Writing for a market (Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction):

Every market has invisible boundaries that they don’t announce. You need to know where those are, and write something fresh that falls inside them.

The best way to know where the boundaries are is to read the market carefully. If you don’t like what they publish, don’t submit.

Don’t write what you think other people are interested in if it doesn’t interest you. Nobody will be fooled.

You have to stand out as well as fit in. Editors don’t want the same thing they’ve already bought.

Don’t write characters who are not interested in themselves, who are bored, apathetic, self-pitying and passive. If you don’t like the kinds of characters that are traditional for the market, write a variation on them; don’t show your dislike by having the characters hate themselves.

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Revising (from Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction):

Put the story away after you finish the draft, so you can come back to it fresh.

Does it make sense and mean something? If not, decide whether to abandon or rewrite.

Does it hang together? Are there pieces missing, or unnecessary pieces?

Is the opening comprehensible? Does it convey information?

Have you answered who, where, what, when? Do you at least know why? Is the opening consistent with your answer? If not, rewrite.

Does the ending round it off and complete the pattern, show the story’s meaning, satisfy the reader, explain the mystery, solve the puzzle? If not, what have you left out of the early part of the story that would make an ending possible?

Are the characters believable, consistent? Have you used the best point of view, person and tense? If not, abandon or rewrite. [I’d suggest rewriting a fresh draft, not just changing the POV, person or tense in the same file. You’re bound to miss something.]

If all that is fine, make every word and phrase justify its use. Block out a few words at a time on screen or paper, with a mask if necessary.

Rearrange awkward sentences. Shorten. Clarify.

Correct viewpoint slips.

Read your dialog aloud. Can you distinguish dialog from narrative? Does it sound natural?

Kill cliches. Correct spelling and syntax.

Keep going until you can’t stand to look at it any more.

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Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction:

What to do when you’re stuck:

1. Track back through the story until you find where you went down the blind alley. Work forward again from there.

2. If a character is going off-script, either you don’t know enough about the character, or you now now enough that you realise she wouldn’t do what you originally planned. Either give her her head and see what happens, or change the circumstances until she will do what you wanted.

3. If you’re bored, scale back or eliminate the part that bores you.

4. If you’re stuck for a name, place, date or fact, put in a placeholder (marked in a way you can easily find when editing) and move on. Often, you’ll solve it shortly afterwards anyway, if you regain your forward momentum.

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Negative practice: if you know your writing has a fault, try to commit it as often as possible. In doing so, you are making it conscious and bringing it under your control. (It’s a psychological technique.)

– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction

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Six ways to think about style:

1. Variety (of sentence structure).

2. Fluency. Nothing must interrupt the flow by making the reader stumble.

3. Consecutiveness. One thing must lead on to the next, so that the reader has no place to stop and bail out.

4. Precision. Use words to mean what they mean, and not something else. “If you have only a vague idea of the difference between one word and another, you are like a carpenter who has only a vague idea of the difference between a screwdriver and a corkscrew.”

5. Economy.

6. Clarity–both simplicity and avoiding vague references.

– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction

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“Style is the visible trace of a workman solving her problems. Good style is the trace of a workman solving her problems with economy and grace, leaving her individual mark…. You will put your individual imprint on everything you do, whether you want to or not. What you need to learn is not individuality but skill.”

– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction

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“Reading a story, even a tragic story, ought to be a succession of sweet pleasures, like beads on a string–vivid images, excitements, anticipations, surprises…. One almost universal fault of beginners’ fiction is that it lacks contrast.”

– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction

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Plotting faults and solutions:

1. Story wanders aimlessly.

Solution: give the character a stronger motivation and more adversity. Rewrite without reference to the original.

2. Story has too much going on.

Solution: Cut down the number of characters to three or four, find one plot, rewrite.

3. Plot structure appears complete, but story seems pointless.

Solution: this is a character problem, not a plot problem. We must care about the characters, and it must matter what happens to them.

4. Ending is disappointing. Too obvious, or not planned and so feels arbitrary and tacked on.

Solution: Go back to the opening situation and replot.

#shortfiction Damon Knight

In the story of resolution, we get the “plot skeleton”:

1. A believable and sympathetic central character

2. has an urgent and difficult problem

3. attempts to solve the problem, fails, and the situation becomes more desperate

4. encounters a crisis, a final chance to win

5. through the character’s personal qualities of courage, perseverence, cleverness, etc., manages to win (or, in a tragedy, fails through his flaws).

In practice, the full plot skeleton is seldom seen in short fiction. There’s no room for step 3, and step 5 is too predictable. Instead, we see a conflict, with the outcome in doubt, and we get:

1. The terms of the competition set out

2. The contest itself

3. The outcome

The short fiction author will usually use this for misdirection, since otherwise it’s too predictable. The meaning turns out to be something other than the outcome of the contest. The conflict exposes character and keeps the reader interested until the revelation.

The story of revelation replaces the resolution (one outcome of the contest or the other) with a third thing that is a revelation. Or else it achieves rising tension in another way, without conflict (e.g. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, where the choice gradually narrows down to one person), then springs the revelation (what’s going to happen to that person).

The trick ending does a bait and switch.

The story of decision needs to have a genuinely difficult choice that could go either way.

The story of explanation builds up the strangeness, then explains it at the end.

The story of solution is a puzzle or mystery (puzzles are solved by the characters, mysteries by events). Don’t attempt puzzle stories unless you’re familiar with what’s been done already.

The story of illumination is not a plotted story. A sequence of events reveals the meaning of a character’s life.

#shortfiction Damon Knight