Category Archives: craft of writing

Use Capital Letters, They’re Cheap.

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In the sometimes dismal world of social media, I see a lot of people who seem to have never been taught some basic things in grade school about how the English language works. Recently, I’ve seen someone advocating for a point-of-view that most people disagree with. He couldn’t be bothered to begin his sentences with a capital letter.

We writers must use correct English at all times. We can still be colloquial and use slang, but we have to use capital letters correctly, use punctuation correctly, and for goodness sake, use the spell check! One wrong usage in a Tweet, and there may be people out there who will never buy your books because they will assume you cannot write readable English sentences.

Imagine you were an avant-garde, artsy-fartsy type. Imagine you wrote a novel in the attempted literary fiction genre. But, for some incomprehensible artistic reason, you refused to use any capital letters at all. your sentences looked like this. even mary and joe, your most loyal readers, would probably not find it comfortable to read your book.

I personally, if anything, overuse capital letters. That’s because I learned German— in childhood from my mother, in Junior High and High School in the classroom— and in German, all nouns are capitalized. (Nouns? ‘A noun is the name of a person, place or thing.)

Capital letters are like punctuation— they are the ‘traffic signals’ of the written language. People who read regularly are used to mostly correct usage. Texting and social media, especially as they distract poorly educated young persons away from reading books, reinforce wrong usage. 

Here is the reality: if you are a writer, you are different, and different rules apply. You are expected to know how the English language works (or whatever language you write in.) Other people can use ‘u’ for ‘you,’ but if you do it, people will presume you are an ignorant so-and-so and not a real writer at all.

The same rule goes for bloggers and would-be influencers. If the tool you work with is language, use it correctly. WITH capital letters to begin every sentence, every proper name of a person or place, as the rules of our language dictate. Yeah, if you are younger than a certain age the dim bulbs you went to school with may mock you for your correct usage. But those dim bulbs are not going to financially support you if you ruin your writing persona with the dim bulb’s version of ‘cool.’

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My books:

Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086H4FQ4M

Banned Books, Banned Girl (Lycian series.): A girl with an autism spectrum disorder escapes government confinement and works a ghost job removing banned books from bookshelves.: https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745

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 Dent Series post #1: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/

Dent Series post #2: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/reviving-pulp-era-writing-wisdom-dentseries/

Two Kinds of How-To-Write Books.

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I have collected how-to-write books ever since I bought a copy of Lawrence Block’s Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print. I since have accumulated a bookshelf full of them, which doesn’t include the books on my Kindle. They range from good to bad to worse-than-bad, published by respectable major publishers, self-published by known writers, and a few self-published by ignorant schemers.

I have come to see two major divisions in the better group of how-to-write books. One group is more academic books, that might well be textbooks in a college creative writing course. The other group is by writers who have been out in the trenches, writing for a living. Some of the older books were written by authors who got started writing and selling to the pulps. 

The first division has the flaws of academic writing advice. First, they tend to assume that if you were really serious about your writing, you would be writing attempted literary fiction, even though attempted literary fiction does not sell. Second, they often accommodate the wishes of classroom teachers of creative writing. The classroom teacher does not want her students batting out several short stories each week to be evaluated. He would rather have the students write ONE short story, and rewrite it many times until it is polished and all the unique and interesting elements removed. Much less work. And little to no risk that the students will send it out into the world, get accepted, and outshine the teacher’s own writing.

Some of my books of the second type do not use standard jargon for parts of a story at all. Lester Dent in his Master Fiction Plot tells the writer to swat his hero with a fistful of trouble. There is no sanitized academic-writing name for swatting a character with a fistful of trouble, but I think most of us can figure out what that means, unlike Inciting Incident or Mirror Moment. 

Many of the writers of the pulp era were self-taught. They didn’t know the proper academic names for parts of the story, because they were too busy writing stories. I have read accounts of young men who went off to New York City with a suitcase and a typewriter, set to work writing for the pulps, and soon could pay their rent off the story sales. Such writers didn’t have time to learn all the official terms for the parts of their stories— they were busy making a living.

