Many of us at the Writing Center are creative writers ourselves, and we’re happy to read your stories, poems, or creative nonfiction.  Writing fiction, however, is very different from writing an academic paper.  Here are some things to remember.

1.  Your fourth grade teacher probably told you that “said was dead,” but for purposes of upper-level fiction writing, “said” is quite alive.  Words like asked, responded, questioned, or chided are fine, but only when used sparingly.  Otherwise you get blocks of dialogue that look like this:

“That’s not fair!” Alice exclaimed.

“Why isn’t it fair?” her mother retorted.

“Because you promised that if I did all my chores, I could go out on Friday!” whimpered Alice.

“Life isn’t fair,” Alice’s mother declared.

It's fine to use “said” – your readers’ eyes will slide right over it.  Also, make sure you use it often enough to remind the reader who’s talking.  Using a quick “said Joe” or “Maggie said” after every few lines of dialogue will help the reader locate himself in the conversation.

2.  You know your characters best, and that’s the point of being the author.  Many of your readers, however, will be seeing their names and identities for the first time.  Characters named Catie, Chrissie, and Carrie may be totally separate to you, but you might lose some of your audience with names like that.  Similarly, Hailey, Kailey, and Bailey may have distinct personalities in your head, but it’s always best to give each character a name that is spelled and pronounced distinctly if possible.

3.  You’re in college to learn new words and how to write better, but fiction is not the place to test all of that.  Descriptions like “The iridescent gold and purple tendrils of the spring sunrise wafted softly and with aching temerity over the solid horizon like a polychromatic jellyfish floating onto an undiscovered, vast, darkly blue beach in the middle of the Caribbean seaboard” are lovely but hard to read, never mind understand.  Description is good, but the goal of description is to help the reader see your scene, not to confuse her.  Don’t to get overly flowery.

4.  Take care to keep the point of view consistent – do not include sudden, unsubstantiated shifts from first person to third unless the shift is very obvious and serves a purpose.  Otherwise, your readers are going to be circling things and writing, “???”  Remember which point of view you picked in the beginning of your story and stick to it.  If you started out describing things from inside Ryan’s head, he’s not suddenly going to be omniscient about the thoughts and feelings of his mom, his ex-girlfriend, his dog, and some Chilean girl halfway around the world.

5.  Similarly, make sure to keep the tense consistent.  Present, past, and future tense are all appropriate for fiction writing, but sudden switches from one to the other can be very confusing, particularly because many people write their stories in present tense and then use the past tense to refer to a flashback or a memory.  Unless you’re using that sort of device, pick one tense and stick to it.

6.  Excessive use of symbols distracts readers from the work.  You probably write things like, “where r u” when you text-message your friends, but in a story or a poem it looks sloppy.  Go ahead and spell out numbers (one hundred twenty-seven, sixteen).  It is perfectly acceptable to write, “She drew an arrow,” instead of, “She drew -->.”  An exception is for foreign lettering (Greek letters, accents on foreign words), in which case it looks much more correct to write “piñata” instead of “pinata” or “ΔΞΠ Sorority House” instead of “Delta Xi Pi Sorority House.

7.  Similarly, too much underlining or bolding or italicizing is distracting.  The point of using underlined/bold/italicized font is to make something stand out.  If every other word is offset, the sentence is going to lose its punch.

8.  The appropriate formatting for a section break is three or five asterisks, centered, on a separate line.  You don’t need to write “Section break,” “Scene change,” “Flashback,” or ~.~.~.~.~.~.

9.  Always number your pages; the upper right-hand corner is the easiest place to see it.  Putting your name, date, and title in the header is also a good idea, since several people will probably be passing out stories/poems each week.

10.  Always staple your pages in the proper order.  There is nothing so annoying as being engrossed in a story and then having to flip around to find the next page.

11.  The rules of good grammar, punctuation, spelling, and proofreading apply to fiction as well as academic papers.

Acknowledgments:

Elizabeth Fields ’05, with input from Claire Hennessy (Ireland) and David Kudler (California, USA)

Contact Elizabeth at efields@gmail.com.