Umberto Eco's 3 keys to fiction writing
Notes from giants - Number 9
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🏷️ Categories: Writing, Literature, Life lessons.
If you want to write and don't know where to start, Umberto Eco has something for you.
In addition to being an important scholar, Eco was a masterful storyteller, capable of creating worlds rich in detail and with captivating plots. After decades of experience writing successful books, he developed a set of key principles for writing novels, which he laid out in his book Confessions of a Young Novelist.
If you wanted to tell your own story and didn't know where to start, pay attention.
Principle 1: Seminal image
Eco's novels are born from a powerful image that drives him to build a whole world around it, and that is what gives meaning to the fictional universe. That is what he calls the “seminal image”.
For The Name of the Rose, it was the image of a monk being poisoned while turning the pages of a book.
For Baudolino, the scene of Constantinople burning in flames under attack by the Crusaders. A shocking image that will be key to imagine everything else.
For Foucault's Pendulum, the fusion of two seemingly unconnected elements: Foucault's device demonstrating the rotation of the Earth and a trumpeter playing in a cemetery. Such a shocking mixture draws the reader in and the fictional universe unravels the mysterious relationship.
How to apply this principle
To write your story, start with an image that haunts you.
You don't need to understand it completely at first. Just choose an image so powerful that it awakens in you an avalanche of questions, doubts, that makes you imagine... Where does the scene take place? Where does the scene take place, who is present, what has provoked it?
Each answer will make you shape the story.
Imagine that the image that grabs you is that of a little girl holding a red balloon in the middle of a devastated city. Now ask yourself: is it a post-apocalyptic world? Why is the girl the only one on the street? Does the balloon have any special significance? From these questions, you could construct a science fiction story, a dystopia or even a psychological thriller.
Collecting...
Let your mind wander, think of powerful images that make you dream.
Write them down in detail and choose the one that grabs you the most.
Formulate 10 or more questions about it.
Answer them so that narrative lines can emerge.
In this way, the seed for a whole universe of fiction will sprout.
Principle 2: Build a living world
A common myth is to believe that inspiration is luck or an innate ability.
This is not true and Umberto Eco debunks the myth with his own experience. The Name of the Rose was not born of a miracle, but of years of accumulating knowledge about the Middle Ages. When the time came to write, he had a vast mental archive from which to draw historical, philosophical and cultural data.
It is his daily hard work of documentation that made the difference.
How to apply this principle
To make your fictional universe credible, research as many topics as necessary and connect the pieces to achieve coherence.
If you write a mystery novel set in a museum, it's not enough to have visited some; you must study its functioning, security, art history, famous thefts, architecture and restoration of works. Anything that might be useful.
The more detail you have, the more authentic will be the world you build.
This is precisely the key Tolkien used: saturate fiction with qualities.
It is the same for Umberto Eco. In The Name of the Rose, he meticulously designed the architecture of the abbey, calculated distances between rooms and planned dialogue times based on the length of the characters' movements.
Maintain consistency and detail.
If magic only works on a full moon, don't use it at any other time.
If in your novel someone rides a train from Paris to Berlin in half an hour, it has no coherence unless you can justify it.
That's how it would be done:
After you have your seminal image questions and a basic idea of what the plot would look like, make a list of areas you need to document.
Find several sources for each area.
Take notes and create your scenes based on what you have learned.
Use maps, chronologies, diagrams and define all the social, economic or technological rules that govern that world to make it 100% coherent.
No matter what you write, the world must be coherent.
Principle 3: Use constraints
Eco believed that restrictions do not limit creativity, but enhance it.
A painter who decides to use only watercolors is not restricting his art, but giving it a clear direction in which to explore. In Foucault's Pendulum, he decided that the novel should have exactly 120 chapters divided into 10 parts to symbolize the evolution of the characters.
This forced you to structure the story in a concrete way and thus abandon clichés.
How to apply this principle
If you feel that your story is becoming overwhelming, put voluntary restrictions. Decide that it will only have 3 main characters, or that everything will take place in a few settings. The more you limit yourself, the more creativity you'll have to connect the story.
This idea about the potential of constraints was covered in Mental Garden a while ago. Here you can learn more about how to use limitations to your advantage.
Why limits make you grow: How limitations enhance creativity.
If you want to write something engaging, it's not luck. Start with a powerful image, make a detailed and coherent universe around it, and learn to limit your focus.
These are the 3 keys to keep in mind when writing.
Now that you know them, it's time to write.
✍️ It's your turn: Have you read Umberto Eco? What other techniques have helped you in writing your fiction? I'm very interested to know more about this.
💭 Quote of the day: “Learning consists not only in knowing what we should or can do, but also in knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.” - Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose.
See you next time! 👋
References 📚
Eco, U. (2011). Confessions of a young novelist.
So cool to show these processes in short order. This all worked for me when I wrote Paradise Ridge. I didn't know what the heck I was doing, but I could see the main character and that first scene. Drawing from cultural things learned from experience with people as well as vast research, the story and characters wrote themselves. Every piece of documentation inspired a new subplot or character contribution to the main story. What an octopus! Or hydra? But it came together. Can't say that limitation came into the scheme of things except it took place in a small setting, a ranch and its people. Holy merde! That's enough. Thank you for this piece, Alvaro. I'm sharing this on Notes.
excellent, alvaro. thank you.