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Robert Plamondon’s Fiction

I put my fiction writing tips in this blog and also talk about my stories.

I have two complete novels out: One Survivor (a space opera) and Silver Buckshot (a romantic urban fantasy thriller with extra banter), and others in the works. This site talks about my stories and also about fiction writing in general.

My fiction writing tips are collected here.

Silver Buckshot: Magic, Mystery, and a Most Aggravating Boyfriend

Silver Buckshot is available in paperback and Kindle.

Thirteen-year-old Princess Flavia has endured a lot recently. Polio crippled her legs and killed her mother, her father is sunk in grief, and her servants veer between negligence and cruelty. She takes refuge in her books and never complains.

But she draws the line at being murdered. Fourteen-year-old Frank Barron, a contender for the most aggravating boy in the universe, conceals her when the shooting starts. This is no accident: a letter told him what to do. It’s signed, “Love, Flavia.” She has no memory of it, and, anyway, she can’t tell the future! Or fall in love. Can she?

This is “a romantic fantasy thriller with the banter turned up to eleven.”

One Survivor

Available now in paperback and on Kindle.

Order on Amazon.

When was the last time you enjoyed a science fiction book where teenagers put an alien ship back together? One Survivor is the kind of old-school SF adventure you love, with competent, strong-willed characters, believable technology, fast-paced action, humor, mystery, murder, betrayal, and a touch of the supernatural, all set against the backdrop of the ruined Terran Empire.

One Survivor will remind you of Heinlein’s early work, but with a depth of background more like Jack Vance. It pits fifteen-year-old Beverly di Mendoza against her parents’ murderers, on a backward planet whose inhabitants owe her nothing. With the help of two other teenagers and their battered spaceship, Beverly survives the initial onslaughts and soon moves to the offensive.

One Survivor is my first novel.

Works in Progress

More book-length works in various states of incompletion.

  • Dad Swore Every Word Was True. Family legends and tall tales.
  • Flavia II. As-yet untitled sequel to Silver Buckshot.
  • Tainted Gold. Sequel to One Survivor. Read the sample chapters (PDF format).

Links to My Other Sites

Do You Need a First-Line Hook?

Not that kind of hook!

This question came up on Reddit this morning. Here’s my answer:

Like most writing advice, “You have to have a first-line hook” is wisdom-adjacent while managing to be both wrong and imprecise. Does “first line” mean the first printed line or the first sentence? It’s wrong either way, but pointless ambiguity is a hallmark of oft-repeated writing advice.

First-line hooks are great. I love them to pieces. But they’re not essential; let’s not overvalue them.

Let’s reject the “line” part first. The position of the first line break on the printed page is irrelevant. Typography isn’t destiny.

How about the first sentence? I sometimes read a book for the first time and its opening sentence grabs me hard enough that I remember it years later, well enough to quote an approximation of it. This makes the story as a whole more vivid and easier to talk about. And, of course, I have no choice but to keep reading.  I benefit; the author benefits.

A vivid and memorable first sentence is a good thing to have. Does it also have to take the form of a hook? No. “Call me Ishmael” isn’t hooky in the usual sense at all, not in the way that, “I was riding down the old high road and came upon a ventriloquist and his dummy dangling from a tree” is.

How about a hook in the first paragraph or two? It’s in the same ballpark as the first sentence, but less quotable from memory and with more of everything else.

Good Openings

Good stories tend to open with a burst of authorial confidence, even swagger. Sometimes blatant, sometimes almost concealed. That’s potent stuff! A hook is often an alternative to this: something more within the grasp of relative beginners.

For example: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

I don’t know about you, but I have no defenses against Tolkien when he’s displaying his carefully crafted playfulness, and it was hard for me to stop reading after looking this up.

Setting the Stage

And the first paragraph or two begin converting the reader’s experience from a blank screen to either a story or the promise of a story Real Soon Now. Either way, it’s simultaneously setting expectations and satisfying them in the sense of, “Whatever it is I’m reading, I want more.”

