Home For Fiction - Blog - Page 69 of 149

How Writing Perfectionism Kills Creativity

December 21, 2020

experience, perception, perfectionism, writing

I’m not really a perfectionist. I’m a jack of all trades and master of some, but I don’t care about perfection. In some sense, I consider it a part of the artistic process for a work to have imperfections – we’ll get back to this, it’s crucial. And so, writing perfectionism is something I reject.

But it wasn’t always like that.

I used to spend hours on a single paragraph; whole nights on trying to figure out – in vain – what the perfect chapter would look like.

But then years passed, life happened, and I became more experienced. I also became more skillful, to be sure, but realizing the harms of writing perfectionism is about experience, not skill.

In this post I’ll try to offer some of this experience and show you how writing perfectionism kills your creativity and harms your work. To be a perfectionist writer is to assign quantitative aspects to an inherently qualitative endeavor. Or, in plain English, a perfect answer can only exist for questions like “How much is 5+5?” and not for “Should my antagonist be more subtle?”

Writing as art involves affect, not perfection. In other words, it’s precisely imperfection that gives meaning, affect, and ultimately value to the work.

(more…)

Review of The Perfect Gray

December 14, 2020

Book Review, Criticism

guest post, Igor Livramento, literary fiction, perfect gray, review

This review of The Perfect Gray is obviously not mine – though it would’ve been an interesting exercise to try to review my own novel. Still, this particular review of The Perfect Gray is offered by my friend and fellow academic, author, and creative-writing advisor, Igor da Silva Livramento. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

Important Note: At the beginning of the process, when I asked Igor if he’d like to review The Perfect Gray, I set down two imperative requirements: i) he would have complete editorial freedom; ii) similarly, he would have full freedom to critique The Perfect Gray as he objectively saw it. What follows from this point on, is his personal, independent review of The Perfect Gray as he saw it. I have only offered some very minor formatting recommendations, for consistency within the blog. I have also suggested the added links to other blog posts.

The Perfect Gray Novel

Unassuming title, aye? To be fair, it is accurate by my book (pun intended).

I must admit: I didn’t expect it to be such a good novel. I simply had to drop everything I was reading to beat The Perfect Gray as quickly as possible. It had been over a year since I’d read something so intense, exciting, memorable – simply unforgettable.

review of the perfect gray — *The Perfect Gray*, paperback cover

(more…)

Inevitable Narrative: How to Detect what Is Necessary in Your Fiction

December 7, 2020

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

characters, ending, narrative, plot, writing

Learning how to detect what is necessary in your fiction allows you to write an inevitable narrative. A narrative that is inevitable is structurally solid and leads to a sense-making ending.

Therefore, it should be fairly obvious that learning to see what’s necessary and what’s not when writing is very important. To put it simply, without having an inevitable narrative you will likely have problems with narrative pace as well as a problematic ending.

Moreover, a non inevitable narrative… inevitably creates problems with over-explaining and exposition. The reason? If something that shouldn’t be there actually is, you tend to (sometimes subconsciously) rationalize it with superfluous content.

In this post we’ll take a closer look at inevitable narratives. I’ll show you how to decide what is narratively inevitable and what isn’t, as well as how to structure your narrative in a way that precisely favors its inevitability.

(more…)