The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [30]
Or suppose you meet a new person today, or happen to pass a stranger on the street. Instantly you form some impression of that person. Immediately you begin to draw conclusions about what kind of person he or she is. In real life, casually, you make perhaps dozens of observations in an instant then you draw conclusions from them. For a nonwriter, such a process is automatic and unexamined. But for you the fiction writer the process must be made conscious, then examined and related to your work.
Look at that new person. Force yourself to note details actively and consciously, rather than passively and unconsciously. What details are you looking at first? Second? Only later? What details are you using as a basis for assumptions about what kind of person this is? Note body conformation, height, weight, clothing, hair, facial expression, stance, skin coloration, movement of eyes, gestures, speed of movement, age, tone of voice, loudness of voice, accent if any, intonation, speed of speaking, vocabulary. When the person begins speaking, note too what his topic may be; his characteristic attitude—whether happy, sad, angry, frightened, bitter, cynical, hopeful, trusting, whatever; note his speaking cadence, pitch and rhythms.
As soon as you can, make notes of everything you have observed. Do you note some "hole" in your observations, some detail you didn't pick up that you now wish you had? Do you find yourself wishing you could go back and look again? Do you find that your notes might describe some other tree or some other vague and ordinary person? If you experience any of these reactions, you probably need to observe more consciously. Just knowing that you need to do this—and remembering not to fall back into routine, passive experiencing—will make you more alert and better as an observer.
Having made your observations and notes, however, you as a writer of fiction must always take another step, that of relating your observations to the writing process.
Here is what I mean. Suppose you just met a new person, and found her interesting, striking or unusual in some way. (If you observed keenly enough, you always will find a new acquaintance to be one of the above.) Now ask yourself: "How can I write down my description in such a way that it becomes even more vivid and striking than what I just observed?"
Then write it!
As discussed in Chapter Seven, you won't ever take a real person literally from life and put her in your fiction; real people, no matter how well portrayed, just aren't big and unusual enough for good fiction. But your work in observing and writing real people or places as vividly as possible will make you a far better writer, and even more interesting when you fictionalize your observations.
One additional point it will be instructive for you to write down everything you notice, in as much detail as possible, in your note-taking phase. "Looking for more words" (as one of my students once put it) prods you to look broader and deeper sometimes. When you practice your final writing of this information, however, you should ask yourself what few details might stand out for the whole—how briefly you can write your description or data, and still provide the reader with a vivid picture.
In this process of distilling the impressions into final written form, you should watch out for adjectives and adverbs. Some will be necessary, but if you find yourself stringing them together like sausages, you must realize that you are no longer writing vivid copy. Good writing of this kind