Which reminds me of an old joke:

Q: How does an IBM salesman make love?

A: He sits on the edge of the bed all night telling her how good it will be.

As writers, we need to take off our metaphorical trousers before the reader falls asleep or even looks at their watch. If we aren’t master stylists, we should probably get a move on.

As with theater, every scene requires some stage-setting. That goes double for the opening of a story. The reader knows nothing: all they have is anticipation. They’re in the same situation as Roger Rabbit: “Who turned out the lights? Boy, it’s dark in here. I can’t see a thing! What’s going on?”

We want to ease the reader past the initial darkness and bring the scene into focus with a minimum of bewilderment.

This is at its most difficult at the beginning of the story, when the reader is at their most ignorant. If we can orient them to the situation, engage their interest, and evoke some kind of appropriate emotional response or other, we’re golden. Readers will take this as a good sign and keep reading.

In my reading, I make decisions quickly. So do a lot of other people. Take the Amazon free samples of stories, for example. I never make it to the end of the sample unless I’m going to buy the story. The samples aren’t very long, either.

So if your story begins with a few lackluster pages and the rest is pure gold, I’ll never know it.

One Survivor

Buy on Amazon 
Or buy elsewhere.

by Robert Plamondon
Norton Creek Press, 258 pages, ISBN 0981928447. 

Robert Plamondon’s novel is the kind of old-school SF adventure you love, with competent, strong-willed characters, believable technology, fast-paced action, humor, mystery, murder, betrayal, and a touch of the supernatural, all set against the backdrop of the ruined Terran Empire.

One Survivor will remind you of Heinlein’s early work, but with a depth of background more like Jack Vance. It pits fifteen-year-old Beverly di Mendoza against her parents’ murderers, on a backward planet whose inhabitants owe her nothing. With the help of two other teenagers and their battered space ship, Beverly survives the initial onslaughts and soon moves to the offensive.

Continue reading “One Survivor”

How to Amost Use Dialect in Fiction

A (Good?) Example From the Master

What’s the big deal about using dialect in fiction? Let’s look at an example from the all-time master of dialect, Mark Twain:

“Say, Jim, I’ll fetch the water if you’ll whitewash some.”

Jim shook his head and said, “Can’t, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an’ git dis water an’ not stop foolin’ roun’ wid anybody. She say she spec’ Mars Tom gwine to ax me to whitewash, an’ so she tole me go ’long an’ ’tend to my own business—she ’lowed she’d ’tend to de whitewashin’.”

“Oh, never you mind what she said, Jim. That’s the way she always talks. Gimme the bucket—I won’t be gone only a minute. She won’t ever know.”

“Oh, I dasn’t, Mars Tom. Ole missis she’d take an’ tar de head off’n me. ’Deed she would.”
—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

At the time (1876) many readers were familiar with the two related dialects spoken by Tom and Jim and appreciated the faithfulness of Twain’s rendition. If you’d grown up in the same town, you’d have talked like one of them yourself.

It sounds overwrought to the modern American ear, though, and some of it doesn’t connect with our experience. For example, I look at “gwine,” wonder how I’m really supposed to hear it, give up, and change it in my mind’s ear to “gonna.”

Continue reading “How to Amost Use Dialect in Fiction”

How to Start a Story

How do you write the first few paragraphs of a story so the reader doesn’t stop reading immediately? Any way you like, but I’ll tell you my way.

I’m going to to assume you already know what happens in your first scene, and it’s a matter of opening it to best effect.

You need two things:

  1. Workmanlike construction.
  2. Something, anything, that makes them want to keep reading (a hook).

Today I’ll talk about workmanlike construction. All I’m going to say about hooking the reader is that, for many readers, it’s like speed dating. They won’t give you the benefit of the doubt for a whole chapter; not even close.

Continue reading “How to Start a Story”