Lisa Tirreno

Writing advice is a strange beast. It took me ages to work out why I found the vast majority of it unhelpful. Eventually I worked out that it’s because everybody’s process is different; but also that advice you might need at one point in your journey is not what you’ll need at a different point.

So now, when people ask me for my best writing advice, one of the first things I always say is that you’re going to have to give yourself permission to ignore most writing advice. The best thing early writers can do is just write. And then, once you come against problems, go find solutions to those, rather than general rules or things that helped other people and might not even apply to you. Think about it like buying a new device. Nobody reads the manual these days; they just google when they need to troubleshoot.

But … this post isn’t about that. This post is about a very specific bit of writing advice that I wish I’d been told years earlier but which it took me far too long to really understand and internalise, on my own. It finally clicked when I needed it.

Fiction is the opposite of journalism.

And I can hear people thinking “Um, obviously?” but I mean this in multiple ways. It’s not just that fiction is, you know, made up. It’s that at the sentence level, you need to communicate completely differently with your audience when you’re writing an article, compared to when you write fiction.

I was thinking of titling this post “Bury the lede”but I wasn’t sure that general audiences would have come across this old maxim of journalism (that you shouldn’t bury the lede) or would even know what a lede was (it’s the absolute most important kernel of a news story, which you will usually find in the first sentence or at least the first paragraph).

In journalism, you want to put this one most basic fact of the story up front and centre. You want the who, what, where, when why and how in the first few paragraphs. If you have the space, you then tell the reader explicitly how this news could be expected to affect them.

I think I got pretty good at this, when I used to write articles. I always tried to make them as clear and helpful as possible, making sure all the information someone might want to know on the exact, precise issue was unambiguously right there.

But when you write fiction, you have to do the exact opposite of this.

The start of a piece of fiction should be ambiguous. You must never, ever say what you mean, because you want the reader to keep reading. You want to entice them, make them want to know who these characters are, what this situation is, and how they’re going to get out of it or maybe into it.

The opening of The Hunger Games is an absolutely perfect example of burying the lede:

“When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with mother. Of course she did. This is the day of reaping.”

It’s so evocative and compelling I want to scream. It implies things rather than saying them outright. We learn that this character normally shares a bed by learning that the bed is cold, with the implication that it shouldn’t be. We learn the name of their bedmate, without context. Their bed only having a rough canvas cover implies poverty. When we get the context—Prim is this character’s sister—we already want to know why she has bad dreams. When we find out it’s because of something called the reaping, we want to know what that is too, and why it would give a sister bad dreams.

We don’t have the who, what, where, when, why or how in any meaningful way: we just get wording that grows more and more ominous. Coldness, roughness, poverty, a missing person, bad dreams, something that causes bad dreams, something called the reaping.

Any questions this paragraph answers just lead to even more questions, enticing you to keep turning pages. It’s such a good beginning for a fictional story <gnashes teeth with envy>.

And your editor would throw this in your face, if you wrote a news story this way.

Part of it is about how news stories are just a sharing of facts, whereas the reading of fiction is much more of a collaboration, between the author and the reader. The reader of fiction needs to participate in the finding of meaning: it’s why two people can read the same story, but take completely different things away from it.

Another part is that while a news story should be neutral in terms of sharing information, a piece of fiction should maintain tension. The opening of Hunger Games does this in spades. Something is very wrong, and no, you don’t get to know what it is yet—and every bit of info you get just makes things more tense, not less <continues to gnash teeth with envy>.  

So—what was the third thing, I said above, that a news story can do? It tells the reader how this news could be expected to affect them. So, perhaps the opening of a new shopping centre will mean their area finally has a Uniqlo, or a discount supermarket, or an opening day full of bargains. Perhaps construction on the new freeway is finally starting and the reader will have ten minutes shaved off their commute time, but for now there will be delays.

Again, fiction will never do this. It isn’t there to inform, that just isn’t how it works. So, when you write fiction, you absolutely must never outright tell the audience how the story is supposed to affect them. That is 100% the best way to puncture any tension you’ve generated. Even better: don’t even tell the reader how the story is affecting the characters. There’s an old rule that if the character cries, the reader doesn’t have to. While I think this advice is more useful in some genres than others (anyone who’s read my work will know that my characters definitely cry, or shout, or express whatever other emotion they’re feeling, because YA usually benefits from closeness to the characters’ emotional states)—there are definite times when the reader will be hit harder by what isn’t said, than what is.

Now, as per my opening comments: this advice isn’t going to help everyone. I just wanted to put it out there, because it’s not a common thing that you hear and I definitely wish I’d heard it earlier.

The thing is that some people understand this stuff automatically, on an unconscious level; I was not one of them. My early fiction was full of info dumps, and scenes which started well but then just sort of tailed off. I was terrible at symbolism and metaphors. It took me ages to work out what the problem was—that I was too used to writing a certain way—and I wish someone had pointed out to me sooner that fiction is all about burying true meaning.

If this helps someone else, then I’m glad.