The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (10 page)

Having made your observations and notes, however, you as a writer of fiction must always take another step, that of relating your observations to the writing process.

Here is what I mean. Suppose you just met a new person, and found her interesting, striking or unusual in some way. (If you observed keenly enough, you
always
will find a new acquaintance to be one of the above.) Now ask yourself: "How can I write down my description in such a way that it becomes even more vivid and striking than what I just observed?"

Then write it!

As discussed in Chapter Seven, you won't ever take a real person literally from life and put her in your fiction; real people, no matter how well portrayed, just aren't big and unusual enough for good fiction. But your work in observing and writing real people or places as vividly as possible will make you a far better writer, and even more interesting when you fictionalize your observations.

One additional point it will be instructive for you to write down everything you notice, in as much detail as possible, in your note-taking phase. "Looking for more words" (as one of my students once put it) prods you to look broader and deeper sometimes. When you practice your final writing of this information, however, you should ask yourself what few details might stand out for the whole—how briefly you can write your description or data, and still provide the reader with a vivid picture.

In this process
of distilling
the impressions into final written form, you should watch out for adjectives and adverbs. Some will be necessary, but if you find yourself stringing them together like sausages, you must realize that you are no longer writing vivid copy. Good writing of this kind is lean and terse. It thrives on brevity, directness, simplicity, concreteness, contrast—precise, specific nouns and strong verbs. If you string out adjectives in an attempt to get the job done, your reader will go to sleep. Adjectives, like adverbs, are lazy words, slowpokes, tranquilizers. Watch out for them!

The more you force yourself consciously to observe and note details you can use—and the more you practice actually writing descriptions and factual passages so that they are as striking and evocative as possible—the keener you will become in picking up data, and the better you will become in learning to use it to improve your writing.

It's a multi-step process, you see:

This whole process is a great deal of fun. Writers who practice it—and that includes all professionals—find that it makes them feel more alive, more in touch with everything and everyone, more excited about living. The job of recording observations, then writing them as brilliantly as possible, keeps them constantly alert and challenged—stimulated by new ideas and associations—and improving in the clarity and impact of their style.

Many fiction writers put much of this kind of work in their journals. A journal can include many kinds of writing and information. But often this sort of thing dominates such a volume.

Try working on your own skills in this way. Make it a lifetime habit. You will never be bored, you will always be challenged, and you are sure to grow.

The tense, conflictful
sections of your story are the parts that most excite and intrigue your readers. For that reason, you should play out those parts of your story for all they're worth.

How do you do that? You put it onstage in the story
now
, and you develop the action between the characters moment by moment, with nothing left out you follow the rules of cause and effect, stimulus and response. To put this another way: you make sure that you never summarize during a high point of conflict in your story.

The result of moment-by-moment handling is a segment of your story which is just like life; there's no summary there, obviously.

Most professionals call such a part of their story
a scene
. However they may differ in defining how a scene works, they tend to agree on the major point just emphasized: you must never summarize while writing a scene. Not only does moment-by-moment development make the scene seem most lifelike; it should also be noted that it's in a scene where your reader gets most of his excitement. If you summarize, your reader will feel cheated—shortchanged of what he reads for—without quite knowing why.

Let's look at the structure of a scene just a bit more to make sure you understand how it works and why summary is lethal to its effectiveness.

To have conflict, you have to have two people with opposing goals. They have to want the same thing, or Character A must want to thwart Character B's immediate goal-motivated quest. Therefore, to start a scene, the first thing you have to do is have one of your characters (usually the viewpoint character) clearly state or show what it is he wants. Once that goal has been demonstrated or stated
with complete clarity
so the reader can have no doubt about what's at issue, then the other character to be in the scene must say, in effect, "Oh, no you won't"—and start the fight.

The fight, the conflict, makes up the bulk of the scene. If it's over a simple issue, the scene may take only a couple of pages to play for all its worth, although most scenes tend to run a little longer than that. In this portion, the characters try different tacks, varying arguments; they struggle for the upper hand. They
do not
just stand there, in effect yelling at each other "Yes, I can!" and "No, you can't!" Every step of their maneuvering is covered in detail.

In a dialogue scene (the most common kind), the maneuvers are verbal. In an action scene, the maneuvers might involve a destroyer crisscrossing over a submarine, trying to hit it with depth charges. In any case, one goal-motivated entity tries something; the other parries and tries something else; the first entity responds with still another stab. And so on, back and forth, no summary, following the rules of stimulus and response.

While this struggle takes place, the readers are bound to worry. While they might worry about a lot of things, the main thing they'll worry about is the
scene question
.

What's the scene question? It's the inversion of the stated scene goal.

Here's what I mean. If you start a scene by having the destroyer commander say, "We have to sink that sub!" Readers will turn the goal statement into a scene question: "
Will they sink the sub?
"—and worry about it. If you start your scene with the young woman saying, "Mr. Jones, I have come to ask you for a job," your readers will turn that stated goal into a question, and worry whether the heroine will get the job she wants. Readers are willing to worry about virtually any scene goal, as long as you make clear to them that the goal is vital to the character's story quest.

