Fiction, however, is a different beast.  While accurate, up-to-date information can be of value, it’s not the central component of the finished product.   Sure, do your research to be able to write believably about the subject, but don’t obsess over it like it’s an indispensable element of your story.

Lusting for factual accuracy is not bad.  But if you don’t watch out, it can easily get in the way of any book or short story you’re writing.   Not only does intense research eat time you could be devoting to fleshing out your characters or creating more elaborate conflicts, it distracts you from the actual job at hand.  Often, writers who enjoy the research too much end up letting the factual details clutter their minds, than using that brain matter to sort out their plots and story progressions.

Should you aim for factual accuracy when you write fiction?  Sure, to a certain extent.  The goal should be to have enough details to make the action and the story believable.  Beyond that, it’s just fodder.  You’re not writing a technical manual or a history book — readers will be willing to overlook holes in your research if the story you present is engaging and memorable.

1. Launching into a lengthy background.  Engaging in too much background exposition makes stories drag, often slowing it to a crawl.  As much as possible, avoid detailing backgrounds in the first chapter to start the book off at a good pace.  When introducing background anywhere else,  do it in a direct and straightforward way to get it over with quickly.
2. Interrupting dialogue.  Some writers fall in love with cutting off their characters’ dialogue mid-sentence, ending it with ellipses, instead of completing what they’re saying.  While the interrupted dialogue can make the pace feel faster, it dirties up the narrative.  It’s a nice technique to use once in a while, but prose works best when characters finish speaking as much as they can.
3. Opening the book by describing the weather.  Some writers use descriptions of weather and environment to set an atmosphere for the book.  Problem is, no one wants to read about the weather.  More often than not, readers will skip the description and look for the first instance of a character appearing.
4. Getting creative with verbs and adverbs to introduce dialogue.  There’s no need to use any word other than “said” when attributing dialogue to a character.   While using “growled,” “screamed,” “cautioned” and similar terms may seem creative, it’s unnecessary.  In fact, it can lead to confusion with some readers.
5. Take too much space describing places and things.  Describing scenes and objects bring the action into a standstill.  Unless you’re exceptionally good at it, keep it to a minimum.

Body Language

The way your characters act while delivering the dialogue can add a lot of emotion into the words they say.   A man saying something while frantically smoking a cigarette conveys a whole different emotion than a man who does so while sitting leisurely in a cot.

Word Choice

The words your characters use can effective convey emotion all on their own.  Word choice does have a lot to do with how people feel, after all.  Look at these different ways of saying the same thing, for instance:

“What, in God’s name, are you doing here, you traitor?”

“Umm… what are you doing here?

“Oh, wow, what you doing here?”

“Good evening, sir.  If you don’t mind, may I ask what you’re doing here?”

As you can see, each of those lines say the same thing, all while conveying an entirely different emotion each time.   One’s angry, the other’s hesitant, another seems glad and the last sounds like a guy who couldn’t personally care less.  There doesn’t need to be that big of a variance to convey a different emotion either — a couple of words and a different punctuation can change things significantly.

Getting the reader emotionally invested early on will have a lot to do with how you set up your story.  And these content elements are what will ensure that you lay down the proper foundation:

1. Acquaint the reader to your main characters.  Good novels rely on interesting characters.  Introduce your reader to the main players in your opening, especially the lead protagonist and the antagonist opposite the hero.
2. Hint at how it ends.  You don’t need to give away the milk without having the reader go through the motions.  But teasing them with a brief foreshadowing is perfectly acceptable — even if you’re leading them down the wrong road to a surprise.
3. Show your main character under stress.  Depict your protagonist under some form of minor crisis as a precursor to the bigger challenge that awaits further on in the story.
4. Give the reader an idea of what’s at stake.  What does the hero stand to gain or lose during the course of the story?
5. Establish the scene of the conflict.  Use the opening chapter to establish the setting of the story and the scene of conflict, setting the tone for what comes later.

When people read works of creative fiction, they’re well aware that it’s a story borne from the writer’s imagination.  However, they also expect to be able to relate to what you’re talking about.  Without real facts, it becomes all that much harder to do.

Say, you’re reading a military novel about an encounter in the middle of the ocean and the troops do all sorts of things that aren’t protocol for naval officers without adequate explanation.  Oh yeah, they’re wearing police uniforms, too.  Chances are, the lack of believable facts will end up distracting you from the story and might even end up turning you off from reading.  Adding just the right amount of factual details can do a lot to keep readers both interested and focused.

If you find it difficult to include facts when you write, you can choose to insert them later during editing.   During first pass, just focus on your characters and your plot.  Once that’s done, you can begin adding factual elements at strategic points.  Just don’t forget that information is meant as a complement to the primary elements of the story, so use just enough to keep things on point.

