If you want to improve your skills as a fiction writer, you need to first become a student of the craft.
In other disciplines, this is common sense. For example, aspiring basketball players might study film of Allen Iverson’s killer crossover, Tim Duncan’s post moves, or Kobe Bryant’s fallaway jump shot. It is not by mere coincidence that any of these future Hall of Fame basketball players created these moves in a vacuum. They, themselves, also studied film of their predecessors. A culture of study and application exists in the NBA.
However, when it comes to writing fiction, many beginning writers will approach the craft with the assumption that anyone can write. And to some extent, this is true. Millions of Americans have composed essays in high school or composed descriptive passages in emails. So, yes, millions of people possess the ability to write. And unlike basketball, since writing is such a solitary experience, judging the inherent quality of the writing begins (and sometimes, unfortunately, ends) with the actual writer.
But, make no mistake about it: Writing fiction is a skill. And like any skill, it requires dedication and direction to improve. This is where reading comes into play.
To be a successful writer, you need to develop an appetite for reading. Read the classics. Read your contemporaries. Read books outside of your genre. And when you finish one book, begin another.
By reading these books, you will be exposed to the “killer crossovers, post moves, and fallaway jump shots” of other successful writers.
In order to improve the ways in which you write your heart out, you need to find the time to read your heart out, too.
(I realize this might be particularly challenging during NaNoWriMo, though…)
In it, he lists eight rules for writing a short story:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
However, Vonnegut qualifies his list by adding that Flannery O’Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.
I hope these rules help you. Write the stuff that only you can write, the stuff that interests you!
P.S. Here’s a hilarious clip featuring Vonnegut sharing his thoughts on the shapes of stories:
While dreams in real life may provide windows into our subconscious, they don’t always. Sometimes our dreams are more likely influenced by that late night snack we ate prior to “hitting the hay.” And other times, we might not even remember dreaming at all.
As writers, if we include dreams in our stories, we must approach them with caution. They are a delicate matter.
Fiction writers can never include dreams just for the sake of dreams. This would be a waste of space, similar to including scenes that do nothing for the overall story. We’d eventually leave these on the editing room floor because our readers are smart; they assume every element of a story matters, and if these assumed elements prove otherwise, we will frustrate them or potentially lose them as readers.
So when we write dreams, they need to somehow tie in with our characters on a subconscious level. It has to mean something. If handled incorrectly, this can feel heavy-handed to readers, so lots of writers will create incredibly abstract dreams that are incredibly difficult to analyze.
From an interview with The New York Times, one of my favorite writers, Haruki Murakami, describes a dream he had personally that reads like one of these examples:
In the dream, a shadowy, unknown figure is cooking him what he calls ‘weird food’: snake-meat tempura, caterpillar pie and (an instant classic of Japanese dream-cuisine) rice with tiny pandas in it. He doesn’t want to eat it, but in the dream world he feels compelled to. He wakes up just before he takes a bite.
I often say, “Write your heart out.” But in this case, when it comes to writing dreams, it’s probably better to avoid writing them altogether. What do you think?
The subject of rules for fiction writing makes me nervous. I hesitate to offer advice that seems a little too prescriptive. Rules can be broken, after all. And some of my favorite writers do just that in their work. However, one of my readers requested rules to make her a better fiction writer, so here we go.
Beginning writing courses will inevitably discuss the topic of “showing vs. telling” (“Showing” is an active technique–engaging the senses, whereas “telling” is much more passive.). The beginning writer will probably “tell” at times in a story when she/he shouldn’t.
We should resist “telling” our readers how our characters feel. Avoid peppering your prose with lines like “I loved my brother.” Instead, we should “show” readers this love through scenes. The development of the scenes should set up the feeling.
For example, let’s look at a critical moment from J.D. Salinger’s masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye:
[My brother Allie’s] dead now. He got leukemia when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You’d have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren’t just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had red hair. I’ll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I’d see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence–there was this fence that went all around the course–and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That’s the kind of red hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them. I really don’t. I slept in garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie.
In the above excerpt, Salinger’s narrator, Holden, never “tells” us that he loves his brother. If he did, this would alter our entire understanding of Holden. Instead, we are “shown” this love in Salinger’s prose, and it’s more than just love that gets passed on to readers.
We also feel Holden’s pain and anger throughout this passage, while at the same time, learning more of his character and personality. To him, Allie had represented all that was good in his family.
I don’t want you to leave this post merely believing that too much “telling” results in poor writing. Some things should be told in the interest of time and page space.
Good writing will have a healthy mixture of both.
(However, avoid “telling” your readers about your characters’ feelings.)
Thanks for reading! Until next week, write your heart out.
Steve Almond is the author of several books, including three short story collections. My favorite of these is to the left: My Life in Heavy Metal.
As provided on the back of its cover, The Boston Globe notes, “Almond writes graphically, vividly, and with unflinching detail about relationships, mostly between men and women, in and out of bed. At times it’s the hum of conquest in the air that drives a story, but at least as often it’s something more complicated: the potential for love, for salvation, the possibility of possibility.”
I met Almond years ago at the Festival of Books at UCLA, where he spoke as part of a panel, and afterward, he mingled with his fans and autographed books.
I praised him for his work in My Life in Heavy Metal, and he was very humble and gracious.
When I handed him two of his story collections to sign, he didn’t hurry me along (like some writers do). He asked me which of his stories I liked best. And I told him “Valentino,” which seemed to surprise him. He asked me if I wrote, and I told him I tried. He opened one of them and wrote:
Ryan–
My rules:
Love your characters at all times.
Slow down where it hurts.
Don’t give up.
Hell Yes,
Steve Almond
I thought I’d share his three rules with you today in hopes that you might find them as useful as I have:
1. “Love your characters at all times.”
If you don’t love your characters, it will be much more difficult for your readers to love them, too. It’s noticeable when writing characters we’ve judged and dislike, especially if they are our viewpoint characters. Their complexity will be stunted. Their rationale will read as shallow. And the writing falls flat. Besides, if we have time to judge a character, we are not in “the zone.” We are not in the “creative trance.” People are never completely good or completely evil. It is our job as writers to present fully realized, tragic, and flawed individuals on paper. Allow them to be vulnerable. We act as conduits to our characters’ dreams and fears and emotional baggage. Even antagonists have redemptive qualities.
2. “Slow down where it hurts.”
To slow down where it hurts is to “never avert one’s eyes” (to borrow from Akira Kurosawa, the famous director). It can be difficult for us to slow down painful scenes. If you’re like me, our tendency is to want to blow past these uncomfortable moments, to get out of them. But if we can’t slow down the images, sounds, and feelings of our characters, opportunities will be missed–the power of a scene utterly diluted. At best, our scene will read as complete B.S. When creating art, this is unforgivable. Readers need to experience what our characters see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel. This doesn’t mean that we are contradicting the first rule at all here. We still always need to love our characters.
3. Finally, Almond wrote, “Don’t give up.”
The life of a working writer in this day and age is difficult, to say the least. For every Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer, there are millions of struggling writers working odd jobs just to pay the bills. We battle rejection. We battle illegitimacy. We battle a culture of immediate gratification and consumerism. The writing life is hard. But we must not give up. Talent is overrated. It is paramount to establish a routine and to sustain the drive and focus to keep it!
I hope you found this week’s post helpful. Please drop me a line below in the comments to let me know what you think. Do you have any writing rules that you live by? If so, please share.
And above all else, write your heart out!
P.S. Here’s a short clip of Steve Almond talking about how he became a writer:
