Fiction Writing 101: Do You Want to Write Fiction?

So you want to write fiction?  It's harder than you think.  Here's a letter of advice that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to a young woman who had asked for his opinion about a story she had written.

Dear Frances:

I've read the story carefully and, Frances, I'm afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn.  When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child's passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway's first stories, In Our Time, went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In This Side of Paradise I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a hemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional, having learned all that he'll ever learn about writing, can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming - the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is "nice" is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the "works." You wouldn't be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn't seem worthwhile to analyze why this story isn't salable, but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,

Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming.  You have talent - which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

_________________________________________________

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Blooming in San Pedro

Taken on December 25, 2011

Back to Indiana

Please indulge me while I tell you a story about Michael who has been a friend of mine since 1990.  This is a story about Michael doing the right thing but being discriminated against by doing so.  Anyway, here’s the true story:

Michael contacted law enforcement in Pennsylvania regarding suspicions about sexual predators in 2004-2005, and I remember the angst and stress this caused him as he worried about one alleged victim and not being able to get help to that person. When he returned to Indiana for grad school, and after discussing what he knew about PA sexual predators, he became the target of discrimination in his graduate program. This nearly killed him. Still, he continued to investigate and found out that people at IU were likely tied to a man-boy sex network, drug dealing, and pornography; he found direct ties between Indiana predators and those he investigated in PA. He again turned this over to law enforcement with no results.

Leaving Indiana in 2007 on the advice of his Asperger's therapist (a Ph.D. psychologist) and his ADHD psychiatrist (an M.D.), he moved to  California "where folks are more likely to understand what it means to have ADHD and Asperger's." He found work at UCSC, and within a  few months he was invited into a PhD program there.  Then after getting back in touch with the people from IU for the necessary recommendations, people from work, who up until then had gotten along with him, suddenly started asking about his interest in underage men and drugs.  One told him they even thought he was going to be arrested!

Though accepted into the PhD program, he lost his funding and began his time as a homeless man; he and his cats lived in a parking lot that first week in his car and many times after that.  So six years after he began sounding alarms and three years after losing his quest for a PhD and going homeless, Michael has finally been vindicated by arrests in Pennsylvania (and a suicide in Indiana) and across all the networks he described. To put an end to rumors, he even returned home to Indiana where they began.

After a year, despite all the rumors, he remains poor, is still trying to create psychology-based software (which he has been doing since 2003) and is unable to find appropriate work in high-tech. We know the world is pretty screwed up right now, but for the person who sounded the alarm still to be living with the effects of discrimination and to be going through all this isn't right. It's like blaming the fireman for the fire.