The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (15 page)

How can you tell if the local guru is for real? You launch a polite investigation.

Ask people about her. Get some idea of her reputation generally. Then write or telephone the teacher-pro and try to set up an appointment to discuss possible coaching. If the pro is agreeable, and preliminary talk about times and costs are acceptable, then you see the teacher in person, ask a few questions, and size her up one-to-one.

Watch out for statements like the following:

"Well, it's all very mysterious, actually...."

"I believe in giving my student total freedom...."

"Sometimes I feel I learn more from my students than they can possibly learn from me....

"I will never
tell
you to do or try anything....

"As William Faulkner once said...."

"As Henry James once wrote...."

"In the words of the immortal Ezra Pound...."

And all such stuff that says (1)The teacher isn't going to teach, and (2)What we're really going to be into here is a disguised literature appreciation course.

If the teacher seems to pass the preliminary test, your second step should be to ask her for a list of successful students. She should be able to provide the names of some former students who are now selling copy. You should also get the names of a few present or very recent students. You should call up some of these people and discuss the teacher with them, finding out what their opinion is, what they feel they are accomplishing.

Finally, if all is well so far, you should submit a piece of copy to the teacher and see what kind of a critique and advice you get. If it seems airy and highfalutin, I think you should run. If it seems basic, pragmatic and practical—even if you don't agree with all of it—then maybe you have found your pro.

But let's assume now that you've gotten lucky, and you are working with someone who produces professional copy herself, and seems to be giving you hard-nosed, practical advice. Now you must
do what you're told
.

This is harder than it sounds for at least three reasons:

First, as we said before in this book, writing is tied painfully close to your ego; suggestions for basic changes in your approach to writing may be psychologically so uncomfortable that you make up all kinds of excuses not to listen.

Second, most new things are a little painful. Your most basic impulse, when told to try something new, will be not to like it—resist trying it.

Third, you may be so in love with your present way of writing—even though you aren't selling with it—that you just get angry and dig your heels in when told to do it some other way.

And most insidious of all—
you actually may not be able to hear what the teacher is really saying
. This is a tough one, and I don't know what you can do about it beyond remembering that it's a pretty common phenomenon. Even in a nutshell the problem is complex, but here it is, as simply as I can state it:

If you don't know what you don't know, then there's no way for you to hear advice designed to remedy the problem.

When I was first starting out with a professional teacher—after more than seven years of trying to make it on my own—he promptly began telling me to do a certain thing in setting up the major scenes in my novels. Week after week, month after month, year after year, he told me exactly the same thing. I kept imagining I understood what he was saying. My copy remained directionless—flabby.

Finally, after a woefully long time, I realized on my own something like,
"Hey, I need better scene-endings that will further trap the hero. "

Only then, having realized that I didn't know how to do this, was I able to walk into my teacher's office the very next week
and finally hear him telling me what I now saw I needed to know—as
he had been doing all along.

This is a point that's hard for people to understand if they have never experienced it. But it's very common for me to have a student walk up to me after a given session and say, in effect, "Why in the world didn't you ever tell me that before?" And almost always I can then take him back to lecture notes from previous courses, and even personal critiques written earlier to him about his copy, which said exactly what he was never ready to take in and apply before.

That's why I so emphasize that, if you find a competent teaching pro, you must really, really listen... strenuously struggle to hear what is actually being said... then work your hardest to do
exactly
as you're told.

It may be that you'll find in the long run that some given bit of advice just doesn't work for you. That's okay. But if you reject advice out of hand, and never try it, then you can never really know, can you?

There are things about the workings of the imagination and the creative process that are indeed mysterious. But most of the craft of writing
can
be taught, and it can be learned.

All it takes is someone who knows what he's doing, at one end of the dialogue, and someone who is truly willing to listen and try, at the other.

As a professional writer
of fiction, you can go crazy trying to out-guess the editors... trying to figure out where the market might go next, or just what such and such publisher "must
really
want." You can waste far too much emotional energy trying to get out in front of the latest trend.

Having said that, let me quickly add that you must, of course, do everything in your power to keep abreast of trends in the sales of fiction. If you're working in the shorter lengths, you should maintain close touch with each new marketing aid such as
Writer's Market
and/or
Literary Marketplace
. Magazines change their emphasis from time to time, sometimes in response to new orders from a publisher seeking out a new readership audience, sometimes because a new editor comes in with new and different ideas. These changes will be reflected in published statements about what the magazine wants... eventually. So at least you should check in with your local library or bookstore every so often to find market aids.

In addition, it goes without saying (doesn't it?) that you should read and study your target magazines on a continuing basis. A new editor might alter the magazine's desires today, and it could be more than a year before any library/book marketing publication reflected the change. If you are alert and analytical in your magazine reading, you'll spot the new emphasis far sooner.

Magazines for writers are a gold mine of up-to-date market information. The "how-to articles" will help; but you should not overlook the trade news section in the back of the magazine. This may provide your first hint that the times, they are a' changin' at your target publication.

For the novelist, a study of the publisher's latest fiction list may provide valuable clues. Ask your local newspaper book reviewer or bookstore owner to share the publishers' catalogues with you. You can see what kind of novels this publisher is publishing—the catalogue will provide an illustration and plot summary, both of which can be helpful. The
ranking
of books to be printed in the near future may provide you with valuable clues, too: it's easy to pick out, from wealth of illustration, space and placement in the catalogue which novels are that publisher's expected "leaders" in the next quarter.

