The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes Read Free Page B

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 simply this: to describe something in detail, you have to stop the action. But without the action, the description has no meaning.
    Therefore, whenever you try to inflict on your readers a detailed description, your story stops. And readers are interested in the story—the movement—not your fine prose.
    Does this mean you should have no description in your story? Of course not. Description must be worked in carefully, in bits and pieces, to keep your reader seeing, hearing, and feeling your story world. But please note the language here: it must be worked in, a bit at a time , not shoveled in by the page.
    I am certainly not the first person to warn about "poetic" descriptions and how they stop a story. And yet they continue to appear again and again in amateur copy. Such segments prove one of two things: either the writer has no understanding of the basic nature of fiction, or the writer is so in love with her own words that she allows arrogance to overcome wisdom. "Fine writing" almost always slows the story's pace and distracts readers from the story line itself.
    And note, please, that description can be something other than writing about a tree