How to Make Your Fiction Faultless (Read Your Work Aloud)

This may not occur to you when you are starting out as a writer, but any time spent reading your work aloud is time well spent. Usually, when you stumble over a phrase, it's a cast iron indication the phrase does not ring true.  Perhaps it's the literary equivalent of the flicker in the gaze which betrays a lie. It's certainly a useful ploy you can put to good use in your work: when you have finished a paragraph or a page or a chapter, if you read it out loud to yourself and note which sentences trip you up, you will usually find that the structure is awkward or the syntax awry, or that you have loaded on too much alliteration.  You can bet your bottom dollar that something won't be quite right.

It may feel like a self-conscious exercise to begin with, and you mustn't get carried away by the richness/polish/perfection of your own prose, but it's well worth doing.

It's There in Black and White – and Grey?

We are complex beings and our behaviour frequently lands us in complicated situations, something you should try and reflect in your fiction writing. Things are rarely cut and dried in the real world, so it is a good idea to tie some intriguingly complicated knots in the story you are working on. Your heroine may love somebody but not be in love with them; she may be frightened of the consequences of being successful in either her professional or her personal life; your hero may be attractive yet unsympathetic all in the same breath. It is within these areas of ambivalence that tension grows and tension is an extremely handy tool to have in your writing armoury.

Things are rarely black and white -- it is in that ambiguous,blurred area that most of us live and where interesting fiction is often kindled. Although you should always be aiming for clarity in your writing: the well-realised character, the taut plot, not to mention crisp, new-minted prose, try not to exclude a little bit of healthy ambivalence at the same time. Instead, go for grey and see where it takes you -- my hunch is that you will arrive in an interesting space full of creative uncertainty.