And though I have read all my writing books at least once, it is the second type of writing book that I come back to, that inspires me. I’m not inspired by something that holds up as a model books of attempted literary fiction that I don’t read. I’ve noticed that the older books by writers regarded as great writers sold well enough— that’s why those writers were remembered in time for the academics to decide they were great writers. 

I have always wanted to write something similar to the kind of books I am willing to read. I think most writers do. I have heard in the days of the pulps there were New York City writers who hated the Western genre, but wrote exclusively for the Western pulps. I wonder, though, if such writers made the list of any Western fan’s favorite writers.

COMMENTS: Civil comments (polite, no swearing) always welcome, even if you don’t agree with me. But if you are a troll commenters who swears at people, bullies people, insults people for not agreeing with you 100%, don’t expect your comment to see the light of day. This is MY blog, after all.

I’m concluding this post with a short list of  recommended reading. I hope it is helpful to you— I hope I’ve sifted out a few of the things I shouldn’t have spend my money on. 

Recommended Reading.

Lawrence Block. Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print. 1979.

Bryce Beattie (editor) Pulp Era Writing Tips. 2018. (Old articles on writing.)

Dean Wesley Smith. Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing. 2016.

Robert Turner. Pulp Fiction. 1948.

James Scott Bell. How to Write Pulp Fiction. 2017.

Lester Dent. Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot.  http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html

JD Cowan. The Pulp Mindset. 

Kit Sun Cheah and Misha Burnett. Pulp on Pulp: Tips and Tricks for Writing Pulp Fiction. 2021.

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 Dent Series post #1: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/

Dent Series post #2: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/reviving-pulp-era-writing-wisdom-dentseries/

Reviving Pulp Era Writing Wisdom #DentSeries

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#DentSeries #LesterDent #PulpRev .

Lester Dent’s Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot was written for the pulp era, when men and women made a living writing stories for dozens of different pulp story magazines. The first pulp-type magazine took all sorts of stories, but later specialized pulps came out for adventure stories, love stories, Westerns, detective stories, war-air stories…. There were even romantic Western pulps as well as the standard Western ones.

Lester Dent describes his formula like this:

“This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words.

No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell. 

The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.”

The original pulp era, is, alas, over. There are very few anthologies or periodicals to which to submit shorter works of fiction, which most of us need to do before we can write longer works, and even if we sold everything we wrote, we wouldn’t be able to make any sort of living at it. 

A limited anthology series I liked was the Planetary Anthology, each one named after a planet of the Solar System. I have Mars and Luna of that series, since I know some of the writers involved. But the anthology series got ‘unpublished’ and is no longer available, due to poor sales. Compared to the pulp era, when there were pulp magazines for a nickel or dime at every newsstand (there were newsstands back then, too,) not enough people learn about any anthology or e-published zine in time to make reading these things a habit.

But the pulp-era’s habit of pushing reader-friendly stories that the ordinary guy could use as a form of entertainment is a good one to continue. People these days are more accustomed to television or movie entertainment. But as the moviemakers and television industry go ‘woke,’ the consumers are left behind. We don’t want a lady Captain Marvel who is unlikeable, and then when we complain we get called sexist for not supporting the movie industry blindly. 

In the pulp era, writers knew better. If they wrote a story that most readers thought was a stinker, you couldn’t complain that the readers were not ‘good enough’ for the story. The pulp editor paid you for stories that readers would like. If your stories were unlikeable, they would not buy. The pulp writer had to work out for himself how to make his stories reader-friendly, or he wouldn’t get paid and his typewriter might get repossessed.

This is post 2 in the #DentSeries – read Dent Series post #1 here.:https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/

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Recommended Reading:

Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing. Dean Wesley Smith. 2016.

Pulp Era Writing Tips. Edited by Bryce Beattie. 2018.

How to Write Pulp Fiction. James Scott Bell. 2017.

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Dent Series post #1: https://myantimatterlife.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/how-does-a-newbie-writer-get-started-dentseries/

The Thrill of Heroes Behaving Badly.

