GOALS

Purpose: how to best use this website as a learning source for your writing improvement.

This site is presented as a reference resource for writers. But it can be used in a systematic approach for learning to write great fiction.

These are the goals the site will serve best:

1. Write a better story using imagination, structure, and reader-sensitive prose.
2. Learn in scene writing techniques to intensify reader involvement in story and character, and avoid excessive descriptive narration, which is easier to write.
3. Learn to value thinking before writing, and then approach prose with a purpose.
4. Make revision useful by recreating structure and emotional arcs rather than just cosmetic adjustments to fundamental problems already written.
5. Develop your style by learning craft and story telling from others but not just copying style components of others.
6. Master concept of character-driven plots, the essence of a good literary story.
7. Mature your attitudes and concepts about writing
   as you learn to modify rules and edicts.
8. Appreciate narration of stories and learn how point of view is a function of narration, not a commandment.

By exploring the site, you should try to appreciate how many different skills are operating together when great stories are written. Your challenge is to get them all perfect then synchronize them to contribute.

THE GUIDE

I. WRITING LITERARY STORY AS AN ART FORM

The complexities of writing story as an art form are endless. As a result, there is no simplified road map for the writer. It is at once daunting and exciting that writing a story is thousands of conscious and unconscious decisions at all levels. Writers’ attitudes about writing and life must be formed; writers must develop story excellence that pleases the readers they want to please; and writers must develop skills so they control their writing, not their writing controlling them.

Writing literary fiction is not just describing an interesting human from the writer’s experience, or trying to recreate, by description, in the reader, emotions and interest in events that interested and produced emotions in the writer. The literary story is created as an art form for maximum effectiveness as a story. It is a special skill—and talent.

II. STRUCTURE

Writers write one word a time. The quality of the words chosen and how they are incorporated into an effective story element is significantly affected when the author, instead of writing in the immediacy of the focused moment, is continuously aware of what has come before and after and what the overall purpose is for the story. Many writers deny any advantage to writing with purpose, preferring to meander from sentence to sentence, seeking enjoyment in the immediate construction that loosely relates to what has been written but is afforded no direction of firm idea of where the writing is going. Structure is not just outline, or writing in context of beginning middle and end, although these can be important. Overall, structure is a concept of unity and interaction of the parts that will cohere created story-elements into controlled action that is pleasant to read.

A painting analogy. To create a painting so the painting in recognizable and provokes some emotional reaction is a process that is more than positioning paint with brush strokes. Painting, whether realistic or the abstract, is thinking about pigments, reflected light, shadows, values, line, continuity, contrast and surprise. The writer who treats words as random brush strokes will never create an effective canvas of a written story that will please a reader to the maximum possible.

III.CHARACTERIZATION: WHERE IT ALL BEGINS

Character is everything. And it is not just making the mundane interesting. Not at all. It is creating unique, interesting, significant characters that last in the memory. No author succeeds at great characterization all the time, if ever. But all should try, at every writing effort, with every story.

Character does not replace plot in literary fiction, character is the plot. A literary story catapults along with beginning, middle, and end; plot points, and dramatic conflict and resolution; but what happens relates to character—not to fate, or environment, or accidental clumsiness. Plot is driven by character desire and motivation, and character’s gifts and flaws. It is not easy, but it is rewarding to author and reader.

IV. CRAFT (SKILL AT DOING SOMETHING)

The mechanics of craft are enjoyable when used as a process to express story-purpose thoughts to achieve emotional reader-involvement or intellectual enlightenment. But craft is technique that is not an end in itself. Craft allows writers to use prose as a way to express the dynamics of a story. It is not just filling in a crossword puzzle, it is thinking about puzzle, then blocking out the puzzle and placing the clues so ideas in the puzzle can be enjoyed by the solver.

Learning craft of prose composition and effective thought transfer is a lifelong undertaking that is integral to learning great storytelling. Craft is most easily practiced in descriptive story style, yet the most useful craft development for most stories comes from emotional engagement of the reader in story and characters. For emotional involvement, writers must look to craft to create conflict and action in writing; strive for reader understanding of emotion, motivations and desires; and create through action and dialogue–and avoiding sentimentality—unwavering interest in the reader by writing crisp, clear, effective prose, in addition to descriptive, lyrical prose.

V. THE PROCESS OF LEARNING