You must remember that readers do not read your story to hear how smart you are, or how complicated you can make your sentences. If you insist on showing off in your copy, readers will flee in droves. It's possible to put even very complex ideas in relatively simple language, and its equally possible to tell your readers a great deal of fascinating information without making it sound like a self-serving show-off act.
Here's an example of the kind of thing you must not do:
In an obscurantist deluge of extraneous verbiage as an outgrowth of an apparent excessive effort to manifest extraordinary intellectual attainment, the aforesaid man impacted adversely on the totality of his audience in a veritable paradigm of irrelevance.
What the writer was trying to say was:
The man tried to impress people by talking too much, but nobody liked it.
You might want to examine yourself—and your copy—for smart-alecky stuff like this. You might also comb your copy for specialized terminology that might be written more simply and for information you've put in the stow just to show how much you know, rather than because it really contributes to the story.
For nobody likes a smart aleck, and fiction readers can sniff one out a mile away.
4. DON'T EXPECT MIRACLES
A DOCTOR SPENDS FIVE to ten years learning how to be a doctor. Why, then, do people think they can learn how to be a professional writer of fiction in a week or a month—or even a year?
The writing of fiction is very deceptive. Like riding a bicycle, it looks easy until you try it. But whereas the bicycle gives you quick and painful proof that riding it isn't quite as easy as it appeared, writing is more subtle; your very first story may look good to you—even though it's almost certainly unpublishable on later reflection.
You came to this book because writing interests you, and you're probably doing some of it. To the task you brought some language skills and a desire to tell stories. Your language skills may be quite good. (I hope so.) You may have wonderful ideas for stories, and you type well, etc., etc.
Does any of this mean you know how to write fiction? Unfortunately, no. The writing of fiction—except in the case of that very rare genius—is a difficult job. It involves the interactive working of dozens of specific, hard-won techniques. It may become an art, but only by first being consummate craft.
Yes, if you have a modicum of talent, you can learn how to do it. But it may take you years.
But, why should that be such bad news? If the task were easy, everybody in the world would be a writer, and your achievement would mean little. Setting out on a difficult course is exciting, and the conclusion can be the triumph of a lifetime.
You may find that it takes many manuscripts... and a lot of time... to learn the ins and outs of the techniques involved in handling viewpoint, or writing developed scenes, or the like. But as you learn each bit of the craft, paying for your knowledge in hard work and the passage of time, I guarantee that you'll grow more excited about the pursuit... more awed by the beauty and logic of how fiction works.
It's worth the time. Expect no overnight miracles, but have faith. If you persevere, the chances are very good that you will achieve some success.
Conversely, if you get disgusted or discouraged, expecting overnight fame and fortune, you're certain to fail. Absolutely.
Write in your journal, or in some other permanent record, your goal as a writer five years from today. Assuming (as is true) that a writing career proceeds by small steps forward—write where you hope ideally to be as a writer four years from now. And in three years. And in two. And by next year this time.
Put that list of hopes aside somewhere safe. Get to work. Be patient, but press yourself to work hard. Make notes of your insights and learned skills as you come upon them. Then, a year from now, compare where you were (now) with where you will be by that time. You'll be surprised and pleased.
Maybe you won't be a selling writer of fiction yet. But you'll be a lot closer and able to see your own progress.
5. DON'T WARM UP YOUR ENGINES
OFTEN, WHEN I START to read a story written by an inexperienced writer, I am reminded of those cold winter mornings long ago in Ohio when I sat miserably beside my father in the old Buick, in the dark garage, waiting for the engine to warm up before driving away from home.
In those days it was considered good form to warm your engine before driving the car. Multiviscosity engine oil was far in the future, and the theory was that the motor should idle a while under no strain while the heat of ignition warmed the oil so it could circulate more freely, providing better lubrication.
Those days are long gone. But, amazingly, fiction writers still do the same kind of unnecessary and wasteful thing in starling their stories.
"Why," I may ask them, "have you started your story with this long, static description of a town (or a house, or a street, or a country scene)?"
"Well," the beginning writer will reply, puzzled, "I need to set up where the story is going to take place."
Or I may be forced to ask, "Why have you started this story by giving me background information about things that happened months (or even years) ago?"
"Well," the poor neophyte will say, "I wanted the reader to know all that before starting the story."
Such static or backward-looking approaches to fiction are probably lethal in a novel, and are certainly fatal in a modem short story. Readers today—and that of course includes editors who will buy or reject your work—are more impatient than ever before. They will not abide a story that begins with the author warming up his engines. If a setting needs to be described, it can be described later, after you have gotten the story started. If background must be given the reader, it can be given later, after you have intrigued him with the present action of the story.
