As an amateur essayist and poet, I'm no stranger to writing. But fiction seems impenetrable to me. I have amorphous ideas in my head I can't quite put out. I have more than a couple thousand word drafts of dead stories that I simply cannot manage.
For a long time, I've had people tell me that you must simply write, as if you have nothing to learn, and this seems wrong to me.
I'm curious if anyone on lainchan has some book that they learned a bit about fictional writing from. I've looked around before, but many of them seem oriented for the market novelist who wants to make money. I'm not interested in money, I don't want to hear about 'the hook' for the thousandth time. I just want some honest-to-God writing advice.