Writing Blog Number 2

20240422 How I Learnt To Write Fiction

How I Learnt To Write Fiction

Okay, the title is odd, but I struggled to find another one that fit.

Of course, I learnt to write at school. Through primary school (which I know is not a US thing, but that’s your issue, not mine), I was taught how to construct written works beyond a simple sentence, and was shown the beginning-middle-end(as it was called when dealing with 8 year olds) structure; I read a lot from a very early age and things entered me by osmosis; I even tried my hand at a novel when I was 11 (as detailed in a previous post).

By the time I hit high school at age 12, writing was well and truly in my blood. I wanted to write fiction that was like the things I read, but I struggled to put things down on paper the way I saw them in my head. Even I realised my writing lacked “something.”

As part of my getting into the elite private school I did (through an academic scholarship), I was given my first bookcase as a gift from one set of grand-parents. The books I already had filled the bed-head and sat in boxes in a corner; now I had somewhere to put them all, arranged by genre, then size (nowadays I ignore genre and put my books in alphabetical order of author, with the Stephen King books and books featuring me having their own spots). I almost filled it straight away with what I already owned. But this meant I went through my books properly for the first time in a long time. I noticed had a lot more books which were novelisations of movies than I realised. Now, we had also recently got our first VHS video player (this was 1983) and I decided, just on a whim, to see how well the books compared to the films.

Clash Of The Titans by Alan Dean Foster was the first, based on the 1981 Harryhausen film. And then it struck me – what I was seeing was being so well put into words on the page. That was the first one, and it led to a few more, and then I decided to write a novelisation of my own, based on the Hammer film The Gorgon, still one of my favourite Hammer films. My version was ten pages long; the novelisation was 220 pages. What was I missing?

The stories were identical, the basis was the same… and when I compared the two it dawned on me what I was missing. The descriptions, the show not tell (though I didn’t know it was called that at the time), the way every little thing from sideways glances to a tap of fingers to the sound of the bodies turning to stone were detailed. I tried again with the film Conan The Barbarian, which was a new VHS release at the time so we could only borrow it for one night. This time my version was 50-odd pages long while the version L Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter was 250 or so. I was getting there.

But that was how I learnt what was needed in fiction – novelisations of movies. I know many authors decry them as the lowest of the low, turning someone else’s screenplay into a book, but they were vital to me understanding what stories needed.

Anyway, that’s me.