Picture credit: Bidgee.
I’m going to write this very carefully. Because it involves a real book, written by a real human being, with feelings, and I don’t want to cause that person any kind of embarrassment. I’m going to use the neutral but awkward pronoun “them” when referring to them, so that not even the gender of the writer will be apparent. You will not, I hope, be able to identify them by what I write.
A little while back, this person contacted me about a novel they’d e-published. It was a Christian novel (I won’t say what genre), and the author seemed to know their business, having been published in the non-fiction field. So I started the book with some hope.
Alas.
Although this person knows how to spell and cast a sentence, they don’t know the craft of fiction, which is a different thing from the craft of non-fiction. Their approach to the story was wrong. It was static. It lacked life and drama.
What this person doesn’t understand is that in fiction, you don’t just tell a story. You stage a story. You dramatize a story.
I’m going to show what this person did wrong, and then show how it could be done better. The first little narrative nugget below is not what that person wrote. The characters are different, the situation is different, the genre is different. Only the technique is (more or less) the same. Then I’ll fix it, to demonstrate how to make it work. Continue reading Opening strong