How to Breathe New Life into Your Short Fiction: 3 Simple Tips

In my humble opinion, the art of writing fiction is made up of the writer's passion, the writer's creative practice, and the writer's story to tell. I've been writing short fiction since 1993, and although I enjoy writing from my imagination, I've found the best way to make my short stories come alive is through using my own personal experiences and observations from real life.

The best fiction novels I've ever read always had a feeling of being a slice of the author's life or at least a slice of real life the author has observed at some time or another. When I can feel the life of the characters and their storylines lifting up off the pages into reality right in front of my eyes that's when I know I've stumbled onto a very well-written story. It's a feeling like you're wondering what the characters are doing long after the story has ended.

If you've been looking for new ways to jazz up your short fiction, here are a few tips I'd like to share that I've used in my fictional creations, I hope you find them helpful as well.

Tip #1: Turn yourself into a character. Whether you use your real name or not, turn yourself into one of your fictional characters with his or her own storyline or perhaps you could be the central character in the story. The key is making yourself fictional, even though you're very real. Do little things like change your name (first name or last name), change your birthplace, give yourself a distinguishing facial or emotional feature that you may not have in real life. For instance, you may give yourself a heart-shaped birthmark on your left thigh in the story, but in real life you don't have a birthmark like that at all. Just small things like that. I've always believed one of the best tricks of the trade a fiction writer can use is to write what you know. And if you're using yourself as a character in the story, then that's half the battle of writing your story. Because who knows you better than you - the fiction comes in through using your imagination and make sure you give yourself as a character a storyline that may be reminiscent of your real life, but be sure to add a few fictional elements to the 'real' story to make truly fiction.