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5 things I wished I knew when I started writing fiction

April 26, 2013
image from anitab0000 at sxc.hu; "Whoops, wrong building!"

image from anitab0000 at sxc.hu;
“Whoops, wrong building!”

Here are some takeaways from spending way too much time writing stories.

Hopefully they will help you to be more productive as you spend too much time writing or reading stories on your own.

1. How you describe something can amplify or undo a reader’s view of what happens.

  •             A terrifying monster is never ‘frazzled’, unless you want to laugh at him.
  •             The lumberjack rarely prances, unless he’s in a Monty Python song.
  •             And the Lorax never rampages.

            The best plot in the world can be sabotaged by poor word choice.

2. Every character in your stories will have some element of yourself in them. That’s not always good, and it’s not always bad.

Empathy with a sadistic villain can scare you. There is, however, a silver lining. The story exists so you can graffiti reality – and follow a thought pattern to its end where you can cringe at the consequences of that mentality. By doing this, you refine your character via mental war games. It shows that we don’t actually want to be Walter White (Breaking Bad), Gordon Gekko (Wall Street), or Nicholas Cage’s character in Lord of War.

Yet you must be careful that every character is not just a clone of yourself. We are all unique individuals. This means that what matters to you may not matter to someone else. The way you finally ‘get’ a lesson may be vastly different from how most people do. What seems revolutionary to you may be last year’s news to everybody else.

Try to differentiate your characters as much as you can, then don’t worry when you fail.

3. FK scores can help you improve.

No, it’s not a crude way to say you need improvement in the bedroom. FK stands for Flesch-Kincaid score. Master copywriters use this to determine how readable a story is.

“Successful writers have two skills: coming up with good ideas and expressing them clearly” – Michael Masterson

The point is not to make your story appeal to the lowest common denominator. Rather, you want to remove unnecessary confusion from your writing. I’ll often run this test 3-4 times per blog post.

Here’s how to do it in Word:

  1. Go to ‘Word’ in the top menu bar (next to the apple if you’re using a mac)
  2. Click Preferences, then ‘Spelling and Grammar’ in the top row of icons.
  3. The bottom check box in the ‘grammar’ section will say ‘Check readability statistics’. Check it.
  4. Now, run a spell check in ‘tools’ for your chapter/blog post. At the end, it will show your score. The higher your ‘Flesh-Reading Ease’ is, the easier the document is to read. The lower your ‘Flesh-Kinkaid Grade Level’, the easier it is to read.

Choose simple words. Shorten your sentences. Cut down your paragraph size. Root out your adverbs and transform passive voice sentences into active voice. Those are the best ways to improve your score.

Want to learn more about how it is used? Check out this link.

4. Break the rules, but learn them first.

I’ll use passive sentences all the time. I tend to use them in dialogue with characters I want my readers to dislike.

  • Politicians often say ‘mistakes were made by the administration’ instead of ‘I’m sorry.’
  • Bureaucrats claim: “That rule wasn’t approved in my department.”
  • Know-it-alls who quip, “It was indubitably broken by a crude ignoramus.”

Shut. Up. I can see readers putting on their boxing gloves now.

The point is, once you learn why things work the way they do, you can break the rules to your advantage.

Where do you learn the rules? One of my favorite starting points is Save the Cat, but you can start wherever you like.

5. Luckily, we are drawn to the same stories.

If you want to fill your brain with paralyzing self-doubt, go here. It shows how all your original ideas are tripe, repetitive, and predictable. Read, enjoy, and then ignore.

Georges Polti, in his book The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, says there’s only 36 types of stories in existence anyway. Many of these are largely ignored in our culture.

In Hero with a Thousand Faces, mythologist Joseph Campbell tries to tell me that there’s just one, but his FK score is criminally high.

We are human beings. In the last few thousand years, very little has changed about that.

Write the same story, using the unique voice that makes you different from every person that’s come before you. If you do this enough times, it is more than enough.

 What did I miss? (I guess that’s lesson six – you always miss something).  Let me know in the comments.

In Writing ,
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