The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [7]
"But I really like that stuff about Grandpaw and Grandmaw, and how things were in 1931!" I hear you protest "I want to put that stuff in!"
Not in this story, you can't—not if this story is set in present tunes. Maybe you can work a little of it into the story later, but starting with it will kill you. (If worse comes to worst, you can write some other story about the 1930s, where the old stuff can become present-day stuff in terms of the story's assumptions.)
Remember what the reader wants. Don't try to inflict your author concerns on her. You must give her what she wants at the start, or she'll never read any further.
And what she wants—what will hook her into reading on—is threat.
The most common variety of which is change.
Test yourself on this. In your journal or notebook, make a list of ten times in your life when you felt the most scared or worried.
My list might include my first day at college, the day I entered active duty with the air force, my first formal speech before a large audience, and my first solo in a small plane. Your list might be quite different. But our lists, I'll bet, will have one thing in common. Both will represent moments of change.
Having realized this, you might want to make a second list, this one of ten changes that you think might make good opening threats in stories. It's perfectly all right to build upon some of your own real-life experiences here. It's equally okay to make up threatening changes.
In either case, I suggest that you keep this list, and the next time you catch yourself sensing that the opening of your current fiction project is bogging down or going too slowly, compare your problem opening with your list of ideas in terms of depth and seriousness of the change you're dealing with. Maybe you'll find that you've backslid into warming up your story engines instead of starting with that crucial moment of change that really gets the yarn under way.
6. DON'T DESCRIBE SUNSETS
READERS NEED DESCRIPTION in the stories they read to visualize settings and people—really "get into the action." But sometimes writers get carried away and go too far in trying to provide such descriptions; they stop too often to describe such things as sunsets, thinking that pretty prose is an end in itself—and forgetting that when they stop to describe something at length, the story movement also stops.
A friend of mine, the late Clifton Adams, was an enormously gifted writer of western fiction, short stories and novels. In one of his prizewinning western novels, he devoted several pages to describing a sunset. It was an amazing departure from established norms in professional fiction.
Yet in this isolated circumstance it worked. Adams had set up the story situation in a way that told the reader of a dire threat as soon as total darkness fell, a band of desperadoes planned to attack the hero's lonely frail camp and do him in. For this reason, every word of the sunset description was relevant—and painfully suspenseful.
Only in such a special situation can you devote great space to description, no matter how poetic it may seem to you. One of the standing jokes among writers and publishers is about the amateur writer who devotes precious space to describing a sunrise or sunset. All you have to do, in some publishing circles, is mention something like "the rosy fingers of dawn" and you get smiles all around. Such descriptions usually are a hallmark of poor fiction writing.
If you've been reading this book straight through from the front, you already see why this is so. Fiction is movement. Description is static. Trying to put in a lengthy description of a setting or person in fiction is a little like the dilemma facing physicists when they try to describe the nature of the electron. As one distinguished scientist once put it, "You can describe what an electron is at a given moment, but if you do, you don't know exactly where it is; or you can try to describe where it is, but then you can't say exactly what it is."
Part of what he was saying, I think, was