Blog

Tag: writing fiction

  • March 15th, 2013 1:19am

    Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway

    Mechanics

    Significant detail, the active voice, and prose rhythm are techniques for achieving the sensuous in fiction, means of taking the reader past the words and the thought to feeling and experience. None is much use if the reader’s eye is wrenched back to the surface; for that reason a word or two ought to be said here about the mechanics of the written language. 

    Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are a kind of magic; their purpose is to be invisible. If the sleight of hand works, we will not notice a comma or a quotation mark but will translate each instantly into a pause or an awareness of voice; we will not focus on the individual letters of a word but extract its sense of whole. When the mechanics are incorrectly used, the trick is revealed and the magic fails; the reader’s focus is shifted from the story to its surface. The reader is irritated at the author, and of all the emotions he was willing to experience, irritation at the author is not one. 

    There is no intrinsic virtue in standardized mechanics, and you can depart from them whenever you produce an effect that adequately compensates for the attention called to the surface. But only then. Unlike the techniques of narrative, the rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation can be coldly learned anywhere in the English-speaking world – and they should be learned by anyone who aspires to write. Poor mechanics read instant amateurism to an editor. Perhaps a demonstrated genius can get away with sloppy mechanics, but in that case some other person must be hired to fill in. Since ghostwriters and editors are likely to be paid more per hour for their work than the author, this would constitute a heady drain on the available resources of those who publish fiction. 

    I felt like this had to be posted. 

  • February 21st, 2013 11:26pm

    There is a myth loose on the land that trying to teach or learn how to write a story is some kind of fraud, like selling shares in the Brooklyn Bridge.

    I come to testify that this is false. You can do both. You most certainly can learn how to write fiction and you can teach it, too. The result will most likely be neither fame nor fortune, but rather the best kind of education there is.

    My experience conforms to the sow’s ear maxim. Intelligence is the essence of a good writer. If you don’t have that in some degree there is s slim chance of developing expertise at the short story or novel.

    — Janet Burroway – Writing Fiction; A guide to narrative craft

  • August 26th, 2012 12:54am

    Pro-tip for writers,

    because I’ve been seeing this a lot. 

    To be is the most common of the linking verbs and also the most overused, but all the linking verbs invite generalization and distance. To feel, to seem, to look, to appear, to experience, to express, to show, to demonstrate, to convey, to display – all these suggest in fiction that the character is being acted upon or observed by someone rather than doing something. She felt happy/sad/amused/mortified does not convince us. We want to see her and to infer her emotion for ourselves. He very clearly conveyed his displeasure. It isn’t clear to us. How did he convey it? To whom?

    Most linking verbs have active as well as effectively passive forms, and it is important to distinguish them. She felt sad is effectively passive, but she felt his forehead is an action. If the magician appeared, he is acting; but if he appeared annoyed, then the verb is a linking verb and the only action implied is that of the observer who perceives this. 

    Linking verbs, like the passive voice, can appropriately convey a sense of passivity or helplessness when that is the desired effect. 

    From Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway

  • August 9th, 2012 8:47pm

    Fiction must contain ideas, which give significance to characters and events. If the ideas are shallow or untrue, the fiction will be correspondingly shallow or untrue. But ideas must be experienced through or with the characters; they must be felt or the fiction will fail also.

    — Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction (via fierycross)

  • August 5th, 2012 2:14am

    Novelist Richard Koster offers a blanket absolution for what writers ten to think of as ‘wasting time’ – that hour or two of muddled glaring at the page before a word will allow itself to be placed there. In in the process of creating fiction we must divorce ourselves from the real world, he points out. And that is hard. The real world is insistent not only in its distractions but in its brute physical presence. To remove ourselves from that sphere and achieve a state in which our mental world is more real requires a disciplined effort of displacement.

    — Janet Burroway – Writing Fiction; A guide to narrative craft

  • July 3rd, 2012 4:14pm

    Natural storytellers are still around, and a few of them are very rich. Some are on the best-seller list; more are in television and film. But it’s probably that your impulse to write has little to do with the desire or skill to work out a plot. On the contrary, you want to write because you are sensitive. You have something to say that does not answer the question, what happened next? You share with most – and the best – twentieth-century fiction writers a sense of the injustice, the absurdity, and the beauty of the world; and you want to register your protest, your laughter, and your affirmation.

    — Janet Burroway – Writing Fiction; A guide to narrative craft