Transform your fiction writing with these links

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Photo (C) herreid | Deposit Photos.

It amazes me how much I’m finding just reading the old The Writer magazines. Most of our information today is filtered though only a handful of people. So if they’ve learned information and discarded others as not workable for them, we miss out on different ways that might help us learn better.

Onward to the links!

Mind your Ps, by Virginia Hallam Findlow. This article is on a topic that I’ve wanted to know more about: information flow. A basic example of information flow is when a character knocks a letter opener off a desk. She puts it back on the desk and we think nothing more of it…until the climax when she’s facing the bad guy, near death, and her groping hand finds the letter opening (cycling also works great for this; you may not know that you need this until the climax. You can zoom back to Chapter 3 and add a sentence or two).

This article provides a key piece of knowledge that I needed: information flow is about cause and effect. And sometimes you have to lay in a long string of subtle information for the cause before you land on the effect. This is an offshoot of character and reaction.

The Bedrock of Experience by William E. Henning. This hits another misinterpreted piece of writing advice, “Write what you know.” I once critiqued a novel where the writer thought his character could only be a human resources employee because he was an HR employee. This article is a more “adult” version of write what you know and what you should do if you run into an area where your knowledge is lacking.

The Four Thousand Word Short Story by Isabel Moore. Don’t skip this one even if you never write short stories. This discusses structuring the story: character with a problem. Flashbacks make a brief appearance, too. But the piece of advice I found mind-blowing occurs near the end:

Complications are character complications.

Isabel Moore

We’re taught so much these days that plot is the only thing to focus on and that everything derives from that, not from the characters. It’s another variation from a webinar I attended.

Make your characters complex, not your plot

Kevin Eikenberry

Robert Malloy follows the above article with one called Random Thoughts on Fiction Writing. It’s as it says it is, a collection of random thoughts. They had the same problem then as we do today: Writers with this experience giving advice that may not fit how you write. He hits on outlining or not (pantsing is, I think, a usage that showed up with the internet). But the section to really read is the one on production. This was the era when writers wrote for the Pulps lived off their writing. It shows the fallacies of word count goals, and what is a respectable amount of writing (which won’t be what you think it is based on today’s numbers, on reading about others). It’s a sane look at how people talk about word count nd remains true today.

Fiction’s Memory: The Flashback by Sarah Litsey. Evidently, even in 1951, people were already saying “Don’t do flashbacks!” because writers did them badly. The author describes the setup before the flashback, as well as transitions (probably the hardest thing to do well), and then three types of them. Transitions are one of the little skills that I’m digging into learning more about. It’s so small, and seems insignificant, and yet can be a stumbling point that causes the reader to lose track of the story.

I’m really hoping to stumble across one on dreams, since that’s another “Do not” and I’m thinking of doing one in the current story (because it fits the scene). I’m thinking of bringing in a second and third project, an amateur sleuth mystery and a cozy mystery set in space. I might try my hand at flashbacks in one of those (probably the first one).

Any burning craft skills you want to learn more about?

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