February 3rd, 2020

Manifesto

• If the character has a thing–a home or a vehicle, a hat or a latte–it should make financial sense in the fictional world how they got that thing. The author need not provide receipts, but it needs to basically be in line with the reality that the author has created–the author needs to at least create the impression that a receipt exists. This applies mostly in present-day and historical fiction, but if it’s a starship or the planet Zerix and people pay in platinum droplets, how many platinum droplets would this character reasonably have? No more 9-bedroom villas for art teachers, no Ferraris for dog walkers.
• Think of the children. It is EPIDEMIC in entertainment both on page and on screen that children are like fold-up umbrellas, useful for being cute or telling a secret at a pivotal time, and then disappearing when adult people want to go on high-speed car chases or have sex. Where is the place the children could conceivably be at this time, if it isn’t with the main characters who are their caregivers–is it at school? Do they have a nanny? Is there ever any mention of their going anywhere at all, or do they simply collapse into dust when the author doesn’t need them as a plot element? As it is in real life, so must it be in fiction–if you don’t want to figure out where the children should be every hour of every day, you can’t have any children.
• How long do things take? It happens more often than you’d think, people get into a car to drive from Toronto to Niagara Falls or put a roast in the oven, or begin to do another thing that explicitly takes several hours, then they have an eight-sentence conversation, and now the thing is done. That is what time breaks are for, or some narrative bridge-building, or some gd thing, but it is very distracting to not have known time-markers obeyed.
• Where is everyone supposed to be during the day? As in the second bullet, but for characters who are adults, who either have jobs or are in school or have other responsibilities. If you must, make the character another god-damned writer (which honestly seems to be code for unemployed in books, given how much writing they seem to do–you’d think the person writing the book would know it doesn’t work like that) but at least they have a flexible schedule. No more bankers and lawyers running out of the house first thing on a Tuesday to do several hours of non-banking and non-lawyering. No more characters who do not seem to work at all ever but still maintain an income (see first bullet).
• If a person enters into a romantic relationship and they are not, say, a teenager, it’s weird to never mention what they understand and believe about romantic relationships. Not that that could have reached that stage of life with no notions about relationships, but there’d be some baggage from that too. Actually even if they are teenagers! A popular trope in fiction is that a couple falls in love when they are very young, then is somehow separated and then reunited after many years, with nothing that happened in the intervening years mattering to them in the slightest, if in fact the author even mentions that anything happened at all. Authors who cannot incorporate personal history into their characters are doomed to write all their novels about newborns. 
• Almost anything can happen, including extremely implausible things–in fact, most very implausible things HAVE happened, once, somewhere. But it there are circumstances that cause implausible things to happen and people notice them. If everyone in the book individually has a lot of inherited wealth and doesn’t have to work, and you are writing in the present day and not about 19th century aristocrats, that’s weird and characters who act like real people will notice and also feel weird about it. It’s not unheard of for a lone person of colour or queer person to hang out with a group that’s very demographically different from themselves, but there will likely be some uncomfortable moments, and some acknowledgement of the difference and the discomfort. People do leave each other at the alter sometimes in real life, but that is actually a very strange and hurtful thing to do, and friends and family will feel compelled to say something about it long after the veil has been put away. “It’s a thing that could happen,” is not a sufficient reason to put it in a book–it has to actually make sense with how the characters operate in the world and with each other.

Did I write this manifesto for other people or for myself??? YOU DECIDE!