Fiction Agency Guide for Writers
The Fiction Agency takes a practical and commercial approach to writing. We are happy to offer the below tools to help you develop the skills necessary to become a successful genre fiction writer. These skills are highly valuable, and many people have used them to build successful careers as professional writers.
Lesson 1: A commercial approach
Writing is many things to many people. To us, it is a means of allowing the writer to earn a living through writing. To do this, we focus on the craft of commercial genre fiction writing. This means writing stories in an established genre that will appeal to as broad an audience as possible. What we write and how we write it are determined by this decision.
Lesson 2: Plotting a page-turner
Plotting is a critical skill for a professional fiction writer. It is the map that keeps you from getting lost in the story. People want to read stories with constant forward momentum. This means that something happens in every scene to move the story forward. Having a plot ensures your story has the right scenes to bring your story to life.
Lesson 3: Prose that stays out of the way
People generally aren’t reading fiction for the prose style. They are reading it to experience the thrill of your story through the eyes of the characters. They want a story that comes to life. For this reason, we focus on writing in a style that stays out of the reader’s way. Every sentence must be clear, understandable, and written in everyday language.
Lesson 4: Breaking big tasks down
Writing a book is generally regarded as one of the great tasks a person can undertake, akin to climbing a mountain or running a marathon. Professional writers have to do it over and over, getting each book finished in a timely manner. To make this easier, we break big tasks into little ones, breaking plots into scenes, and focusing on one scene at a time.
As well as breaking big plots into concise, easy-to-write scenes, we also believe in working on each scene a number of times. There is no point in writing a perfect masterpiece of a scene when subsequent development might force you to make changes. Instead, we write in drafts, with the first being little more than bullet points of what’s going to happen, and each subsequent draft adding detail.
Each pass of the manuscript allows you to edit and polish the scenes. However, at the end, it is important to try and read your story the way a reader would read it, from start to finish, at a reasonably quick pace. This allows you to get a sense of the flow, to experience the story information the way the reader will, to polish any rough transitions, fix plot holes, and improve individual sentences.