transitioning to fiction
- Home
- Board: /lit/ - Literature
- Reading: transitioning to fiction
Hey /lit/,
Does anyone have advice on applying writing abilities to fiction/storytelling?
As a child I loved fiction. but as a teenager I pretty much exclusively read non-fiction - articles, essays, and informative books. I read constantly, but mostly ignored fiction for those years. Then, in college, I started reading fiction again. Early in college I wrote a short story that was pretty good, and was highlighted by an instructor, but then I churned out a bunch of atrocious, awful short stories. I'd applied minimal effort to them, so when I learned from others how awful they were, it was essentially just bringing me back down to earth, that I didn't have the Midas touch.
Still, I've always been able to write essays and opinion pieces pretty effortlessly, and I assume it's at least in part because that's what I consumed so much of as a teenager. Now I'm reading fiction a ton to catch up with that.
So the question is, how to I transition my abilities in non-fiction to fiction/storytelling? I can write an opinion piece effortlessly, but maybe because I'm so self-conscious about my fiction now, sometimes it's hard to even get going with fiction.
/bump/ for hope...
first of all learn to use paragraphs
second, just write a lot of fiction and don't expect it to be good
simultaneously read a lot of good fiction, study what makes them good, and hope it trickles into your own writing
that's pretty much it
I suppose you could try creative nonfiction first but all this really doesn't matter
