[Many readers of this blog are familiar with my unconventional and acerbic opinions about the writing business—see the posts archived in the “Writing” category of this blog.  I recently saw something about SkillShare, so I thought maybe it was time to distill some of those ideas into a short course on fiction writing for would-be authors.  You’re in luck.  A perusal of that site’s offerings about writing didn’t impress me at all.  So, here’s my short and unconventional course—and it’s free!

Actually, like any Irish whiskey, this little course is thrice distilled—a development over the years of my own ideas about writing, the afore-mentioned blog posts, and now this mini-course.  You might not like some of the things I say because I don’t sugarcoat my opinions.  That’s too bad.  They’re my honest opinions at this stage in my writing career.  BTW, while readers might enjoy my points of view, this is mostly for indie writers, but traditionally published authors who aren’t Patterson’s slaves on his book-writing assembly line, or other Big Five old stallions, i.e. midlist authors, can benefit too. Without further comment, here’s lesson one.]

An Iconoclast Examines Fiction Writing

Lesson One: Writing Your Story

Introduction.  The competition for readers is ferocious.  The number of authors is increasing; the number of readers is decreasing.  That’s a fact of life.  It’s probably only going to get worse.  Many good books by good authors are appearing every week, and, if you’re a reader ignoring the indies, you’re really missing out on some good stories.  Something that’s occurring that helps a wee bit to diminish numbers in that class of “good authors” is that the age-old art of storytelling is getting mauled by young creators of bad screenplays oriented to bad TV shows and streaming video, crappy movies, and video games, all emphasizing the visual and passive in comparison to fiction that involves the reader at a more cerebral and active level.

Emphasis is on “young.”  Even the younger baby boomers have grown up with TV and are addicted to passive visual stimulation.  Stephen King makes this point in his best book, On Writing, although he doesn’t come out and say it directly, so I will: passive visual stimulation destroys the imagination.  Many young authors nowadays often don’t have enough experience to have original story ideas either.  King: “Life isn’t a support system for art.  It’s the other way around.”  I disagree.  (To be fair, this King quote has more to do with the placement of his writing desk!)  Instead of waiting to become formulaic like Grafton, King, and Patterson have become, they now start off being formulaic, writing bad screenplays and uninteresting novels (current MFA programs too often teach formulaic—a journalism degree is probably the better prep for a wannabe writer if s/he thinks some sort of formal degree is required).

Life experiences are essential for story ideas.  That doesn’t mean you slavishly follow the adage, “Write what you know.”  That’s malarkey.  (Consider sci-fi.)  Experience leads to story ideas; imagination polishes them into great stories.  The visual but passively viewed pyrotechnics described above kill imagination.  Period.  Most MFA profs kill imagination too.  That’s fine if you’re writing non-fiction.  If you want to write good fiction, you better have a lively imagination.  Fortunately, many creative people do, no matter what they do for their day-job.  Writing courses, while perhaps useful for polishing prose, aren’t really necessary.  If you don’t have any imagination, though, don’t write fiction.  If you insist on writing, write something else (maybe greeting cards?).

Please note that On Writing along with a few other paper books figure prominently on my reference shelf (see my list in the last lesson).  You will find On Writing has influenced my own writing as manifested in my many blog posts about fiction writing (none of King’s books have, though, which says something).  But it’s a bit dated.  King never had to worry about the digital revolution.  His name was already a household term.

Here I’ll add to and go one better than some of the sage advice he offers in the second half of his book.  He says, “This is a short book [especially if you skip the memoir-style first half and move to that sage advice on writing] because most books on writing are filled with bullshit.”  I couldn’t agree more.  At the risk of adding my own BS, I’ll try to bring King up-to-date.  I’ll write just these lessons because I don’t want to write a book (I’d rather be writing fiction). King writes sci-fi as well as horror, or so he says, so he should know about Sturgeon’s Law (look it up; he quotes Sturgeon, at least), so caveat emptor.

