Fine Tuning Fiction

By Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Fine-Tuning Fiction began as a two-part writing seminar, each five hours long, at the Writers Connection in Cupertino, California. They were a popular duo, receiving high marks from those who took the seminars --- often more than once for each --- and were repeated regularly for three years. After the Writers Connection stopped giving seminars, award-winning novelist Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was often asked by those who had taken the courses, for copies of the various exercises in Part 2, or notes from the material in Part 1. This workbook is the result, and it combines both the lecture and the lab portions of both seminars. As Yarbro told those taking the seminars, "I don't want you to write more like me, I want you to write more like you."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
• Release date: Feb 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301404957

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Chelsea Q. Yarbro is the first woman to be named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild and is one of only two women ever to be named as Grand Master of the World Horror Convention (2003). In 1995, Yarbro was the only novelist guest of the Romanian government for the First World Dracula Congress, sponsored by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, the Romanian Bureau of Tourism, and the Romanian Ministry of Culture. Yarbro is best known as the creator of the heroic vampire the Count Saint-Germain. With her creation of Saint-Germain, she delved into history and vampiric literature and subverted the standard myth to invent the first vampire who was more honorable, humane, and heroic than most of the humans around him. She fully meshed the vampire with romance and accurately detailed historical fiction, and filtered it through a feminist perspective that made both the giving of sustenance and its taking of equal erotic potency. A professional writer since 1968, Yarbro has worked in a wide variety of genres, from science fiction to Westerns, from young adult adventure to historical horror. A skeptical occultist for forty years, Yarbro has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.

Book preview

Fine-Tuning Fiction began as a two-part writing seminar, each five hours long, at the Writers Connection in Cupertino, California.  They were a popular duo, receiving high marks from those who took the seminars --- often more than once for each --- and were repeated regularly for three years.  After the Writers Connection stopped giving seminars, award-winning novelist Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was often asked by those who had taken the courses, for copies of the various exercises in Part 2, or notes from the material in Part 1. This workbook is the result, and it combines both the lecture and the lab portions of both seminars. As Yarbro told those taking the seminars, I don't want you to write more like me, I want you to write more like you.

FINE TUNING FICTION

The Five P's And A Few PS's For The Fictionist

a writer’s workbook

by

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

I hope you will do the exercises in this workbook in pencil on a printed-out copy of the workbook.  If you cannot do that, then get a standard notebook so that you may write down your exercises

For reasons of copyright you may print out only one copy of the text; more than one copy printed out is copyright infringement, and illegal.

There is one note of warning for this workbook:  these exercises cannot give you talent if you lack it.  Nothing can.  But if you have talent, these exercises may help you to hone your abilities, and provide you with the means of sharpening your eyes and ears, and your prose.

Fine Tuning Fiction

Published by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is for

Libba

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1 - People

Part 2 - Plot

Part 3 - Presence

Part 4 - Pacing

Part 5 - Poetics

P S's

About the Author

Bibliography

Introduction

Fiction is not like other forms of prose, although it regularly uses elements of all prose forms, as well as many peculiar to fiction itself: unlike reportage, which provides an account of events or facts that is supposed to be unbiased observation; or essays, which seek to elucidate an insight, opinion, or experience; or memoirs, which are the reflection on a life and its experiences, fiction’s purpose is to support the made-up story it is telling, which is, by definition, the creation of the teller’s imagination, and even the most realistic forms of storytelling remain firmly wedded to the story-form, making the prose elements secondary to the imagined lives of the characters of that story.

For that reason, unlike nonfictional counterparts, the writer of fiction, in order to do the job effectively, must first get him/herself out of the story he or she is telling; the ego of the writer is not intrinsic, or even desirable in a story because the story is not about the writer, it is about the characters in the story. Writing a story is similar to a one-way romance, in that although the writer is the story-teller and intensely involved with the people of the story, the characters do not participate with the writer in the telling. In a very real sense, the writer doesn’t exist as far as the characters are concerned. The writer deals with the people of the story from outside it, even if it is a first-person narration, for the character is not the writer — that’s called autobiography and it isn’t supposed to be fiction. It is that need to allow the story and its characters to supersede the storyteller that makes fiction much trickier than it looks, and makes it essential for the writer to understand the methods by which this can be achieved.

This book is the result of a number of seminars of the same name that I presented more than two decades ago for The Writer’s Connection in Cupertino, California; what I have done in putting this book together draws heavily on the experience of those seminars. The exercises come from not only the Fine-Tuning Fiction seminar, but from two others that complemented Fine-Tuning. I’d like to thank those who attended the seminars for all their comments and insights that made it possible for this book to exist.

To make the most of this workbook, I recommend you arm yourself with the tools of the trade: a computer, a typewriter, or a pad and pen, a very comprehensive dictionary (I use the Oxford English Language Dictionary), a thorough Thesaurus, a good reference on grammar and syntax (I like The Transitive Vampire in any of its editions, and The Well-Tempered Sentence), a book on slang and language changes, Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is probably the most useful, and a good reference on phrase and fable, such as Brewer’s The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Keep in mind that the more concise your use of language, the better chance your story has of being accessible to the widest possible audience.

