Rules

There are always rules no matter how much the child inside us wishes there wasn't.

I was watching the new show, Once Upon a Time, on ABC, and I had been fairly into it up until last Sunday. Without giving too much away I was watching the episode where they first introduce Cinderella. Now first off, yes, this is fantasy. But fantasy still has rules, and from what I could tell is that up until this episode the original fairy tale stories were still intact. But this episode threw me for a loop when it seemed that Rumpelstiltskin could move about in this world, and affect stories other than his own.

On the surface this isn't bad. The turn off comes from me believing that I understood the rules of this new world, and then those rules that seemed to be established were turned upside down. Now I hope that they will explain this later on, but if they don't I might not be able to get back into it. And all this leads to why the rules of the world you create within your story are so important.

These so called 'rules' give us a feel for your world. They make it seem more real. Would it be any fun if anything really could happen? Take superman for example... How interesting would he be without kryptonite? Rules give others grounding within your story. Without them we wander around unable to figure out why things happen and other things do not happen. If you tell your reader that magic is only done by women in your world, but then introduce a man with magical powers, you better have a damn good reason for it. In other words, you've got a lot of explaining to do, Lucy.

Rules also give your characters obstacles. Really, what is the point if everything is easy? If everything is easy, then there is no problem, and if there is no problem there really is no story. Stories need problems and conflict to survive. No one wants to read anything where everything is hunky dory, and nothing ever goes wrong. What's the point? We all know how its going to end already. Rules can help you in this task. The make the world feel more real, draw your reader in, and let them know that even with magic not everything can be solved with the wave of a magic wand.