Fiction, part 3

Hello everyone! I hope your weeks got on well, and that you’re all set for the weekend. For all you writers out there, I’ve prepared a little something for you on what not to do when writing fiction. If any of you try your hand at writing a fresh short story, I hope you’ll consider submitting it to Mavguard! Only twenty days left to get your work in!

Follow the Rules

1. No genre

It may sound obvious, but it’s harder than it sounds. Especially if you’re accustomed to writing in genre. The most important thing you can do when writing fiction is make sure that’s really what you’re writing. Focus on the details, on making the story as real as possible. Don’t add too many embellishments, don’t try to take the story in a genre direction. Just write a plausible story about people who could be real people, doing things that anyone might do in their lifetime.

2. No boredom

For me, this is the hardest part about writing fiction. See, I’m a genre fiction writer. That’s what I write on a daily basis. So when I write things in straight fiction, I tend to get a little bit bored. But when the writer gets bored, they lose the interest of the reader – and that’s the very last thing we can allow. Everything we do is done to keep readers, to attract them and hold their interest. If we lose them, then we’ve failed at our primary duty.

So, don’t get bored. Or at the very least, don’t let anyone know if you do. Keep the interest flowing, the ideas moving, the people as real as possible. Make it fun, make it intriguing and increasingly plausible (or implausible, depending on the direction you’re taking). Just make sure that you don’t lose interest. As soon as that happens, you’ve lost the battle.

Next week, we’ll get into some of the fun stuff.

And I repeat – submit to Mavguard! Do it! We want to publish you!

[love and publication]

{Rani Divine}