The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [31]
The more you force yourself consciously to observe and note details you can use—and the more you practice actually writing descriptions and factual passages so that they are as striking and evocative as possible—the keener you will become in picking up data, and the better you will become in learning to use it to improve your writing.
It's a multi-step process, you see:
• First, you stop being passive and actively examine your environment.
• Second, you seek out what makes this tree... this person... unique.
• Third, you go through the formal process of recording your observations so you won't lose them.
• Fourth, you practice translating your observations into deft, brief, evocative writing.
This whole process is a great deal of fun. Writers who practice it—and that includes all professionals—find that it makes them feel more alive, more in touch with everything and everyone, more excited about living. The job of recording observations, then writing them as brilliantly as possible, keeps them constantly alert and challenged—stimulated by new ideas and associations—and improving in the clarity and impact of their style.
Many fiction writers put much of this kind of work in their journals. A journal can include many kinds of writing and information. But often this sort of thing dominates such a volume.
Try working on your own skills in this way. Make it a lifetime habit. You will never be bored, you will always be challenged, and you are sure to grow.
22. DON'T IGNORE SCENE STRUCTURE
THE TENSE, CONFLICTFUL sections of your story are the parts that most excite and intrigue your readers. For that reason, you should play out those parts of your story for all they're worth.
How do you do that? You put it onstage in the story now, and you develop the action between the characters moment by moment, with nothing left out you follow the rules of cause and effect, stimulus and response. To put this another way: you make sure that you never summarize during a high point of conflict in your story.
The result of moment-by-moment handling is a segment of your story which is just like life; there's no summary there, obviously.
Most professionals call such a part of their story a scene. However they may differ in defining how a scene works, they tend to agree on the major point just emphasized: you must never summarize while writing a scene. Not only does moment-by-moment development make the scene seem most lifelike; it should also be noted that it's in a scene where your reader gets most of his excitement. If you summarize, your reader will feel cheated—shortchanged of what he reads for—without quite knowing why.
Let's look at the structure of a scene just a bit more to make sure you understand how it works and why summary is lethal to its effectiveness.
To have conflict, you have to have two people with opposing goals. They have to want the same thing, or Character A must want to thwart Character B's immediate goal-motivated quest. Therefore, to start a scene, the first thing you have to do is have one of your characters (usually the viewpoint character) clearly state or show what it is he wants. Once that goal has been demonstrated or stated with complete clarity so the reader can have no doubt about what's at issue, then the other character to be in the scene must say, in effect, "Oh, no you won't"—and start the fight.
The fight, the conflict, makes up the bulk of the scene. If it's over a simple issue, the scene may take only a couple of pages to play for all its worth, although most scenes tend to run a little longer than that. In this portion, the characters try different tacks, varying arguments; they struggle for the upper hand. They do not just stand there, in effect yelling at each other "Yes, I