Writing Fiction in the New World (page 3A)
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This one you should find fun. I’m debunking the bad writing advice. It’s so big that it’s more than one part! Feel free to comment with your hate writing advice.
Debunking Bad Writing Advice
One of the horrifying realities I discovered in my journey was how much junk advice I’d picked up along the way. Sure, I knew some of it wasn’t true, but it shocked me that the repetition of it had filtered into my writing despite that. To work on more advanced skills, I had to identify all these and mentally make an effort to unlearn them. That was a painful process!
Unlearning is big talk in business these days. A company might have old processes that are no longer valid, so the employee has to reset mentally to stop using the old processes and start using the new ones. Writing fiction is worse because the information is not outdated; it’s inaccurate and always was. Yet, much of it also seems to make sense as something you should, especially if a big writer like Stephen King says to do it.
So I’m going to hit the most common writing advice everyone’s seen. If I can find an origin to it, I’ll provide that; and also what it really means; why it’s being interpreted the way it is. I think knowledge of these is helpful to resetting yourself mentally.
Onward to the fun stuff!
Start with the action
Opening a story is hard, and not at all intuitive, especially at the beginner and beginner-advanced level. This advice originated with boring openings. The character wakes up and gets out of bed. She wanders into the bedroom, and brushes her teeth. Maybe she looks at herself and does the mirror description, admiring her supple body (who does that anyway?). She wanders out into the kitchen and begins making breakfast…and yawn.
Action’s supposed to mean “start with the story,” and yet, it’s not clear how you get to that. Given most writing advice relies on movie examples, writers think they have to start with actual action scenes. You know, a body on page one, an explosion going off, of, as I did in my first novel, a sentence designed for shock value. Movies start with physical action to hook the men in the audience. On the writing side, it’s far less effective because the reader is being thrown into an action scene where they need to care about the characters…but that foundation hasn’t been established.
This advice shows why trying to present writing fiction entirely from a beginner approach doesn’t work well. You can’t break opening a story down into tiny, actionable steps anyone would understand because each story and writer approach is unique. It is likely that “start with the action” showed up because writers were trying to push past the beginning advice, and the “expert” didn’t have a better answer for them.
If you were writing a romance book, the opening would be very different from opening a thriller. These two genres are opposites. Thriller would start much faster paced, for example. Or anything in speculative fiction would require world building. Yet, you also have to provide a hint of the story to come in the opening and control the pacing so it doesn’t drag. This is not a skill that can be broken down into basic beginner step!
When I did the Great Challenge, a short story a week for an entire year, the hardest part for every story was that opening. I spent 80% of my time working on how to get into the story in that first scene, because if that didn’t work, the rest of the story didn’t work. There was no formula, either; each story was unique in what it needed. Even genre influenced how I opened it. And I still can’t give concrete advice I know people look for because it’s different every single time.
Kill your darlings
This advice has been attributed to many writers, including Oscar Wilde and William Faulker. Stephen King’s also repeated it. Slate found the earliest instance of it is from around 1913 by Arthur Quiller-Couch. What it actually refers to is a writer who becomes too writerly in their prose. It probably applies more to literary writers rather than genre, since literary’s genre requirements encourage that (style choices are a reader requirement). Pretty much, it’s flowery, ornate words that you put in…well, just because.
But our world loves a soundbite. Most writers assume this advice now means if it doesn’t move the plot forward, get rid of it. This turns it into incredibly bad advice because you might take out things your story needs. For example, I love reading the character interactions in the J.D. Robb In Depth series. But by the KYD standard, those would be edited out in favor of the plot. And it would suck the heart right out of the story,
If you aren’t doing ornate writing that might be labeled as purple prose, you can leave this one in the last century.
Don’t use Prologues
Agents put this one on the top ten because writers didn’t know how to write a prologue. The writers struggled to figure out how to open the story and get backstory in. Invariably, the prologue became a scene of the character’s life before the story to show the backstory—not very interesting,
Of course, no one said to learn how to do a prologue correctly. Mostly, these days, there is little on how to write one correctly at all.
The prologue is a scene with the event that triggers the rest of the book. This is most likely to be the victim getting murdered (though Clive Cussler had amazing historical scenes that did the same thing). The scenes have a different feel to them. They summarize rather than go deep. Beginners will be quick to accuse them of “telling,” though telling has its place. Here, it pulls back enough, so it’s obvious to the reader this isn’t a character who’s going to be around long. Dean Wesley Smith and J.D. Robb are both examples of this.
More to come!
