The Fire In Fiction My Verdict: Keep On Desk
The Fire In Fiction: Passion, Purpose, and Techniques To Make Your Novel Great by Donald Maass is a great well-rounded book for any genre. I classify it as a workbook because there are many opportunities to test out the theories discussed.
The nine chapters in this book cover the basics of any story:
- Protagonists
- Secondary Characters
- Scenes That Can’t Be Cut
- World Building
- Voice
- Believability
- Humor
- Tension
- Why to Keep Writing.
This is a lot to cover in one book.
There
are Practical Tools at the end of each chapter. These give you specific exercises
to try right now and then has discussion questions so you can reflect on it.
The tools mirror the sub chapters in each chapter, so if you enjoyed reading a
particular section, I’d recommend skipping to the practical tool section it
corresponds with and trying it out while it is fresh in your mind.
Many of the exercises require you to examine the opposite
emotions or ideas you are trying to portray in a scene. How can you think of
opposites without synonyms? It becomes a clever way of defining your original
intent for a scene.
Put the fire in fiction could translate to put your truth in your fiction. Steal from your emotional experiences in order to make your characters real and original. It is the only way to make an original story, because all plots and arch types have been used before.
Put the fire in fiction could translate to put your truth in your fiction. Steal from your emotional experiences in order to make your characters real and original. It is the only way to make an original story, because all plots and arch types have been used before.
You would be doing yourself a disservice to read more than
one chapter a day. With such thorough examples to back up his statements in
each sub chapter, you need to allow your mind time to mull it over and think of
examples in your genre. Then take time to brainstorm and daydream your
responses at the end of each chapter. The questions take on a life of their own
when held up to your work in progress.
Do you want to pick a random page of your current work and
dissect it a bunch of different ways? This book will help you do it. It’s
definitely a good choice to browse when you are fleshing out a book or starting
to draw the connecting lines of a new plot.
It would probably take you a month of hard work to try out each of the practical tools at the end of the chapters. That is both exciting and daunting.
It would probably take you a month of hard work to try out each of the practical tools at the end of the chapters. That is both exciting and daunting.
Your Homework (beyond the Practical Tools at the
end of each chapter): Decide what fuels your passion for writing fiction and
find a way to connect with that on at least a weekly basis.
Rating Scale: Keep On Desk, Own it, Read it, Skim it, Don't Bother
Rating Scale: Keep On Desk, Own it, Read it, Skim it, Don't Bother
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