Hot answers tagged fiction
14
There's two main techniques I use. Mix and match as appropriate for your story.
The simplest one: for a conversation between two people, don't give attributions like "he said", but just state it. If it's going to be a lengthy conversation, you can also throw names into their speech.
"Hey Sally, check it out - I found an important clue!"
"What's ...
13
Even though you notice the problem in the first words (in the subjects of the sentences), I think the problem is elsewhere: Each of the first five sentences has a verb that reminds that we're in Adele's head. But we already know we're in Adele's head, so these reminders are unnecessary, and they weaken the sentences.
Consider this edit, which removes all ...
12
Any species you invent will have characteristics. Find yourself a creature with similar characteristics, get a good dictionary, and follow the etymology.
Using you 'hawk' example, the etymology says that the OE was habuc or heafoc; midle Dutch was hawic or havic, High German was habuh and Middle German habech: the Norse was hauk-r.
Take any of those, and ...
11
In real life, conversations ramble, so it's unsurprising if your dialogues ramble as well. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In realistic literary novels, it would be unsurprising, or even expected, for your dialogues to include long tangents and unrelated content. This is part of that genre's attempt to present situations naturalistically. In other ...
11
In some paragraphs, have the speaker do things in addition to speaking. Readers will understand that it's the same person acting as speaking.
Bob knocked on door. "I found an important clue."
Sally held her breath. "What was that?" She cranked the pencil sharpener more furiously.
"The killer left this behind." Bob held out an evidence bag ...
11
That's totally nonsense. Stupid gender category thinking. Just ignore statements like this one.
The truth is that many women do not think (because of this nonsense) that men can write fiction for women (probably because they think men do not understand women). Therefore male writers use a female pseudonym if they want to sell romances and stuff where the ...
10
If it is clear who is speaking, you do not need a dialog tag.
He looked to the side and blushed. "I probably love you."
"He" is looking to the side and blushing, so "he" is the one who speaks. Skip the dialog tag. Add them if you do not have an action tag and it could be unclear to the reader who is speaking.
But this has nothing to do with:
He ...
9
I've been there myself, stuck trying to work out how to make things flow in a larger context, but just feeling like I can't pull it off. It's frustrating all around, but I can at least tell you what I did to get over it. It be of some help.
Keep trying to write the longer stories. It might be frustrating now, but if you don't work at it it won't ever come ...
9
As I've said elsewhere, don't pad your stories with, er, effluvia. If your idea is a short story, leave it short. Not every writer has to write long pieces. I'm reasonably sure Shakespeare didn't write novels. If short stories are your strength, your passion, and your interest, stick with them.
Now, if you want to write something longer as an exercise, ...
9
"Something happening" doesn't have to be earth-shaking. If the character wakes up, something "happened." It's been a long time since I read it, but in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, about a prisoner in a gulag, nothing much "happens." He doesn't escape or get sprung from prison. He doesn't die or fall in love. But it's still a powerful book.
If ...
8
Rather than focusing on generating names - a process that's usually somewhat arbitrary - perhaps examine the purpose of these names in your story. There's a school of thought that goes like this:
World building is an exercise whose purpose is to help the writer tell a good story. Correspondingly, the design of a species in SF or fantasy should contribute ...
8
Sentences should start with anything that makes grammatical and syntactical sense. Writers create, so create your own rules. As long as they make sense, your reader will understand.
Your example is actually a gerund, which does act as a noun, but consider these:
"To be or not to be?" (Starts with a preposition.)
"Brilliantly, he began his sentence with a ...
8
I'm mostly a non-fiction writer, just trying to write my first novel now, so I don't claim to be speaking from the voice of deep experience. But that said ...
Yes, absolutely. I've gone through this a number of times on my current project. I write a scene, and then when I look back at it the next day, I realize it's boring.
As SF says, consider moving the ...
8
In terms of what your college is offering and the differences, your best bet is to ask them directly.
In terms of the wider world of writing, based on my own experiences in my own locale:
creative writing should focus on the art and style of writing,
fiction writing on the technical and functional.
So in creative writing you'd learn to experiment, have ...
8
You should watch - or maybe better read up on - Hitchcock's movies.
Build up a sense of normal, dull life, then shatter it. The more standard, dull the image, the harder the blow hits, the stronger the effect.
Of course don't overdo it, don't just bore the reader, but setting up the pristine stage for a disaster is an essential step. Add some good ...
