Putting Fire in Your Fiction – Part I

Most fiction starts out hot, then bogs down. How can you keep the fire in your fiction so that readers will continually turn the pages of our novel? Scenes and dialogue can be our greatest friends or our worst enemies. In this next series of posts, we’ll ramp it up by putting the fire in your fiction.

Scenes: how do we know what scenes to keep, and which to cut? Generally, when writing, then self-editing, you go back and determine whether or not any given scene moves the story along and how important it is. Many scenes were cut from my novel. I learned a lot about how to decide whether a scene was important enough to keep.

First, we need to define what a turning point is. What change takes place? When does that change occur (at what precise second in the scene)? In that moment, how is the point-of-view character changed?

Dialogue is a common downfall of many scenes. The characters talk, but the scene doesn’t go anywhere. Dialogue should: 1) bring clarity to middle scenes; 2) be strong and advance the story, 3) produce and reveal tension, and 4) define the scene’s purpose.

First and last lines of scenes are also important. First and last lines need not be fancy. Even a utilitarian line can work well if it yanks us straight into, or amplifies, a scene’s main action.

There is also what is called “The Tornado Effect.” Put in a disaster. I loved this because I put a tornado in the middle of my novel. “Novels need events. Things need to happen: little things, big things. Especially big things. Big events shake protagonists, change the course of lives, and stay in readers’ memories.

This is true in real life. Almost two years ago, I was in Israel and I broke my wrist. Separately, either one of those could have brought great change in my life, but together, they made a huge difference.

I like to share what I learn and where I learn it from. For this next series of posts, I’ll be referring to The Fire in Fiction, Donald Maass. The tagline to this resource is “passion, purpose, and techniques to make your novel great.”

What will you do to put the fire in your fiction? How will you make your novel crisp and strong? Leave a comment and let me know.