The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (16 page)

I'll spare you an example of this kind of writing. You have seen too many examples in print, I suspect. Such writers tend to write about rough, tough heroes who grunt and curse and bash a lot.

In recent times, however, the male crusher-basher tough guy has a serious competitor: the tough-talking, neurotically independent "modern female." These women need no one, and talk and act as bad as their fictional male counterparts.

The existence of all such tough-talk fiction proves that a lot of authors are posing behind the act of creation.

It's crucial that you be yourself as an author, and not pose. Just to be sure, you might consider asking yourself the following question:

Am I acting tough in order to hide my true feelings behind the act?

If the answer is "yes," then you're operating a charade rather than writing honest fiction, and you ought to rethink things.

You see, the bottom line here is that you have only one thing that's yours and yours alone—only one unique item you can sell: yourself. Posing, whether it's as a sachet-sniffing poet or brass-knuckled bully, is still posing—may still represent flight from your own feelings, which are your most precious salable commodity. Ultimately, posturing is a symptom of fear. It's always self-defeating.

This section is aimed
primarily at novelists.

If you've never written a book-length story before, one of the many interesting (and possibly dismaying) things you'll learn during construction of the first draft is simply how many incidents and events you have to dream up in order to "make length." It's possible to write a one-idea short story. But even the shortest novel contains dozens of plot ideas, subplots, minor incidents, and significant events.

One of your first creative jobs as a novelist, therefore, is to dream up enough stuff—a sufficient number of things to happen.

Very often, however, dreaming up the events proves to be relatively easy when compared with another related task, which is to make maximum use of plot developments once you've introduced them. Failure to make maximum use of plot ideas can make your job twice as hard, and possibly doom your novel, turning it into an illogical farrago of events rather than a continuous, interesting narrative.

Here's what I mean.

The amateur, unpublished novelist may insert a scene early in her book in which the hero meets a doorman at a hotel, gets some information from him, and walks away to act on that information. The doorman may be an interesting minor character, but he will never—as the amateur novelist tends to see it—enter the story again.

"Why did you put the doorman in the story?" I may ask.

Says Amateur Novelist: "To give the hero that info."

"Okay," I persist. "Now that you have the doorman in the book, what else can you invent that would involve him?
How else can you use what you've already made up?"

Amateur Novelist (usually): "Huh?"

Or suppose you've just imagined and written a scene in which your heroine has had a minor collision with another car, driven by the hero-to-be. You put in the accident so the two could meet. Fine. But again a professional coach will ask you, "What else can you make of that accident? Can you think of other ways you can use it later in the story?"

In the case of the doorman, he might be brought back into the story as a source of later information; he might turn out to know more than the hero so far got out of him—in which case all sorts of interesting questions immediately appear: "Why did he withhold information?" "What else does he know?" "How does he know it?" "How is the hero going to come to suspect that he held something back?" And so on.

In the case of the fender bender, plotted to make heroine meet hero, the professional will immediately begin to ponder questions such as the following, all under the general heading of
What other use can I make of the episode?

You get the idea, I'm sure.

Professional novelists recognize that it's sometimes a problem, coming up with enough events and incidents in the first place. For that reason, they always think as in the example above, looking for ways to make maximum use of everything they invent. The grand by-product of such thinking is that more and more characters and events take on significance; various scenes and plot lines begin to link more tightly together, making the novel tighter, and more logical; and the reader tends to read with more attention and pleasure because
every page
is sure to be important not only for itself but in terms of later development.

Another minor but sometimes nagging problem for the novelist can also be solved by constant attention to maximum use of your material. That has to do with the way minor characters tend to proliferate in beginner copy. It's not unusual for the fledgling novelist to introduce that doorman in chapter one, a cabdriver in chapter two, a TV reporter and a yard person in chapter three—and a dozen more bit players by halfway through the book. But the simplest novel is complex enough, and nobody (neither the writer nor the reader!) wants to need a printed program to keep track of all the minor parts.

In such circumstances, you may solve some of your "cast of thousands" problems by being alert to how you may be able to use one character to handle several minor missions. For example, is it possible that that doorman could take over the work you assigned to the cabdriver and the yard man? Could the TV reporter from chapter three also provide the information you gave to the policeman in chapter seven—and maybe also make the needed telephone call you handed to a convenience store clerk in chapter twelve?

Often the manipulation of plot to accomplish such telescoping of roles is far simpler than you might think. It simplifies your storytelling. And the side advantage you sometimes encounter is that the doorman—now slated to be onstage in nine chapters—can be developed into an interesting character in his own right, vastly enriching your novel!

Pleasant surprises abound for the novelist who looks for new and unanticipated ways to make more and better use of existing plot developments
or
characters. Try it.

Writing a story—any story—
can be a fatiguing process. if your project has been a complex short story or—harder—a novel, you will probably come to the end of your first or second draft in a state not only of weariness, but also of a certain amount of anxiety. You want to be
done
with this arduous task—to have it finished and sent out somewhere, so you can at least relax a bit... and perhaps begin to think of some new project.

At such a time, when your enthusiasm for your current story is perhaps at an all-time low, and you ache both literally and figuratively, you run the grave risk of stopping a bit too soon—of failing to take one more critical look at what you planned to do, what you've ended up doing, and how well the job was done.

