Life doesn’t have any rules beyond “if you don’t procreate you don’t count”. Everything else is either ways to stay alive for the procreation part, or wrappers around it all to make sure that the procreating doesn’t get wasted. Even so, for a very long time (and still in more than a few parts of the world), the begatting thing was pretty wasteful – people would have a whole lot of children and if they were lucky more than one or two would survive to have children of their own.

Life also has a whole lot of randomness, bad things happening to people who don’t deserve it, good things happening to the wrong people (defined as “not me”), and things that leave you scratching your head.

Stories, though, are a wholly human invention, and they have rules. The rules can be bent (and on occasion twisted into pretzels), but you break them at your peril. If you doubt, scan a typical news front page article. Identify the villain, the hero, and message. Most of the time, the villain and hero will be people. Occasionally the “villain” will be some impersonal force (the fire near Colorado Springs right now comes to mind), and there will always be some kind of message. Most of the time this isn’t an attempt to slant things, either. It’s simply that the rules of story are so deeply ingrained that it’s almost impossible to relate any sequence of events without turning them into some kind of story.

I suspect the process works something like this: we observe the sequence of events and – because stories originated with real events – notice their similarity to a story pattern. At this point the human pattern-matcher takes control and shuffles everything into the appropriate story pattern without us even noticing. We absorb the cues that tell us if it’s a happy or a tragic ending, who or what we should be wanting to win, and we adjust what we see accordingly. We “know” that something in shadow is darker than something that isn’t, so that’s what we see. We “know” the hero is supposed to be a better person than the villain, so that’s what we see.

Of course, people are a bit more complicated than that – which is why you see so much confusion and distress when the much-idolized sports star proves to be human (and fallible) too. Because people had mentally cast that person as hero, they didn’t see the signs that the all-too-human flaws were causing problems until the poor sod crashed and burned.

Where that leaves writers is… interesting.

We can’t break the rules with impunity. The rules of story aren’t arbitrary, they’re the accretion of thousands of years of human storytelling, encoded into culture and behavioral norms. They tell people how to behave, and how to be. If you give people the structures of a romance with a happy ending and finish with an uber-gory tragedy, your story is going to meet the wall at speed – and worse, your name will be poison to every reader who touches you.

It’s not coincidence that the pushers of gray goo are intellectual types. These are people who have analysed things until they’ve twisted themselves inside out, and lost track of the real purpose of the thing. It’s a specialized kind of stupidity reserved for the intelligent and not terribly well grounded (you’ve got to have lost track of the universe where your feet are to follow it). It’s also the end-point of what good writers do all the time – start with “what if” and move from there. The key difference lies in how much of the real world you let into you chain of “what if-then what?” (What if someone got enough DNA from somewhere to clone a T-rex? Then what? (Really ugly meat bills, for starters)).

So we’ve got rules for stories, and they don’t take kindly to being ignored or broken. It feels wrong as a reader to have a story not follow the rules. I read one – unpublished, by someone who I hope has since been published because yes she is very much good enough – where all the story structure and settings pointed to romantic entanglement with two characters, and a particular kind of final conflict ending. I felt cheated when that wasn’t what happened. I hope I managed to explain why that novel didn’t work, and I hope she found a way to make the story work without the ending seeming to come out of nowhere, because it was very good.

What are the rules?

That’s where it gets interesting…

Possibly the first, and hardest to break, is “It must matter”. Something or someone in the thing has to matter enough to a reader that they’ll bother to turn the next page (or hit the button on their hardware). Whatever it is it has to matter early.

Second is “First impressions stick”. This makes redemption plays a right bugger to deal with, but there it is. If you show someone kicking the puppy, readers expect that this person is going to be bad. They’ll be unhappy (you’ll get hate mail) if the puppy-kicker isn’t bad. (Yes, kicking the puppy is metaphorical. It means doing something abhorrent in the culture you’re writing for, even if in the culture you’re writing about that same act is considered good and virtuous. No-one was this was going to be easy.)

Third, mostly applicable to modern writers, if you’re focusing mostly on one male and one female good guy, you can expect your readers to assume there will be a romantic subplot (unless you’re writing a romance, in which case you break the happily ever after at your peril).

And of course, the rule that causes writers all over the Anglosphere to complain about things that they couldn’t put in a book, it must make sense. Real life doesn’t have to, which is why writers bitch. They see all this wonderfully bizarre stuff, but if they used it in a book it wouldn’t fly because stories have to make sense. Yes, even stories with magic. Coincidences in stories have to be foreshadowed to within an inch of their lives, and telegraphed like crazy, because otherwise readers assume it’s just the author making life easier for himself/herself (and on occasion itself).

There’s a whole lot more to be said about the rules of story, so stop by next week for the next installment in the series.

Oh, and don’t forget, there’s still a few days to enter the competition for a gruesome demise of your choice and a free copy of ConSensual.