Categoría: How to write fiction

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How to write fiction

The ouroborus

close up of a black ouroboros ring
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As you can tell from a glance at the Contents, An Introduction to Literature includes practical advice about reading and responding to literature and writing analytical papers, advice that comes directly from our experience not only as readers and writers but also as teachers. This experience derives from classrooms, from conferences with students, and from assignments we have given, read, responded to, and graded. We have learned from our experiences and have done our best to give you the tools that will help you make yourself a more perceptive reader and a more careful, cogent writer.

An Introduction to Literature. Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Second Printing. SYLVAN BARNET. Tufts University

To read in order to write. Anyone who has decided to become a writer has been fed by fiction. Including the fiction that teaches one how to read when literature analysis is no good at all for learning how to keep a plot entertaining. Nonetheless, learning how to read better is important. Noticing how your favourite writer kept you reading is a weapon to add to your arsenal slot.

Are you reading how to become a better reader? Enjoy or hate the reading. Pasto kalo.

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How to write fiction

The magic kingdom of Storytelling

grayscale photo of inflatable unicorn
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As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

Sapiens. Nuval Yoah Harari

Someone will say: But God exists!
And then, we might shut our traps to survive.
Perhaps, only because the only time I discuss fiction is when I’m discussing how fiction is written. Not if the things  in fiction do exist or not. Anyone can play to believe in unicorns, right? Pasto kalo.

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How to write fiction

Tales about tales

pexels-photo-16693267.jpeg
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Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.

Sapiens. Nuval Yoah Harari

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How to write fiction

Conviction, utility and stupidity

black teapot with water
Curiously enough, there were photos for the search with the «stupid» word and none for «dumb». The photos for «stupid» were not suitable at all. I thought a tea pot could do.

[…] the pre-eminent French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, considered ‘the weakness and stupidity of the sheep’ to be so extreme that ‘without the assistance of man, the sheep could never have sub-sisted, or continued its species in a wild state.’ Fortunately, it so happens that ‘this animal, so contemptible in itself, and so devoid
of every mental quality, is, of all others, the most extensively useful to man.’ Here is another formula central to the human–ovine relationship: the sheer inanity of sheep justifies our use of them.

Sheep. Philip Armstrong. Reaktion books.

Can’t we just say it is useful and we are too lazy to go around hunting smarter animals?

Why is it embarrassing to want to eat meat and needing the wool?

Ah right, because then we have to become aware we have been enslaving a fellow being instead of looking up ways to face our wickedness for killing it or ways to make their lives any better in a win-win situation with an inferior1 [oops!] animal.

Only humans are gullible enough to create stories that justify a lot of suffering. For others and ourselves. Remember that when writing. Pasto kalo.

  1. Sheep are smart enough to notice they have done mischief by eating your plants and to know who will pay attention to their bleating tantrums. ↩︎
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How to write fiction

Inadequate ethnological data

a group of dancers in traditional folklore costumes
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The error of the nineteenth-century folklorists was not that they focused on similarities, but that their methods for alleging such similarities were not always sound. Much of what they did involved picking and choosing arbitrarily among inadequate ethnological data and inferring similarity where in many cases it did not exist.
But with over a century of subsequent fieldwork to draw on, today both anthropologists and folklorists are in a better position to make cross-cultural comparisons than were the early folklorists. According to Dundes, studies in the distribution of myths reveal that while there is no myth that is truly universal, so is there no myth that has ever been found to be limited to a single culture (1984, 270). Elsewhere he concludes: “Mythology must be studied in
cultural context in order to determine which individual mythological elements reflect and which refract the culture. But, more than this, the cultural relative approach must not preclude the recognition and identification of transcultural similarities and potential universalities” (1962, 1048).

Archetypes and motifs in folklore and literature : a handbook / edited by Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy

This is important. The hero’s journey is not universal. Not the way Joseph Campbell made it look like or what other writers who take it as universal might push it as a wonderful timeless recipe that only needs tailoring.

Human beings change. Slowly. We have changed from depicting conflicts to crave ideal worlds where everything gets fixed in a finger snap by marrying the rich, having a baby and there’s no great couple bouts. Easy slices of life. Otherwise, webtoons that repeat and repeat such an statement would have gone obsolete very quickly. It is not the case.
Why? Because the conditions young human beings are living now and will, are certainly different. They’re starting to face on imagined realities that went unchallenged for centuries. They still need purpose but they’re realizing purpose doesn’t come from the above or the below or anywhere else. They’re realising there’s the unchangeable human nature. They’re facing destruction in ways we have decided to ignore. They’re angry. Very angry.
They are less in need of a hero’s journey than they’re in need of Prozac.
Enjoy discovering what’s in need. Pasto kalo.

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How to write fiction

Superstitions

small green flower with dew
Photo by Susanne Jutzeler, suju-foto on Pexels.com

Nonverbal customs deriving from ancient fairy belief survive as well. Our forebears once nailed horseshoes above their doorways to keep them safe from fairies, a good-luck practice still widely observed. We encapsulate four-leaf clovers into keychain ornaments to carry as good-luck charms, but have forgotten that our ancestors used them to see through fairy deceptions.

Fairy Lore. A Handbook. D. L Ashliman. Greenwood Folklore Handbooks

Stories survive. The only thing they need to do so is change. Recycle as much as you can from unknown sources but please… Don’t make up Aztec Batmans [does the plural grammar rule apply when I’m speaking of a character being duplicated?].  Reality is stranger than that if you need a muse.