So, let’s assume you drove your parents nuts screaming and jumping around with your toy saber and cape while playing with a crowd of imaginary friends.  You were also a precocious reader, taking what you read and letting your imagination run wild, even if it was just with comic books at the beginning.  Maybe you stood in line for the next Harry Potter book (why, I don’t know—they’re ponderous with back story).  Maybe you discovered some classic authors—Edgar Rice Burroughs (the original Jedi masters), George Orwell (more than three little piggies), or Conan Doyle (the books, not those terrible, recent movies)?  The next step should be to become an observer.  You soak up observations about how humans act and interact, you keep your eyes open when you encounter new places, and you absorb the nuances of the spoken language (your reading and practice will provide the nuances of the written).  Become a lifetime observer and you’ll have…

What-ifs, plot ideas, characters, and settings.  Observe and file them away.  You can do this for years and should continue doing it.  (King differs on this, saying it requires no creativity.  Now, that is BS!  Intelligent observation is a creative activity.  I worked with scientists for many years; King lacks that perspective.)  When you’re reading or observing, you might say to yourself, “What if….”  That can become a more developed plot idea later on—maybe much later on.  You observe some strange and/or interesting real-life characters and weird interactions between them.  File them away for future reference.

You experience a simple sunset, a big city rally, a ride on a horse along a rocky trail, a strange landscape in a strange country—these are potential settings.  File them away for future reference too.  Jot them down on anything handy if you have a bad memory.  If you have a day-job, none of this takes much time—if you have a smart phone, you don’t even need a notepad (although the app’s probably called that).  If you do this often enough, you’ll have such a backlog of material that you’ll never have writer’s block.

Themes and plots.  King incorrectly defines them.  Themes are the threads woven into the plot.  Plot is story.  King writes a lot of BS in On Writing, but this is an egregious example.  Here’s one absurd quote from his book (comments in square brackets are mine): “Good fiction always begins with story [true, because it’s plot] and progresses to theme [false, because themes are woven into the plot]; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story [false].”  The last is false because themes are just elaborate what-ifs that can motivate you to write a story.  Your story has meat because it starts with themes.  (This is all subjective, for course.  King is entitled to his BS, just as I’m entitled to mine.)

Outlines or free prose?  When you’re ready to use some of the above to spin your yarn, in other words, let your blarney shine, you need to make a choice between outline and free prose.  If you choose the former, don’t be rigid about sticking to it.  That’s foolish because the story and its characters can take you elsewhere.  Free prose fiction tends to avoid restrictions imposed by an outline, but it can wander—you might need the outline as a crutch to stumble down that creative road.  Content editing as you go is needed in both cases—“cut” and “paste” are your friends.  Never trust an editor to do that for you.  Chances are s/he’ll kill your personal style and make your life miserable as s/he tries to change you into her/his clone.  Even when you’re aiming for a first draft and finish, you can go back and content edit, but it’s best to do it as you go.

Let your characters guide you.  If you haven’t read Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, do so.  I know it sounds a bit schizoid, but your best storytelling might very well occur when you get into the zone where the characters seem to write their own story.  (Reading between the lines, it seems King went through that process with Carrie.  Yeah, I did read his memoir-like BS.)  People talk about flow.  That’s one way to maintain it.  If the fire hose stops, do something else for a while and come back to the writing later.  DO NOT be strict about putting in a certain amount of time or completing a number of words.  Exhaustion can create bad prose.  You need an alert mind when writing, even if the characters take it over!

A genre-appropriate mix of descriptive narrative, flashbacks, action, and dialogue, both direct and internal.  These are some of the essential elements in writing fiction.  Those used and their emphasis are often genre-dependent.  A sci-fi saga might have more descriptive narrative (also called world-building).  A mystery might have more internal dialogue than direct.  A thriller might have a lot of action broken by the protagonist’s internal dialogue.  Learn the essential elements of your genre and use them accordingly.  Here practice makes perfect—the more stories you read and write, the better your new stories will be in general.  But be original, not formulaic.  That’s where themes and good dialogue can help.  Many writers avoid controversial themes and colorful language reflecting the milieu of the characters.  Being formulaic is more than that.  When you write your next story, make sure you’re not emulating the first.

POV – master viewpoint.  Abrupt changes of a character’s viewpoint in midstream confuse the reader.  Use POV to get inside a person’s head, but only change to a different character’s POV when changing sections or chapters.  If you have omniscient POV in narrative prose (back story and the like), don’t confuse it with characters’ POVs.  POV is related to choice of person.  Most prose is in first person or third.  Don’t get cute by trying something else unless you’re supremely confident about your skills.  If you don’t have Card’s Characters and Viewpoint, get it.  There’s some BS there (a characteristic of all books on writing?), but it’s a place to start).

Never stop honing your skills.  How do you do that?  Read, read, read; write, write, write.  No BS here.  Those two things are your best courses of action.  By reading, you absorb techniques by osmosis.  By writing, you practice them.  Period.  End of lesson.

[Next week: Lesson Two: “The Path to a Polished Manuscript.”]

In libris libertas….

 

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