I've had the horrific experience of standing in the doorway of a room at a magazine publishing house where first readers go through freelance submissions, deciding whether the stories should be passed on to an editor for further consideration, or sent back as a rejection at once. Sometimes a reader would slit the end of a manila envelope and pull the manuscript only halfway out of the envelope, scanning the first paragraph or two of the yarn. Sometimes—on the basis of this glance alone—the, story was either passed on to an editor for consideration, or tossed into the reject pile.
Do you think that you're really going to get past that first reader with an unmoving description of a house or a street? Do you imagine that that reader, going through hundreds of manuscripts every day, is going to pass on your story if it begins with stuff that happened twenty years ago?
The chances are very, very slim.
Moral: Don't warm up your engines. Start the story with the first sentence!
How do you do that? By recognizing three facts:
1. Any time you stop to describe something, you have stopped. Asking a reader to jump eagerly into a story that starts without motion is like asking a cyclist to ride a bike with no wheels—he pedals and pedals but doesn't get anywhere. Description is vital in fiction, but at the outset of the story it's deadly.
2. Fiction looks forward, not backward. When you start a story with background information, you point the reader in the wrong direction, and put her off. If she had wanted old news, she would have read yesterday's newspaper.
3. Good fiction starts with—and deals with—someone's response to threat.
Let's look a bit further at this No. 3, because it tells us how our stories should start.
As human beings, it's in our nature to be fascinated by threat. Start your story with a mountain climber hanging from a cliff by his fingernails, and I guarantee that the reader will read a bit further to see what happens next. Start your story with a child frightened because she has to perform a piano solo before a large recital audience—and feeling threatened, of course—and your reader will immediately become interested in her plight.
It stands to reason, then, that you should not warm up your engines at the outset.
You should start the action. What kind of action? Threat—and a response to it.
Every good story starts at a moment of threat.
Does this mean you are doomed to spend your writing career looking for new and dire physical threats? I don't think so, although some fine writers have thrived by writing fiction dealing with literal, physical threat and danger. But you don't have to write about physical catastrophe to have fascinating threat in your stories.
Think back a moment over your own life. What were some of the times when you felt most scared, most threatened? Perhaps it was your first day of school. Or at a time when there was a death in the family, or a divorce. Perhaps the first time you had to speak a line in a school play. Or when you tried out for a sports team. Maybe your first date? When you changed schools? When the family moved? When some new people moved in next door to you, and you didn't know if you would like them? When you were engaged or married, or when you started your first real job? When you were fired from a job? Or promoted to a better one?
All stressful events. All threatening, even though many of them were happy occasions. Now, why should that be so? Isn't it strange that happy events would be threatening?
Not at all. Better minds than I have pointed out that we human beings like to feel in harmony with our environment and our situation in life. Each of us carries inside a view of ourselves, our life, and the kind of person we are. When things are going well, we feel in harmony with everything and everyone around us, and we aren't threatened. But enter change—almost any change—and our world has been shaken up. We feel uneasy.
Threatened.
Nothing is more threatening than change.
From this, it stands to reason that you will know when and where to start your story—page one, line one—when you identify the moment of change. Because change is where the story starts.
A bus comes to town, and a stranger gets off.
The boss calls an employee: "Please come in here. I have something important to tell you."
A new family moves into the house down the block.
A telegram is delivered to your door.
The seasons change, and you grow restless... uneasy.
It is at this moment of crucial change, whatever it may be, that your story starts. Identify the moment of change, and you know when your story must open. To begin in any other way is to invite disaster:
• Open earlier, with background, and it's dull.
• Open by looking somewhere else in the story, and it's irrelevant.
• Open long after the change, and it's confusing.
Begin your story now. Move it forward now. All that background is an author concern. Readers don't care. They don't want it. The reader's concern is with change... threat... how a character will respond now.
"But I really like that stuff about Grandpaw and Grandmaw, and how things were in 1931!" I hear you protest "I want to put that stuff in!"
Not in this story, you can't—not if this story is set in present tunes. Maybe you can work a little of it into the story later, but starting with it will kill you. (If worse comes to worst, you can write some other story about the 1930s, where the old stuff can become present-day stuff in terms of the story's assumptions.)
Remember what the reader wants. Don't try to inflict your author concerns on her. You must give her what she wants at the start, or she'll never read any further.
And what she wants—what will hook her into reading on—is threat.
The most common variety of which is change.
Test yourself on this. In your journal or notebook, make a list of ten times in your life when you felt the most scared or worried.
My list might include my first day at college, the day I entered active duty with the air force, my first formal speech before a large audience, and my first solo in a small plane. Your list might be quite different. But our lists, I'll bet, will have one thing in common. Both will represent moments of change.
