Writing Fact and Writing Fiction

Can we learn about the one from doing the other?

Published by The Writing Cooperative

I've spent a career as an academic writing non-fiction. Admittedly, that's not how some of the critics of my research output see it, but that's another story. The question I want to address in this post is the following: can I carry over things that I have learned about academic writing into the business of writing novels?

Same and different

Binaries? Photo by The Creative Exchange on Unsplash

Binaries are generally unhelpful when it comes to understanding most things. We notice the limitations of absolutes as the basis for understanding stuff once we allow ourselves to engage fully with, and be comfortable around, complexity. So, it's worth recognising that while on some levels fiction and non-fiction writing are entirely different things, in other respects they are still fundamentally the same thing. Let's try to pick some of that apart.

I'm a process sort of person, at heart. For me structure always comes before content. My PhD supervisor advised me at the start of my studies to get a lever-arch file (this was a long time ago) and a set of card dividers—one for each chapter—and whenever I wrote anything, to add it in roughly the place that I thought it might go. In that way stuff would start to accrue, physically, and before you knew it, you'd have big chunks of it done, and be able to spot the bits that still needed doing.

I still work like that for any papers that I write. I either create, or find online, an appropriate Word template for the document I'm about to draft. I make sure all the styles that I want are defined (more of this, below). And then I put in the section heads. For research reports these are often defined by long-established convention (Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion). This strategy has the advantage of enabling you to start writing not at the beginning. The first sentences of the introduction of a paper are always difficult to frame. It's much better to start with easy stuff. In research reports that's often the method, where you describe what you did. This gets you going, and before you know it…

Templates and styles

Does this approach translate into the domain of novel writing? For me the answer is 'yes'. I create all the chapters I'm going to need using the 'Header 2' style, which automatically inserts a page break, and provides a blank page per chapter so that I can start to write anywhere. This suits my style of story construction, which works through the creation of key scenes that I am motivated to write. I've got a rough idea where these scenes might go, so I will just slot them in where it seems most sensible. They will of course get moved to different locations as the story arc develops. But they get you started.

Chapter structure: Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

For me it's relatively easy to estimate the number of chapters I need. I know that my novel will be between 80,000 to 100,000 words, and I know that I aim to write short chapters that are readable in one sitting (on a half hour commute, say). Their length varies between 2,500 and 3,500 words. Therefore, I create chapters 1 to 34 as the very first step of the writing process.

'A very special level of hell'

There are a number of reasons for working with templates and styles. The first, and most important, is that local formatting is evil. It's the devil's own work. Using the 'Enter' key, 'Tabs', and the 'Space' bar to format up documents should result in some sort of custodial sentence. All the 'spacing' in the document should be created by styles. These define the hierarchy of headers (I always use four levels), the characteristics of 'normal' text (font, spacing between lines, spacing between paragraphs, and so forth), and any other particular devices you use. My heading hierarchy usually looks like this:

Header 1: Book Title
Header 2: Chapter number
Header 3: Headers within chapter to be seen by the reader (sparingly used)
Header 4: Placeholders for me that I will delete before sharing with any readers

This brings me onto the second major reason for using templated features. Changes that you want to make to how the document looks are done through editing the style, not by having to go through adjusting all the local formatting. If you decide you want more whitespace between a header and the text, or if you decide you want to indent the first line of every paragraph, you edit the style and the whole document responds. This is, of course, basic stuff.

Global delete

Employing this strategy brings the additional functionality of being able to select every instance of a thing and delete the lot. This is how I use the fourth layer of headers in my documents. These describe scenes, and act as labels in the 'navigation' pane. While I'm drafting, every section of each chapter is listed using these headers. When I come to share the draft with someone, I save it to another file (I always keep one definitive document for drafting), select all the level four headers (through the 'style' menu), and click 'delete'. Bingo, all the 'notes' that help me keep track of the storyline are gone. Just make sure that when you go back to working on the book you open up the original file, with all your headers still in it. I also use this technique to insert bookmarks to provide word counts of chapters and other devices that help me keep track of the structure of the document as it's developing. If each of these devices is identified by a style, they can be deleted en masse in the same way.

Editing imperatives can be dealt with similarly. I insert comments into the text (denoted by a distinctive ‘edit’ style), telling me to expand on this section, or consider moving that section. I prefer comments like this in the text, because they don’t take up screen space in a separate pane, while remaining fully visible when you are working on a given section. For reasons that should be becoming clear, I prefer to use the valuable resources of screen real estate for displaying the styles I use while I write, rather than for a separate comments pane!

Voicing

Characters must have distinctive voices. And each character’s voice must be consistent. What they say in dialogue must be ‘them’. If you are working with a character you know, and who is well-developed in your writing, you will already have achieved this. What I’m interested in here is how structural devices can be used to support the development of distinctive and consistent voices in the early stages of character development — perhaps in that first draft when there is still a certain amount of plasticity in the world you are creating. Surprise-surprise, this is also something that templates can help you with. Create a style that is identical to ‘normal’ for each of your characters. As you write dialogue, mark each utterance with the appropriate style. This will not intrude on the look of the text. But it will enable you to undertake the simple operation of copying and pasting every word that each character says into another reference document.

The markup can be done quickly. By and large, each utterance should be a new paragraph, so the relevant text doesn’t even need highlighting. Your cursor just needs to be somewhere in the paragraph when you click the appropriate style. You do end up collecting all the surrounding non-dialogue text when you perform the copy and paste operation, but the process is ‘good enough’ to give you a thorough observation of each character’s voice in turn. What contractions do they use? Do they have favoured words or phrases? Distinctive expostulations? Pet swear words? And how do the characters differ, one from another, in these regards?

I also keep track of on-going ideas in this way. An ‘ideas’ style enables you to insert a thought directly into the text. This is particularly useful when you don’t want to interrupt the flow of writing by opening up some other file that you might use to keep track of such things. These thoughts can be copied and pasted into a separate document, in the same way as the dialogue, and they can be deleted on mass when it comes to sharing the draft with readers. I know that I find it distracting to see the comments of the author in any text that I review. This technique enables you to keep such comments well away from reviewers.

The upshot

No amount of clever structuring will make up for dreary content. But these are some of the lessons that I have learned from my non-fiction publishing that help me to start generating creative content in a manageable, organised, and flexible way. . And the ideas about dialogue development illustrate how apparently uninteresting structural devices, like templates and styles, can (albeit somewhat counterintuitively) have a constructive influence on the creative process.

Writing fact and writing fiction