Writing: the Short Version

The way I read them, writers try to write how writing is written, but mostly, by the time writers get their version of Writing written, I want to write them off.  Me? I want a diagram.

This is Diagram #1 in a DIY series about writing fiction.

My only credential is that I have pubbed a few short fictions.

Recently, in a Little Free Library, I saw a writer’s “Workbook” (3rd Edition!) I saw the term “sentence structure”. If you want to write fiction, such harshness will cripple you! Since publishable fiction is personal, the Writer writes all the rules. For the purposes of shortness, my fiction writing PRs(plastic rules) follow:

PR1: You read, right? You know a good story when you read it, right? Trust that. No lie. If you are playing hardball, you will be able to tell if you have written publishable fiction. Believe it!

PR2: Get a vision of just one paragraph of the story you want to write. Take an hour. You will see it in your head. Write it down. Describe exactly what you see. Do it. Write it down. You love it, because you wrote it. You love it because it is important. You love it because, for some reason, you felt compelled to write it down. Now, make a file and label it “Important” and file your paragraph there. Leave it there.

PR3: All month long, daily or…write other paragraph(s) for the same or other story(s). File them samewise.

PR4: At the end of a month, go back to the first para you wrote. Read it ALOUD. If it doesn’t seem to say what you wanted, fiddle with it ‘til it does. That’s all there really is to writing good short fiction: you monkey with it until it regenerates your original vision of what you wanted to say. If it regenerates your vision from a month ago, you’ve got something you can build a story on. The guts of this is that what you wrote a month ago, and then re-visited strenuously, still interests you – just as it will interest other readers.

PR5: It is your story. You have no one to answer to. Write it by your own rules!