7
Think of your story as separate scenes. Your idea about writing a novel of interconnected short stories is basically the same thing. Each chapter is a different scene, or a different short story, if you will. Take the time to figure out where you want to go with your story and then start documenting that.
A lot of writers will get an idea of what they want ...
7
Punctuation marks, like words and paragraph breaks, are tools. Overuse of any tool will make your writing inelegant, but using the proper tool at the right time will help you generate pages that are well crafted and precisely assembled.
In fiction, as in other kinds of writing, you'll still want to use the em dash to indicate interruptions, performing a ...
7
I would find it annoying, or annoyingly convenient, to be switching POVs repeatedly, particularly just for one sentence.
I think even when you have an omniscient narrator, you need to stick with one person per scene, or per beat. When you read a story, you are kind of sitting on the shoulder of whoever is the focus of a scene, and if the POV jumps from A ...
7
The problem is not the genre. Lots of people read lots of love stories. The problem is that (up until now) there's a mismatch between your stories and your readers.
In trying to leap from reaching only a few to reaching everyone, you're setting yourself an impossible task. There is no genre that reaches everyone of all ages and genres. Heck, there is no ...
6
'Setting' is not the same as 'place' or 'world.' All of which are close enough in definition but since you said crime fiction I think what you meant is the setting, even though you go on to say 'the place' but let's cut to the chase and see what's going on here: Edit: I swear I'd read 'place' somewhere in the Q!
Place:
This's a subset of 'setting.'
The ...
6
The italics indicate that the words are the person's thoughts, so it's almost the same as speech. It's entirely fine. I agree with Joel, however, in reminding you not to overdo it (or any given technique).
(On an entirely separate note, why is she walking down an escalator? Escalators move. Is it broken or does she want to go faster than it's carrying ...
6
I had the same problem as well. I've got key scenes scattered here and there (though mine tend to be near the end) that inspire me, and no idea how to get there.
Sad to say, the only solution I've found is to write, throw it all away, and rewrite. Rinse and repeat many, many times. Even if it starts off as embarrassingly awkward, it's a base to work from.
...
6
As always in a good story, I'd say it depends.
Is the riddle itself relevant to the story? Or, is the method of solving it relevant to the story? If so, I think it's fair to show the reader how the protagonist solves the riddle, even if it ends up boiling down only to something like he thought about it for a moment before it dawned on him that these ...
5
It is getting there, but not quite yet, IMO. The rule I have seen so often applies here - show don't tell - and you are still telling too much.
If you can remove description and replace it with emotional response, while still telling the same information, then you will have it. That is a real challenge, but you are part way there already.
[Edit] An ...
5
In this case I would say you have it pretty well balanced. The whole point of her checking the news is to see if anyone else noticed the Earthquake, so seeing what's on the news works well. There's just enough there to give us a feel for it and so we can all fill it in with the same old day-to-day news we're all familiar with.
All in all, I think you've ...
5
If it distracts from your plot and from your theme, then yes - sooner or later, that dialogue should be rewritten or cut entirely.
Real conversations get sidetracked; they go off on tangents. If you do a lot of your writing by figuring out "what would they say next," you're likely to follow that natural tendency. The problem is, if it's really nothing but ...
5
All your constructions are useful in different situations. Keep John Smithers's comment about cause and effect in mind, and vary your tags so that you aren't repeating the same sentence structure constantly.
In your examples, I like your action tags better than your dialogue tags only because they're a little tighter. There are times when you need use to ...
5
I know you've probably heard this a million times and it sounds like a generic answer, but it's really the best advice there is:
Make it as long as it needs to be.
Worry later about whether it's classified as a short story, novella, novel, or lengthy 10,000 page brick.
If you can get the main plot written, it will also be easier to see afterwards what ...
5
"Is it okay..." and "Can I..." are subjective. It's about context.
Are the sentences grammatically correct? Strictly speaking, no. But you are clearly writing in a first-person, casual, stream-of-consciousness dictation style, so they are perfectly fine for that.
Speaking as an editor, as long as this is your character's/narrator's voice, and you're ...
5
I found that when I was reading a collection of Grimm's fairytales — just translated, not the bowdlerized Disney versions — a whole bunch of them have nameless characters. The King, The Queen, The Prince; the baker's daughter, the tailor's apprentice. Puss in Boots is the only character with a name in his story; the rest are the miller's son, the ...
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