Originally published on Facebook 10 October 2014
Here’s a secret.
All fiction writers have limitations.
All good fiction writers are acutely aware of their limitations.
All good fiction writers are therefore constantly working on ways to hide those limitations, to distract you from them, to wave their hands so that you don’t notice them.
And, if at all possible…to move them further away.
I know a very popular fiction writer who signed a contract to write a novel about a certain action hero. The problem is, this writer happened to be uncomfortable writing action. So whereas other books about this action hero have lengthy and elaborate fight scenes, this writer dedicated an entire novel to having the hero track down and find the villain…ending, finally, with the big fight about to happen. The last lines on the last plot-driven page said, pretty much, in about as many words, you know what happened next: he took the punishment, he went down, he got back up, and in the end he was the last one to get back up. Boom. Done.
Robert Cormier despaired of coming up with the words to describe a mansion. He called it a “big white birthday cake of a house.” Boom. Done.
Some fiction writers spend their careers writing inside their limitations, always using one kind of style and one kind of plot structure, to the point where it if you’ve read enough of their books you know the rhythm of the sentences before you read word one of the next one.
Others say, I don’t know if I can write this story, but the only way to find out is to start it.
I am a guy who winces, daily, from his limitations as a storyteller.
I am appalled by some of them.
I make a habit of starting and finishing stories that those limitations render difficult. I have been doing this since the late 1980s, when I made my first sales. The fences that imprison me are farther away than they used to be, but I am still aware of them; I have not pushed them beyond the horizon. As a result, I can still stroll through my stories and poke at places where I am acutely aware that I really did one thing because I was incapable of doing another. In the same sense that a moviemaker will sometimes have a character look off-screen and describe something a limited budget will not pay for…it is pretty much part of the process.
It is also necessary, for me.
I learned long ago that I cannot be one of those guys who has learned how to write one kind of story, and will always produce that kind of story. I get bored, terribly bored. So I write spare prose and I write ornate prose and I write tragedy and I write farce. The drawback of this is that readers who stay within genre are constantly saying what a shame it is that I don’t have a bigger name than I have; there are horror readers who have no idea I write science fiction and science fiction readers who have no idea I write horror and folks who have seen some of my more experimental stuff who have absolutely no idea that I also write squarely within genre lines. The advantage is that I spend less time being bored…and more time surprising myself by shifting the location of my fences.
My biggest advice to newbies?
Pick the kind of story you know you can’t write, and write it.
The limitations are where the art is.
Comment By: Dylan Otto Krider
October 10th, 2015 at 12:19 pm
A creative writing teacher told me once, “every writer has weaknesses and places where they excel… and we call that style.”