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I would hope that most writers are aware that a compelling story should have a hero, not a mere protagonist. By ‘hero’ we don’t mean ‘sinless savior,’ but simply a normal person with a moral compass. In today’s world a hero might never have memorized the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments, or read the Sermon on the Mount, but even if your hero does not have any faith-based values (yet,) he acts like he has. He doesn’t go around killing, stealing, lying or committing adultery on a daily basis. 

WritingLife

Recently I watched the old movie ‘The Great Escape’ on Pluto TV. I’ve always loved that movie and watched it many times with my late mother. 

In ‘The Great Escape,’ a group of British and American men are prisoners of the Germans during WW2. These men are fellows with a highly functional moral compass. They are prisoners because they chose to put their lives at risk for their fellow man— they were doing the right thing (unless, like the modern neofascist/antifa movement, you think that freedom’s not a good thing.)

But in the prison camp, they are under the control of the Luftwaffe— the German air force. Their camp has rules that their captors expect them to obey. But their duty as officers means that they are to try to escape, and to make life difficult for the Germans.

So, these honorable men break the rules to dig tunnels, steal things, lie to their guards, take wood from the rafters and their bunk beds to shore up the escape tunnels, forge papers, and do all sorts of naughty things normally done only by criminals.

Why is that interesting to us? We don’t watch movies about purse snatchers, second-story men, or vandals, do we? But this is different— it is honorable men, men dedicating their lives to taking up a duty to defend others, who are doing these things in an a noble cause— getting the Nazi boot off the face of mankind.

We all have an urge to do not-right things— Christians would call it having a sinful nature due to the fall of Man into sin. I remember as a little girl going to a store with my tiny bit of pocket money to buy toys. Every time, I found many more toys to want than my pocket money would buy. I might have fantasized about stealing toys— but my parents didn’t raise me to steal— they took me to Sunday School, after all. Plus, if the store man had caught me stealing, I would have the deep disgrace of having my father informed. My father was a store manager himself. He talked about shoplifters sometimes— and never in a flattering way. I felt if I was caught stealing, I would be diminished forever in my father’s eyes. And the best way not to get caught stealing was not to steal.

But that didn’t stop me from wanting things I couldn’t afford. And so I could get caught up in the idea that in some strange special circumstance I too might steal, forge, do many other bad things— in a good cause of course.

In ‘The Great Escape,’ which was based on real events, many of the escaping prisoners paid with their lives. The two American characters, Steve McQueen and James Garner, lived, but each lost a close friend. Garner and McQueen ended up right back in the camp they escaped from. So even though they were doing the right thing, they paid the price for the normally illicit things they did as part of the escape plan. 

In your own fiction, sometimes your heroes will be in extreme circumstances. Since their goal will be a morally good one, they may be justified in doing some normally not-good things. They may kill an attacker, steal unattended food or clothing to aid people they are rescuing, lie their tongues off to a Nazi-like oppressor seeking escaped victims, and otherwise do ‘naughty’ things in a good cause. 

Placing your heroes in such situations makes your story more exciting. And letting them do things that aren’t normally allowed in these situations make them seem less ‘priggish’ and hypocritical— the standard accusation against anyone who chooses to have and follow a moral compass.

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Recommended Reading:

The Pulp Mindset – JD Cowan.

Pulp Fiction – Robert Turner.

How to Write Pulp Fiction – James Scott Bell.

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Coming Soon!

My new online novella, A Lycian Patriot. Since something in my hero’s past is toxic to the Wattpad crowd, and I don’t have time or energy to post on Wattpad and then move it, I will be posting much of it  on this WordPress blog. An expanded version will be available in ebook format through Smashwords and maybe KDP. 

[An earlier story in the Lycian series, available free on Wattpad: Banned Books, Banned Girl : A girl with an autism spectrum disorder escapes government confinement and works a ghost job removing banned books from bookshelves.: https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745 ]

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How Does a Newbie Writer Get Started? #DentSeries

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A lot of folks these days think of the pulp era of fiction as a golden age when writers actually wrote things that entertained their readers, instead of appalling them by grimdark despair that’s supposed to be ‘good for you,’ especially if that one attractive character turns out to be transsexual. A popular guide to writing pulp-style fiction is ‘The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot: http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html

The Dent is specifically about writing a 6000 word story for one of the pulp magazines of the day. Neopulp writers today use it as a way of outlining longer yarns, even novellas and novels. Lester Dent said that his master plot worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air stories, and that Dent’s yarns written to the formula never failed to sell. 