To put this another way: If the stated scene goal is clearly relevant to the character's
story goal
, it will be vital to that character's happiness and the outcome of the story. If the scene goal is relevant in this way, readers will see how important the outcome of the scene is going to be and will worry about it.

The conflict portion of the scene draws readers out through a moment-by-moment drama, extending the scene suspense with pleasurable agony.

At some point, of course—after two or six or a dozen pages—the scene must come to an end. If your readers are to feel satisfied, the scene has to end in some dramatic way. Therefore, it can't just stop; it has to provide some new twist or movement for the story.

In addition, the ending of every scene has to be logical; it can't cheat the readers. They have eagerly read the scene, worrying about a question. So to play fair with them, the conclusion of your scene
has to answer the question posed by the goal in the first place
.

So if the question was whether the destroyer would sink the sub, the end of the scene has to answer that question. If the question was whether the woman would get the job, the end of the scene has to tell whether she did or didn't get the job.

To maintain reader tension, however—which you always want to do—you should seldom provide a happy answer to the scene question. Ideally, to keep readers involved and worried, the scene should answer the question with a bad development.

We call this kind of scene ending a
disaster
.

How do you create disaster? Whatever your viewpoint character wants, he must not get it at the end of the scene. For if he does, he has suddenly become happy... story tension relaxes... the reader goes to sleep... and your story has failed.

So, again turning to the example about the destroyer, the captain must not clearly see that he has without doubt sunk the submarine. To the question, "Will the destroyer sink the sub?" the answer must not be a simple and unqualified
yes.
The submarine must escape, or shoot a torpedo through the destroyer before itself sinking, or manage to radio for help. Or possibly the submarine can be sunk, but debris proves
it was a friendly sub
.

Such dynamic bad news keeps the story rolling forward.

Any time you start to write a scene, you should go through the following process:

After you have practiced this procedure for a short while, I think you'll begin to see that it has within it the essential dynamic of fiction, the way fiction "works." A character wants and strives and is battered back tension increases, and so does reader sympathy; then the character strives again.

This structure of scene... one scene inevitably leading to another scene... gives your fiction straight-line development. In addition, the structure powerfully implies something wonderful about life and the human condition. In using scene structure, you show people who struggle and try to take charge of their lives; indirectly, you are saying that people in real life can do that, too. In addition, you imply that life is not merely blind fate... that anyone can struggle and try to take their own life by the scruff of the neck, and improve it. Finally, by showing a character meeting serious disaster after such a struggle, then getting up to struggle again, you say something positive about human strength and courage.

Please note, however, that none of this can happen—nothing can work—if the scene does not grab your readers and intensely involve them. To accomplish that, the scene must be lifelike. And the greatest danger to this verisimilitude is summary. Check out the scenes in your story. If you find inadvertent summary, by all means fix it by playing out that part of the scene in detail. Nothing less will do.

Disasters—those bad twists
that end scenes with an unhappy answer to the scene question—often are very bad indeed. But sometimes the use of the word "disaster" confuses a new writer, and she thinks
any
kind of really bad thing will work at the end of a scene.

It is said that somebody once provided a "disaster" at the end of a detective-client scene by literally dropping an alligator through the transom.

In the fabled detective yarn, there sat our Sam Spade clone, interviewing his beautiful client in his grubby office. His goal, clearly stated, was to learn the name of the man who had threatened her life. Thus the scene question clearly was: Would he discover the identity of the man?

At the end of the scene, according to legend, the writer realized she needed a disaster. So
kerplop!
over the transom of the detective's office door came a live alligator, wetly hitting the floor beside the desk and opening wide in a decidedly nasty mood.

The development was pretty stupid in that story. Why? Because it didn't answer the scene question.

The question, remember, was, "Will Sam learn the identity of the man threatening his client?" The alligator had nothing to do with that question.

If so, the disaster had to answer that question. The answer could
not
be, in effect, "Gosh, I don't know about that, but an alligator just fell through the office door transom."

That's the worst kind of cheating, the sorriest kind of writing.

Don't do it. You'll give all of us fiction writers a bad name.

Figure out what the scene question is. Then devise a setback, negative answer for the end of the scene, one that is bad news, logical but unanticipated,
but which answers the question asked
.

In the case of the mythical scene and question just presented, it's hard to imagine how an alligator could provide an honest disaster. But it's easy to think of some disasters that would have worked.

The answer simply could have been: "No, Sam never got an answer."

Better yet, the answer could have been: "Yes, Sam finally got the answer, but when the client identified her threatener, it turned out to be Sam's dearest friend."

Or it might even have been: "No, Sam never got his answer, but his persistence so angered his client that she fired him on the spot, storming out of his office and leaving him
never
to know—or have the income he needed from her fee."