Practical Advice for Beginning Fiction (Or Other Genre) Writers – Part 1
They say that hindsight is “20/20” – that maxim was never truer than in relation to writing your first work of fiction. I speak from personal experience when I say that many authors simply launch off into the writing process without even being aware of some of the technical aspects that are required to make any book “work”. Boy, was I naïve!
It would be a rare talent indeed for an author to address them all automatically without any guidance or training. Often, it’s only at the stage where an author is repeatedly rejected by agents and publishers that the causes come to light – and then a huge amount of re-working is required. Most of this could have been avoided with greater awareness from the get-go. So, here are four tips for any newbie fiction author and I’ll provide four more in the next article. Please bear in mind that these eight are not meant to be a comprehensive list, but they are certainly things I wish I had learnt earlier!
1. Find Your Voice (And Stick To It)
Your voice is essentially the soul of your writing style, which is unique to you. It is a composite of a number of things including your use of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development and dialogue. It will be informed by your life experiences and especially the variety of voices that you have read and been influenced by. You need to understand what makes your writing distinctive and allows you to connect with your reader. If your voice isn’t clear and consistent, or doesn’t have the ring of authenticity, there is going to be a problem. You might want to use the services of a beta-reader to give their opinion of how your voice is conveyed to them. It is a little odd at first to find yourself being so self-analytical – but it is absolutely key to success.
2. Choose Your Tense (And Stick To It!)
You might not think that the tense in which you write would be so important – but it is. It’s almost a subset of the voice in a way, as your choice of tense will govern how your story is told. The key choice is between past and present tense. Personally, I find reading books written in the present tense is almost impossible, so it was a relatively easy decision for me to use the past tense in my first book – I never regretted it. The last thing you want is to get three-quarters through a manuscript and decide that the tense is not working for you, and you have to go back and fix it all. Present tense can work in certain circumstances, although my personal opinion is that past tense is easier for a less experienced author to execute well. But, whatever tense you use, my advice is to stick with it throughout and don’t go chopping and changing it – it is just very confusing for the reader, never mind yourself. Confusing a reader is almost never a successful strategy to get them to carry on reading.
3. Select Your Point of View
Point of view is simply the perspective from which you write. First person would be “I saw the ship”, whereas third person would be “He saw the ship”. There is no right or wrong here and a great deal depends on the nature of your story. Once again, it is better to figure out the approach sooner than later. I had got to the latter stages of my first book before realizing that a first person narrative was going to work better – simply because it gave me more opportunity to get inside the character’s head and tell the story from their perspective; it also felt like a more energetic style which was in keeping with the plot. Having to rewrite was a pain, but I simply wouldn’t have been happy keeping it as it was.
4. Timeline Your Plot
Have you seen those websites which catalogue all the embarrassing continuity errors or sheer impossibilities in movies? It is fortunate that nothing equivalent seems to exist for books! My first novel had a lot of action compressed into a couple of days, with two scenes developing at the same time. I suddenly had a hunch that the timing of the scenes might not work, so I built a simple timeline which matched up the various events against each other. I found that at one point I had not left enough time for an event to physically happen, so I had to amend the book so that it flowed more realistically. Would anyone else have spotted it? Possibly not, but like any fine craftsman, you need to set a high standard for yourself and not take shortcuts in areas that might be hidden to a casual observer.
Look out for four additional tips next time!
Practical Advice for Beginning Fiction (Or Other Genre) Writers – Part 2
In Part 1, I provided four tips that I think are important for any new fiction writer to take on board as they start to put pen to paper. Here are four more gems to add to them!
5. Show, Don’t Tell
“Show, Don’t Tell” has become one of the great clichés of fiction writing, but that does not mean it can be ignored. Instinctively, our first reaction as an author is to factually tell the reader what happened. For example, “the window shattered. Fred started to panic…” would be “telling”. “The window shattered. Fred’s mouth went dry and his pulse started to race…” would be “showing”; by painting a picture you are actually letting the reader figure things out themselves and getting them more engaged in the story. I found that “showing” required a conscious effort to achieve but it got easier after a while. Where I disagree with some experts is that I believe that an element of “showing” is appropriate at times and there is a risk that trying to “show” too hard might actually be a bit forced and counter-productive. I am not totally convinced that readers care about this as quite much as professional reviewers and publishers!
6. Revise, Revise, Revise
I believe it’s very tempting for an author to be so happy to have written the last sentence of their book that they fall into the trap of fooling themselves that they have finished! But no! No matter how long the road has been to get to the end of your story, the work has really only just begun. I made this mistake, and perhaps I did so because I was actually fairly diligent at editing my work as I went along. Every few chapters, I would give the creative side of the brain a break and go back over what I had done and sift through it, making sure that my work to date was consistent and flowed well enough. But this process needs to be repeated many, many times, well beyond the point that you are so sick of your manuscript that you can hardly bear to look at it! When it got to that point, I found it good to take two or three weeks away and come back to it with a certain degree of freshness. That can be very hard when you are chomping at the bit to see your pride and joy reach a wider audience. However,
it is vital that you see yourself as a master sculptor, chipping away all the extraneous material and tweaking things here and there until every word is where it should be and conveys exactly what it needs to.
7. Benchmark Against Peers
I thought I would throw in this point as it is the only one of my pieces of advice which looks primarily outside of yourself and your own writing process. I found it helpful to realize that you don’t exist in a bubble and it is important (especially if you have any designs on your book being a commercial success) to know what approach has proved popular with readers. This could apply to any aspect of what we have already covered; for example, if you are writing a romance novel, how many bestsellers in that genre use the first person? How many use the present tense? It can even get more granular than that – how long are the chapters and how long is the book? Of course, you can deliberately choose to break the mould and do what has not been done before – that could be the road to certain failure or success, but at least you will be doing it consciously!
8. Plot and Characters Are Equally Important
There is no doubt that some works of fiction are plot-driven and some are character-driven. You will know which of these your book is by how your original idea came to you in the first place. Did a character come to mind that you then had to decide what you were going to do with? Or was it a fantastic story-line that just required a person or persons to make it happen? In my case, the plot definitely came first. Why does this matter? I think it matters because there is a risk that any author will focus too much on the original driver and neglect the other. The problem is that you need both a strong plot and a strong character or characters to produce a book that will keep the attention – at least, this seems to be the general rule. It would have to be a stupendous character that could hold your attention by doing nothing, or a fantastic plot that could still be meaningful while being executed by cardboard cut-outs.
Don’t get me wrong, your plot or your characters will be what motivates you to write the book and will drive you to complete it – but make sure to keep a reasonable balance between the two. Looking back, I could have added more colour to my character but, on the other hand, I suppose that I have some capacity to do that now in the other books in the series.
So, there you have it – my eight top tips! If I’ve helped an author even a little bit on their writing journey, then I’ll be delighted to have helped out.
