Writing Great Fiction II

PART 2: THE WHAT

The What of writing fiction

When you have decided the most effective style, let’s discuss the components that will contribute to its efficacy. We may call it the What of writing or the chassis on which your fiction is mounted.

No doubt that writing is more of an intuitional skill, born out of good reading and a great deal of practice. However, it is useful to know about the elements that constitute the What of writing. The six main elements are character, plot, setting, point of view, theme and style.

Character

Characters are the people through whom your reader experiences the story. Usually there is a main character or protagonist, another character who opposes the main character, also known as the antagonist and other minor characters. The trick is to make these fictional characters appear absolutely real. Flat cardboard characters bore readers. We need to make them 3D but how?

Your characters need a back story or a history that makes them react in specific ways to events in the story. Remember the behaviour and thought processes of Amy Elliot Dunne in Gone Girl? Much of those could be attributed to her background.

A little research into psychology helps to make the responses of your characters logical. They must behave in ways that makes sense for human beings. John Green’s A Fault in Our Stars is a moving story. But the portion when Hazel Grace’s mother is wallowing in self-pity because she will cease being a mother once her daughter dies is an amazing bit of psychoanalysis. It was a typical human survival response to a traumatic experience. I was stunned at how the writer gauged it so precisely.

Build a character arc. Your character must change or evolve from the beginning to the end. In my historical novel, Padmavati, the main protagonist, the Queen of Chittor discovers little by little her own strengths. She is a naïve girl when she comes to Chittor but events force her to evolve into a woman who not only takes her own decisions but stands by them. When she sits on the Jauhar pyre, she is calm and collected. Her fortitude makes her nearly divine as she embraces her destiny.

If characters are flat, readers have trouble empathizing with them. When your characters feel real and relatable, readers will lap up your story.

Plot

The scaffolding on which your story hangs is the plot. It begins with the premise, which is the basic story in a nutshell. This is expanded into a sequence of events taken forward by the characters. Plot can be divided into five stages.

Exposition or introduction, which introduces characters and setting.
Rising action, that displays the conflicts. Conflicts which are struggles between the protagonist and the antagonist, is a must for every good story. Some kind of conflict needs to be developed even if it is purely a struggle in the protagonist’s mind with a heavy emotion.
The plot, through conflicts, moves to the climax, also known as the turning point. It is the point where emotion, tension and interest peak.
Falling action is the stage when things start to wind down. The tension you have created at the climax stage has to be actively resolved. You must address here the solutions to all the issues you have raised till then.
Lastly, the plot comes to resolution. This is the ending when you bring the story to its logical conclusion, to the point where the events of the plot have been leading. Resolution doesn’t mean that the ending must be happy. It can be sad but the ending must be satisfactory to the reader, even if you are planning a sequel. When you come to the end of Amish Tripathi’s Scion of Ishakavu, you are conscious that the story will continue but the solutions in that part of the tale have been tied quite satisfactorily.

Setting is the physical location (real or invented) and the social environment of the story (including chronology, culture, institutions, etc.)

In many ways, it’s similar to character. No, setting doesn’t have feelings, but characters are forced to interact with it everywhere they go and in everything they do. Setting actually helps develop characters and tells us things like:

The skills they develop to survive
The tools they have (weapons, money, clothing, transportation)
Cultural nuances for communication (speech, body language, rules of interaction between genders or classes). Notice the kind of colloquial language that Mark Twain uses in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Besides nailing Huck’s education level, social background and personality, Twain succeeds in telling the story convincingly through the eyes of a thirteen-year old.
The concepts characters bring into the story (religion or philosophy, or things that will decide how they react to events)

You may need to research when designing settings to make them real. You may need to find answers to questions like: What is the weather in the region? Or What spices are used in avial? I had to certainly research a great deal when I was creating the setting for The Legend of Genghis Khan. I needed to find out everything about Mongolians in the 11th century; language, customs, food, clothes, war strategies, weapons used and so much more.

Your characters live in this world. Make it come alive for your readers. Have fun building it. It is one of the most creative and interesting part of storytelling.

