is about how narrative artists tell truth through fiction. These great artists are all faithful to their own experience of humanity, so you should be faithful, too, to your experience of what it means to be human. So avoid cliché: copy life, not art or movies.
2. The way to avoid cliché is to develop detail, to look past the general formula and to notice the little particulars which make a scene vividly imaginable, dialogue credible, and a character worth noticing.
3. Limit your scope. The only way to include enough detail is to limit the action to one or two central episodes. Some of you might be tempted to outline plots for a novel. Terrific! Keep them! And keep writing—on into the next semester, and beyond. But for this assignment, you need to focus on a slice. And don’t worry if it feels like a fragment.
. Precision does not limit you to any particular style, of course. Conrad, Austen, Dostoevsky, and Melville all have very different styles, but each word is nonetheless placed where it is for a reason, with a view to its effect upon the reader, and with an ear to the beauty of language itself.