Finally, some publishers (especially the romance publishers) can provide you with sometimes—elaborate "tip sheets" that specify all sorts of things that publisher wants or doesn't want in submitted novels. It's common for such tip sheets to tell you the desired age of the central characters, settings that the editors may be overstocked on, etc. A letter of enquiry together with a stamped, self-addressed envelope (SASE), will bring you the tip sheets.

All of these aids keep you from writing a good book that is simply not acceptable because of publisher prejudices you might have learned about at the outset. All such aids and studies help you learn more as a novelist.

On the other hand—and hence the title of this chapter—it's a common observation among publishing professionals that too many new novelists hang themselves up trying to find "a sure thing" in publishing. Chances are that even the tip sheet you get from a publisher today will include no-no's that you might include in a novel and still sell to that publisher, if everything else about the book was wonderful. There just are not a lot of ironclad rules at book length.

Further, trends change with astonishing speed in book publishing today. By the time you got a tip sheet saying submarine stories were "in"—and Tom Clancy's best-seller was being made into a movie—a dozen other publishers might have jumped on the bandwagon to prepare submarine novels of their own, glutting the market
and ending the trend
. Not long ago, spy novels involving the CIA and the KGB were hot stuff. Then the Soviet Union changed drastically... readers grew tired of such spy maneuvers... and the subgenre died on the vine.

Maybe you can spot a developing hot trend and get your book written in time. But it's chancy business. Even if you guess perfectly, a lot of other people are probably guessing right along with you. And then it's going to take you a year to write this hot idea... a year to sell it... another year to get it through the editing and publishing process.

And how hot is that hot trend really going to be in three years?

For all these reasons, chasing after the market can be a self-defeating process. In addition, consider how much creative, analytical energy market-chasers expend, trying to outfox the trendsetters. Might it not be more profitable to stay aware of trends generally, yet concentrate your energies on simply
writing the best novel you know how to write?

In today's crazy fiction markets, its devilishly difficult to outguess the future. You may hear people say they have it figured out. Don't let them make you uneasy. Your business is creating stories. If you do that well enough, the trends will tend to take care of themselves.

Be aware. Pay attention to the business end of writing. But always keep in the back of your mind a reassuring fact every hot new fiction trend was Usher's expected "leaders" in started by a lonely writer, working alone, bucking whatever the last trend seemed to be, and creating such a grand story that it started a new trend the moment it was published.

Or to put that another way: the best books don't follow trends; they establish them.

Your style and attitude
in your stories should be like a clean pane of glass through which the reader sees the action. If you pose and posture in your copy, you'll draw attention to you as a writer, rather than to what's happening on your page. And that's always bad.

The two kinds of posing and posturing that seem most widespread these days are:

Both are phony. Both may be sick. Both wreck fiction. To make sure you won't do either of these acts, let's look briefly at each of them.

The frustrated poet act most often shows up when the writer is trying to do one of two good things: face a strong emotion in a character, or describe a striking bit of scenery. The writer usually decides to gear up and mount a massive effort to string together some really striking word-pictures. What results is what we sometimes call a
purple patch
—a few sentences or paragraphs crammed with adjectives and other crutch-words designed to "be pretty" or provide some "fine writing." At best it's a pretty but cumbersome and distracting effort to get at the finest detail, when presentation of such poetic detail isn't necessary for the reader's understanding of the story. At worst, the purple patch is the result of the writer's compulsion to show off the style that won her accolades from her sixth-grade English teacher.

The prototypical purple patch, mentioned once before in this book, is the "rosy fingers of dawn" chapter or scene opening. Such openings go something like this:

As the rosy fingers of dawn painted gossamer strands of drifting cumulus over the vast and lovely expanse of the cyan night, a gentle zephyr nudged sleeping emerald leaves to sibilant stirrings, turning each tiny protoplasmic elf into a whispering, pirouetting dancer, intent upon welcoming the dawn of another warm and beautiful morning.

Such stuff when carried to the extreme shown in the example is obviously hilarious because the reader can almost see the poor writer sitting there at the keyboard, risking creative hernia and mounting tiny droplets of blood on her forehead. But even if the poetic effort isn't quite this absurd, it is still bad—and not only because it calls attention to the prose itself, rather than to the story. It's also destructive to the story because a story's momentum, for the reader, comes from the plot's forward movement. And when you stop to describe something, you have
stopped
. Thus, after such a passage, your job as a storyteller has been made harder because your first task becomes one of
getting things moving again
, off dead center.

Any time you find yourself sighing over a paragraph you have written, you are well advised to take a long, hard, more critical look at it. Ask yourself:

All of us have written passages we look back on with fondness. But the dead-stop poetic description will never be among them. Purple patches, signs of a frustrated poet rearing his shaggy head, may occur in first draft of a story as we let our imagination run, but on revision we must look hard at all such passages with an eye toward simplifying and cleaning up our act.

The tough guy/gal act also represents a false pose. In this case, the writer runs to the opposite end of the writing spectrum and
denies
all impulse at the delicate or the soft by being over-tough, over-cynical, over-gruff, or over-bitter.