Tips on writing fiction In the fall and spring of 1997-98, I took courses in novel writing from Lewis Buzbee

and from a mystery writer named Shelly Singer. The two courses were very different in their attitudes, but both offered some very valuable insights. Comments by Lewis Buzbee: In many bad novels, the sense of shame and politeness is kept intact, so that the novel doesn't go into those private things which are normally too private and shameful to mention. In novels, the secret life is visible. Don't put a barrier between this secret life and the reader. We want to find within the main characters the whole raggedy bundle of that character, including the contradictions. What are your characters trying to get? What are they trying to give? How do these two urges work against each other? We don't normally read novels for plot. Novels are to baseball as movies are to football. The novel is a messy thing. Andr Gide: A novel is a journey from innocence to experience. A novel starts with a mystery we can't understand until we've gone back in time. Even in philosophical novels, we are drawn to the character s because of who they are, not because of their ideas. The main characters in beginners' novels are often too nice: boring. Don't be afraid to offend, to exaggerate. People who wait for things to happen to them tend not to be interesting. What is your character's quest/ambition? In a beginner's novel, frequently what's boring is the main character.

The inner qualities of a character are made visible through action, dialogue, and thinking. And inaction. Aristotle said that action is character. The journey from innocence to experience happens through action. Keep the characters in motion. How is the character both altruistic and selfish? Make your characters smarter! Give them some edge. Conflict: X wants something and Y is not going to give it up. Thank about the connection between the characters as well as the conflicts. Is your novel set in the inevitable place for your novel? The novel --- especially the beginning --- is an act of seduction. You are constantly flirting with the reader. Turn, counter-turn, and stand. The end is implicit in the beginning. If you've written a good first chapter, you do know the ending. Don't think beyond the first draft. You'll only know how to write the novel when you've finished the first draft. On revision: Piece of Work, edited by Woodruff. The letters of Anton Chekhov and Flannery O'Connor are best books on revision. You have to be playful in the revision. Take chances. Don't worry about simultaneous submissions. Go ahead and submit simultaneously. Don't announce that fact. A novel is about characters in their society. From the minor characters, the locale, etc. we learn about the society the characters are immersed in. The reader has to believe that the world they're stepping into is whole and entire. You have to establish this at the beginning.

How can you capture the entire predicament and entire fate of your main character in the very first paragraph? The gap in time and the mystery are there in the first paragraph. The best book on point of view is Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. Incorporation motion into the descriptions of landscape and characters. Characters are in conflict, but there's also a connection between them. Characters need both flaws and assets. There are several epiphanies in a novel. They are the key points in the character's forward motion. An epiphany is not simply a major insight by the character. It's an emotional transcendental moment. "In epiphanies, prose fiction comes closest to the intensity of lyric fiction." "The soul of the commonest object seems radiant." In a novel, structure is not as important as the sentences and paragraphs. Write a telegraphic precis for each chapter. What are the ironies in your novel? When novels get too earnest, we tend to put them down. Three best books on writing: Eudora Welty: Eye of the Story Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners Anton Chekhov, Life and Thoughts Buzbee's comments on the short story form Frank O'Connor says that stories differ from novels in that we see the character outside their society, often alienated from their society. [This Doesn't Seem True to Me. --L.L.] Tom Parker: A story is 15% beginning, 80% middle, 5% end. Landscape: a web of images.

The details of physical appearance that help give us a sense of who characters are. The type of vitality that person brings with them when they come into a room. What is the great urgency in your life? Where do you find that urgency? Is the beginning of your story the place where the characters' fates are set in motion? Comments by Shelly Singer: Synopsis: Say what your book is about in a paragraph. 1. An idea the publisher can sell. 2. A sample of your writing that shows you can write. A general scenario of the action. Occasionally a chapter by chapter breakdown. "A narrative summary of the main action of your novel." Act like you really know the whole story. Don't keep any secrets in the synopsis. Write for drama. A cast of characters can be a useful addition to the synopsis. Name only the main characters. Refer to "the chiropracter," etc. Emphasize characters, sense of place, etc., not clues and technical details. You have to sell the idea that your book is just like one of the curr ent best sellers and is completely fresh, unlike anything ever written before. Try to avoid a long synopsis. General Comments: The structure of a novel is a number of small climaxes gradually building to a main climax and then a denouement. In a suspense novel, the protagonist is an admirable character, a good person, and is very very scared. The protagonist is pitted against a personal enemy. A thriller is a work designed to hold interest by suspense, mystery, intrigue. Fast paced, as opposed to a suspense novel. The pace is what maintains the interest.