Have fun diving into the garbage bins of storytelling and finding PET. Pasto kalo. 

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How to write fiction

Truth is the aim

blue eyed pupil wallpaper
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What are the aims of the writers of literature? Well, one of our authors, Jamaica Kincaid in various interviews mentions her “insistence on truth,” even if—especially if—the truth is painful. It is not unusual for writers to insist that in their fictions they present truths, they tell it as it is, they wake us up, they seek to make us take off our rose-colored glasses, and to make us see and feel reality. Joseph Conrad, for example, said: “My task . . . is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.”

An Introduction to Literature. Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Second Printing. SYLVAN BARNET.Tufts University

For the definition of it, I don’t write literature. I write fiction. Whatever it is that’s happening when I leave behind something written, it is not to find the truth. For there is a good portion of lies in there.

Have fun writing the truth or inventing it. Pasto kalo.

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How to write fiction

Reference frame and motifs

grey and brown snake opening mouth
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In studying the distributions of motifs, one finds that the same object in different cultures may hold vastly different meanings. For example, snakes are found in the mythology and folktales of many cultures. While in Judeo-Christian tradition the snake usually symbolizes evil, in India it is a sacred creature that plays “a major role in folklore and in many Buddhist, Jaina, and Hindu legends. . . . In southern India, especially on the west coast, many houses have a snake shrine or a snake grove in a corner of the garden, where offerings, especially of milk, are made to the snakes” (Dallapiccola 2002, 139–140). In European folklore the dragon is a guardian of remote, dark regions and often a beast to whom humans must be sacrificed, but in many Asian cultures dragons are helpers of human beings and bring good luck.

Archetypes and motifs in folklore and literature : a handbook / edited by Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy

Just as in visual communication. You can’t take colour red meaning the same in Mexico as it does in Vietnam. The meaning will be dictated by the referencial frame of the culture behind, or altered. Either by convention (security manuals stating red is the colour to indicate hot water pipes and water sources for firefighters) or by individual choices. Knowledge alters the way we represent or abstract things.
Someone who has read manga instead of comics won’t see heros the same way someone who has grown up only with superman.

Hereby, motifs in folklore will differ in meaning and use depending on the original culture.

Enjoy thinking outside your cultural frame or enhance the cultural motifs in yours. Pasto kalo.

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How to write fiction

Is it worth to write short stories? How to write them? p3

man in orange jacket and gray pants holding black and red fishing rod
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HOW TO WRITE SHORT STORIES THEN?

  • Make the character list short
  • Start the closestto the ending
  • If you’re to count…No more than 1000-5000 words
  • Use a very defined ruling idea: adultery, murder, justice, anecdotic.
  • Use a very strong point of view.If it is a murder take a stance in favour or against and how you expect the reader to react.
  • Remember, for the second time, you’re to write very few words
  • Erase, erase, erase. Or to say it in the craft’s argot: edit. With the big scissor.

For en ending I’ll take a phrase attributed both to Mark Twain and Blaise Pascal:

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte[1].

I wrote long to you for I had no time to make it short.

Summarizing: to make something as short as a question mark, Victor Hugo must have spent more than a few hours thinking. He also must have filled the waste bin.

What do you prefer writing: long or short stories?

Enjoy both. Pasto kalo.

[1] It is attributed to Pascal in French… I shrug. I don’t know.

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How to write fiction

Is it worth to write short stories? How to write them? p2

grayscale photo of tree on a snow covered field
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WHAT’S THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA’S TOPIC?

Survival.

We all like survival. We all are survivors of something. The displaced Russians from Tajikistan have fled their home to go and settle in Chernobil. They have gone from surviving war to surviving radiation. We, the rest of us with a lot less dramatic survival feats, survive sickness, nature… stupid bosses.

In short, The old man and the sea is short, subtle and kicks ass.

HOWEVER, THAT IS NOT AN ARGUMENT FOR SHORT

The old man could be shorter. And according to literary analyze, Hemingway wanted to take us into a fight against adversity through dense[1] (in some critic’s opinion) prose. And the ending is equally futile as the useless struggle of K in The castle[2] by Kafka.

TO THIS, <<MORE WORDS>> SEEMS BETTER, RIGHT?

This is the moment I bring up a very short letter. Once upon a day, Mr. Hugo —no one you would know but the author of The miserables, Our lady of Paris[3], The legend of centuries; delivered or had delivered some manuscript and as soon as he was told the manuscript was being sold, he went and took out his suitcase[4]. After jumping on it to be able to close it, he went on holiday.

Yet… he was restless about the book selling[5]. So much he couldn’t sleep and decide to write to his editor. Indeed his editor was a really busy person with lots of appointments in his agenda. Thus, Hugo wrote a really short letter:

?

… In a whole blank page with nothing else in it?

Yes.

And the answer?

!

Not always writing a lot is writing better. It is the how good you’re telling tales.

HOW TO WRITE SHORT STORIES THEN?

TO BE CONTINUED

[1] No wonder I didn’t like it. I’m a simple human being.

[2] Thos one I abandoned because I read the prologue. And its author had the great idea of telling me K never reaches the castle.  Thus the dense and heavy prose feels like making line in any health bureaucrat’s department to end up being told there are no appointments available. No need to torture myself any longer.

[3] So far I’ve only read that one and Hernani, the one piece Paganini allegedly plagiarized to write Rigoletto.

[4] Spicing things up, I’m not sure it happened exactly like that.

[5] Precisely Les miserables.