The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (2 page)

If, on the other hand, you make excuses for yourself half the time, then at best it will take you
four
years to have a book ready. That's too long.

And if you make excuses for yourself three-fourths of the time, you will probably lose so much momentum that you'll never finish your project at all.

Consistent, persistent, even dogged work, day in and day out, is the professional's way. And if at the end of a long period of dogged work, your story happens to be rejected, you can't afford to use the rejection as an excuse to quit producing, either. All writers produce some unassailable work. All writers get discouraged, tired and worn down. The good ones don't make excuses. They keep going.

Let me suggest a simple device that may help you avoid the trap of falling into excuse-making. Go find a cheap calendar, the type that has a small open block for each day of the month. At the end of each day, write down in the day's block two things: 1. the number of hours you spent at the typewriter or word processor, working on your fiction project; and 2. how many pages you produced (rough draft or finished, makes no difference) in that working day.

For those days when you don't have anything in terms of work to report, type one double-spaced page of excuses, date it carefully, and file it in a special place. Make sure your excuses fill at least one page, about 250 words. You must do this without fail every time you don't work.

I guarantee you one thing: If you follow this system religiously, you'll soon get so sick of writing down your flimsy excuses that you'll either start investing your time in writing that's more creative, or you'll quit.

In either case you'll have stopped kidding yourself.

No excuse is good enough. Think back to that young man I mentioned in the "Forward." Blind and deaf,
yet he wrote everyday!
You can do no less if you really want to succeed.

It's possible to sabotage
your fiction by being too smart for your own good—by being a smart aleck. Even before you begin writing your next story, you should examine your attitudes toward yourself, your readers, your own work and contemporary fiction. It could be that these attitudes are damaging your work without your realizing it. Ask yourself:

If so, I congratulate you on your self-satisfaction, but warn you that such smug condescension will be the death of you as a writer; at best you'll one day publish obscure little short stories in giveaway magazines for other small-college English teachers like yourself, at worst, on your death bed, you'll whisper to your sister the location of your hidden treasure trove of unpublished fiction, and breathe your last in the vain hope that future generations will revere you like they now do Emily Dickinson.

Wouldn't it be a lot better not to consider yourself so smart? To try to figure out what contemporary readers like—then to work to give them the best stories of that type they ever read?

Condescension is a terrible thing. Readers sense it and are turned off by it. The good writer writes humbly, never in a condescending manner, as if to lesser mortals. As the sign said on many a newsroom wall in the olden days, "Don't write down to your readers; the ones dumber than you can't read."

And in terms of fiction, that statement is absolutely true, because fiction does not come from the head; it comes from the heart. The job of the fiction writer is to plumb the depths of human emotions, and then to portray them... re-create them... stir them. Bigness of heart—compassion—is far more important than bigness of IQ.

If you consider the public a great unwashed that's somehow beneath you, then, I beg you to work on changing your attitudes. You can't write down to your readers. They will catch your insincerity in an instant and hate you for it.

To put all this another way, consider this:

If you're extremely smart, you're lucky. But if you
are
that intelligent, one of your hardest jobs may be to keep a snobbish attitude out of your work. And you don't have to be that smart to write wonderful fiction... if you're sensitive and caring enough.

You might even consider putting the following reminders on the bulletin board in your writing room:

If you have a special
area of expertise—if you're a nurse, for example, or a lawyer—your specialized knowledge may be a gold mine you can use as background for your stories. Fiction readers love learning about new things as they read a good stow.

If you have a rich and extensive vocabulary, that may also prove to be a useful tool. Or if you happen to be a widely read person, or more cultured and schooled in the arts than the average citizen, this too may help you when you write your fiction.

But just as a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, too much erudition may be fatal to your fiction if you succumb to the temptation to show it off.

Good fiction writers never show off dump in abstruse knowledge for its own sake, or purposely use big words when simpler ones would do. They constantly seek ways to work in necessary background information in as unobtrusive a way as possible, and they remember that readers get irritated quickly if a writer's style sends them to the dictionary once or twice every paragraph.

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.

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.

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:

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.