Choose one character to bully

‘So it’s settled. We head north.’ Her hand resting lightly on the pommel of her sword, Saltar looked at each of her companions in turn. Pheos returned her gaze coolly, sparks of shadow flickering around his gloved hands. Gramble shrugged and hefted his axe from one compact, muscled shoulder to the other. ‘No objections?’ said Saltar. ‘Then we ride as soon as...’ She hesitated. ‘Where’s Dingleton?’

‘Curse him!’ muttered Gramble, looking around. ‘Stupid wretched creature.’ Pheos smiled archly.

‘I believe our diminutive friend is currently relieving himself,’ he said, nodding towards a nearby bush.

‘Sorry!’ said the bush. ‘Sorry! Hang on, I’m just...’ The bush rustled and Dingleton fell out, his trousers round his ankles. ‘Wooaah!’ He tumbled head over heels down the muddy slope, his hands stuck in his belt as he tried desperately to pull his pants up.

‘Dingleton!’ snapped Saltar. ‘Get up. We’re heading north. Where did you tie up the horses?’

‘Tie up?’ said Dingleton, a baffled expression on his face. ‘They were... um...’

‘I’ll murder him!’ yelled Gramble, gripping his axe. Saltar sighed.

‘At least tell me you picked up the bag with the holy amulet in,’ she said.

‘The thing about that...’ Dingleton began, before losing his balance and falling flat on his face.

‘Why is he here again?’ hissed Pheos.

‘I don’t know,’ Dingleton moaned quietly to himself. ‘I really don’t know. I’m not equipped for this. It seems cruel even to have brought me. When you think about it...’ Whatever he had been about to say, it was muffled by the bird faeces that fell directly into his mouth at that exact moment.

Include unnecessary linguistic redundancies of language

Kevin entered his PIN number into the ATM machine at a rapid rate of speed. He had a preplanned date arrangement with a female woman and didn’t want to be delayed by lateness. If he compared and contrasted Olivia with previous girlfriends he’d dated before, she was universally superior and better in every way.

‘Hurry quickly,’ he whispered under his breath, his hand advancing forward towards the cash slot where money would come out. He glanced at the LCD display, which was showing an advertising commercial. ‘I’m in too much of a rush to have time for this,’ he muttered. ‘You can keep your added bonus free gift.’

Finally at last, his cash money emerged into view and he grabbed it with his hand. Irregardless of this delay, the end result of his date arrangement would be a new beginning at this moment in time. Little did he know or realise, but his goals and objectives were about to be completely and utterly met in a way and manner it was impossible to over-exaggerate.

The ending should have a twist... or should it?

Sarah sank into an armchair and let out a satisfied sigh. It was good to be home. As remarkable as it seemed, the house was just as she’d left it, all those weeks ago. Or if there were differences, they were small things – a layer of dust on the furniture, a pile of unopened letters in the hallway, the gentle click of a pistol being cocked. Wait, what?

‘Get down on the floor!’ screamed the masked gunman, kicking open the kitchen door. ‘Face down! Face down!’ Sarah hesitated for a moment.

‘Freddie?’ she said. ‘Freddie, is that you?’ The gunman froze.

‘No,’ he said.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Sarah. ‘I thought we were a team.’

‘We were,’ whispered Freddie. ‘But that was before...’ He reached up to his face and gripped his mask. Sarah braced herself. ‘Before...’ He pulled aside the fabric. Sarah couldn’t look. ‘Before this,’ he said, throwing the mask to the floor. ‘Look at me, Sarah. Look at what you’ve done to me.’ She slowly raised her eyes to his. A second passed. ‘You did this, Sarah,’ he said. ‘You gave me this big smile by being so lovely.’ Sarah grinned back at him.

‘You big silly,’ she said. ‘You had me worried there.’

‘Worried? He laughed. ‘What could there possibly be to worry about? It’s all safe again. We won, Sarah.’

‘I think you mean I won,’ said Sarah, turning into a werewolf which she had been all along and eating him.

Get fixated on a particular reference point

Geoff craned his neck and looked up at the building.

‘Soon they’ll be everywhere,’ he muttered. ‘Pinkman and Grist Associates, sweeping across the financial district like Genghis Khan, destroying everything in their path.’

‘Not if we stop them,’ said Felicity, quietly. Geoff shook his head.

‘We’re like unarmed Chinese peasants,’ he said. ‘They’ll run us down on horseback.’

‘But the antitrust investigation...’ began Felicity.

‘Useless,’ Geoff interrupted. ‘Like a bamboo hut. They’ll lie to the regulators, they’ll lie to the courts, they’ll do whatever it takes and come out clutching the still-beating heart of the bonds market like a newborn Genghis Khan emerging from his mother’s womb clutching a bloodclot – a story which, whether apocryphal or not, indicates the high regard in which Genghis Khan’s capacity for bloodthirstiness was held by his people.’

