15 rules for writing fiction gleaned from workshops

It’s true. I’ve been neglecting this blog and taking the easy way out by posting book reviews.  I’ve been reading a lot this year, kid in a candy story lot. So it seems fair that I at least review the books someone sent me gratis, and that’s what my focus has been.  Sadly, I’ve not reviewed the books I actually bought and loved, at least not yet, and I’m promising myself that indulgence soon.  I do feel lucky to have received ARC’s of books I’d have anyway… and a little guilty for it. Ah, that protestant guilt….

While I don’t have many words on paper to show for it, I’ve been working a lot on my writing. Research, discussions, workshop and yes, reading.  I realized yesterday that I’ve become a workshop junkie, attending more than 20 in the last ten years.   I spent some time with a couple of my “notebooks” from workshop earlier this year and gleaned a few tidbits that I’d written down so I would remember them as I wrote.  Because I’m generous, and because once I post them I’ll never have to remember what I titled that document again, I decided to share the list. Some of them will sound like platitudes and they are.  None of them are credited, simply because they are just class notes and probably paraphrased, and possibly the words of someone great whom I didn’t realize was being quoted.  Feel like discussing? Comments or hit me on twitter. @rosespringvale.

1. Reader needs a map of the world.  Landing in an airport where you don’t speak the language.  The world and time frame established in the first paragraph

2.  Absence is the best form of presence. Intentional presence—absence ---shall have a presence. Not a void.

3.  Essence of all marriages:  we each occupy our own building. We pretend that we are coordinated.

4. The story knows more than you do.

5.  Don’t piss on your characters.

6.  End on a strong note.

7.  “Furniture is a bad investment.”  Fiction means “to arrange.”

8.  The best way to get the moment across is dramatic enactment. The danger of a highly dramatic scene is melodrama.

9. Try when writing description to limit to three sentences. “Rule of 3’s”

10.  Never start a short story with a character waking up.

11. You can use familiar language, cliché, but you must make it fresh.

12.  Try not to steal from other writers.

13.  Write with all five senses.

14. Aspire to create a situation where there are no right answers.

15. When writing character lives, you must know everything about the character.

Fans of To Kill a Mockingbird will enjoy this one: The Truth According to Us, by Annie Barrows

 publication June 9, 2015

The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows, co-author of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, takes us to depression era Macedonia, West Virginia, a place between the north and south so much that it changed sides in the civil war 37 times. A town in West Virginia where the major industry, and employer, is not coal, but the American Everlasting Hosiery Company, and southern pride runs deep.

Willa Romeyn, age 12, is a natural born sneak. She lives with her Aunt Jottie, her sister bird and sometimes her charmingly dangerous father, Felix in the house their parents lived in when they founded the American Everlasting Hosiery Company and earned their place in the pages of Macedonia history.  The family has fallen on hard times so that in 1938, they take in a boarder who eventually complicates everything. Willa spends the 500 plus pages of this delightful book figuring out how the family changed and why, and grows up along the way. She figures out who she is and what is important, all the while trying to follow the town values of “Ferocity and Devotion.”

Barrows has a gift with historically based fiction and she’s recreated the slow pace of a southern summer, right down to the hey you porch visits of neighbors on Sunday afternoon.  Willa, a free spirit who idolizes her daddy, for the most part enjoys the freedom of an era gone by, reading books that are too mature for her over and over again, slipping into neighbors houses to visit and explore and becoming a full member of Geraldine’s Army determined to beat the Reds.  Her jealousy is aroused when her beloved father takes up with the boarder, Layla Beck, a Senator’s daughter, who is writing the history of Macedonia as part of the WPA writers project after having been cut off by her rich father for refusing to marry a man of his choosing.

Willa reminds us of young Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and Layla is as silly as any Victorian heroine.  Neither of them are reliable narrators though, for that we trust only the indomitable Jottie, whose life has centered around taking care of her family.  Even though technically, the family belongs to her brother. The pace of this small town, with drama and intrigue woven between glasses of iced tea and bootleg whiskey, keeps this book moving.  The loyalty between the family members and friends, with all the quirks of people you know, or wish you did, keeps it from slipping into sentimentality.   It is a place you will miss when you close the cover.

More info about Truth:http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/9072/the-truth-according-to-us-by-annie-barrows/

I received this book from NetGalley for this review.