By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JAN. 17, 2019 | Those really good fiction writers? I admire them. Although I generally read non-fiction, particularly histories, if I pick up a good book of fiction, then I am engrossed and content. Sometimes you want the book to go on and on, since the author is so good. I am in awe of those who can produce good fiction.
I cannot figure out how authors of fiction do it. I have a hard time even envisioning development of a fictional story. Since I was a teen, I’ve been observing what’s going on, then writing about what I have seen. That’s news writing. It’s simple: you tell the most important element first, then you go with the next most important part of what you saw, and you continue that way until you run out of interesting aspects of that story. Yet you made nothing up, merely told what you saw.
But come up with a story entirely out of my head? That is something that I can’t imagine doing.
About the only other style that I can construct is the editorial. For editorials, you state your opinion based on a matter, then you ramify and enlarge on it, and give reasons for your thoughts so that it make sense, then at the end, you re-emphasize the beginning. That makes a coherent editorial.
Perhaps I’ve figured out why the really good fiction writers are successful. They must think creatively as no one has before, and come up with a story never told before. But maybe they think “inside themselves.” Perhaps they conjure up their plots from their dreams! After all, even I dream outside the box, sometimes wild dreams. Maybe that’s where good fiction authors get their ideas.
Now, first of all, you recognize that dreams are not straight-line thinking, one element following another in logical order. Dreams jump around with story, plot, characters and setting.
It was a dream that brought this to mind.
The other night in my dreams, I was young, perhaps a teenager, and needed to go downtown. So here I was waiting for the bus to go downtown. Only I was waiting on the wrong side of the street from where the bus stopped. Had a bus come, I would have had to cross the street. See? Dreams do not always make logical sense!
About that time, a white Cadillac convertible taxi pulls up, and three people got out. One was the taxi driver, who said, “You going to town? So you drive the taxi back.” Two other guys were also headed for town, and one gets in the driver’s seat, with me in the front and the other guy in the back, and we turned around and headed for town.
That’s where the dream ended. Made no sense to me. Yet it got me to thinking that perhaps all these fiction writers … may use their subconscious and nightly dreams to develop their sometimes zany plots.
It can’t be that simple. Yet to sit down with a writing pad, or typewriter or computer, and see that blank screen staring at you, and bat off a story that people will recognize as good writing … how else do they do it? What’s the secret?
Beats me. I can only tell a factual story based on what I have seen or learned. Those fiction storytellers? I admire them. They have quite a gift.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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