writing fiction with style
“What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, ‘Write what you know.’ It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know, we never grow. We don’t develop any facility for languages, an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.”
– Annie Proulx
As writers, our adventures begin when we journey into make-believe.
And after returning from the seabeds of our imaginations, we empty out piles of monsters and treasures that allow us to become that which transcends time, language, and culture: artisans of fiction.
Fiction writing is among the most potent forms of expression available to the human brain. There’s a near-godlike power one feels when using words to build worlds; the architectural joy of creating characters, settings, and stories that have never existed before. And depending on their intent, the fruits of a writer’s imagination can delight our senses or wrestle with our beliefs.
When we translate those stories into letterform, we bring them to life in a way others can experience.
It would be terrifying if it weren’t so damn cool.
Because there are so many of them, and they fascinate me, I’ve decided to scuba dive into various styles of fictional writing.
For part one, join me as I wax prosaic about the worlds we weave in our heads.
Part 1: Prose
Every writer begins with prose — if only for the unimaginative reason that we learned our letters by way of cats who sat on mats. This straightforward, linear expression of ideas is the foundation of most fictional works — good prose will let you tell a story without pretence.
But to truly master prose, one must balance the necessary and the decorative.
Ernest Hemingway proposed the Iceberg Theory, which prioritises subtext, omission, and above all, faith in your reader’s intelligence:
“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”
In other words: never convey explicitly that which you can trust your reader to infer. (And in stating that, I’ve already broken the rule.)
In his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell suggests that bad prose (besides its “avoidable ugliness”) has two primary qualities: it uses stale imagery and lacks precision.
He elaborates:
“The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.”
…and he laments:
“Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of prefabricated hen-house.”
Orwell proposed a solution with 6 rules for writing effective prose:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive when you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll talk about poetic writing (and how to completely ignore all of the advice you’ve just read here).