Writing Great Fiction I

Cave paintings tell us that even before formal language was developed Man wanted to tell his story to the world. Great writers like Ernest Hemmingway, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen wrote because they wanted to tell of their experiences, their ideas and eventually leave behind a unique mark.

Hemmingway said, ‘There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.’

Anybody can write.

What is more important is to know why you want to write. It is not easy to hammer out 60,000 words that tell a story in such a way that people will want to read it. So it is important that you know the reasons you want to write one. I know a writer who wrote a book just to gift it to his daughter. He was not interested whether anyone else read it or not. Great reason. Noble thought. That’s what I think.

PART 1: THE WHY

So WHY do you want to write?

My reply is: I have always wanted to spin stories that would be as compelling a read as those of my favourite authors. It was a challenge I threw at myself.

This may not be your reason. The reasons for writing fiction could be as diverse as there are people.

It is possible you feel very strongly about an issue and want to communicate it to the world. Take for instance, George Orwell’s 1984. He was concerned about totalitarian governments taking away people's rights and freedoms. So he wrote 1984 which is, today, too close to reality for comfort.

Maybe, you would like to bring to the world a unique experience as happened in the case of Roots by Alex Haley or in ER Braithwaite’s To Sir, with Love; made into a wildly popular film. In my book, Dangle, I wanted to take my readers to beautiful Manipur, closed to tourists and ravaged by insurgency portrayed through eyewitness accounts.
However, you may just want to entertain readers with a romance or make them shake in their shoes with the supernatural or thrill them with a whodunit.

Or you may want to explore the truths of Life, as in Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea.
Or none of these reasons work for you. Your Why could be quite different.

But whatever it may be, there is absolutely no doubt that the starting point is the Why or Whys.

Knit the Whys into your writing

Once the whys are clear to you, knit them into your fiction so that they are comprehensible as well as enthralling to the reader.

Depending on your whys, there are different ways of weaving them in. While your basic story could be a simple one, your Whys to emerge naturally and smoothly from the tale.

Let’s consider The Old Man and the Sea. At one level it is the simple tale of a man and a fish. At another, it is a story of man versus nature. The entire story takes place over a few hours but the dynamics of those hours are sufficient for the message to come across. The book cannot but make you think about courage in the face of existence. Not just that impressions remain with us over the years.

As a writer you have to structure your novel so that your communication to your readers is crystal clear. Therein lays your skill. Writing is a conversation between the reader and the writer. Remember, if readers do not understand your communiqué or misinterpret it, a writer cannot blame them for their inability. The ball is firmly in your court to convey the Whys of your fiction. It is not their responsibility to seek them out.

There is a range of styles through which your whys can be communicated in your writing. Just remember to choose an effective style. Take a look at the styles of some well-known works of fiction. You could write:

A narrative like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
A fantastical satire such as Alice in Wonderland or Gulliver’s Travels.
It can be a first person account such as in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake
You tell the story in flashbacks as in Lahiri’s The Lowlands.
It can be in the form of letters like Jean Webster’s Daddy Longlegs
You may decide to use the stream of consciousness as in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
You might want to do things differently like Davy Eggers in Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? Written in 2014, the story is told entirely in dialogue.

Fiction is a potent and powerful medium. Whether you want to entertain or express your point of view you must tap its potential to the fullest.

Writing Great Fiction I

Writing Great Fiction I

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