=How to write fiction=

You're never supposed to start a story by writing "I woke up" or with an alarm clock going off. This is considered awkward and amateurish writing. It's like clearing your throat and accouncing "Alright reader, I'm taking up my pen. Get ready. I'm going to write a story!" I once read this advice at the very beginning of the first chapter in a book on how to write fiction. Of course, Kafka started off his most famous story with Gregor Samsa waking up to find that he's turned into a giant bug. But Kafka is Kafka and he's an exception to the rule. More than likely, you're not an exception to the rule; you're as bound to it as I am. So instead, for the sake of this story, let's say I didn't wake up. Let's say I'm still just lying here, sound asleep, as if dead. Maybe I am dead. We'll see. What kind of a start to a story is that? Not a very promising one, I'll admit. 

Conversely, stories aren't supposed to end with any variation of "it was only a dream." That's considered a cop-out, a signal that the writer got in over his or her head and couldn't figure out how to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion, couldn't reconcile fiction to reality. Say, for instance, I start off a story dancing in a strip-club and to my shock and mortification I see my dad walking through the door. He hasn't seen me yet, his eyes are still adjusting to the murky lighting, and he's fishing around in his wallet for dollar bills. But he's going to see me any minute now.  Admittedly, this is a tough beginning to follow up on but I can't just make it a dream. I can't end the story by writing "...and then I woke up and realized it was all a dream, whew!" Not even the great Kafka did that. So in the meantime I guess I'll just stay asleep. I won't wake up until I can think of something better. Maybe I'm waiting for my Prince Charming. Now I'm writing a fairytale, which really no one believes in anymore. I'm going to have to wake myself up. I'm going to have to come up with my own happily-ever-after.  

All in all, it's probably a good idea to go with some perfectly ordinary situation, something you can resolve in a perfectly ordinary way. That seems to be the general drift of fiction nowadays. Real-life stories for real-life people. After all, real-life is challenging enough, absurd enough as it is. You can start a story with something like this:

"They were out of butter again. How was that possible? Patty stared at the empty butter dish on the refrigerator door. Where did all the butter go, anyway? Two people couldn't possibly eat so much butter, could they, especially two people watching their diets as assiduously as her and Ben? Butter didn't just evaporate, like the ice cubes did in the ice cube trays in the freezer, did it? Patty would ask her husband when he came downstairs to breakfast; he was always good for an answer when it came to answering questions like this. At least he was always game, never at a loss for a theory." 

Who is Patty? 

What's this about the butter?

Why were they always running out?

What would her husband say when he came downstairs and shuffled into the kitchen in his underwear for breakfast?

Answer these questions and you have your story.

Finally, the general consensus when it comes to writing is that you can't just wait around for inspiration, for the muse to visit, the hand to come out of the cloud. The most successful and prolific writers insist that you have to sit there every day and grind it out. You have to make something happen because it's not going to happen by itself anymore than that floor will mop itself, buster. You have to answer the above questions as best you can as if your life depended on it, as if you were being interrogated by the police under a hot light without legal representation, and most of what you come up with will be unsatisfactory, end up in crumpled wads in the wastebasket, the authorities won't buy it.


It's ironic that I was thinking these thoughts while lying in bed this morning, staring at the ceiling, shortly after I woke up from a long disjointed dream that incorporated all of the above and other stuff besides that I've already forgotten or am currently in the process of forgetting even as I write this sentence. My husband stirred beside me. Just as an experiment I asked him, "Why are we always running out of butter?"

"What the hell are you talking about," he muttered groggily.