Applaud the Writers Who Can Naturally Write Fiction in Their Sleep

The first piece of fiction I ever wrote was in high school. My English teacher loved it. Amazed, I still remember how long it took me to handwrite those pages.

My second completed piece of fiction started with a paragraph and grew into a short story called The Orange Wood Burning Stove submitted to a fiction challenge on Vocal Media. Maybe, too, since I'm self-competitive, I needed to see if I could challenge myself to wrap my imagination around an idea and go from there.

I will say I started to get lost in the characters as I continued to write the short story. Some people are already wanting to know what happens next. Will it continue or not? I'm not sure.

Writing fiction is time-consuming work

Honestly, I can say I don't love writing fiction. My preference is non-fiction. I can be a contradiction sometimes, so I'll say when I experiment, I discover while it may not be the genre that drives me, it's interesting when I read what my mind brought to life.

I believe all fiction writers are well-pleased with their product that took their imagination onto pages, line after line, of storytelling all to capture a reader's mind and heart.

I have a vivid imagination like other writers but I lean on research and history and being creative with language and art. When I was writing the piece of fiction mentioned above, I actually surprised myself. I was trying to create a reality that was believable fiction.

Writing fiction can require a lot of research

I believe writing a great piece of fiction requires a lot of time, research, and thoughtful writing with so many details. If you're writing fiction that includes history, this could involve reading books associated with the history you're writing about. For example, if your story takes place in the Victorian Era, then you have to read to obtain all those details of that era down to what a character might be wearing.

Fiction novel details

With a fiction novel, you have an outline, a back story, details of characters, your plot, the protagonist, and building up culture and the environment of your characters. It's a lot of work with various components. Fiction writers know best what it entails and they're good at it.

Writing fiction short stories seems less complicated than a long novel. It could be I look at the time factor involved or because with non-fiction, it involves facts and research.

Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, there is some motivation and dedication involved. Research is involved with both, but with fiction, you are setting up scenes and going over conversations to include in diaglogs. You literally have to put yourself into each character's mind to know what each is going to say.

As a fiction writer, you create behaviors and mannerisms for each character. You become so good at that so when your reader picks up the novel you just wrote, there is trust in your writing skills and the reader falls in love with your characters. The reader is breathing your story.

As a fiction writer, you focus on the settings for each scene. Will you have rooms that give the reader the feeling they're back in the 1950s with retro furniture or the 1970s when green shag carpeting was popular? All these additional details are partly why I choose to write non-fiction.

It's not that fiction is complicated; it is time-consuming. Lots and lots of thoughtful details are expected. A writer might be able to complete a non-fiction story in a month or less whereas a fiction writer might need a year or sometimes longer than that.

This is why I applaud all fiction writers.

© Cathy Coombs

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