In the pulp era, writers made a living from writing short stories— often short-shorts to break into the writing business, since more experienced writers wrote longer yarns to get more money, and editors needed the short stuff as well and didn’t get as much of that submitted. They got paid enough if they kept writing and kept submitting to support themselves as they honed their writing skill. The pulp magazines, alas, have died out, and so at least since 1979 when Lawrence Block wrote Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print neophyte writers have been urged to start out with writing novels.

Since Block’s book was my very first how-to-write book, I was taken in. I wrote so many novel-beginnings I joked about cramming them all together and selling them as an avant-garde novel. 

That wasn’t even the way Block learned to write— he started with short stories, which sold. To me, as a person with Asperger Syndrome, which can mean organizational difficulties, it’s a little like being an infant who has just been advised to avoid those useless first baby steps and jump right in to running a marathon. 

So, my advice is this— go visit the website link to the Lester Dent formula and PRINT IT OUT and put it in a file folder. I keep mine in a red file folder. Also, if you can, get some books of short stories, or e-reprints of pulp magazines, so you can read some good examples. I got the whole Conan the Barbarian series for 99 cents. 

Write some yarns to the formula. Don’t worry, you don’t need a market for your first efforts. I once would have suggested posting your completed yarns to Wattpad, but Wattpad gets more and more toxic, encouraging the teenage ‘smutwriters’ to post their raunchy material, evidently unworried that these teenage writers may be attracting sexual predators who may be interested in molesting these young authors in real life.

I still do recommend online ‘publishing’ especially for beginning writers to get reactions. If all the Wattpad-type services are too ‘woke’ or toxic for you, consider using a WordPress or Blogger blog. Please think ahead— if you are going to be generating a lot of short stories, short-shorts and flash fiction, don’t start a blog for each one— start a general fiction blog, using tags and categories to sort your stories so the reader can find the first chapter of each one.

ASSIGNMENT: Find and print out the Lester Dent formula. Use it to write out the plot for a 6000 word or so ‘yarn.’ Write that yarn. Finish it. Celebrate your success! (If you write a story as part of this assignment and post it online somewhere, mention it in a comment and share a link to your story.)

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Recommended Reading:

The Pulp Mindset – JD Cowan.

Pulp Fiction – Robert Turner.

How to Write Pulp Fiction – James Scott Bell.

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Coming Soon to this Blog!

My new online novella, A Lycian Patriot. Story of a young man escaping the dystopian Harmony government to the scary Wildlands, where criminal patriots live.

[An earlier story in the Lycian series, available free on Wattpad: Banned Books, Banned Girl : A girl with an autism spectrum disorder escapes government confinement and works a ghost job removing banned books from bookshelves.: https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745 ]

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Writing Rules to Ignore While Writing.

