I haven’t written fiction in more years than I care to say, but recently I became involved with the unbelievably awesome Fiction Workshop over at PALnet’s Discord channel. What started as a Peer-Review sub-channel (with little to no community, direction, or participation) has – in large part due to @Rhondak’s tireless efforts – become a supportive, inspirational, and discerning group of authors dedicated to creating and promoting quality content.
And by “quality” we mean fiction that would be publishable on the open market. Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of stuff on Steemit making big bucks that is frankly unreadable.
I’m looking at you, “Exclamation! Marks! End! Every! Sentence! Guy!” and you, “random-Capitalization-Of-words-girl”
Rather than sitting around licking our wounds or flagging shitposts, we are ‘tending to the logs in our own eyes’ by submitting our work to rigorous examination and feedback. We are putting our time and effort into each other’s work because we genuinely believe a rising tide lifts all ships. We want to be that rising tide and at least some of the ships.
I find certain recommendations are being made again and again (both by me and to me) and I thought it would be nice to spend some time sharing those in a more easily and permanently accessible way than a channel comment.
"Yeah, just scroll up about 30 hours to see when @PegasusPhysics wrote an extensive explanation of that very thing”
So I’m going to dedicate a series of posts to writing to be read, starting (appropriately) with the beginning.
Let’s start [the action] at the very beginning
According to those in the know, you have about 100 words to either hook a reader or lose them. When you read your own writing, step outside your head as best you can and ask yourself, “What have I said to a reader in this first paragraph or two?”
If you see that you’ve told them:
- What your character looks like
- What he does for a living
- Where he is right now
Then those things better be really interesting. If they are:
- Handsome
- Office job
- Work
You’re going to have a bored reader. A bored reader will quickly become a non-reader. If, on the other hand, they are:
- Deeply scarred below the right eye
- Black ops team leader
- Hiding behind enemy lines
Plenty of people are going to want to read more.
A great way to have an impact immediately - while also getting in those things you feel are essential to impart in the beginning - is to pepper your descriptions of the action with hints or references instead of spending your first 100 crucial words spelling out everything about your character. Let your reader get to know your character as they would a person in real life: a little bit at a time. How weird would it be if someone you just met rattled off an exhaustive itemization of his every character trait, educational experience, relationship status, and family member?
I did NOT need to know you had a hairy back…yet
I think that’s enough to start with. I really want to keep these relatively short and sweet. I go a little more in depth on how to let your reader in on details without drowning them in narrative chatter in my next post, Show, Don’t Tell, aka Show me yours, I'll Show you Mine
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