: Re: I am teaching myself how to write a novel -- where can I find support and resources? I want to have training in how to write fiction (particularly science fiction). I know that I can take
Read, analyse what you read; write, analyse what you wrote.
The greatest training I had for writing was my 'modern language and literature' degree. While studying literature, I learnt the effects that different techniques produce and then I simply wrote until those methods became second nature. You don't even have to learn the technical terms (although I had to and it's useful when discussing them with other people), simply developing the intuition for what works and doesn't work.
Try to find a guide for close reading geared towards literary texts. Make sure you've got a guide for the whole book and for excerpts (including characters; setting, both space and time; stylistic device; dialogue vs narration; everything). Then read a book. Go back and analyse it in general following the guide. Next choose some short excerpts (the beginning, description of a place or character, a dramatic scene, etc) then analyse them carefully. Don't just identify personifications, metaphors and hypallages but find out what effect they cause. If the author had chosen to do something different, how would that detract from the effect.
Also, plot out all the main events in the book and analyse how they're sequenced. See how that sequence creates (or not) tension. Why? Identify the events that pertain to the main plot and to the subplots. Ask yourself how shuffling a few events in the sequence would change the pace and the tension build.
I suggest you start with modern books, as classics of previous periods were written with different rules (e.g. in the second half of the 19th century, lavish descriptions were the thing to do). Work with one or two famous contemporary literary books then move on to the genre you wish to write on. Choose a good book and do the same. Eventually you can try to look at a bad book and actively search for what went wrong. Think how it could be improved, story and writing wise.
If you want to study dramatic scenes in particular (or the beginning, place description, etc), identify 2-4 such scenes in the same book and compare them. Then choose different books (by different authors), choose 2-4 such scenes and compare them. Alwasy ask 'what effect does this choice cause?'. Very often, you don't have bad techniques but techniques that were used in the wrong place or for the wrong effect.
On the other hand, if you want to study how, say, the weather, plays into the story, identify all the references to the weather (but don't do this on a whole novel or you'll never see the end of it; stick to a chapter or a scene).
In the mean time, keep writing. An interesting exercise my high school teacher had us do was pick a picture and describe it or use it as the starting point for a short story. Another was rewriting a scene from the POV of a different character. You can practice with writing short stories or just scenes, which is great for developing specific techniques.
One thing you should do is write different versions of the same scenes, descriptions, whatever. Then compare the different texts and see the different effects. For example, my high school teacher gave us photos of people from magazines then had us describe the same person in different ways: one paragraph of general description; a set of paragraphs of detailed description worthy of the 19th century; description of the person's actions (could be invented) with minimalist insertion of the two most striking physical features; description by a fashion-obsessed person (focus on clothes and hairstyle); and so on. She would also make us do similar stuff for describing places, weather, or describe a person's personality through her possessions, bedroom or actions.
The objective was to widen our horizons: there is no one way of doing things, you must choose the one that creates the right feel for the story or scene you're writing.
More posts by @Jessie137
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