1. Adjectives.  While this type of modifier is often necessary for precise dialogue, it’s also very prone to overuse.  A lot of the time, you can eliminate an adjective using the right pairing of a verb and a noun.  Only use adjectives when the idea can’t be expressed without them.  Even then, use as few adjectives as is necessary.
2. Adverbs.  Similar to adjectives, you want to use adverbs sparingly (people who talk with unnecessary bluster is largely unnatural).  If a stronger verb can express the same thought as the pairing of an adverb and a verb, then do without the modifier.
3. Synonyms of the verb, “said.”  You may think you’re being clever by replacing “said” with the multitudes of more descriptive verbs like “grumbled,” “lamented,” “opined” and similar synonyms.   In truth, these constructions often end up annoying readers as it interferes with their interpretation of the dialogue.   The word “said,” on the other hand, is a neutral verb that allows the dialogue to convey the tone of the expression.

Here are some techniques to achieve just that:

1. Minimize speech tags.  Despite their usefulness, it’s never a good idea to rely too much on bits of description to complete the meaning a dialogue.  The more the dialogue can stand on its own, the better it will be for keeping the reader in the present.
2. Don’t just dump a load of information at the reader.  Instead, thread bits and pieces of detail into the story — it’s more natural that way.
3. Minimize the number of viewpoint characters.  Stick to just one, if at all possible.
4. Stick to the active voice during action scenes.  Passive sentences will just dull the pace.
5. Add realistic details to both the characters’ behaviors and the surrounding environment.
6. When adding descriptions, focus on things that would naturally impact the viewpoint character under the prevailing circumstances.  Avoid throwing in any detail simply because you feel like the reader would appreciate it.
7. Choose strong verbs and nouns, avoiding ambiguous and imprecise words.
8. Use dialogue that directly impacts the plot and character development.  Anything else is unnecessary fodder.

In a way, you can consider fiction writing for class pretty similar to joining a writing contest. After all, your grades will depend as much on the merits of your own story as it would on the quality of writing your classmates produce. Write just a little bit better than everyone and you can nail yourself an A. Here’s how you do it:

Start strong. Bring the action early into the story by presenting a complicated situation, a problem to be resolved or an intriguing incident. The stronger you start out, the better the impression you make. For a teacher grading a stack of papers, first impressions can be huge.

Make your characters believable. Create authentic characters by presenting various aspects of their personalities, as well as giving them realistic dialogue. Make each of them active in your story, helping move the story along, instead of simply being there.

Have a beginning, middle and end, with a clear central theme running through the entire story. This ensures a cohesive story with clear-cut parts. Start out by defining your main theme and writing a working outline of how the story will flow.

Avoid cliche endings. You know those endings in movies that leave you unsatisfied (e.g. revealing that the entire story is a dream sequence)? Stay away from that. If it feels trite, it probably is. Find another way to finish.

Proofread to the hilt. Use an English grammar software to comb through your writing and give it one manual pass for good measure. Grammar, spelling and other writing mechanics are easy enough to fix that you should always use it to sway things in your favor.

Committing to reading a book is like locking yourself up in a room for several hours.  If you spend that time in the company of characters that aren’t interesting, those few hours can feel like an eternity, just like when a book has skipped decent editing (even a software based proofing).  When surrounded by compelling personalities, on the other hand, time will just fly.

When crafting your characters, don’t look to make them people that you’d like to keep as a friend.  Instead, make them larger-than-life personalities that deserve to be watched.  If the E! Network was showing a profile of them, would you watch in anticipation?  Or would you quickly turn the channel?

Interesting characters can be loveable, admirable, entertaining, irritating or plain insidious.  It doesn’t matter whether they’re the type you’ll invite to your birthday.  What matters is if they’re the type that TMZ will spend hours tracking down for footage.  The former is nice, but they don’t make for compelling reading; the latter, on the other hand, can fire up the imagination and keep readers glued.

Conversation is not dialogue.  When Joey says, “The sun shines” and Gina replies, “Yes it does,” it’s only dialogue when it pushes the story forward.  If it doesn’t, then it’s just two people talking.  Like two friends lying on the sand in the beach, enjoying the sun – they’re probably speaking words, but it’s all fodder. No matter how impeccably written the exchanges are (thanks to your powerful writing software), two people “chatting” just doesn’t make a good story.

Dialogue, on the other hand, always serves a purpose.  Because it pushes the story forward, it keeps things active.  Remember, readers will pay more attention to that which moves, than those which stand still.  As such, dialogue will keep your readers tuned in the way mere conversations are likely to make them tune out.

How do you write strong dialogue?

• Make sure your characters move the piece along by discussing things that are relevant to the story.
• Don’t have a character give a second hand account of an important event.  Put your reader in the thick of the action by letting them sit in the middle of it.  Any dialogue that happens then becomes vibrant naturally.  At the least, have it told through one of your characters’ eyes.
• Be efficient with your use of quotes, using it to highlight strong, forceful exchanges.
• Make sure the reader knows who’s speaking.  I know that’s a given, but it always begs saying.