Fiction Writing – Drawing on Your Own Experience

"A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar." So says Stephen King in his own particular take on the old adage that you should write about what you know, drawing inspiration from your own experience. I like the idea of remembering every scar, even though it might turn you into a poor, paranoid, retributive creature. The key thing is to be able to recall the feelings associated with each inflicted wound, because being able to write truthfully about emotion and therefore to share insights with your readers is what will bring them back for more.

However, being able to reproduce your own personal scars as literature is harder than it looks. If you transcribe your experience directly, without allowing your imagination to work upon it and transform it, you run the risk that a) your work will be full of self-pity and b) it will be so personal to you that it will fail to resonate with other people. You need to convert the particular into something general, without losing that unique genesis that made it individual in the first place – almost a contradiction in terms and flipping difficult to do.

Write about your scars from a safe distance, when you have enough perspective to interpret them in a way that will illuminate what you are describing for your audience. One of the best experiences for a reader is to think That's happened to me, I've felt that, I've been there. It's that moment of recognition, of identification, of profound sharing. The way you achieve that connection with them is not simply to reproduce your own trauma and unhappiness for public consumption, no matter how skilfully you re-imagine it. What you need to add is a sense of wisdom gained,  the promise that out of the darkness light has come. Suffering in stories always needs to be accompanied (and redeemed) by hope.

A Kiss in the Dark....

....from a stranger. What an intense, terrifying, exciting thought. It's how Stephen King describes a short story: a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

There are two things that strike me about this extraordinary image. One is its transience – think how fleeting even the longest kiss can be. The other is the sense of mystery, of the unknown, contained in the description. I am also conscious that although a kiss can be the most sought-after, longed for embrace, a kiss from a stranger, in the dark, might be nothing short of an assault.

So what is King's phase suggesting to us? That a short story is something fleeting, unknown and open to different interpretations.

Without the roomy expanse of a novel, a short story must be, by definition, brief. As a writer you don't have the time or space to paint a complete picture, you have to content yourself with conveying  just enough information to suggest everything you haven't been able to include. It's the art of inference. Yet even within the limited scope of a short story, it's still possible to cover a big subject, you just have to be more selective about how you tackle it. In Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary Tolstoy and Flaubert take hundreds of pages to describe the downfall of their heroines, in a short story you might focus on one pivotal scene, making it resonate with what has come before and what might follow. I suspect resonance is an important quality when writing in miniature.

All good fiction – short or long – should have something of the unknown at its heart, an essential mystery that the plot sets out to resolve – or not: unanswered questions pack a lot of narrative power, giving an extra bang for their buck, which might be particularly appropriate in shorter fiction when space for answers is in short supply. Don't necessarily play safe and write about what you know – write about what you don't know, instead

In a longer piece of writing, you have the luxury of exploring different themes at different points of the narrative. With fewer words, sometimes these themes have to be dealt with concurrently rather than consecutively, with several different layers operating at the same time. Although this happens in large-scale works as well, in short stories everything is a little more dense and concentrated. If you  have different themes or different notes, sounding at the same time, perhaps there is more scope for interpretation. Think of it like shot silk: if you hold the material up to the light one way it is duck egg blue, but tilt it another way and it looks crimson. The fabric is woven in such a way that both are true at the same time.

Why not take Stephen King's phrase – a kiss in the dark from a stranger  – as the starting point for a short story of your own?

Writing Fiction – Three Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

When you're appraising manuscripts, it's easy to spot the work of an inexperienced writer. The most common pitfalls I come across are these:

• Overwriting
• Lack of editing
• Lack of planning

I suspect that all of these stem from the same overwhelming urge to create. Once you discover the intoxication of spilling your thoughts across a page, it can be very hard to reign yourself in. If you enter that magical space where time passes without you realising as you write, write, write, you will feel extraordinarily protective of what you have produced there. Because writing is such a personal and intimate activity, and inspiration is not something you can always count on, you can be reluctant to make any changes to your work, in case something is irrevocably lost and the fairy dust disappears.

This is where tough love comes in. If you want to do justice to your writing, once the white heat of inspiration has passed, you may find you need to do some rigorous re-drafting.

Overwriting - It is easy to get carried away with reams and reams of superfluous description. If you discover you have a way with words, try not to indulge it too often. In fiction more than anything else, less is often more. How do you tell if you are overwriting? If you have chunks of description which aren't carrying out another function at the same time, i.e. advancing the plot, revealing something new about a character, providing a counterpoint to contrast with the mood of the scene, then that description is probably superfluous and should be cut. If you find that you are using two (or, heaven forfend, three) adjectives - the long, narrow, winding road – try and find one that will do the work on its own (the snaking road?) If you find you are saying the same thing twice, in slightly different ways, then ditch one of them. If you are repeating anything directly, jettison it right away.

Lack of Editing - Don't be over-protective of your work. The chances of getting everything right first time are zero. Apparently Martin Amis does up to six drafts of every novel and Stephen King has revealed he cuts twenty percent of the prose from his first draft. If they can do it, so can you. The dead weight of bad writing will drag your story down.

Lack of Planning – People who are starting out as writers tend to come up with a brilliant idea, so brilliant that they have to get it down straight away while it is fresh and crackling with excitement, and they charge through the first few chapters without drawing breath. Often, when this first surge of creative energy is spent, they come to a grinding halt. To follow the story's journey, at the very least you will need the sketchy outline of a map; you need to know the terrain. Some writers may find this inhibiting, they are fearful that it will impede their creativity, but my hunch is that it is much more likely to support the creative process. Having a plot mapped out doesn't mean that you can't make changes to it as you go along, but it is likely to mean that you will set up the necessary twists and turns in your story well in advance and that you won't have to rely on awkward coincidences or improbable events to get you out of a tight plotting spot. It will also protect you from the horrible moment when you sit down, look at the empty page, and think what do I write today? You will know that the next scene you need to start on is the one where they sail out of Paris on a boat, or whatever...When you know where you are going, you can go striding on your way.