Good Fiction Writing is specific…and More

Good fiction writing names things, particular things.

As writers we tend to default to the general. It’s easier. Consider this  snatch of speech, a character describing himself for a dating service: “I like reading, I like sports, I like eating, I like having fun with my friends.” What have we learned about the speaker? Almost nothing.

Now try this: “I like reading horror novels in which evil telepathic children threaten to devour their parents. I like Ultimate Fighting. I like eating things that are still alive. I like going out with my metalhead buddies and throwing cherry bombs into church sanctuaries.”

I’m sorry if I offended anyone, but I went extreme for a reason. We’re looking at the same list, only now it’s specific. And what have we learned? A lot. In particular, that we would probably jaywalk cross 42nd Street at rush hour to avoid getting anywhere near this guy. That’s the power of specificity.

But good fiction requires you to build in one more level: significance. Yes, specifics are required, but they must be significant. By that I mean that, to serve the process of developing character and moving the story along, good specifics, valuable as they are, still need to support whatever the story is attempting to do at any given moment.

I know…whew! It’s beginning to sound like rocket science. But it’s really not so complicated in practice. If, say, I wanted to reveal the depths of a character’s depravity, the details I used above would be fine. Plus they would be significant.

But if I wanted to show him falling in love, the same details would be useless: their specificity would point in the wrong direction. They would, in the worst way, be decidedly NOT significant.

Tagged as: creative writing, Fiction Writing, good writing