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In the book Pulp Fiction by Robert Turner, the author admits that during the white heat of fiction writing, he didn’t think about fiction rules. That’s what worked for him, and that’s what he recommended to others.
It’s understandable. There are worlds and worlds of writing rules, and many are not helpful during the act of writing. Dean Wesley Smith, in the book ‘Writing into the Dark,’ tells the story of how he gave a talk to a college class that had already read and analyzed a story of his. The students asked him how he knew to put in the second hidden meaning for the story, or how he knew to foreshadow that event. Which puzzled Smith, because he did not put those things into the story consciously.
Writing is something we do in creative mode, with our personalities in Child rather than in Parent or Adult. Following an infinite set of rigid rules kicks us right out of creative mode and into critical mode, and has us using the logical part of our mind that isn’t connected to our creativity.
There are writing rules and writing rules. There are the basic things we have learned about spelling and grammar in grade school. For most of us it’s probably more natural to spell and use correct grammar even in a rough first draft, because that’s how we write and there are less things to clear up later on.
Rules we learned in English literature class (or German literature class, or whatever other classes you took in school,) in my mind are often secret-decoding classes. Teacher tells us what the story really means, what the theme of the story is, what things in the story have symbolic meaning. Things that have nothing to do with figuring out how to make a story of your own. The writer may not have put these things in the story consciously. Other teachers may deny these things are in the story at all.
Literature-class derived rules may get in the way of writing a good story. If you decide on a ‘theme’ first, your story might be heavy-handedly preaching that theme instead of telling a compelling story.
Other rules that we might ignore are the kind of rules shared in writing groups by beginning amateur writers. I remember a group that promoted a rule that you should avoid the use of the word ‘and’ whenever possible— but that group saw no problem with stringing four adjectives in a row. Others worry insanely about ‘head-hopping,’ which if done in a non-confusing way can actually be a part of a professional story.
The big problem with amateur writing rules is that they are the blind leading the blind. They increase beginning writers’ insecurity— which may be one thing they are intended to do. In amateur writing groups, many insecure writers like to make other writers insecure, too.
What about more professional and practical writing rules suggested by a professional writer like Lawrence Block, James Scott Bell, Dean Wesley Smith, Jerry B. Jenkins and other writers who have written how-to-write books?
Here is the thing: different writers work in different ways. Also, some writers have more of a gift in teaching their writing process to others. So if you read ten how-to-write books, all by authors whose books are recommended as being helpful, your head becomes so filled with writing rules you may feel paralyzed. Who is your protagonist? What should your mirror moment be like? Have you included the right story beats? Have you outlined fully— or written without any outline at all?
Enough! Calm down, just start writing. Reading about writing rules, and reading lots of fiction so you can internalize what a novel is, may help you, but you have to find out which writing rules help you, and at what stage of the process you should think about them.
Experiment a little. Next time you sit down to write, ignore a writing rule that you normally keep in your head— or think about a writing rule you normally ignore. What works for you, right now? In time, you may find that you have internalized the important rules so that you are applying them without thinking about them. And, perhaps, breaking them when it feels right to do so.

From Head-Fiction to Words on a Page #writing

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I’ve been making up stories in my head since early childhood. I’d go walking— ideally in the nearest wooded or wild spot— and take along my ‘imaginary friends’ and think up stories for them. I don’t know quite how early these story walks began, but I know I went for unauthorized walks when I lived in Arvada, Colorado, and that would have been when I was kindergarten age.
My earliest story friends were characters from TV shows— Batman and Robin, the crew of the Enterprise, the people of Dark Shadows. My first original characters were people I made up to interact with my TV characters.
My head-fiction wasn’t exactly like real fiction from a book. My stories didn’t have a proper beginning, middle and end, nor much of a plot. I would re-run scenes I liked and ignore what might have happened next.
As I developed an identity of myself-as-writer, thanks to the character ‘Jo’ in Little Women, I began making up stories that weren’t set in the Star Trek universe, but were my own stories. I even started writing things down.
I quickly figured out I couldn’t just set down my imaginings from my head. The stories had no plot, my dialog went on pointlessly, just to give characters a chance to make more smart aleck remarks, and it didn’t go on to an ending.
I realized I had to learn more about writing, and so I got my first-ever how-to-write book, ‘Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print’ by Lawrence Block. I knew Block’s writing from his short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Block gave his readers a bum steer. He said they should start out writing novels instead of short stories— even though Block himself started out writing short stories. His reasoning was that there was no market left for short stories, and so writing short stories wasn’t a selling proposition.
But the thing is this: most of our first efforts won’t be sold for money anyway. Any more than a professional artist was able to sell the first rough sketch he did in childhood. We have to practice first.
Once one learns a little bit of the structure of a short story or novel, you can start plugging your head-fiction into the structure, and create some ideas to fill out the rest of it.
This means doing a bit of an outline or pre-planning. If you feel you are a natural ‘pantser,’ go on ahead pantsing— you can plug in the structure things in a second, ‘taming the chaos’ draft.
Planning a story ending is hard for me. it’s like saying the fun time and my beloved characters should be scheduled for death. Which is silly. As a writer your fun time can go on and on through many different stories, and you might use the same characters in other stories. Even characters you’ve killed off— just give him a new name, appearance, and characteristics.
When you sketch out your story’s beginning, middle and end and the various plot points, remember you are not committed to use any part of this plan if something better occurs to you in the course of writing.
I have still not fully mastered the trick of turning my head-fiction into words on a page. Some of my head-fiction remains at the childish, fragmented stage, and that’s okay. It has a different purpose than the fiction-fantasies I have on purpose about my current WIP. I may go for a ‘plot-walk’ to work out how the next scene up will be scheduled to go.
What about you? Do you have fiction running around in your head? What do you do with it? Have you worked out any tricks for turning it in to written-down fiction? Share in a comment!
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Murder in Fiction.

