Writing popular fiction

like dark pinpricks bottomed with dried blood. There were his ears: very flat against his head and somewhat pointed like the ears of a wolf. There were other things that would show up on a closer, more intimate examination, things like his hair (which was of an altogether different texture than any racial variant among the normal human strains), his nipples (which were ever so slightly concave instead of convex), and his genitals (which were male, but which were contained in a pouch just below his navel and not between his truncated limbs). There was only one way in which Timothy was remotely human, and that was his brain. But even here, he was not entirely normal, for his IQ was slightly above 250.
    How did Timothy become as he is shown? What problems would such a freak have? What would his outlook on the world be? What kind of adventure might he have about which to base a story? I ended up writing "A Third Hand" to satisfy my own curiosity as much as to entertain a reader.
    Of course, most of your ideas will not be generated in any of the ways I've described, but will float unbidden from your subconscious. Only a team of psychiatrists could ever deduce what all contributed to these "spontaneous" ideas. Still, you can help these stories surface if you read, read, read. With every novel you read, thousands of facts, characters, and plot twists are stored in your subconscious, constantly interacting below the level of awareness. When they jell and rise, they are usually in an original arrangement that bears no resemblance to the books that inspired them. Also, you will often find a concept in another writer's work which intrigues you, something he tossed away in a line or paragraph but which can become the whole center of your own novel. If you develop this idea into a story that does not resemble his, you are not guilty of
plagiarism, but of literary feedback which is a source of story ideas for all writers.
    If you write science fiction, most of your reading—but by no means all of it—should be in that field. Other science fiction writers are most likely the artists who will spark your own flights of fancy—though you may well generate science fiction story ideas from mystery novels, too. The science fiction writer should also read the popular science
magazines—Science Digest, Popular Science
, and others—to keep apace with various advancements which might be incorporated into a story. A Western writer will benefit from reading histories of the old West in which he may discover an historical incident that will spark an entire story idea in him. Full-time freelancers will have more leisure for reading than will those holding jobs during the day and writing nights and weekends, but both the full- and the part-time writer cannot afford to ignore what else is being published.
    Because the second person viewpoint (an example would be: "You open the door and walk into the room, and you see the corpse at once. You are shocked, and you wonder if you should run. You can't be sure if the murderer has left, yet you have a duty to find out what has happened") is too affected to be suitable in any but the most special cases, the genre writer has four possible viewpoints from which to tell a story: the omniscient, modified omniscient, third person limited, and the first person.

OMNISCIENT AND MODIFIED OMNISCIENT VIEWPOINTS
    An omniscient viewpoint is one from which the author may look in on any of his characters, switching from hero to heroine to villain to any of the minor characters and back to the hero again. Free to view the unfolding events from many vantage points, the writer can develop several plot threads, building suspense by letting the reader see how all the pieces will come together while the characters are kept ignorant of the true situation: when the reader knows something the characters don't, this is called "dramatic irony," and it can be quite effective. Furthermore, by spending some time in third person with every character in the book, the writer is better able to create believable people all down the line than if he must use only the eyes and mind of the hero to present the rest of the story people.
    In the late 1800's, the pure omniscient viewpoint was most popular with writers. In this, the author was a God who halted the action to comment on his story people, and he often addressed these comments to his reader, like this:
Robert stepped away from the overturned coach, brushed off his britches and