The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [5]
It's worth the time. Expect no overnight miracles, but have faith. If you persevere, the chances are very good that you will achieve some success.
Conversely, if you get disgusted or discouraged, expecting overnight fame and fortune, you're certain to fail. Absolutely.
Write in your journal, or in some other permanent record, your goal as a writer five years from today. Assuming (as is true) that a writing career proceeds by small steps forward—write where you hope ideally to be as a writer four years from now. And in three years. And in two. And by next year this time.
Put that list of hopes aside somewhere safe. Get to work. Be patient, but press yourself to work hard. Make notes of your insights and learned skills as you come upon them. Then, a year from now, compare where you were (now) with where you will be by that time. You'll be surprised and pleased.
Maybe you won't be a selling writer of fiction yet. But you'll be a lot closer and able to see your own progress.
5. DON'T WARM UP YOUR ENGINES
OFTEN, WHEN I START to read a story written by an inexperienced writer, I am reminded of those cold winter mornings long ago in Ohio when I sat miserably beside my father in the old Buick, in the dark garage, waiting for the engine to warm up before driving away from home.
In those days it was considered good form to warm your engine before driving the car. Multiviscosity engine oil was far in the future, and the theory was that the motor should idle a while under no strain while the heat of ignition warmed the oil so it could circulate more freely, providing better lubrication.
Those days are long gone. But, amazingly, fiction writers still do the same kind of unnecessary and wasteful thing in starling their stories.
"Why," I may ask them, "have you started your story with this long, static description of a town (or a house, or a street, or a country scene)?"
"Well," the beginning writer will reply, puzzled, "I need to set up where the story is going to take place."
Or I may be forced to ask, "Why have you started this story by giving me background information about things that happened months (or even years) ago?"
"Well," the poor neophyte will say, "I wanted the reader to know all that before starting the story."
Such static or backward-looking approaches to fiction are probably lethal in a novel, and are certainly fatal in a modem short story. Readers today—and that of course includes editors who will buy or reject your work—are more impatient than ever before. They will not abide a story that begins with the author warming up his engines. If a setting needs to be described, it can be described later, after you have gotten the story started. If background must be given the reader, it can be given later, after you have intrigued him with the present action of the story.
I've had the horrific experience of standing in the doorway of a room at a magazine publishing house where first readers go through freelance submissions, deciding whether the stories should be passed on to an editor for further consideration, or sent back as a rejection at once. Sometimes a reader would slit the end of a manila envelope and pull the manuscript only halfway out of the envelope, scanning the first paragraph or two of the yarn. Sometimes—on the basis of this glance alone—the, story was either passed on to an editor for consideration, or tossed into the reject pile.
Do you think that you're really going to get past that first reader with an unmoving description of a house or a street? Do you imagine that that reader, going through hundreds of manuscripts every day, is going to pass on your story if it begins with stuff that happened twenty years ago?
The chances are very, very slim.
Moral: Don't