Categoría: How to write fiction

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How to write fiction

The big questions

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Where do stories come from? How do they work? What do they tell us about ourselves? What do they mean? Why do we need them? How can we use them to improve the world?

Above all, how do storytellers manage to make the story mean something? Good stories make you feel you’ve been through a satisfying, complete experience. You’ve cried or laughed or both. You finish the story feeling you’ve learned something about life or about yourself. Perhaps you’ve picked up a new awareness, a new character or attitude to model your life on. How do storytellers manage to pull that off? What are the secrets of this ancient trade? What are its rules and design principles?

THE WRITER’S JOURNEY ~ THIRD EDITION. Christopher Vogler. Published by Michael Wiese Productions

I know. Not all writers wonder. Perhaps narratologists do. And not all good stories make you cry or laugh. I didn’t cry or laughed with Macbeth or Hamlet. I was enchanted with the body spread on stage (on my mind since I’ve never seen those performed). Am I weird? A little, right?

I also remember books that follow this hero’s journey idea that bored me up to the third or second sequel. The same structure again and again[1]. By the third book I had figured out some female character would need help and this guy, out of an outdated noblesse towards females, would go, lose his liver, an eye, ribs or got a broken leg and; gathering strength from nature or any other pre ordained magical condition, defeat the evil being. Thank you very much, where can I read something that’s not as predictable? Very akin to what happens to some fighting webtoons. Yet, for those; I still wanna know: why does the main character own two bodies?

Dramas that intend to leave behind a moral principle that infuriated me enough to question myself if the writer belittles their audience or if the audience is really that stupid. I always conclude it’s either the writer or the government trying to censure any gray morals. What if anyone feels like robbing a bank? No, we can’t have that. Those who dare may be banned from reincarnation.

Great stories have things in common. Indeed. However, they’re not always the same pattern. Good storytelling is like quantum physics. If you think you understand quantum physics, you understand nothing.

Have fun wondering. Pasto kalo.   

[1] I’m too sophisticated for the franchise story ( except Harry Potter or A song of ice and fire…) but too vulgar for the intellectual quest of revolutionary story telling.

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How to write fiction

The easy way

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“One thing I’ve learned, Calvin: people will always yearn for a simple solution to their complicated problems. It’s a lot easier to have faith in something you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t explain, and can’t change, rather than to have faith in something you actually can.” She sighed. “One’s self, I mean.” She tensed her stomach.

Lessons in chemistry. Bonnie Garmus

Since humans are capable of creating things that do not exist and make of them something real inside their brains and by agreement with many others1; is it possible to influence the universe by believing things?

Have you ever though what would happen if your story were to come alive just because it exists within the realms of the brain?

On the other side. Why can’t we just face things the way they are? Is it too scary?

Pasto kalo.

  1. That is what we should call the collective unconscious. Imagined realities are there by agreement and firmly implanted into the unconscious by repetition. I still open my mouth to answer «amen» when mass ends in movies. Then I smirk. ↩︎
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How to write fiction

Prosody

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All poets use rhythm and all readers of poetry hear rhythm, whether or not they are conscious of doing so, but prosody, the description and analysis of poetic rhythms, can be as complicated as musical notation, and different languages require different sorts of prosody.

In the classical languages prosody was quantitative, based on vowel length or quantity. In Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) prosody was qualitative, based on patterns of stress or accent (with other complex rules concerning alliteration, p. 202). In Slavic languages, like Russian, words can be very long, because such synthetic languages build a lot of meaning into one word by adding prefixes and inflecting endings, but there is also a rule which allows only one stress per word, however long––so Russian poetry is usually analysed with a basis in accent but many variants. In Romance languages, like French, rules of stress are more flexible than Russian but more rigid than English and French poetry is usually analysed in syllabic prosody, according to the number of syllables in each line.

The Poetry Handbook. A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism. Second Edition. JOHN LENNARD. Oxford University Press

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New word I’m sure I’ll forget in less than a week. Have fun reading about things you have no idea about , to improve the writing. Pasto kalo.

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How to write fiction

The ouroborus

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.