DO
Create wholesome characters with integrity and personal intent. Create a novel about someone who happens to live in a dystopian society, not a dystopian society that happens to have some people in it (or ‘plot carriers’ as they can somtimes be called).
DON’T
Let your main character have a runaway messiah complex.
DO
Think about every aspect of your dystopian world, even the bits that you won’t end up writing about and the stuff no one cares to know. How do the toilets flush in your totalitarian state? Working on this trivial detail might influence the end result of your book. It also might not, but who knows until you’ve decided?
DON’T
Display every detail of your fictional world to the reader. This isn’t a textbook after all, and there won’t be a quiz afterwards.
DO
Research. Research. Research.
DON’T
Get caught up on reality.
DO
Know your genre. Read the greats, read the not-so-greats, read the mainstream and read the obscure. Learn to love Big Brother. Know who your fans and peers will be and show your appreciation of their existence. Although the act of writing itself is an isolated task, every other step to creating a novel is not.
DON’T
Try to be 100% original. You won’t be completely free of influence, so just embrace that fact. Acknowledge which writers are similar to you stylistically (but also don’t get too carried away and flat-out copy them).
DO
Lighten the mood occasionally. Although I love the dreary, bleak depths of a good dystopian novel, it can be quite suffocating if not occasionally broken up. You don’t have to make a fart joke or describe someone clumsily falling down after every death scene, but you do need a bit of contrast.
DON’T
Give up.
Further Reading
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