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Fiction is different from real life— fictional life makes more sense. Everything that happens in fiction is part of a plot. Real life is just one thing after another.
Fictional murders, even in ‘gritty, realistic’ stories, tend to make more sense. In real life, a murder often seems motiveless or senseless, or the reason is crazy, like that serial killer who claimed he had to kill people to prevent an earthquake.
Fictional murders, like other fictional behaviors, have to be motivated. And in most fiction, that motivation has to be something an ordinary person might understand.
Murder mystery murders.
In conventional murder mysteries— the kind now tamed down and called ‘cozies,’ the murder at the center of the plot has a commonplace motive. Financial gain is very common, as it allows there to be a number of suspects, especially if the murder victim was wealthy and had a number of heirs.
Marital jealousy, a big motive in real murder, doesn’t work so well in a murder mystery since that motive points to one suspect usually. If that proves to be the motive of the ultimate killer, that factor must be hidden to make the killer’s identity a mystery.
Murder to prevent a revealing of secrets is also a possibility, especially if the author can frame the victim as someone who habitually ruined people by revealing their shameful secrets.
The suspect individuals in a mystery may have a variety of possible motives, rather than having them all after money or all protecting secrets. The main thing in the traditional murder mystery is that there must be a variety of suspects. No one can be standing over the dead victim with a knife in his hand— unless that someone is actually innocent and the real killer must be located.
Criminal enterprise murder.
In many types of adventurous fiction, the murders go back to a central criminal mastermind or Dark Lord.
The initial corpse can be a result of whatever the criminal enterprise normally kills people for— someone who didn’t go along with the gang’s extortion plot, a witness, a rival gang member, a young wizard whose magic powers might be stolen, whoever owns the McGuffin….
Afterwards, murders tend to be plot complications in the quest of the hero to stop the criminal villain. Witnesses that the hero wants to question might get murdered first. A friend or associate of the hero might get killed to intimidate the hero.
The more murdery your criminal enterprise villain or Dark Lord is, the more important it is for the hero to stop him. Also, the more corpses the hero encounters along the way, the more power the villain seems to have. Does it seem hopeless? It should. You want your hero to face an almost impossible challenge and win.
Incidental murders.
Every fictional life is precious. But some minor charaters must die or disappear as part of the plot, and sometimes murder is the cause.
It’s common to make fictional characters orphans, since that makes them more vulnerable. Sometimes that orphaning happens by means of a murder.
Murders in your character’s backstory can be just sad events, or perhaps your character will need to get justice/revenge for a murdered father. This need not be the central theme of the plot, however.
Sometimes an incidental murder might just be an obstacle to your hero’s actions. That one person with the important information is now dead so the hero must make other plans. At other times, the murder can point up dangers. If your hero goes to a dangerous city and the first person he speaks to ends up murdered by the end of the day, that illustrates the dangers of the city.
The hero kills.
In commercially viable or non-grimdark fiction, the hero can’t be a murderer. If the hero kills, it must be justified— defense of others or self-defense, ideally. Sometimes a bad guy just won’t surrender and must be killed to protect others.
In certain circumstances, the hero may do a ‘justice killing.’ In a remote region— in the pioneering West, or on a remote planet— there may be no realistic way to get a murderer to formal justice.
Also, in a dystopian totalitarian regime like the real-life regimes of Stalin, Mao or Hitler, a killer might be protected by the ‘judicial’ system because he is part of it. If the hero kills such a killer for righteous reasons, that will stop him from going on killing.
A fictional hero must have a very strong motivation to kill. Perhaps he lost a loved one, or has some strong emotional connection with the victim. He must have strong knowledge of the guilt of his target. In a dystopian regime, that killing judge has to be proved to be doing more killings than he needs to, rather than serving as a brake on a killing regime.
The big test of any murders you may commit in your fiction is, how well do readers accept it? Do they feel it is a tragic but necessary part of the plot, or are they mad at you, the author, for an unneeded killing? Reading should take your reader to an exciting adventure, not introduce interesting characters doomed to die so an author can earn his grimdark credentials.
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The doomed, pro-censorship Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nissa.amas.katoj

