All Write - Fiction Advice

Characters are an important element in any story. They have to be the perfect fit; the right personality and the right name etc., so that for the readers, the characters feel like real people. Every one of them is different, yet their stories and experiences are similar to our own. One thing that helps a story stand out isn’t just authorial voice – it’s character voice. Your characters are individuals with their own personalities, traits and flaws. They are their own people. They are not you. And they shouldn’t be anything like you. That’s where a lot of authors fall down. When they create their main characters, they often create them with themselves in mind, and too much of the writer’s personality creeps into their characters. That’s because it’s easier to write about us rather than go to all that trouble of characterising. While it’s not a bad thing to have some little snippets of our own personalities in our characters, remember that your protagonist isn’t you. The charac...

There is a lot of mixed advice about using co-ordinating conjunctions such as ‘and’, but’, ‘or’, ‘so’, and ‘yet’ etc. Some people advise against their use in writing, while others advocate it. What advice should you follow? Which one is right? The simple truth is that there is absolutely nothing wrong using co-ordinating conjunctions to start a sentence. This writing myth may have evolved around rigid schoolteachers who taught children that such sentence constructions were not grammatically correct and thus perpetuated the idea that it’s wrong to use them. But it isn’t wrong. That’s because writing is all about balance rather than ‘right or wrongs’. For example, the general advice about adverbs is to cut down on their use and use nouns and verbs to strengthen your narrative. That doesn’t mean that every adverb must be eradicated. It just means to cut back on them to make the writing better . The same is true for adjective use or passive sentences etc. So there is no reason why ...

One of the things I see when I edit other writers is the inability to control time. But what does that mean?   The notion of time in a novel is different to time in the real world. That’s because, in fiction, we can play around with time. We can jump from point to point in any moment in time – sometimes we can cover whole generations. We can move forward or back, we manipulate time, but it has to be done properly. Without the right attention, the inability to control time can cause problems with pace and the reader could become confused as to when time is supposed to have passed, and when it doesn’t. The biggest problem is the writer’s tendency to rush the narrative, which means the sense of time is also rushed.   For example, when one scene zips to the other without the slightest hint to the reader that three weeks have passed, then it blurs the transition of time and causes confusion. Has time actually passed?   Is it the next day?   Next week?   W...

Short stories are not always easy, simply because of the way they are constructed.   There’s a lot to pack into something that may only be a few thousand words.   But the fundamental difference between a novel and a short story, other than the length, is that a short story only captures a brief moment in your main character’s life, rather than a set timeline of events.   That’s because novels can span years or even decades.   A short story simply doesn’t have the room to focus on these things. It can only capture a few days in the life of your protagonist. This makes it easier to condense a lot of the fictional elements into a short time frame.   The best short stories tend to have short time-spans – hours rather than days.   It keeps the story tight, concise and focused. The structure of the short story is important – it consists of a single premise, a coupe of characters, a strong theme and it takes place in a short time frame. By their very natur...

While fictional stories are just that – fictitious – there’s one thing they rely on in order to help them convince the reader that the story feels real, and that is facts. Whether it’s thriller, crime, romance or a historical novel – facts make a difference to the overall enjoyment of a book. It lends to its realism . Facts provide extra layers to your description and dialogue; the more descriptive layers you have, the better experience for the reader. That doesn’t mean you have top overload the story with every single fact you can find, but rather it’s down to the subtle snippets of information you weave into the story.    We’re always told to ‘write what we know’ – so if you’re a photographer, you could use this in a story, or perhaps you are a nurse, so your medical background knowledge is very handy or maybe you’re a mechanic and you make your protagonist a mechanic...it’s all knowledge and skills you can and should use, but sometimes what we know isn’t always a...

Editors talk a lot about description in fiction, and one of the things I often see when editing other writers is the lack of description, or if there is some, it’s too weak to make the story as effective as it should. Writers tend to be very good at it, or pretty bad. Description shouldn’t be confused with narrative, which is the expositional bit of writing woven between the dialogue and the active descriptions. Any good story isn’t effective without great description – it’s a clever way to involve the reader, to help them imagine themselves within the story, with the characters, to show them action, drama, tension, atmosphere, mood and, importantly, emotion and conflict. It places the reader within that setting, that moment; it makes the story feel real. And the best way to do this is to write description that appeals to the reader’s senses, engages them, thrills them and takes them on an emotional journey. It’s sensory description. Well written description utilises the sense...

Never underestimate the power of conflict. Without it, stories wouldn’t exist. No matter what the story is, your characters will disagree over things, dislike one another, argue, fight, hate antagonists, dislike themselves or situations they’re created or found themselves caught in, or disagree with things around them. This is exactly what happens in real life.   Such conflict makes life interesting, exciting, crazy, frustrating and, at times, hard. That’s because conflict creates all manner of emotions, which forms an essential ingredient in fiction and pushes the story forward to its conclusion. Layered conflict is what it says – it’s a way for the writer to add layers of conflict throughout the story. This builds the drama and tension until the story reaches its conclusion.   But conflict comes in different ways. Characters can come into conflict with other characters, they can come into conflict with their environment and they can come into conflict with themselv...