The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes Read Free Page A

—and a response to it.
    Every good story starts at a moment of threat.
    Does this mean you are doomed to spend your writing career looking for new and dire physical threats? I don't think so, although some fine writers have thrived by writing fiction dealing with literal, physical threat and danger. But you don't have to write about physical catastrophe to have fascinating threat in your stories.
    Think back a moment over your own life. What were some of the times when you felt most scared, most threatened? Perhaps it was your first day of school. Or at a time when there was a death in the family, or a divorce. Perhaps the first time you had to speak a line in a school play. Or when you tried out for a sports team. Maybe your first date? When you changed schools? When the family moved? When some new people moved in next door to you, and you didn't know if you would like them? When you were engaged or married, or when you started your first real job? When you were fired from a job? Or promoted to a better one?
    All stressful events. All threatening, even though many of them were happy occasions. Now, why should that be so? Isn't it strange that happy events would be threatening?
    Not at all. Better minds than I have pointed out that we human beings like to feel in harmony with our environment and our situation in life. Each of us carries inside a view of ourselves, our life, and the kind of person we are. When things are going well, we feel in harmony with everything and everyone around us, and we aren't threatened. But enter change —almost any change—and our world has been shaken up. We feel uneasy.
    Threatened.
    Nothing is more threatening than change.
    From this, it stands to reason that you will know when and where to start your story—page one, line one—when you identify the moment of change. Because change is where the story starts.
    A bus comes to town, and a stranger gets off.
    The boss calls an employee: "Please come in here. I have something important to tell you."
    A new family moves into the house down the block.
    A telegram is delivered to your door.
    The seasons change, and you grow restless... uneasy.
    It is at this moment of crucial change, whatever it may be, that your story starts. Identify the moment of change, and you know when your story must open. To begin in any other way is to invite disaster:
    • Open earlier, with background, and it's dull.
    • Open by looking somewhere else in the story, and it's irrelevant.
    • Open long after the change, and it's confusing.
    Begin your story now. Move it forward now. All that background is an author concern. Readers don't care . They don't want it. The reader's concern is with change... threat... how a character will respond now .
    "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