Seven Tips From F. Scott Fitzgerald on How to Write Fiction

Open Culture selected seven quotations from F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips, to put together a nice little list of tips from the novelist on how to write fiction. Here are two of them:

Make a detailed outline of your story.

When Fitzgerald was working on a novel, he would surround himself with charts outlining the various movements and histories of his characters. In a 1936 letter to novelist John O’Hara, he advises the younger novelist to start with a big outline:

Invent a system Zolaesque…but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down an outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.

— —

Create people, not types.

Fitzgerald was known for creating emblematic characters, but he said it was accidental. “I had no idea of originating an American flapper when I first began to write,” he said in a 1923 interview for Metropolitan magazine. “I simply took girls who I knew very well and, because they interested me as unique human beings, I used them for my heroines.” In the opening sentence of his 1926 short story, “The Rich Boy,” Fitzgerald explains the principle:

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created–nothing.

To Fitzgerald’s first point, beyond the advice to work from an outline, what intrigues me is this idea of drawing up something as “complicated as a continuity”. If you’ve read the series I did analyzing the 1920 book “How to Write Photoplays”, you will remember that continuity was a precursor to what came to be known as a ‘screen play’ and ultimately a ‘screenplay’. Fitzgerald, who worked in Hollywood off and on for years, may have been saying here to come up with something akin to a screenplay to function as an outline.

As to his second point, this sounds strangely like the language I use with regard to the screenwriting principle: Character = Function, especially since that function can often be slotted into one of five primary character archetypes: Protagonist, Nemesis, Attractor, Mentor, Trickster. Once determined, a writer may use that archetype as a lens through which to see the character and a foundation upon which to craft them into a multilayered, complex individual.

For the rest of the article, go here
Comment Archive