Craft and significant detail in fiction

[worldforger]

Originally published at An experimental life. You can comment here or there.

I hear a lot of would-be fiction writers say they "don't believe" in studying writing, fearing that doing so will force them to write by some preset formula and destroy their "personal styles."

Nothing could be further from the truth. If you look at some of the greats--who

Comments

[satyrblade]

Thank you. Very true.

And yet - how much like a typical mainstream novel your rewritten excerpt is! (The daVinci Code leaps to mind as a textbook in how NOT to write well... but...)

[gryphonrose]

Nicely done, amigo. Good stuff, and all very true.

[cryptess]

There's equally a problem with focusing on the theory and never getting any actual work done, which is often my problem; in my case, I've avoided learning to draw perspective by not actually laying down a pair of rulers and choosing a vanishing point or two.

I have books, I've looked up tutorials -- I have nothing against theory -- but I want everything to be bloody perfect before I pick up the tools and do something with them.

As Rich keeps telling me, theory is good when you've hit a barrier in your work where you won't get better otherwise, but if you never do any of the work, you'll never gain the skills.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they rarely ever are.