“My Writing Gets Better and Better.”

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To defeat that Inner Critic bound to stop you from writing by making you believe your writing sucks, a good method is to ensure your writing is actually getting better. But how do you do that?
  1. Write every day. If you feel bad about your WIP, just keep on writing. You learn writing by practicing writing.
  • Read good how-to-write books by authors known for their fiction writing like Lawrence Block, James Scott Bell, and Dean Wesley Smith. Find an idea you can use in your writing today.
  • Hang out with ‘real’ writers online or in real life.
  • Start thinking of yourself as a writer, not a wannabe.
  • Finish your writing projects. Projects you’ve given up on make your Inner Critic happy and you discouraged.
  • Try shorter fiction. Fiction writers tend to write short fiction before they tackle novels or trilogies.
  • Publish something, if only on Smashwords or online. Even if you have to go with a weak book cover. When you publish, you are telling yourself that you are a real writer.
Even if your writing is objectively not so great right now, if you work at it, you will get better. You ARE a writer— act like it. Believe in your writer persona. Because when you can start doing that, better writing will follow.

I’m working to increase my number of followers on Gab, a free speech oriented social medium. I’m https://gab.com/nissalovescats

Please join me there, and become my follower— I follow back.

Creative Mode, Critical Mode, and PAC Psychology

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Dean Wesley Smith strongly encourages writers to write in Creative mode, rather than switching to Critical mode, which he says exists to stop you from writing.

Creative mode comes from a child-like, free version of you that likes making up stories because it’s fun.

Critical mode is your Inner Editor, which speaks in the harsh voice of all the adult authority figures from your childhood. Critical mode wants to stop you from doing ‘wrong’ things like being original and not boring and conventional.

In Transactional Analysis, we are said to have three ego-states— Parent, Adult, and Child. The Parent is based on the things our parents and other adult authority figures said during our childhood. The Child ego-state is based on our earliest childhood memories. Our Adult is the name for the thinking, logical part of ourselves— which is confusing since even a nine-year-old has an Adult ego-state.

Creative mode clearly comes from the Child, since we are at our most creative when we are like free, uninhibited children, before we learned to follow all rules and fear every criticism.

Critical mode comes from the Parent, and often echoes the mean things parents and teachers said to us when they didn’t approve of our creative side. Critical mode can also be called the Inner Critic or Inner Editor. When we have low esteem about ourselves as writer, it can act like a bully or an emotional abuser.

The Adult is the part of you that learns things like the rules of grammar and the scores of writing rules you find in writers’ networking groups. Most of which won’t apply to you and your work.

Your Adult’s job is to let the Child be creative and free, while providing correct spellings and grammar, and to banish the Parent/Inner Critic from your writing session.

You know that Critical Mode is in the room by the way you feel about your work. If you become convinced your writing is dreck, or that every original thought you express in your work is shamefully bad and you must write more like other, duller people, that’s Critical Mode.

When the Child is in charge and you are in Creative Mode, writing is fun— it’s the Child’s playtime. Your subconsious mind will be tossing loads of cool stuff into the story that you may not realize until later.

Our mission as writers is to stay in Creative Mode, let your child run free, and become a better writer, naturally.

I’m trying to connect with other people, especially writers, on Gab, since I want to build up more followers there before I’m banished from Facebook or driven crazy by the ‘fact checkers’ claiming people’s jokes are fake news. I’m Nissa Loves Cats there. A group I like on Gab is ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy’ and the group is a good way to connet with new people there. It could use a few new members.

https://gab.com/groups/307