5 Common Mistakes You Should Avoid As An Amateur Literary Fiction Writer

Writing fiction is a bucket load of fun, you are free to explore the fringes of your imagination, break a few rules, and create a new world, albeit a fictional one.

The freedom expressed however has to be within the boundaries of reality if you are writing Literary fiction, a genre often ungrasped by amateur fiction writers.

Literary fiction is looked at as serious fiction, whereas Genre fiction, Thriller, Science Fiction, Dystopian Horror, and Romance are plot-driven, Literary fiction is character driven.

It is mostly formulaic, melodramatic, and predictable. It cannot be defined easily but can be identified by what it’s not.

Genre fiction fans love fast-paced plot-driven action, and find literary novels are flat, — nothing happens.

On the other hand, literary fiction readers are serious and expect excellent, original, and distractions free writing.

The Power Behind Literary Fiction

Literary Fiction, is mostly a study of humanity, an exploration of difficult social or political issues that control our lives. A literary fiction book is therefore introspective.

It doesn’t really follow a formula it may or may not have a story arc which means it doesn’t guarantee a satisfying ending.

The line between hero and villain is often blurry. And without a tidy plot to spell out every character’s motive, metaphor, symbolism, and imagery play a greater role in telling the story.

Because of their powerful symbolism, literary fiction characters influence politics, culture, and society, they live in our memories as reminders of who we ought to be or who we shouldn’t be.

Remember greedy Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and how he taught us the dangers of cadaverous greed for money?

Or Harriet Beecher’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that inflamed American conscience about slavery and sparked the civil war? That’s the power of literary fiction.

The Art of Writing Literary Fiction

Literary fiction still has to have a plot. It may not be on the surface like in Genre fiction where the protagonist has to conquer something triumphantly or get destroyed.

But the plot is always there, under the surface, in the hearts and minds of the characters, as they express their pains, triumphs, and challenges.

It’s expressed in characters’ thoughts, desires, and motivations as they navigate intricate social and cultural challenges.

Literary fiction is always written in beautiful and distinctive personal prose. The endings may sometimes be sad, abrupt, or leave the reader free to interpret what happened without resolving the protagonist’s conflict.

Experienced writers over the years develop a singular authorial style that expresses a deep emotional complexity that fuses the outer world with their character’s inner battles.

They have distinctive artistic prose, that raises their character’s conflict and inner turmoil to powerful imagery.

This distinctive style cannot be duplicated, you can pick a paragraph in a page and know if it was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harper Lee, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Atwood, or Toni Morrison.

They all have this distinct, polished prose, an authorial voice that sets them apart from genre writers.

Literary fiction is always more challenging to read. The reader is always pulled into the story and has to infer the plot instead of sitting back and watching events unfold.

And that’s what makes writing literary fiction a challenge, the writer has to build empathy to relate to characters as humans and to deduce the hidden motivations and desires that lurk beneath their actions.

Experienced writers help the reader to recognize small turning points, low points, and high points based on what they know of the character and about human nature.

The interesting thing about literary fiction is that it isn’t bound by strict standards, every writer has the freedom to explore and make their own rules as they go along, this limitless freedom can lose the reader in the endless plains of the writer’s imagination.

And because it is free from rules, literary fiction writers sometimes push the boundaries of what’s acceptable and may sometimes go too far.

1. Readers Don’t want to be lectured about Morals

Amateur Literary fiction writers are sometimes tempted to overtly show their personal beliefs; they try to influence the reader’s attitude. Because It’s easy to offer a one-sided moralistic “lesson” when you let your personal feelings cloud your writing.

Figure out how you feel about certain issues as you write, then control those feelings from spilling onto the page.

But be careful of writing a story that falls flat because you are conscious of keeping your feelings off balance.

Professional writers always write a story that looks at all viewpoints.

Do This: Think about how your narrative can show the nuanced complexities of an issue. Allow contradictions to exist in your work, without worrying about teaching the reader.

2. Ground your reader, Don’t lose them with many themes.

Because most Literary fiction explores society’s issues writers are often tempted to write about several themes, they create several characters and try to lump them together.

