Experience is the best teacher. It's the fire which baptizes all of us in equally, but in different ways. Here in this last chapter of The Fire in Fiction, Mr. Maass explains how using that experience can bring original new life to the story an author has to tell.
Working, hating work, evil bosses – those are all common experiences with wide reader appeal - if the story's told in the right way.
"… novels of workplace complaints do become worthwhile [when] they offer us extra levels of humor and insight." Maass cites The Devil Wears Prada as one example of a common experience (evil boss) told well.
"What is routine in your story? You can edit out low-tension stuff…or, alternately, you can find in it the drama and significance that it can have if we will but see it."
Engaging the reader in an experience means you've excavated the deeper meaning inside yourself to better illustrate either the mundane or the monumental moments of life.
"What does it mean to write for the ages?…is it enough to…plumb depths of human experience so that we all can relate?" Maass says what matters, what gives fiction power is "touching readers. Touching readers comes from your own compassion."
And perspective.
No matter how many tools are in your writer's box, no matter how well you turn a phrase, none of it matters unless the story is "charged with your own deep feeling."
So writing to a concise or moral point, like Aesop or writing from universal tragedy or comedy, it all comes down to the fire you put into your fiction.
The corresponding exercises are effective (no surprise there), but the most pertinent of the questions, for me, is what is the reader missing and how will seeing it – the way I see it as the writer – make a difference?
Additionally – when stretching to tell a tale of uncommon experience – the exercise step where I had to assess 'what in my story world was timelessly true' was the turning point that made the whole thing click for me.
Working through the steps for the moral of the story – that felt more like the familiar character arc/character development than anything else so far in this book.
Not that that's a bad thing – to the contrary – it was simply more that I didn't have much in my collection of doorstops to address this point specifically.
To your best creative writing!
~Regan
Filed under Blog by on Apr 21st, 2010. 
