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Announcing the Home for Fiction Patreon Page

October 26, 2020

feedback, home for fiction, patreon, premium content, tools, workshops

Note: Years have passed, things regarding Home for Fiction have changed, and so the text below is irrelevant. If you discovered it accidentally, consider it purely a snapshot of history.

Quite some time ago, I posted a survey with some questions related to premium content for Home for Fiction. It took me a while to ponder on it and decide on the details, but here it is: the Home for Fiction Patreon page!

Take everything you know about the Home for Fiction blog and supercharge it. The Home for Fiction Patreon page offers premium content such as:

early access to blog post drafts.
writing resources and media (tools, checklists, tutorials, presentations, programs, etc).
workshop courses, where you can try my writing tips with exercises.
personal feedback on your own novel or short story.
…and more!

But there’s also an important thing to keep in mind…

home for fiction patreon — “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” — George Orwell

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Repeating Reality in Fiction: Why You Should Avoid It

October 19, 2020

Writing

fiction, guest post, Igor Livramento, reality, writing

Today’s post on (not) repeating reality in fiction is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. 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.

If you want your fiction to immerse the reader, you probably suppose you should describe reality as it is. That is, you should be repeating reality in your fiction. Well, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Writing fiction is a process of controlled distortion, in which emphasis is placed on what really matters.

If we describe all the details of an event, we will fill many pages with unimportant trivia. Moreover, we will leave the reader tired, cognitively and affectively, so they will be unable to appreciate the most important moments of the narrative. All our figures of speech, so well crafted, will be nothing more than exhaustive annoyances.

Repeating reality in fiction — To avoid repeating reality in fiction is like a photograph that, by hiding some facets, boosts the affective power of what remains visible

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The Perfect Gray – New Literary Fiction Novel

October 12, 2020

Fiction

book, fiction, literary fiction, perfect gray

So, here we are… A new literary-fiction novel – though, hey, what’s so “novel” about a novel? The Perfect Gray is a project I began almost as an exercise. The idea came soon after I wrote the post on concept fiction. Quite frankly, I had absolutely no plan in mind regarding plot or characters, which of course is the whole point behind concept fiction.

At 70,000 words, The Perfect Gray is within the usual range of literary fiction word counts, yet I still find it a bit surprising how little it took me to complete it – about 5 weeks.

What is it about? I’ll let one of the character in The Perfect Gray to answer that:

It’s always hard for writers to tell you what their book is about. But I think you’ll like it.

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