Charlie Stross
#WritersCoffeeClub December 17th
Which writing conventions do you ignore, if any?
Short answer: all of them.
Long answer: I've been writing for about 50 years and turns out there are no firm rules. Some conventions are mutually contradictory: others sometimes work against the author's intent. So I pick and choose which to ignore.
For example, there was one novel in the first person present tense where I murdered the narrator two-thirds of the way in—and kept going. Made the Hugo shortlist.
Charlie Stross
#WritersCoffeeClub Of course, I had *reasons* for murdering the first person narrator: (a) they were a shit, and (b) it signaled to any reader paying attention that *this was an unreliable, untrustworthy narrator*, which put a different frame around the plot.
Mitch Wagner
@cstross I liked Teresa Nielsen Hayden's advice for generating story ideas: Find an online list of sf/fantasy cliches and mix two together. For example, alien invasion and elfs/dragons.
Charlie Stross
@mitchw Yeah, I've used that successfully to generate the seed of a nine book, million word series (which was reasonably successful in print). Hint: what do you get if you strip the world-waking premise of "Nine Princes in Amber" back to basics and cross it with the time patrol from H. Beam Piper's "Paratime"?
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