The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes Read Free

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 warm up your engines. Start the story with the first sentence!
    How do you do that? By recognizing three facts:
    1. Any time you stop to describe something, you have stopped . Asking a reader to jump eagerly into a story that starts without motion is like asking a cyclist to ride a bike with no wheels—he pedals and pedals but doesn't get anywhere. Description is vital in fiction, but at the outset of the story it's deadly.
    2. Fiction looks forward, not backward. When you start a story with background information, you point the reader in the wrong direction, and put her off. If she had wanted old news, she would have read yesterday's newspaper.
    3. Good fiction starts with—and deals with—someone's response to threat.
    Let's look a bit further at this No. 3, because it tells us how our stories should start.
    As human beings, it's in our nature to be fascinated by threat. Start your story with a mountain climber hanging from a cliff by his fingernails, and I guarantee that the reader will read a bit further to see what happens next. Start your story with a child frightened because she has to perform a piano solo before a large recital audience—and feeling threatened, of course—and your reader will immediately become interested in her plight.
    It stands to reason, then, that you should not warm up your engines at the outset. You should start the action. What kind of action? Threat