A Quote by Arthur Slade

As with all types of writing, fantastical fiction depends on the same basic rules. — © Arthur Slade
As with all types of writing, fantastical fiction depends on the same basic rules.
Before I started writing, I'd never read much fiction. I was more interested in non-fiction. I'm taking the same approach to theatre: I can operate from a position of ignorance and make up my own rules instead of being bound by customs and practice.
I like rules. I like definitions, categories, and writing advice of all sorts. When I'm writing fiction, there are often a lot of things for me to try to get right at once, and rules help me to stay organized. But my favorite rule of all is that, ultimately, there are no rules.
Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!
I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.
When writing fantastical literature, your biggest problem is getting your audience to believe the fantastical elements of your story.
I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.
It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.
In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise.
How much freedom I have depends on the number and nature of my options. And that, in turn, depends both on the rules of the game and on the assetts of the players: it is a very important and widely neglected truth that it does not depend on the rules of the game alone.
If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.
Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging.
Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'.
The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.
Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.
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