Read Online How to Write Fiction by The Guardian - Free Book Online Page B

the events? Did they all happen to the same person, for example, or are they all tragic?
Has anything been repeated in the piece: a word, a kind of action, a feeling, an image?
    The answers to these questions will probably give you some idea about the focus of your piece. Now rewrite it, sharpening the focus. Remove or play down anything that doesn’t help to focus it and invent anything you can to make the focus clearer.
    5 The focus of a piece can change drastically as you explore it further. See if these shift the focus of your piece at all:
Delete the first paragraph of your piece so that the second paragraph becomes the start of the piece. Does that suggest a different emphasis?
Make the piece half as long. What have you left out?
Make the piece twice as long. What have you added?

9. Revising & rewriting

Cut, then cut again
    Every successful writer knows that revising is a crucial part of the creative process. MJ Hyland explains how to go about distilling your novel to its essential core
    I ’ve never read or written a perfect first draft. Perfect first drafts don’t exist. And yet most writers, at the beginning of their careers, think they must. This intimidating myth of effortless gift persists because successful authors aren’t in the habit of admitting to writing weak drafts and rarely show the public their mistakes.
    â€œEvery writer I know has trouble writing.” Joseph Heller
    The truth is that every beautiful, exciting and moving work of fiction is last in a line of at least a half-dozen carefully reworked drafts. Good writers are good because they have the right measure of intellect and talent for the hard labour of rewriting. Most writers haven’t the stamina for this exacting work, or are too thin-skinned, defensive, or too impatient to face the bad news that they haven’t got it right the first time round.
    Rewriting accounts for the lion’s share of a writer’s work; the calculated and deliberate work that comes after the gleeful, and sometimes unconscious, first draft. Good writers, even the arrogant ones, are also humble and self-aware enough to know that revision is always necessary.
    Fixing the first draft
    â€œIf it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” Elmore Leonard.
    Here are seven techniques which are sure to make your job of revision easier and more effective:
    1 Remove exaggeration (tell the fictional “truth”). “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” George Orwell
    2 Cut out cliches. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Anton Chekhov
    3 Remove your failed similes. A bad simile is embarrassing, like a long joke with a weak punch line, told by a nervous comedian. “Kate inched over her own thoughts like a measuring worm.” John Steinbeck
    4 Don’t attempt a final version of the beginning of the story until you know how it ends. (And don’t waste time fussing over the beginning until the rest of the work is done.) “Be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.” HW Fowler
    5 Do at least one of the following to help you see your prose more clearly:
Write by hand
Use an ugly font
Read your work aloud, or have somebody else read it aloud
Write your second draft without referring to the first draft
    â€œHave something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” Matthew Arnold
    6 Don’t use more words than you need to and beware of fancy or ornate words. “I never write ‘metropolis’ for seven cents when I can write “city” and get paid the same.” Mark Twain
    7 Make sure your adverbs and adjectives aren’t muting your verbs and nouns. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Stephen King
    An