The Four Tools

A Writer's Guide to the Craft of Fiction

There are no quick tricks to becoming a good writer: it comes with LOTS of reading and LOTS of practice. But there are tools good writers use and elements good stories include.

Tip Before Going in: NEVER SAY NEVER. Part of being a good writer is learning the rules so you can break them later. Most beginning writers, though, don't know the basics. Once you hone your craft, you'll understand the rules well enough to break them intentionally for good reasons. You'll notice great works of fiction break the rules all the time, but after you learn craft you'll see how and why.

Four Tools

These are the four tools good writers use to lend depth and reality to a story. Upon close-reading, one can see that any well-crafted story demonstrates effective use of these tools.

Concreteness: Concrete detail; the descriptions that appeal to the five senses (taste, touch, smell, sound, sight) and ground the reader in the concrete world of the story and the character(s)' perceptions

Avoid: adverbs (“she said angrily”), abstract adjectives (“he was handsome”), abstractions (“her heart was broken”)

Tips: There are obviously exceptions to the proscriptions above, but more often than not, adverbs and abstraction cause the writer to gloss over concrete detail. Also, you'll want to avoid using too many adjectives in general as verbs and nouns—a person's tics, their behavior, what they own, what things they wear, what they say—often reveal a lot more about a character.

Precision: Effective use of concrete detail to render the external and internal realities of a story's character(s) – details that not only are vivid but also communicate the theme(s) of a story

Avoid: Overly flowery prose that is detailed for the sake of hearing yourself talk, metaphors and images that do not coincide, any detail you can't justify having

Tips: Write a draft and be as detailed as possible to achieve concreteness, but upon revising, think about what themes emerge from your work and trim down, omit and/or tweak the descriptions that sound cool but don't jive with the overall tone of the piece. The primary concerns of your story and your protagonist should determine the details that remain.

Expansiveness: Using an economy of language to portray events and characters in a way that is not static or cliché, but indicates meaningful dramatic movement and contradiction.

Avoid: Any events, dialog, or details that do not reveal more than one new, important thing to the reader about the character(s) in the story and its themes; the expected or cliched version of events

Tips: To achieve expansiveness, you want, as Pound says, not one more word than you need in your story. However, the images, events, and interactions you DO include will be working “double time”--doing more than one thing at once. In the description of the yard at the beginning of the winning piece, for example we learn about the setting, we learn about the narrator, her mother, and their relationship; the conflict is established; and themes begin to implicate themselves. Every detail and event in an expansive piece moves the story forward, but also works on other levels to render vivid the characters and the themes of the piece. Expansive details are not include cliché, nor do they indicate stasis, but instead evoke complex movement in a character. For example, the fact the narrator in the winning piece draws the men as animals is an idiosyncratic detail that indicates how she works to shape the world around her.

Generosity: Complex, humane, and compelling treatment of a story's characters and their interactions with the world and one and other.

Avoid: 2D, stereotypical, “good” or “bad” characters; reducing a character to an example in a cautionary tale; cliched or 2D portrayal of a character's emotional state; unsympathetic or, conversely, uncritical portrayal of a character; focusing on an “issue” or “message” as opposed to the characters

Tips: A gay democrat might struggle to generously portray a fundamentalist Christian protesting an AIDS walk. Generosity may also elude a college-aged male who ogles hipster girls who wear skull candy headphones writing about a college-aged male who ogles hipster girls who wear skull candy headphones. In the first case, your opposition to the protagonist can prevent you from lending them the dignity and understanding a character needs for a story to work. In the second, your proximity to the character can prevent you from exacting a well rounded portrayal. Another issue in the first case, is that the politics of the issue can hijack the story, rendering the characters 2D figures in a polemic puppet show. Generous portrayals are complex and difficult—rife with meaningful contradiction. Generosity is the doctor who chain smokes, the Catholic priest who molests children, the cop who cheats on his taxes, the psychiatrist with the alcohol problem—portrayed as complex and sympathetic humans, not merely mocked, but understood as reflections of humanity as a whole.