Point of view

This is a very important element because it actually connects you as a writer with your reader. Basically, it is a combination of the following:

· The overall perspective from which the story is told

· The narrator’s point of view

· The attitude or belief of the author

Point Of View in writing is fun but also tricky. It determines tense and how much the reader gets to see. There’s first-person (I, my), second-person (you, your), and third-person/narrator (she, hers). There’s present tense (I see/she sees), past tense (I saw/she saw), and future tense (I will see/she will see).

It’s the combination of these things that creates an effective POV. So how do we go about it? There two things to focus on.

1.The style you have chosen

Different genres often use different POVs.

Urban fantasy, for example, is almost always first-person past-tense, because they take the approach of a person telling you an exciting thing that has happened. There’s an intimate, immediate feel that goes with this close-up-and-personal viewpoint, like seeing the fist come right for your face. My book The Cursed Inheritance has a first person POV which made it very relatable to its readers.
On the other hand, literary fiction usually uses third-person POV because it has a much broader scope. It needs to be able to take the reader to a bird’s-eye view, usually seeing the events through multiple characters. The pace is often a little slower, but the impact can be deeply powerful, and tends to explore consequences. Pride and Prejudice by Austen is a third person narrative which gives different views of the social environment.

2. How much do you want your reader to see?

Do you want the reader to see things happening outside your protagonist’s point of view? Do they need to see things your protagonist does not see, or hear things your protagonist does not hear? Then you need third-person POV.
Do you want the reader to discover things as when your protagonist does? Do you want your reader to cry and rage with your protagonist, seeking for answers? Then first-person might be better.

Here are some examples of tenses according to the POV.

Want third-person present tense? (She turns and sees him, and wonders if the unearthly wailing can stop one’s heart.)
Want first-person past tense? (I turned and saw him, and found myself wondering if the unearthly wailing could stop my heart.)
Want second-person future tense? (You will turn and see him, and you will wonder if the unearthly wailing will stop your heart.)

Theme

This is the element into which you can easily weave in some of your whys.All fictions have themes. Even authors who don’t want a theme use it, such as personal beliefs on how the world works.

The tricky thing about theme is it should rarely be bluntly stated; the moment you do, your work slides into the “preachy” category. If you can get the point across without ever frankly stating it—your readers will actually take it to heart a lot more deeply.

Effective stories are written by authors who are clear about their themes. One of the best stories, I have read, with a strong theme is Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth.

Style

Style is important because it is your signature. Style is what makes your work distinct from everybody else’s, because in essence, it’s your ‘voice'.

By working on technique, we can develop style. Syntax, word choices, and tone contribute to this. Style expresses not only your voice as a writer, but it is used to indicate details about your story and characters. Style shows accent and dialect, character intelligence and observation; it brings out the underlying humour or drama in your writing. Style is a writer’s unique flavour. To illustrate, both PG Wodehouse and James Joyce, wrote in the 1920s-30s. Their style or voice was easily identifiable and very distinct in their writings despite their writing being completely different.

It may take an entire writing career to develop style but it is one of the most rewarding parts of being a writer. It takes a lot of slogging to develop style. There are no short-cuts but it can be fun too. Some tips are:

Read a lot. Exposure to variety ends up giving you that many ingredients to cook with as you develop your style. Read books from different countries, different genders, different cultures. Read everything and learn as you go.
Write a lot. No writing is ever wasted. Practise, practise, and practise some more.
Read aloud. Reading your work out loud will let you hear if your writing reads like writing or like telling a story. Anything that reads like writing is a no-no.
Listen. Listen to people. Listen to conversations. Tone is a crucial component of style, and you’ll need to learn how to convey that in your work—but you can’t convey it if you don’t know what it sounds like.

You must be thinking. OMG! This sounds like a lot. And you’re right, it is. However, if you’re a dedicated reader, I think you’ll have already noticed some if not all these elements in most good stories. Some of the greatest stories I know and love have all of these elements. If you are passionate about your story, incorporating them into your writing will not be as difficult as it may seem.

Writing Great Fiction II

Writing Great Fiction II

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