Having realized this, you might want to make a second list, this one of ten changes that you think might make good opening threats in stories. It's perfectly all right to build upon some of your own real-life experiences here. It's equally okay to make up threatening changes.
In either case, I suggest that you keep this list, and the next time you catch yourself sensing that the opening of your current fiction project is bogging down or going too slowly, compare your problem opening with your list of ideas in terms of depth and seriousness of the change you're dealing with. Maybe you'll find that you've backslid into warming up your story engines instead of starting with that crucial moment of change that really gets the yarn under way.
6. DON'T DESCRIBE SUNSETS
READERS NEED DESCRIPTION in the stories they read to visualize settings and people—really "get into the action." But sometimes writers get carried away and go too far in trying to provide such descriptions; they stop too often to describe such things as sunsets, thinking that pretty prose is an end in itself—and forgetting that when they stop to describe something at length, the story movement also stops.
A friend of mine, the late Clifton Adams, was an enormously gifted writer of western fiction, short stories and novels. In one of his prizewinning western novels, he devoted several pages to describing a sunset. It was an amazing departure from established norms in professional fiction.
Yet in this isolated circumstance it worked. Adams had set up the story situation in a way that told the reader of a dire threat as soon as total darkness fell, a band of desperadoes planned to attack the hero's lonely frail camp and do him in. For this reason, every word of the sunset description was relevant—and painfully suspenseful.
Only in such a special situation can you devote great space to description, no matter how poetic it may seem to you. One of the standing jokes among writers and publishers is about the amateur writer who devotes precious space to describing a sunrise or sunset. All you have to do, in some publishing circles, is mention something like "the rosy fingers of dawn" and you get smiles all around. Such descriptions usually are a hallmark of poor fiction writing.
If you've been reading this book straight through from the front, you already see why this is so. Fiction is movement. Description is static. Trying to put in a lengthy description of a setting or person in fiction is a little like the dilemma facing physicists when they try to describe the nature of the electron. As one distinguished scientist once put it, "You can describe what an electron is at a given moment, but if you do, you don't know exactly where it is; or you can try to describe where it is, but then you can't say exactly what it is."
Part of what he was saying, I think, was simply this: to describe something in detail, you have to stop the action. But without the action, the description has no meaning.
Therefore, whenever you try to inflict on your readers a detailed description, your story stops. And readers are interested in the story—the movement—not your fine prose.
Does this mean you should have no description in your story? Of course not. Description must be worked in carefully, in bits and pieces, to keep your reader seeing, hearing, and feeling your story world. But please note the language here: it must be worked in, a bit at a time, not shoveled in by the page.
I am certainly not the first person to warn about "poetic" descriptions and how they stop a story. And yet they continue to appear again and again in amateur copy. Such segments prove one of two things: either the writer has no understanding of the basic nature of fiction, or the writer is so in love with her own words that she allows arrogance to overcome wisdom. "Fine writing" almost always slows the story's pace and distracts readers from the story line itself.
And note, please, that description can be something other than writing about a tree or a sunset. Beginning writers sometimes make the mistake of stopping everything while they describe a character's thoughts or feelings. This often is every bit as bad as the rosy fingers of dawn.
Of course you should and must look into your character
's head and heart. And some of your insight must be given the reader, so she can know about the character, sympathize with the character, identify with the action. But in good fiction—even at novel length—such descriptions of the character's state of mind and emotion are usually relatively brief. The accomplished writer will tell (describe) a little, and demonstrate (show in action) a lot. Modern readers want you to move the story, not stand around discussing things.
In this regard, you may want to think about your fiction delivery systems. There are different ways to deliver your information to your reader. They have characteristic speeds:
• Exposition. This is the slowest of all. It's the straight giving of factual information. Nothing whatsoever is happening. You're giving the reader data—biographical data, forensic data, sociological data, whatever. Some of this has to go in your story, but there's no story movement while you're putting in your encyclopedia info.
• Description. Almost as slow. Again, some is necessary. But watch it.
• Narrative. Here we have characters onstage in the story "now," and their actions, give-and-take, are presented moment by moment, with no summary and nothing left out. This is like a stage play, and much of your story will be in this form, as we'll discuss in a later section. This kind of storytelling goes very swiftly and provides continuous movement.
• Dialogue. Story people talking. Very little action or interior thought. Like a fast-moving tennis match, back and forth, point and counterpoint. When the story people are under stress and talk in short bursts, this is tremendously fast and forward-moving.
• Dramatic Summary. The fastest form of all. Here you have dramatic stuff happening, but instead of playing it out moment by moment, as in narrative, you choose to add even more speed by summarizing it. In this mode, a car chase or argument that might require six pages of narrative might be condensed into a single light-speed paragraph.
The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes Page 2