Good stories result from the writer's taking a few days off to rest, then returning to the fray to take one more cautious and caring look at the "finished" work.

Revise, revise and be ready to revise again. After all the work you've done, it would be tragic, wouldn't it, if you stopped a day or a month away from making those final adjustments which could make all the difference in the products acceptability?

Now, it is possible to revise
too
often, too long. There are a few writers out there, I'm sure, who have worked and reworked the same dog-eared pages for many years or even decades when they would be far better off to let the story go, and get on with a new project on which they can use all they have learned. A part of wisdom is knowing when to let go like this, when to move ahead to the new.

A far more common error, however, lies in quitting just one read-through... one small set of changes... short of the ultimate goal: the best work you can do. You must beware the temptation to stop short just because you're tired and even discouraged. You must not stop on a project too soon.

What do you do if you decide to go through your present "finished" manuscript yet another time? No revision checklist can suggest everything you might look at. Your own awareness of your personal strengths and weaknesses as a writer, together with some idea of the kind of writer you want to become, will dictate some of the things high on your own checklist. What follows, however, is a suggestive list you might consider using as a basis for your own expanded one—things to do, questions to consider, things to check. Many of the questions assume you are to revise a novel-length manuscript, but most are equally applicable to a shorter tale.

1. 
Give yourself a brief break
. After finishing—you think—the story, it's imperative that you give yourself a few days off away from it so you can rest a bit and allow your mind to clear. It may be months or years before you could hope to read your own story truly "cold," as if it were someone else's work, with any genuine objectivity. But even a week or two away from the project can provide you with some artistic distance, some perspective.

In the time off, you should not look at the manuscript. You should try not even to think much about it.
Pretend it's
out of your hair once and for all. Take a short trip, go to a party, read a couple of books, maybe even do some preliminary planning on another fiction project. The idea here is to separate yourself from the thing yet to be revised one more time. Then—

2. 
Check the story for general acceptability
. Is there a length requirement or limit you must stay within? Have you followed guidelines or tip sheets, if available? Look back at your story plans? Does the finished story match up with the plan? (If you discover in the tip sheet that the heroine must be under thirty-five, for example, and somehow you made her forty-seven in your story, some obvious changes have to be made.)

3. 
Read the manuscript straight through
. If possible, read it away from your work desk and even out of your office room. Except for a red pencil to mark typographical errors, don't plan to write notes during this reading. A tape recorder nearby is okay. But you are to try to make this a
reading experience
, not a writing or editing one. If you note problems, dictate notes on how to fix them, or merely dictate a note that the problem exists.

4. 
Repair any problems found on the read-through
. This will involve going back to the word processor and writing or revising some pages. It's import ant to produce these now, in order, and get all your substitute pages neatly into the manuscript so it once again is "finished."

5. 
Reexamine the opening of the story
. Is it gripping? Does it start with something happening—something that threatens the viewpoint character and sets her in motion toward some goal? Are you sure you didn't warm up your motors or describe a sunset to open?

6. 
Study the viewpoint character(s)
. One viewpoint must clearly dominate. Make sure of this. Count pages in each viewpoint if you must. Now look at ways you established the placement of the viewpoint. Is it clear where the viewpoint is at all times? Can you find any author intrusions that ought to be taken out? Any excursions into other viewpoints that are slips, or author self-indulgence rather than being required by the plot?

7. 
Check the time scheme
. Make a chart if you have to, but make sure your timing is correct. Sometimes you can get this far and have two Tuesdays in the same week, for example, or someone in Houston at noon and in New York an hour later. Make sure you have enough time pointers in the story so the reader always understands what time it is, what day it is, how this segment fits into the larger time scheme of the tale.

8. 
Reexamine the character motivations
. At key points, is it perfectly clear what the story people want, and why? Just as important, at key points of stress in the story, have you made it clear to the reader why the character is hanging in there? Ask yourself: "Why doesn't my hero just resign from the plot and go home, here? Why must he carry on?"

9. 
Look for coincidence
. Coincidence, as explained earlier, is nearly always bad, bad, bad. Make a conscious search for coincidence, especially of the kind that helps the viewpoint character. If you find a coincidence, figure out a way to fix it so the character has the desired experience by trying, rather than by luck.

10. 
Read the chapter or section endings
. These are the spots where you most risk losing your reader. Do most of your sections or chapters end with developments that hook the reader with a new twist, disaster or realization that positively defies the reader to quit at that point? Of course they should.

11. 
Think about total story logic
. Unless you're writing about crazy people, they'll all be trying to do things for what they see as good reasons, and they'll be trying to do things that will achieve their ends. Make sure you don't have any characters—especially the antagonist—doing things just because you the author wanted them to do that.

12. 
Examine the ending
. The start of the story raised a problem, a character goal, and a story question. The ending must answer the question you posed at the outset. Does it? Clearly and unequivocally?

You may come up with many other checklist questions. These are enough to suggest the kind of process involved. As you can see, even this short list will force you to go back into the manuscript several times, looking for a specific possible problem—and none other—on each excursion. By isolating various possible problems in this way, you will see them more clearly if they exist.