Start the first chapter with a dramatic and mostly unexplained death:
Chapter 1:
He slumped against the door and collapsed, his face a rictus of agony. Harry was dead.
<Now abruptly jump to another thread of the plot>
Terry Pratchett has addressed the next one at length, but:
The more improbable an outcome, the more likely the hero will be able to pull it off faultlessly; if it’s a million-to-one shot, it can’t fail.
Generally avoid mention of sex or sexuality until you write The Sex Scene ™, then do a bang-up job involving comparisons with industrial machinery, fireworks, and various forms of goo spurting in all directions so everyone knows it was great. After you’ve written The Sex Scene ™, you can go back to ignoring your character’s sexuality.
If you are writing about a society centuries in the future, please make sure that all expository statements re: science is cast in the terms and knowledge and beliefs of 20th-century Man. Thanks!
Quotation marks are the only way you can tell dialogue from the rest of the text. If the author doesn’t say which character said what it is all but impossible to figure it out.
Emotions of characters are a part of describing a scene. After all when you look around a full room don’t you see the little emotion bubbles above people’s heads?
Plot twists are surprising because there are no hints of how the story will end anywhere in the story before the twist. On a related note plot twists are manditory and should involve at least one nonsensical revelation about a character.
Every book on bad fiction planet has to be part of a series, or at least set in an established fictional world. The only reason for a book not to be is that it was meant to be but the writer wasn’t up to the real task of writing.
Any alien race mentioned will have names with lots of punctuation in. There will either be no possible logical reason for this to be there, or it will be described as representing sounds that make it impossible to read the name in your head as anything but “That ‘shp[click]something’-guy”
In regards to adjectives, it’s always helpful to pick three or four favorite ones and keep using them over and over again through the entire book. For example, in Michael Crichton’s novels, on every single occasion where someone’s voice is heard over a walkie-talkie (this will happen about 400 times), that voice will be described as “tinny.”
Other good adjectives that can be used infinitely are “swarthy,” “voluptuous,” and, of course, “indescribable.”
If the hero is a Harvard professor or someone of similar intellect, whatever clues they discover will baffle them just long enough to advance the story, even if you figured out the answer 10 pages ago.
When the story is part of an established series, important plot twists must involve either glaring inconsistencies with previous volumes or arbitrary extensions of previous knowledge. See many Star Trek episodes for examples.
The Unique Name Rule (general rule to the above corollary): Your characters are so special, so unlike anyone else, ever. Therefore, no matter what fictional genre, their names will be special.
The Contemporary Name Corollary: If set in contemporary U.S., there will be no Mikes or Janes; there will be Milligans and Jaiynes[sup]*[/sup].
The Fantasy Name Corollary: If set in a fastasy time, there will be the same set of unpronounceable set of letters and punctuation as in sci-fi worlds: there will be K’Lorvs and Ptretri-owghs.
[sup]*[/sup]The Unique Spelling Corollary: If you can’t think of a totally new name, then spell it uniquely. This will cue the reader that your character is unique, unlike anyone else, ever.
By the same token, bad fantasy writers (and good ones) often try to prove they are really super imaginitive and instead of having humanoid creatures, have aliens that look like spheres or mists or, as my personal favorite, a certain shade of blue (parodicly done by the late great Mr. Adams).
Although the Villain[sup]tm[/sup] has whacked forty-seven people without hesitation, and done so in the most expeditious manner (i.e., shooting from point blank range, pushing off a bridge, etc.), have the hero be subject to an elaborate form of dispatch. Tying them to a machine which has a lethal spinning device is usually good. Bombs with convenient timer displays also work.
Oh. And be sure to have the Villain[sup]tm[/sup] leave before the hero is actually demised.
Women’s hair always looks great. “Tina’s long ebony tresses swirled around her face bewitchingly, as she leapt from the roof of the burning building after the gas explosion, and landed in a dumpster full of rotting fruit.” This is clearly the first thing people notice about you when you are jumping from a burning building.
The level of sexual experience of the writer is inverse to the number of sex scenes and the amount of detail in said sex scenes. Unfamiliarity with basic human anatomy will creep in.
The impact of an action scene can be considerably enhanced if each incident is described in mind-numbing detail, e.g.
Dirk Manly’s index finger squeezed the M-16’s trigger. He had set the weapon to single-shot mode, shrewdly calculating that the increase in accuracy was easily worth the reduction in firepower. Three hundredths of a second later, the weapon’s hammer impacted on the base of the newly-chambered fully-jacketed 7.52mm anti-personnel round. The resultant explosion propelled the bullet, minus its cartridge case and the now rapidly-cooling propellant gases, at a velocity approaching the speed of sound along the gun’s barrel. The barrel’s rifling imparted a clockwise spin on the accelerating bullet, increasing its accuracy without noticeably reducing its velocity. If a slow-motion camera had been present to track the bullet’s exit from the flash-suppressed muzzle, the result might have resembled a miniature version of the winning pass in the 1986 Superbowl.
