The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (3 page)

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:

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.

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:

If your stories seem to be moving too slowly, you might analyze some of your copy, looking at what form of writing you tend to use. It could be that you are describing too many sunsets (in one form or another) and never using any dialogue or dramatic summary. On the other hand, if you sense that your stories whiz along at too breakneck a speed, perhaps you need to change some of that dramatic summary into narrative, or even pause (briefly!) now and then to describe what the setting looks like, or what the character is thinking or feeling.

In this way, you can become more conscious of your tendencies as a fiction writer, and begin to see which tendencies help you, and which tend to hold you back from selling. You can learn better to call your shots in terms of pacing your yarn, selecting the delivery system that's needed for the desired effect, and keeping the yam moving.

One of my new writing
students, a gent we shall call Wally, came by my office the other day with the first pages of a new story. I read the pages and then handed them back to him.

"Wally," I complained as gently as I could, "these characters are really not very interesting."

Wally frowned, not understanding.

I tried again: "Wally, these characters are dull. What they are is flat and insipid. They are pasteboard. They have no life, no color, no vivacity. They need a lot of work."

Wally looked shocked. "How can these characters be
dull?
They're
real people
—every one of them! I took them right out of real life!"

"Oh," I said. "So that's the problem."

"What?" he said.

"You can never use real people in your story."

"Why?"

"For one reason, real people might sue you. But far more to the point in fiction copy, real people—taken straight over and put on the page of a story—are dull."

Wally sat up straighter. "Are you telling me my friends are dull?"

"Of course not!" I told him. "That's not the point. The point is that in fiction real people aren't vivid enough. Good characters have to be constructed, not copied from actuality." Wally was discouraged. But I tried to explain it to him with something like this:

One of the toughest jobs we ask of our readers is to see characters vividly and sympathize with them. Consider: all your readers have to go by are some symbols printed on a sheet of paper. From these symbols, readers must recognize letters of the alphabet, make the letters into words, derive meaning from the words, link the meanings into sentences. From that point, readers must make an even more amazing leap of faith or intuition of some kind: they must use their own imagination to picture—physically and emotionally—a person inside their own head. And then they must believe this imagined person is somehow real—and even care about him.

Readers need all the help they can get to perform this arduous imaginative-emotional task. They have a lot to see through to get the job done even imperfectly.

To help them, you can't simply transcribe what you see and know about a real person. You have to
construct
something that is far bigger than life, far more
exaggerated.
Then, if you do your job of exaggeration extremely well, your readers will see your gross exaggeration dimly, but well enough to think, "This constructed character looks like a real person to me."

Good fiction characters, in other words, are never, ever real people. Your idea for a character may begin with a real person, but to make him vivid enough for your readers to believe in him, you have to exaggerate tremendously; you have to provide shortcut identifying characteristics that stick out all over him, you have to make him practically a monster—for readers to see even his dimmest outlines.