Making Shapely Fiction

1. Start Writing with Narrative Shapes

The shapes of fiction inspire by presenting ways to embody your experiences, memories, and imaginings.

Shapes provide structure. Instead of staring at a blank page, use narrative shapes as starting points to organize your swirling memories and ideas into fiction. These aren't rigid rules but creative frameworks. They offer a way to give form to your material.

Examples of shapes. The book introduces various shapes, each suited for different types of material or lengths:

• Facade: Character unknowingly reveals flaws while telling a story.
• Juggling: Interweaving a character's actions and thoughts.
• Iceberg: Dialogue where real feelings are hidden beneath the surface.
• Journey: Character leaves ordinary life behind on a quest or flight.
• Visitation: An unexpected intrusion disrupts ordinary life.
• Aha!: Character comes to a significant realization.
• Bear at the Door: Character faces a pressing problem requiring action.

Fill the shape. Choose a shape that resonates with your material and begin filling it with specific details, characters, and events. The shape provides the initial container, guiding you in embodying your experiences narratively.

2. Build Characters Through Voice and Action

Readers need to hear the characters speak for themselves.

Characters live through voice. Don't just tell readers about your characters; let them hear them. Sentence length, word choice, imagery, and repetition in dialogue and internal thought all contribute to a distinctive voice that makes characters feel real and believable.

Actions reveal character. What a character does is often more revealing than what is said about them. Mundane actions, significant choices, and physical mannerisms all provide clues to a character's personality, motivations, and internal state.

• Cleaning imaginary lint vs. spilling scotch and not caring.
• Turning to the medical column vs. reading headlines.
• Fidgeting with cuticles vs. averting eyes during conversation.

Thoughts provide intimacy. Going inside a character's mind allows readers the deepest level of understanding. Their memories, fears, hopes, and internal conflicts reveal who they are beyond their external actions and words.

3. Tension is the Engine of Fiction

A story doesn’t happen unless there is some problem, some oddity, some incongruity.

Conflict creates tension. Fiction thrives on conflict, whether it's between characters, a character and nature, or a character and themselves. This conflict, or even just an oddity or problem, is what grabs the reader's attention and makes them want to know what happens next.

Tension isn't just danger. While physical threats create obvious tension (Bear at the Door), psychological and philosophical conflicts are just as powerful.

• A character's internal struggle with faith or fear.
• The discrepancy between a character's self-perception and reality (Facade).
• Unexpressed feelings simmering beneath the surface of dialogue (Iceberg).

Maintain the tension. Tension needs to be present throughout the story, not just at the beginning or end. It can be orchestrated through plot, pacing, withholding information, and developing character stakes. Even a seemingly peaceful scene can have underlying tension if the reader feels the fragility of the moment.

4. Show the World, Don't Just Describe It

Make readers feel where actions are taking place, whether in the lobby of Radio City Music Hall or in a smoked-eel shop.

Engage the senses. Instead of simply stating facts about a setting or character, use vivid sensory details (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) to immerse the reader in the fictional world. This creates immediacy and makes the narrative feel real.

• Smell the grease in a fast-food restaurant (A Day in the Life).
• Feel the cold and wetness on the ice (Juggling).
• See the glove without fingers or the crumpled yellow tissue (Description).

Description is action. Good description isn't static; it moves the story forward. Details should provide necessary information, affect the characters, or contribute to the atmosphere and themes. If description doesn't serve the narrative, it can feel skippable.

Settings are characters. Treat your settings as active participants in the story. A place can increase tension, create drama, and influence character behavior, just like another person.

5. Master the Art of Point of View

Find the point of view that seems comfortable for you.

POV shapes perception. The choice of narrator or central consciousness determines how readers experience the story. Whether it's first, second, or third person, the point of view filters all information, influencing reader understanding and emotional connection.

Explore different POVs. Each point of view offers unique advantages and challenges:

• First Person: Immediate, intimate, convincing voice, but limited to one character's perspective and knowledge.
• Second Person: Dramatic and engaging, but can feel insistent or artificial.
• Third Person Limited: Intimate like first person, but with narrator flexibility, often focused on one character's mind.
• Third Person Omniscient: God-like knowledge, ability to comment and access multiple minds, but requires a strong, engaging narrator voice.

Match POV to story. Consider what you want readers to know and feel. Do you want them inside one character's head, or to see the broader picture? Do you want the narrator to be a distinct personality or invisible? Experimenting with different POVs can reveal the best fit for your material.

6. Dialogue Reveals More Than It Says

Conversations are like icebergs—only the very tops are visible.

Dialogue is subtext. What characters don't say is often as important as what they do say. Unexpressed feelings, hidden motives, and underlying tensions create depth and realism in conversations.

• Complaining about a musty house instead of expressing anger (Iceberg).
• Saying "I'd love to" while thinking about stuffing a trophy up someone's nose (Iceberg).

Beyond spoken words. Dialogue includes physical actions, gestures, pauses, and interactions with objects. These non-verbal cues provide context and reveal character, making the conversation feel full and believable.

