Alan Wall - Writing Fiction

Collins
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First published by Collins 2007

Copyright HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

Text: Alan Wall

Writing exercises: Gill Paul

Editor: Grapevine Publishing Services Ltd

Typesetter: Judith Ash

Series design: Mark Thomson

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007244355

Ebook Edition JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007591848

Version: 2017-01-12

Fiction is the creation of character and narrative in prose. Theatre and cinema have images and music; they even have holograms and special effects. Radio at least has the intonations of an actors voice, to beckon and cajole. Fiction relies entirely on the written word as it is presented to the reading eye on the page. In this lies its enormous freedom, and its peculiar difficulties. There is nothing in principle that the fiction writer cannot do. The writing must be accomplished though, or the reader will soon be lost.

Ancient writers used to say that fiction stood midway between history and fable. It employs the inventiveness of legend but must make itself convincing by use of that historical element which produces a kind of realism, even in the modern form of writing called magic realism. In a fairy story, a giant eagle can swoop out of the sky and carry away our hero to a safer land. If the modern writer of fiction is to employ the same device then there can be no automatic reliance upon the readers acceptance or credulity.

Fiction must convince, and it achieves this by the skilfulness of the writing, and the sense of localized reality it generates. The means by which such skilfulness might be achieved are the subject of this book. Writing Fiction does not make any pretence to being exhaustive, since it could not possibly be so. What it does is to try to cover some of the techniques required for any serious writer of fiction today.

Fiction creates an imaginary world. It may be only a cameo of a world, as in a short story. It may be an enormous, panoramic world with multiple characters, the sort we find in George Eliot or Tolstoy. It may be a world of considerable external activity, as in Gullivers Travels or Tom Jones, or one of unrelenting interiority, as with much of Samuel Becketts later writing. Sometimes it is obsessed with war, sex or history. It may be set in the past, as a great deal of contemporary writing is; or it may be set in the future, like much of the work we normally refer to as science fiction. This last term is not a very helpful one, since much futuristic writing is relatively unconcerned with science. But we are stuck with it, and will use it here, referring to this type of writing from now on as SF.

An imaginary world convinces us of its verisimilitude its truthfulness within its own form by the specific gravity of its characters and the different aspects of fiction writing which allow the writer to shape such an imaginary world successfully. We will look at such aspects of fiction writing as character, plot, voice, setting, humour and irony. We will look carefully at the writers use of language. This is, after all, our medium; lack of attention here would be fatal. We are shaping worlds and we do it with words.

We read fiction to enter a new world; and we write it to create one. Fiction is a way of exploring reality through invention. Lets start, logically enough, with ways of establishing the characters who are going to tell us the story.

must know

Where to begin?

Start writing wherever the interest is greatest; always try to write out of passionate concern, since this tends to produce the best prose. It does not matter whether or not this will end up as the beginning. When the beginning must finally be composed (often towards the end of the writing process, in fact) it needs to be striking, succinct and enticing. Remember: it is on the basis of this that the reader will or will not proceed.

Beginnings

The beginning of any work of fiction is an announcement. In a sense it is even an annunciation. A curious unknown creature enters the room of our life and changes the narrative tone of everything. Thats what any new beginning, any story or novel, does inside the room of our minds. A door opens and a different voice is heard for the first time. Everything suddenly changes. Our new world has arrived.

For this reason, the beginning of any piece of fictional writing is crucial. Its achievement or lack of it will decide whether we are to continue or not. This entry into our lives, this sudden consciousness of an unknown voice, an unfamiliar story, a different account of things, is asking for our time. So what does it offer in return? Let us look at a few famous openings and see what they put before us.

Here is the beginning of Herman Melvilles Moby Dick:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago never mind how long precisely having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking peoples hats off then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Ishmael wants us to be on first-name terms. The very first sentence of the book is an invitation to intimacy. But note how much information we are given in this opening; see how much we find out about Ishmael without being subjected to any lists:

Ishmael is a restless soul.

He is evidently not a rich man.

He has no family ties to hold him to a particular place.

He is ironic, about himself and others.

The combination of melancholy and his hypos suggests a temperament we might nowadays call manic-depressive. And the urgency of his tone suggests a trenchant mind.

The economy of means employed to convey all this biographical data so rapidly, and without employing any type of catalogue, deserves study. This is writing of a high standard, as can be seen by the swiftness with which it relocates us from our daily reality into the fictional one.