‘I know,’ said Felicity. ‘That’s what you always say.’ She stared down at her shoes, made of the same kind of leather as Genghis Khan’s saddle would once have been. Geoff’s gaze was still on the skyscraper above them.

‘How tall would you say it is?’ he mused. ‘If you got two hundred Genghis Khans and stood them on each other’s shoulders...’

Refuse to give names to characters

A tall man with glinting eyes stepped meaningfully from the ship’s gangplank and surveyed the dock.

‘Where is she?’ he demanded, gesturing at a stooped and subservient man beside him.

‘Sorry, sir?’ the servile man asked. The tall man with the smooth black walking stick clicked his tongue impatiently.

‘You know who,’ he said. ‘The demure woman with the scarf.’

‘I’ll make enquiries, sir,’ the balding, diminutive man replied (the same man who had been talking a moment before).

‘Well make them quickly,’ interrupted a tall man with shining eyes. This was not the same tall man with glinting eyes who had so far been conducting the conversation, but a new, even taller man with eyes that shone rather than glinted, who had just disembarked behind the two figures already standing on the dock.

‘You!’ hissed the tall (merely tall – not taller) man with glinting rather than shining eyes. ‘I should have known you would try to interfere.’

‘Interfere?’ queried the tallest available man with the really quite unsettlingly shiny eyes. ‘I would never interfere. I am merely concerned for our mutual acquaintance’s wellbeing.’

‘The demure woman?’ asked the second-tallest man.

‘I would describe her as more reserved than demure.’

‘Ah.’ The still-actually-quite-tall-though-short-comparatively-speaking man said. ‘I’m not entirely convinced we’re talking about the same woman.’

Base your plot on unsupported assertions

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, a leaden feeling spreading from my stomach and into my limbs. ‘What did I do wrong?’

‘No,’ said Father Eschaton, ‘you do not understand.’ Light from the highest windows of the temple bathed him in gold. ‘When you destroyed The Machine, you upset the delicate balance of good and evil in the world.’

‘But...’ I frowned. ‘But The Machine was evil, wasn’t it? It fed on people’s souls.’ He nodded gravely.

‘It was evil,’ he said. ‘But it was precisely evil enough. Now there is a dangerous imbalance in the forces of the universe.’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘Hang on a minute. Surely we’re in favour of good and opposed to evil. I really don’t see what I’ve done wrong here.’ Father Eschaton hesitated for a moment.

‘There is a balance...’ he began.

‘Why?’ I said. He shifted uncomfortably.

‘Sorry?’

‘Why? Why is there a balance? Why not just have everything good and nothing evil? What’s actually wrong with that?’

‘I...’ He licked his lips and squinted. The golden light seemed to be bothering him. ‘The balance is beyond human understanding, beyond the mere...’

‘You don’t know, do you?’ I let the question hang. ‘You were going to send me back into that volcano, to almost certain death, and you’ve absolutely no idea why.’ He shrugged and mumbled something. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Speak up.’

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I just thought...’

‘What? You just thought what?’

‘I just thought...’ He poked at the dust near his foot. ‘Just thought it’d be interesting.’

Use... dramatic... ellipses...

(with thanks to... Carolyn)

With a screeching cacophony of mechanical discomfort, the plane dipped unevenly towards the runway and...

...made contact with the tarmac. The rubber on the tyres instantly shredded, the exposed metal sending a shower of sparks directly towards the stricken aircraft’s fuel tanks, which...

...were of course safely sealed. The plane skidded along the runway, hurtling ever closer to the airport’s observation tower...

...which luckily was still half a mile away, this being a sizeable airport. Wide-eyed and soaked in sweat, the pilot gripped the controls in front of him and silently cursed...

...his decision to wear thermal underwear and to reuse the same pair of disposable contact lenses he had worn yesterday. Then, with the inevitability of a volcanic eruption, the plane...

...came to a halt safely and every single one of its unfortunate passengers...

...disembarked.

Act as if you, as the author, have no inside information

(with thanks to M.H. Forsyth)

Why Thomas opened that door, we may never know. It could have been something he did instinctively, some remnant of an ancient primal urge. It could have been an impulse from the depths of his brain, a half-remembered childhood memory tugging gently at his conscious mind. It could have been something he had been planning for weeks, knowing long before now that he would open the mysterious door at the first available opportunity. It could be that he was not human at all, with none of the caution and instinct for self-preservation humanity brought, but a sophisticated android with a pre-programmed agenda for door-opening. There really is no way of knowing without some kind of detailed neural scan.

Maybe his name wasn’t even Thomas. After all, guessing someone’s name based on their appearance is often a matter of pure chance. Suffice it to say, there was a human, or humanoid figure of some sort, opening (or appearing to open – such tricks of perception are possible) something that looked very much like a door, but don’t hold me to that.