For example, they want to write about immigration, race, and migrant workers’ problems in the same book.

Professional literary fiction writers come up with a specific character in a specific situation and hinge their central theme on this central character.

Think of the Protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, the central character in Toni Morrison’s famous book The Bluest Eyes. She is an eleven-year-old Black girl who believes that she is ugly and that having blue eyes would make her beautiful.

She is sensitive, delicate, lonely, and imaginative, and passively suffers the abuse of her mother, father, and classmates.

Toni Morrison sets the book’s pace and grounds the reader in its central theme — Race.

Do This: Commit to detail to depict your character’s experience in a moving, relatable, and entertaining way.

 

3. Embrace Weird Character Traits

Because Literary fiction is character-driven the writer has the freedom to create quirky, freaky, kooky, and sometimes outlandish characters, in so doing they can write extremely strange fiction.

Professional writers listen to whimsical, wacky, sometimes bizarre ideas. The stranger the twist in the character’s personal traits the more fun the writer will have pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable in society.

Quirky characters have a story behind their quirkiness a survival strategy.

Their quirkiness becomes endearing to the reader in light of the challenges they bravely have to overcome.

Consider Jack Torrance an aspiring writer with serious anger issues in Stephen King’s book The Shining. He breaks his son’s arm, assaults a student, and he can’t be blamed, his insanity is spiritual.

He is possessed by a hotel spirit. But Jack isn’t possessed outright, the hotel pushes him to insanity when it aggravates his problems.

Do This: Think of how to bring out the weirdness of your characters.

4. Your Characters Need Dramatic Events

Literary fiction characters are best explored when in action, the more dramatic the event the more pressure is put on the character to reveal their finer personality traits.

For example, in the rise of a totalitarian government in Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale, Moira is depicted as the symbol of resistance to authority and represents hope to the Handmaids.

Atwood presents her as the polar opposite of Offred. She is independent, strong-willed, and outspoken. Conversely, the pair can be argued to be doubles — they both ‘resist’ the oppressive Republic in Gilead.

Moira’s use of informal language and slang and her crude vocabulary is dramatically different from how the Handmaids are taught to speak. It marks her as a dissenter.

Do This: Create events to help move your story forward, and to unpack your character’s quirks.

5. What’s the color of your prose?

Literary readers expect well-considered narrative. That doesn’t mean the writer should be constrained to a single writing style.

But Amateur writers enjoy purple prose, a flowery and ornate language that sacrifices plot and clarity for detail.

They enjoy the use of big words in a language that doesn’t match the occasion or the character. Neither does it advance the action, clarify the plot, or reveal a character’s intentions or thoughts.

Consider this statement: The grey haired whimsical man, rugged with age glanced fleetingly at his abode. He reminisced of the days past, a crystalline sparkle in his eyes as he gazed, enraptured, by its white walls.

Beige prose, a direct writing style that doesn’t allow for similes, metaphors, or imagery. It uses brief descriptions, plain words, and simple sentence structure. On its own it isn’t bad because it can be witty and effectively get the point across. But at its worst it may lack emotion, for example:

He held her hand and stepped on the red carpet, he had never envisioned this new setting. An empty hall in a deserted corner of Arkansas.

Or this passage from Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

We went tiptoeing along a path amongst the trees back toward the end of the widow’s garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn’t scrape our heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made a noise. We scrouched down and laid still.

Then there is blue language, usually used in dialogue and can be full of profanity, cursing, and obscenities.

In Closing:

Professional Literary writers know when to use the right kind of prose and which language to use in dialogue and bring out the best narrative flow.

A lyrical or poetic style is perfectly fine if it builds the story’s momentum.

 

This article was first published Here: 5 Amateur Literary Fiction Mistakes You Should Avoid

 

Sources and Further Reading:

https://celadonbooks.com/what-is-literary-fiction/

https://nathanbransford.com/blog/2007/02/what-makes-literary-fiction-literary

https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/literary-fiction/writing/

https://nybookeditors.com/2018/07/what-is-literary-fiction/

https://medium.com/@lucillemoncrief/what-is-purple-prose-beige-prose-and-blue-language-9cae7fd44ba9