The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack M Bickham Page A
Authors: Jack M Bickham
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary Criticism, Reference, Authorship, Language Arts & Disciplines, Writing Skills, Composition & Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Fiction - Technique, Technique
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about the speech." That construction implies that we are momentarily in Max's viewpoint.
How do we get around the problem? Two possibilities come immediately to mind:
"As he walked to the podium, Bob remembered how worried Max had said he was about the speech."
Or:
"Walking to the podium, Bob glanced at Max and saw the worried frown on his face."
In either case, we've conveyed the information about Max's worry without risk of losing our reader's sense of where the viewpoint is.
You would do well, I think, to test yourself on how you handle viewpoint, since it's such a vital technique in fiction. Here's one way you can do it.
Select a few pages of your own fiction copy. Then go through it with colored pencils and mark it up as follows:
Underline the name of your viewpoint character in red.
Underline in red every statement that clearly defines that character's viewpoint ("He saw," "she heard," "he thought," "she felt," "he intended" and the like).
Look for any intended or accidental statements establishing any other viewpoint. If you find a second viewpoint, underline that character's name in green, and then underline in the same color all the words that establish his viewpoint.
At this point, if you have found more than one viewpoint, get it out of there! Rewrite, if necessary, to make it all a single viewpoint.
Learning to handle viewpoint well is a crucial step for any fiction writer. It can be troublesome at first, but later it becomes second nature. That's good, because learning it is a necessity. For without good handling of viewpoint, your readers may forget whose story it is—and you might, too!
14. Don't Lecture Your Reader
There you are, deep in your story somewhere, and you realize that there's some vital information that your readers really ought to know. So you write something like:
Charlie had no way of knowing this, but it is a well-documented fact that Type A personalities suffer a high incidence of heart attacks, and his enemy Sam was definitely a Type A personality. Sam's troubles had begun early in his life, and an examination of his early background provides an interesting example of how compulsive Type A behavior can be destructive....
It's probably pretty obvious to you that this kind of lecture doesn't fit very well into contemporary fiction. There was a time, in the earliest days of the novel, and before the modern short story had begun to assume its present form, when a fiction writer could address "You, dear reader," and speak author-to-reader like a stage lecturer might speak to an audience. But fiction has become much more sophisticated since those long gone days, and readers now won't stand for lectures by the author.
Why? For at least two reasons: First, lectures by the author violate every principle of viewpoint, as just discussed in the two preceding chapters; second, such lectures completely stop the forward movement of the story, and so distract the reader from the plot, where he should be focused.
Another possible reason for avoiding author lectures in your fiction: you may find yourself deviating from the fictioneer's goal—the telling of a story—to that of a pamphleteer, which is trying to sell a belief. Fiction may convince readers about some moral, ethical or political issue, but if it does, the convincing is a by-product of the tale-telling. Fiction does not exist primarily to convince anybody of anything; it exists to tell a story, and by so doing to illuminate the human condition.
Let me make a suggestion: if you ever find yourself saying that you are writing a story to "prove" something political or whatever, shelve that story instantly, and don't work on it again until you can write it for its own sake.
Of course writers of fiction care about issues of the day. Often they have very, very strong opinions. But the published writers entertain. They don't write to prove anything. If their story happens incidentally to say something thematic, that's grand. Most
How do we get around the problem? Two possibilities come immediately to mind:
"As he walked to the podium, Bob remembered how worried Max had said he was about the speech."
Or:
"Walking to the podium, Bob glanced at Max and saw the worried frown on his face."
In either case, we've conveyed the information about Max's worry without risk of losing our reader's sense of where the viewpoint is.
You would do well, I think, to test yourself on how you handle viewpoint, since it's such a vital technique in fiction. Here's one way you can do it.
Select a few pages of your own fiction copy. Then go through it with colored pencils and mark it up as follows:
Underline the name of your viewpoint character in red.
Underline in red every statement that clearly defines that character's viewpoint ("He saw," "she heard," "he thought," "she felt," "he intended" and the like).
Look for any intended or accidental statements establishing any other viewpoint. If you find a second viewpoint, underline that character's name in green, and then underline in the same color all the words that establish his viewpoint.
At this point, if you have found more than one viewpoint, get it out of there! Rewrite, if necessary, to make it all a single viewpoint.
Learning to handle viewpoint well is a crucial step for any fiction writer. It can be troublesome at first, but later it becomes second nature. That's good, because learning it is a necessity. For without good handling of viewpoint, your readers may forget whose story it is—and you might, too!
14. Don't Lecture Your Reader
There you are, deep in your story somewhere, and you realize that there's some vital information that your readers really ought to know. So you write something like:
Charlie had no way of knowing this, but it is a well-documented fact that Type A personalities suffer a high incidence of heart attacks, and his enemy Sam was definitely a Type A personality. Sam's troubles had begun early in his life, and an examination of his early background provides an interesting example of how compulsive Type A behavior can be destructive....
It's probably pretty obvious to you that this kind of lecture doesn't fit very well into contemporary fiction. There was a time, in the earliest days of the novel, and before the modern short story had begun to assume its present form, when a fiction writer could address "You, dear reader," and speak author-to-reader like a stage lecturer might speak to an audience. But fiction has become much more sophisticated since those long gone days, and readers now won't stand for lectures by the author.
Why? For at least two reasons: First, lectures by the author violate every principle of viewpoint, as just discussed in the two preceding chapters; second, such lectures completely stop the forward movement of the story, and so distract the reader from the plot, where he should be focused.
Another possible reason for avoiding author lectures in your fiction: you may find yourself deviating from the fictioneer's goal—the telling of a story—to that of a pamphleteer, which is trying to sell a belief. Fiction may convince readers about some moral, ethical or political issue, but if it does, the convincing is a by-product of the tale-telling. Fiction does not exist primarily to convince anybody of anything; it exists to tell a story, and by so doing to illuminate the human condition.
Let me make a suggestion: if you ever find yourself saying that you are writing a story to "prove" something political or whatever, shelve that story instantly, and don't work on it again until you can write it for its own sake.
Of course writers of fiction care about issues of the day. Often they have very, very strong opinions. But the published writers entertain. They don't write to prove anything. If their story happens incidentally to say something thematic, that's grand. Most
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