When you write fiction, everything — style, vocabulary, allusions — must support the characters and their story and contribute to the credibility of the story in its context. This will bring about characters who can reach through temporal and cultural differences with the reader and allow the reader to build the story in his/her mind long after you are around to explain it. Storytelling in that sense is almost as universal a language as music, which is accessible to almost everyone. It is that special quality of fiction that can reach across boundaries of all sorts that makes it an art. It is the greatest accomplishment of any good story — to outlive its creator and reach beyond the limitations of the writer.

PART I – People

All fiction begins with people and the premise that people are interesting. The term people covers all species and forms of characters, human or otherwise, who command your attention as a writer, for if the people of a story cannot hold your interest as a writer, no reader will be interested in them, either. Think about the stories you remember best: are you more aware of the characters than the action? What about the characters held your interest? Why were those personalities interesting?

Choose one of those memorable characters and write down ten things that make him/her/it memorable. Keep in mind that the character in question must come from a reading source, not film, television, on-line, or other audio-visual media.

1)_______________________________________________________________________________________________

2)_______________________________________________________________________________________________

3)_______________________________________________________________________________________________

4)_______________________________________________________________________________________________

5)_______________________________________________________________________________________________

6)_______________________________________________________________________________________________

7)_______________________________________________________________________________________________

8)_______________________________________________________________________________________________

9)_______________________________________________________________________________________________

10)______________________________________________________________________________________________

Take a good look at what you have written. Think about how these elements have combined to make a character you believe in, one who held your interest and made you involved with his/her/its life, a character who convinced you. What made all these factors compelling and convincing? How did the writer do it? What made the character come alive for you?

Without characters, a story is nothing more than an account, requiring no argument or resolution, which are the foundations of story-telling. Developing characters who hold the attention of your readers is the first task of the fiction writer, for the nature of the characters drives their stories, just as the personalities of real people shape their actions in life. Characters are what make your story real or unreal, convincing or unconvincing, compelling or dull; without them, fiction cannot exist.

In this section of the workbook you will find ways to bring characters to life, to flesh them out and give them the depth and believability that makes for memorable story-telling, filled with characters who will live in the readers’ memories long after the books they live in are closed. To do this, you must know them well, and far beyond the limits of the story in which they appear. You must take the time to learn all that makes them come alive for you — because (to make the point again) if they don’t come alive for you, then they cannot and will not come alive for your readers.

For example: if the character on the page is nothing more than a puppet, or a simple persona, or the object of reporting, nothing more need be said than this: A man went down the corridor, or A man moved along the corridor. This figure is little more than an object in motion, hardly more than an extra in the drama, a stick figure in a sketch, or mobile window-dressing. But add some means of distinguishing him — it needn’t be much — and he becomes more interesting — more real: The man limped down the corridor. The man sidled down the corridor. The man skittered down the corridor. The man in the raincoat stalked down the corridor. The man, clad in paint-spattered over-alls, jogged heavily down the corridor. The man with the hazard armband hurried down the corridor. The man, his Armani suit set off by the daisy in his button-hole, sauntered down the corridor. The man with the bruised jaw stumbled down the corridor. The grey-haired man struggled down the corridor. The man with the camera sneaked down the corridor. The man with the bandaged hand strode purposefully down the corridor. Each sentence provides a sense of who this man is, and implies something about his character, and his intent in moving down the corridor. It also creates a desire to know why he was limping or sidling or skittering or stalking or jogging or sauntering or stumbling or struggling or striding down the corridor, which is the beginning of characterization, for it implies a stake in the action taking place in the corridor, of giving a figure dimension beyond the immediate situation, or in other words, making the character extend beyond the page.

In my own work, I subject the characters of my stories to what I call The Pizza Test:

The Pizza Test

Premise:

The character in question is asked to join colleagues for a celebratory pizza (or its equivalent for the culture and setting of the story) upon the occasion of a shared accomplishment —

First question:

Does this character like pizza: why? What is his/her favorite kind of pizza?

Second question:

If this character does like pizza, will he/she go with his/her colleagues: where?

Third question:

If this character does not like pizza, will he/she go anyway: how come?

Fourth question:

If he/she goes, what will he/she order: if not pizza, what would he/she prefer? Will he/she actually order it? How will he/she account for the preference, or will he/she explain at all?

Fifth question:

How will he/she pay for his/her part of the meal: if he/she does not pay, who pays for him/her and why? How will he/she react to being treated, or not being treated?

Sixth question:

Will he/she enjoy him/herself: why or why not? If he/she has a good time, how will he/she show it? If he/she does not enjoy him/herself, how will he/she behave? What does he/she think of the others attending the celebration?

Seventh question:

What makes the occasion important to him/her and why? Does the character think that sharing a pizza is an appropriate way to mark the occasion?

If you have a primary, secondary, or tertiary character you can’t do the Pizza Test with, you do not know that character well enough.

Incidentally, there are no correct or incorrect answers to the Pizza Test; there is no grade for doing it — it is only a device to help fix the character more clearly and comprehensively in your mind. Every character will have different answers, and so long as they are true to that character, whatever the answer is, is the right answer.

For example, you may have a character who likes pizza but does not like the place they are going for it: that character may or may not suggest an alternative, and whether he/she does or does not recommend a different place, or kind of food, is indicative of the character. Also the reason the character does or does not like pizza is significant: does he/she like it because he/she likes Italian food, or likes pizza parlors, or doesn’t like it because it is fattening