The story in a mystery tends to revolve around motives. Theme: What is the point of the book? The setting has meaning and use. Backstory: What happens before the book starts to create this situation? Basic plot: Challenge, reaction, resolution. Aristotle on plot: 1. Reversals. 2. Discoveries. 3. Strong emotions caused by the reversals and discoveries. 4. Complications, turning points. 5. Catastrophe. A low point produced by a reversal. Every plot has catastrophes. 6. Recognition. 7. Resolution. All these should be present in any plot. The book should exist on more than one level. Something else is going on. The protagonist wants something or wants to achieve something. Conflict is dramatic tension. A thing unresolved, a problem to be resolved. Characters with strongly opposing goals. All the characters have something at stake, otherwise they wouldn't be in the book. What's at stake must be hard to achieve. The antagonist must be powerful. Drama = desire or need + danger. Fiction starts with something out of place. The novel is devoted to putting it back in place. Drama includes action and reaction. The story starts when the change in the events or characters begins. But the novel doesn't always start at the beginning of the story. Plot is how you arrange incidents, time the occurrences, build the story, show what happens in the story, build in the conflict and the resolution. Structure is how you cut it up. The first chapter has some seeds of the plot. Each chapter begins with something that drags the reader in, and ends with a lack of resolution, a question, or a hook. Don't be vague or confusing at the beginning of a chapter.

A chapter focuses on a single idea, event, or conflict. Each scene has some conflict. Each scene has a point, a purpose. Transitions: If possible, move from one scene to another with dialogue or description. Structure is one of the things you use to create pace and rhythm. Foreshadowing: Making the reader wait to the second shoe to drop. A promise of future conflict. First person mysteries are more difficult to do. They tend to get less respect and not pay as well. Characterization: Think about how a t raumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. A series hero has to be unusual in some way. Publishers insist on this. The protagonist has to be different, fascinating, and real. Arthur Miller: "A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from, and the ones he has walked away from and regrets." Setting is an important part of the characterization. People are where they are for a reason. A home and furniture tell a huge amount about the person living there. Part of a setting is the local conventional wisdom. The culture, the politics. The emotional climate of the book comes from the setting. The ambiance. Setting can be a huge part of the story. The character's attititude toward their environment tells a lot about the character. Richard Lupoff: Hit one or more of the editor's emotional buttons on page 1. Emotions a book can arouse: Curiosity, fear, adven ture, escape. Richard Lupoff: Mystery fiction is in large part fiction of the mind. Additional Comment by Me

The classic definition of plot is that the protagonist has an important problem that he must solve, or wants something important, or is trying to achieve something important. He takes action to accomplish his objective, but there are obstacles, which become worse and worst until finally the protagonist is faced with the black moment which is the climax of the book. Although there are certainly man y novels that have a plot of this form, novels in general tend to be about the interaction of various characters. In general, in a novel characters are not simply obstacles. In a simplistic action novel, a cardboard villain may devote all this efforts to t hwarting the hero's effort, but in real life, almost no one is that obsessed with some other person's goal. Everyone has their own agenda. In a novel of substance, all the major characters have objectives of their own that they are trying to accomplish, an d it is the conflict between their attempts to accomplish these conflicting objectives that creates the plot.

James N. Frey: How to Write a Damned Good Novel This is a very useful book for a beginning novelist. (Lewis Buzbee hates it.) Frey's book is in fact about how to write a "damned good novel," i.e. a novel which is a wonderful piece of entertainment. It will not teach you to write a serious literary novel comparable to those by Faulkner, Virginia Wolfe etc., although it still may be useful for a novelist with that goal. James N. Frey, volume II. To gain the sympathy of the reader, make him sorry for your character. Identification occurs when the reader is not only in sympathy with the character but also supports his or her goals and aspirations and has a strong desire that the character achieve them. (This can be done even with an evil character. See opening of The Godfather. We are on Don Corleone's side because he is helping a character we sympathize with.) You can win empathy for a character by describing the sensory details in the environment that trigger his emotions. The thing that moves the reader from sympathy, identification, and empathy to total absorption is inner conflict. Suspense is created by something undecided or undetermined: a story question.

To create apprehension and anxiety in a reader, one needs a sympathetic character. A sympathetic character is one most readers want to see good things happen to. In the opening and throughout the story, the reader should be worrying abo ut bad things that might happen to sympathetic characters. Dean R. Koontz: The worst error a novelist can make: not beginning his novel by plunging the main character into terrible trouble. Lighting the fuse is one of the most powerful ways of creating s uspense. Wimps can be okay, but avoid the constipated character: the one that cannot move. A dynamic character is driven: he wants something desperately. Desperation is the dynamo that fires up characters and pushes them into action. Readers are intrigued by characters who are good at what they do. One way to create a wacky character is to take a trait and exaggerate it. Wacky characters add spice to your novel and make a foil for the serious characters. A character's ruling passion is the central motivating force within that character: the sum total of all the forces and drives within him. At all times, characters must be driven by at least one ruling passion. The ruling passion for the story need not be the same as the character's overruling passion in life, but may be a consequence of the situation he's in. If you structure your stories with a strong premise in mind, your novel will be structured and dramatically powerful. Premise, as used here, is a statement of what happens to the characters as a result of the actions of the story. As a result of the core conflict. One dead giveaway that a story is not about anything is that the incidents of the story can be reordered without changing anything. The three types of premise are: chain reaction, opposing forces, and situational. In a situational premise, some situation affects all the characters. When what you have isn't working, you must be able to redream the dream, not try and rewrite the same dream. One way to redream the dream is to start the scene earlier and give the characters different objectives in the scene.