Words matter. These are the best Nancy Kress Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Surreal fiction is a sophisticated art form. Events happen divorced from conventional logic, as events in a dream may happen. But unlike dreams, everything in the story contributes to an overall coherent point, impression or emotion.
The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor’s attention enough for her to finish your story.
A true epilogue is removed from the story in time or space. That’s the reason it is called an ‘Epilogue’; the label serves to alert the reader that the story itself is over, but we are going to now see a distant result or consequence of that story.
Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.
In general, fiction is divided into ‘literary fiction’ and ‘commercial fiction.’ Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn’t stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed.
There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don’t know any of these writers.
For commercial books in a genre, readers’ and editors’ expectations may be fairly rigid. Some romance lines, for instance, issue fairly detailed writers’ guidelines explaining exactly what must happen in a book they publish (and what must not).
Slipstream fiction is usually defined as fiction with a contemporary setting in which story elements are mimetic (that is, seem real) – except for one or two eerie strangenesses. Unlike outright fantasy, these are not explained or integrated into an alternate-reality setting.
Questions that require answers are what keep readers going – and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.
Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even ‘furniture’ characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere.
You do not have to dramatize everything. In fact, you usually can’t, not without ending up with a half-million-word novel.
If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That’s much more effective than being given section after section of telling.
Conflict drives fiction; no one wants to read a four-hundred-page novel in which everything rolls along smoothly.
Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an ‘Airedale,’ not just a ‘dog.’ A taste should not be merely ‘good’ but ‘creamy and sweet’ or ‘sharply salty’ or ‘buttery on the tongue.’
As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.
In one sense, every character you create will be yourself. You’ve never murdered, but your murderer’s rage will be drawn from memories of your own extreme anger. Your love scenes will contain hints of your own past kisses and sweet moments.
When a story is flying along, and I’m so into it that my ‘real’ world goes away, it can feel magical. I cease to be, my desk and computer ceases to be, and I am my character in his world. Psychologists call this a ‘flow state,’ and it’s better than publication, money, awards, fame.
Every drama requires a cast. The cast may be so huge, as in Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina,’ that the author or editor provides a list of characters to keep them straight. Or it may be an intimate cast of two.
Words that add no new information or aren’t repeated for emphasis are just padding. A sentence may carry three or five or eight of them, each one as unnoticeable as an extra two ounces on your hips but collectively adding up to a large burden of fat.
A stereotype may be negative or positive, but even positive stereotypes present two problems: They are cliches, and they present a human being as far more simple and uniform than any human being actually is.
Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you’re not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.
Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this – and it is a very large problem – is that almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you’re too close to your own complicated makeup.
Without coffee, nothing gets written. Period.
Every story makes a promise to the reader. Actually, two promises, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think.
The reader is going to imprint on the characters he sees first. He is going to expect to see these people often, to have them figure largely into the story, possibly to care about them. Usually, this will be the protagonist.
For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they’re all doing.
Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.
Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it’s still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn’t want information. He wants a story.
The climax is the place where the opposing forces in your story finally clash. This is true whether those opposing forces are two armies or two values inside a character’s soul.
In fiction, a reaction shot is a brief portrayal of how your character reacts to something that someone else has done. In contrast to more direct character building, your guy doesn’t initiate the sequence; he completes it. Exactly how he completes it can tell readers a lot about him.
