So I'm mainly a fantasy author and I'm in a literary fiction class this next semester. I just finished my first short story for it, and it has some magic realism as character background, which highlights some things, but I'm not sure if it will be alright for the class. Any advice on writing more literary minded work?
So, my first piece of advice is: Don’t try to get around the class rules and do things your own way. Because, at the end of the day, that means you’re not actually pushing your boundaries or challenging yourself as a writer, and you won’t actually get anything out of the class. Basically, it’s not more creative; it’s cheating. Writing stuff that’s outside your comfort zone is really, really good for you, and if you never do it you’ll never grow past a certain point. So don’t try to beat the system. I speak from experience, because I did this for a whole semester in college and ended up really regretting it. Because the teacher saw right through it, and she graded me accordingly (and I commend her for that). When I actually stopped trying to be cute and followed the rules, I produced some much better–and much more interesting–stuff that even surprised me. I had to write stream-of-consciousness for one assignment, and I went into it kicking and screaming because there are few things I hate more than stream-of-consciousness. But finally I said, “Look, you need to stop fucking around and bending the rules because you’re not fooling anyone and what you’re writing is crap” and sat down and made myself do it. And it turned into this bizarre internal monologue by a girl freezing to death in her car and it was written in a weird mosaic mash-up that was half her thoughts and half Led Zeppelin lyrics, and people in the class loved it and said it was the best thing I’d written all year. And five years later, it’s actually sort of spawned a whole novel. I’m about 75k through it, it’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had working on a project, and I think it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done. This is a long way of saying, even if this is not your genre, give it a chance and actually commit to it, because the results might really surprise you. (And if you’re asking the question “Is this all right?” because you kind of not-so-sneakily bent the rules of the class or the assignment, the answer is probably no. Yes, what you write is your prerogative, but that’s not the point of a stylistics class with a specific objective. The objective is to learn to write a certain way, and you’re not going to learn anything if you’re trying to take a shortcut.) That’s the first thing.
Moving on to the second thing: Literary fiction is all about character, and about humans as a species. So, don’t worry too much about ‘what happens’ in the story until you’ve figured out who this story is about. Literary fiction is about turning people inside-out. It’s about who they are, and why they are who they are. Start with a plain human person. Resist the urge to add magic. A person shouldn’t need magic to be interesting, and in the long run you will learn to write much better, more believable characters–whatever the genre–if you learn to write real people before you give them wings or a magic wand. I honestly think the best thing you could do in this scenario is force yourself to put all the magic aside and confine yourself to the real world. As for how to do that: there is no step-by-step manual. But I have a character masterpost here, a list of crowdsourced character questions to get you thinking here, and so much more under the character development tag. If that doesn’t give you what you’re looking for, come back to the inbox with a few more details and I’ll see what I can do to help!