Choose the right form. Decide whether to use summary, indirect, or direct dialogue based on the desired effect. Direct dialogue offers immediacy and drama, while summary and indirect dialogue are more efficient for conveying information or the gist of a conversation.

7. Structure Gives Your Story Form

A story grows with each draft, finding itself, developing its textures, and eliminating what is extraneous.

Structure is design. Beyond just plot, structure is the overall design of your work – the arrangement of scenes, the flow of time, the relationship between different parts. It provides the framework that holds the narrative together.

Scale affects structure. The structural demands differ significantly between short stories and novels.

• Short Story: Often focuses on a single moment, incident, or realization, with a simpler, more concentrated structure.
• Novel: Requires a more complex structure to sustain interest over hundreds of pages, involving multiple plots, subplots, and character arcs (Freytag's Pyramid elements like exposition, rising action, climax, falling action).

Revision finds structure. The final structure of a story or novel is often discovered through the revision process. Early drafts may be exploratory, but shaping the work involves making decisions about where the story truly begins, ends, and how its parts connect.

8. Style is Your Unique Vision

Your style is who you are.

Style is how you write. Style encompasses your word choice (diction), sentence structure, rhythm, imagery, and overall voice. It's not just decoration; it's the lens through which readers experience your fictional world and the characters within it.

Word choice matters. Every word contributes to your style. Whether you choose everyday language or esoteric vocabulary, the words you select shape the reader's perception and establish the tone and authority of your narrative voice.

• "Mean, nasty low-life" vs. "incorrigibly maleficent cur."
• "Azure" vs. "blue."

Sentences create rhythm. The length and structure of your sentences create a rhythm that influences the pace and feel of the story. Varying sentence length keeps the prose engaging and reflects the dynamics of the narrative.

Find your authentic voice. Avoid imitating other writers' styles. Listen to your own natural language, both written and spoken. Your most powerful and persuasive style is often rooted in your authentic voice and unique way of seeing the world.

9. Write What You Know (Broadly Defined)

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

Knowledge is multifaceted. "Write what you know" doesn't just mean writing about your personal experiences. It includes what you know through observation, empathy, imagination, and research. You know more than you think, but also less.

Don't write what you don't know. Conversely, avoid writing about subjects you have no genuine understanding of. This can lead to inaccuracies, stereotypes, and a lack of authenticity that readers will detect.

Experience is internal. True experience for a writer is the ability to be observant, perceptive, and thoughtful about life. This internal quality allows you to imagine and render worlds and characters convincingly, even if they are outside your direct personal history.

10. Learn from Common Writing Traps

Art is made out of broken rules.

Recognize clichés. Be aware of overused ideas, plots, characters, and phrases. While some clichés can be revitalized with fresh treatment, many signal a lack of originality and can make your writing feel predictable or tired.

Avoid formulaic endings. Steer clear of endings that rely on cheap tricks, sudden surprises, or overly neat resolutions that feel unearned or manipulative. This includes common pitfalls like "and then I woke up" or simplistic poetic justice.

Beware of static stories. Stories where nothing significant happens to the character's internal or external position (Zero-to-Zero) or where characters are merely described as weird without insight (Weird Harold) can bore readers. Ensure there is movement or deepening understanding.

Challenge the "Don'ts". While it's wise to learn from common mistakes, remember that literary conventions can be challenged and broken. Understanding the "rules" allows you to break them effectively and inventively.

11. Embrace Imagination and the Improbable

Readers are willing to enter whatever world you create.

Suspension of disbelief is key. Readers are generally willing to accept the premises of your fictional world, no matter how unusual, as long as you establish them with authority and remain consistent within that world's logic.

Make the unreal believable. Even in fantasy or surreal fiction, grounding the narrative in specific, convincing details makes the improbable feel real. Kafka's detailed descriptions make his bizarre worlds chillingly plausible.

Imagination is personal. True imagination comes from unleashing your own unique fears, dreams, and obsessions, not from copying popular fantasy tropes. Dive into what makes you different.

One odd thing (or many). While a traditional rule suggests only one major coincidence or oddity per story, you can create worlds full of the bizarre if you build it into the premise and maintain internal consistency.

12. Beginnings Hook, Endings Resonate

Beginnings are a tough business.

Start with tension. Grab the reader's attention immediately by plunging into the action or establishing a compelling problem or situation. Avoid lengthy prefaces or unnecessary background information at the outset.

Endings are crucial. The final words of a story carry immense weight. They should feel earned and resonant, bringing the narrative to a satisfying close that fulfills the pattern established throughout the work, even if it's not a tidy resolution.

Endings are in the beginning. Often, problems with an ending stem from issues earlier in the story. The beginning and middle must set up the possibilities and inevitabilities of the conclusion.

Revision finds the right start and end. The ideal beginning and ending are often discovered during the revision process, as you refine the story and understand its true heart. Don't be afraid to cut early drafts or rework conclusions.

Last updated: May 19, 2025