How to write fiction

Mark Twain said writers should write what they know. Writers need to write about things they have experienced. For beginning writers, this is excellent advice on how to get started. There are many different ways writers use their past adventures to create characters and stories. Writers use experiences, old friends, and a child like ability to fantasize to create characters, settings, and story lines.

One of the best ways for beginning writers to create a story line is to base it upon real life occurrences. Mark Twain worked on a riverboat. Jack London explored Alaska. Hemingway was an avid fisherman and loved to travel. Their experiences allowed them to create settings and characters that seem real. A good way for a young writer to fictionalize personal experiences is to combine several of them. Use things that happen to a friend, and add those experiences to your own. They may be things a writer has witnessed, or things a friend tells them about in detail. For instance, Johnny falls through the ice skating on the golf course pond, Jimmy goes ice fishing, and Ralph shovels driveways for money. We can use these three experiences to create a completely different story about a boy named Tony who shovels snow off the ice to go ice fishing, and later falls through the ice, and has to be saved.

The same idea works in creating characters. Johnny is short and skinny, with long blonde hair, green eyes, and a small upturned nose. Johnny likes to read adventure stories like the Hardy Boys. Jimmy is tall heavy-set kid, with braces, curly black hair brown eyes, and dimples. He loves playing sports, and watching his favorite athletes on television. Ralph lost his two front teeth when he fell off his bicycle. Now fantasize and combine Johnny’s long blonde hair, with Jimmy’s heavy-set body and dimples, and Ralph’s missing front teeth to create Tony. Tony loves sports, reading books, and racing his bicycle. Tony lost his front teeth riding his bicycle at the park. When Tony rides, his long blonde hair sticks out of the back of his helmet. He is a big kid, some would say heavy, but I’d say athletic looking. It doesn’t matter because combined with his missing front teeth his dimples create an irresistible smile.

Another neat trick is to use nicknames. Johnny’s nickname is squirrel, because he once had a pet squirrel. A car hit the squirrel’s mother. Johnny had to nurse the baby squirrel with a bottle. He used to carry the squirrel around snug inside his leather jacket until he got caught with the squirrel in school. That’s why everyone calls him Squirrel. Now instead of Tony, we call our character the catchy name Squirrel and give him Johnny’s story.

A canal that served as a moat protected the west side of the lake. Australian Pines lined the canal and hid the lake from the well-traveled country road the city folk used as a short cut. Davie's almost surrounded with city folk. Miami to the south. Fort Lauderdale to the north and east. Dozens of concrete jungles of condos and townhouses sever Davie from the Everglades in the west. The city folk come to Davie like tourists in their Lincolns, Mercedes and Cadillacs and stare at us and point fingers, like we're a sideshow act, as we ride down the streets on our horses and Harleys. They park on the side of the road by our pastures and let their kids feed the animals junk food.

A cow farm protected the north border of Wolf Lake. Thick woods and canals protected the south side of the lake. The only path into the lake was along an old dirt road that led to a horse ranch. I parked my car on the side of the road in the woods and then climbed a steep hill. I thought I was in heaven. Sweet smelling Australian Pines and Malaleuca trees lined the steep embankment that led to the lake. I had to hold onto vines to avoid falling as I descended towards the deep, crystal clear water. No trails, no paths, only woods covered with thick underbrush. Old cars, once used for family vacations, lay on the lake bottom thirty feet below, creating artificial reefs. Fish swam through the windows and out the doors. Gators drifted like logs from shore to shore silently hunting. Several large white swans mingled with a flock of ducks. Pink Flamingos rested on massive old trees that fell naturally into the water and were replaced by young saplings. The only evidence of man, besides the cars the fish used for their homes, was a rope swing high up in the trees. There were no beer cans, or garbage, or fishing line, or McDonald's bags, or old tires, or signs telling you, you can't do this and you can't do that. There was only nature and its beauty.

The setting created here is real. This place really exists. We could even use this setting as the place where Squirrel our fictional character falls off his bicycle and looses his front teeth. “Squirrel was on vacation visiting his grandparents in Florida. He decided to ride his bicycle to Wolf Lake to go fishing. The trail around the lake is full of overgrown plants and trees. Squirrel doesn’t see the root of the huge Malaleuca tree sticking out of the ground. He hits the root at full speed, and flies head-first over the handlebars.” The use of a real setting makes the story more believable, and therefore more enjoyable.

These techniques allow young writers to create characters that jump off the page and feel alive. The setting, the story, the characters are all based on what the writer knows and experiences. A good writer exaggerates those experiences, creating fictionalized stories based on reality. The more realism found in a story, the more believable the story. Good fiction combines this realism with fantasy to create stories we can relate to in our own lives. Mark Twains characters and stories are fictional, but he uses just enough reality to make them feel alive, and real.