The Deadly Sin of Fiction Writing
In his entertaining book on writing fiction — not great literature, but fiction that will hook the reader and give him enjoyment — H. Bedford-Jones, “The King of the Pulps,” reveals what he considers to be the “deadly sin” that fiction writers often commit.
It’s not the lack of plot. Bedford-Jones himself was sometimes accused by editors of writing stories that didn’t have plots, novels that consisted of one episode after another, without one overarching plot that linked everything together. He argues that that sort of plot really isn’t crucial for a story, that there are great stories that lack that sort of overarching plot, though every paragraph of the story should be critical and no paragraph should be extraneous.
But what is the deadly sin? It’s the “lack of perception as to what must be emphasized, played up strong!” (46). It is the “lack of proportion in telling the story” (50). It’s … well, it’s what you’ve experienced from time to time when you’ve read a story:
You read a story, get interested in the characters, find the plot absorbing and good, entertaining. When you come to the climax, do you want to be told that the hero “knocked the skipper into the scuppers, overawed the crew, and took command of the ship?” Not much. You want the details of the knocking and overawing. You want to be on the inside, learn how the thing was done! In other words, you want to follow the emotions of the hero in detail.
Never forget that the reader, in general, identifies himself with the chief character of a story. He desires to see things through the eyes of that character. When the reader arrives at some crucial point in the tale and finds it glossed over in a couple of sentences, he is bitterly disappointed….
The amateur writer seems bound to commit this sin. He seldom realizes what points in his story he should lay most emphasis upon, and what points are least vital to his tale. It is a question of seeing the story in his own mind, of visualizing it, in its proper proportions. This perception of values, however, is something that he must come to learn unless he is to fail utterly. It is, undoubtedly, the great essential of fiction writing (This Fiction Business, 46-47, 48).