THE ICE PICK

The Art of Compelling Fiction, by Christopher T. Leland. Cincinnati: Story Press, 1998. ISBN 1-884910-30-0. $17.99.

Basically a book for beginners, this one may be useful if you’re experiencing difficulties in writing or in selling your work. Leland advises you to do an inventory of your past and current work so you can sort out your strengths and weaknesses, and then takes you back through the processes of creation to find what is blocking your progress or your success.

Leland begins by trying to explain why writers write and what it is that readers want. An impossible task, but within his discussion you may discover what it is that drives your own vision, and from that better understand how you make your stories the way you do. By knowing what kinds of things interest, fascinate, obsess, or haunt you, you should be able to use those images, conflicts, relationships, and feelings in planning and creating stronger, more "compelling" stories--ones that will resonate in your readers’ hearts and minds.

Leland encourages keeping a journal that does more than record the weather or what you did that day, but that draws "attention to things you had not really thought about, details of a new consciousness you had not accessed and elements of your conventional world you had never paid attention to." In other words, he wants you to think about the world around you, write down your discoveries so you don’t forget them, and then use what you’ve learned about yourself and others in your writing. He wants you to use what you know of history, other cultures, other generations, and people of the opposite sex, in order to be able to create a richer fictional world.

He then discusses all the basic building blocks of plot, description, point of view, dialogue, pace, and character. In speaking of revision, he warns us not to throw anything away until we are sure we won’t need it. This is a particular danger to computer users who find the delete key handier than cutting to a clipboard, or pasting to a second "scrap document" or just to the end of the current manuscript. Leland tells of the time his editors asked to see a previous draft of his novel, and he ended up integrating half a dozen passages back into the book.

If you become stuck or blocked, the chapter on "Polishing Plot" may be just what you need to get your story unstuck and back into space or out on the road again.

The index is excellent, and all of the chapters have challenging exercises to help you get started or re-started on your writing.

Some writers avoid how-to-write books because of conflicting advice. Leland acknowledges that "for each example given, there is probably an opposite and equal example. For each assurance, there is one just as legitimate that absolutely contradicts it. Still, I hope what you have read has been useful. . . . Fiction is not an occupation for the faint of heart, nor for the smug. It is a calling that, in its very essence, implies an investment of self few other endeavors demand."

This is an excellent book, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to write "compelling fiction."

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, Mar. 2001.}