking through even before you tell them. This is really, really, freaking hard. It takes years of character development and moving words around, plus an insane amount of subtlety and sleight-of-hand. You're not going to pull this off in a first-try, pulp genre fantasy that you crank out in three months. You're just not. So much of the market right now seems to be written so fast (Gotta get those sequels out! Gotta get ten books out before you can make any money!) that I think that first or close-third, with their limited perspectives, are the only ways that people can keep their word counts up.

 

[Devora]

My main WIP is planned to be a stand-alone. I dislike that so many authors are trying to do epic fantasy at epic lengths more frequently. I agree with the writer: why can't we have a single book story?

 

[Steerpike]

Re: portal fantasy, there was a new one aimed at adults just released by Angry Robot - An Accident of Stars.

There are plenty of books that break these rules and plenty that don't. The important thing is that you can write a great book either way, and whether you do or not is what counts in the end, not whether you've checked the boxes from some internet article.

 

[Russ]

One of the reasons that both publishers and self-published writers lean towards series rather than stand-alones because they tend to make more money.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Yes I break many of these rules - I think?! The problem being that every rule presented in the list is given with pro's and con's and it was hard to tell what the rule was before you could decide whether it should be broken.

But for me the big three I break are:

Prologs - I absolutely love them. As a sci fi / fantasy author with usually an enormous world build to put in place a prolog is fantastic. It sets up the world build and the conflict if it's done right and saves the info-dumps later on.

Stand alones - all my books are stand alones. Not because I believe in them versus series, but simply because that's the way I write. I have a story, I tell it. After that, next story. So it's a pointless rule for me.

No FTL - and my response is WTF! No FTL means more or less no space opera - and I love space opera. I mean think how boring Star Trek would be without warp drive. They get in their ship, jump in their suspended animation tanks, and four hundred years later arrive at their destination to carry out the next phase of their interstellar mission! Or else their entire mission isto explore the solar system. The reality is that this rule absolutely needs to be broken in order to have a whole class of story. So what they're really saying is no space opera. And what I'm saying is no thank you.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Darkfantasy]

Me too though I didn't understand the song until I got older. I really thought it was just about Alice

Anyway I have seen this list before and although I think all rules can be broken it is a good idea to learn how to break them correctly and more importantly how not to do it. Fantasy is probably the most unlimited genre, I mean you can do anything and get away with it and yet all you seem to see is the same stuff being repeated. The same magical creatures being re-used, the same settings and characters.
We are seeing more variation though people are beginning to think outside the box more.

 

[Chessie]

I still write prologues for my fantasy stories. Something is missing without them.

 

[FifthView]

Incidentally, anyone write epilogues? Samuel R. Delany's epilogue to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is one of the finest things I've ever read.

I've never written an epilogue, but that example makes me want to.

 

[Chessie]

Yes. I write epilogues for my romance books. They provide a window for the reader to see the heroes happily in love months into the future. It's pretty wdespread with romance books but I don't see them done often in fantasy.

 

[FifthView]

That's interesting considering Delany's epilogue, given the romantic elements in the book, but it's not a happily ever after epilogue.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

I don't have a prologue (my opening scene is really good and I want to keep it at the front, and anyway, one is not necessary) and probably won't have an epilogue either.

Epilogues...I have mixed feelings about them, mostly negative. Often epilogues end up giving information I don't want when the story should have just ended. Giving Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows an epilogue was the worst decision in the entire series. Why not leave us to imagine what stupid names the main characters gave their children? The story is over...!

I suppose an epilogue would work if it was more impersonal, showing how the world as a whole had changed...but most epilogues are just extraneous information that could be left off...

I used to skip prologues. They hardly ever contained useful information.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

I'm planning a couple fantasy standalones, but they aren't what you would call "epic" fantasy. One is more along the lines of historical fantasy/magical realism, the other is more like...weird fiction? It doesn't really obey the rules of time and space and logic, and it's just really bizarre, no magic or elves or anything. Epic fantasy is hard to fit in a standalone. There's a ton of world-building you have to do, the plots are often large scale...

 

[SaltyDog]

I don't have a prologue (my opening scene is really good and I want to keep it at the front, and anyway, one is not necessary) and probably won't have an epilogue either.

Epilogues...I have mixed feelings about them, mostly negative. Often epilogues end up giving information I don't want when the story should have just ended. Giving Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows an epilogue was the worst decision in the entire series. Why not leave us to imagine what stupid names the main characters gave their children? The story is over...!

I suppose an epilogue would work if it was more impersonal, showing how the world as a whole had changed...but most epilogues are just extraneous information that could be left off...

I used to skip prologues. They hardly ever contained useful information.

Agreed with the prologues. Epilogues? I don't know.

 

[SaltyDog]

I'm planning a couple fantasy standalones, but they aren't what you would call "epic" fantasy. One is more along the lines of historical fantasy/magical realism, the other is more like...weird fiction? It doesn't really obey the rules of time and space and logic, and it's just really bizarre, no magic or elves or anything. Epic fantasy is hard to fit in a standalone. There's a ton of world-building you have to do, the plots are often large scale...

No Elves? What is this? lol.

 

[skip.knox]

Next book I'm going to have a prologue about elves.
<gdr>

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

I don't do epilogs per se, but I often have a short final chapter set some time after the story has ended, just to show how things wound up for everyone. Zelazny used to do some brilliant final chapter / epilogs. The one to Damnation Alley had me laughing for days.

Cheers, Greg.