“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite,” writes the late Martin Amis in his memoir Experience (Hyperion, 2000) about seeing the parallels between real life and fiction, and making those connections in his writing. “The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending.” This week, inspired by Amis’s process, adapt dialogue from your own life into a short story. Compare what really happened with how you write it in fiction. Can you learn anything from life’s seemingly predictable patterns?
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