Warning: this post should be taken with a pinch of salt - or whatever seasonings you deem appropriate and healthy. Paprika is mentioned further down, so maybe that. Paprika is nice.
Some time ago, I read a very good post containing the six top writing tips of the Nobel Prize winning novelist, John Steinbeck. The critics – particularly nowadays – tend to vary in their opinions of Steinbeck between the patronising and the downright bloody rude. In writers from that era, Hemingway’s their boy nowadays; manly of habit, spare of prose. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking both: and since Steinbeck was a formative influence on me as a writer, I read the post with interest, particularly Steinbeck’s last tip which was: don’t listen to Top Writing Tips.
I’m a contrary soul, so naturally, I decided to write mine.
The thing about a lot of posts with this title is that they all dispense the same advice – a lot of it lifted, without much thought, from Stephen King’s excellent book On Writing. So let me, as a starting-point, quote Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker:
Whenever you see everyone in the market doing the same thing, you should actively seek to do the opposite.
Now, Mr Lewis made quite a few shilllings in the Stock Markets on the back of that philosophy, back in the day; plus he’s an excellent writer. So I thought it might be kind of fun to buck the trend, and present a few subversive little personal takes on some of The Rules Of Writing….
Set a word target and write every day.
Are you serious? You have a day-job, right? Kids? A relationship?
I’ve got a very straightforward way of ensuring that I might get to write every day, which would be to write every day. I’d lose my job; my girlfriend would leave me; my son would stop calling me; my mother would disinherit me. Then I’d be able to write every day. Right up to the point where I get evicted from my flat, and then starve to death in a gutter, deprived of all love and human contact.
Get real.
A better rule - for the part-time Indie, at any rate - is: write when you bloody can, and make the most of every minute you get. Your word target should be: the number of words I can write in two evenings a week, max, before I fall asleep at the desk and my head crash-lands on my ten-quid Logitech keyboard, off which the letters have all worn away.
The Correct Environment. Create the correct environment to allow your creativity to thrive. Minimise distractions. Develop a routine.
Stuff that. See above.
If you can only write in a darkened room, with the scent of jasmine, in silence, you’d better already have a million-dollar deal. For the rest of us – develop the ability to write anywhere, at any time, on any device, including actual pen and paper and, if necessary, by carving your prose on lumps of bark with a sharpened stone.
Consider Peter Moen. He was a very brave Norwegian journalist, who was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Second World War. For months, he kept a journal by pricking out the words with a pin on pieces of tissue paper, which he then concealed in a heating-pipe in his prison-cell. Now that’s a writer.
Writing time is precious. Don’t waste it, just because you can’t write anywhere other than in your own personal tree-house to the music of Phillip Glass. I’ve written on hospital wards, on my lunch break at work, on trains, ferries, at my in-laws’ dining table and in a tent in a tiny Derbyshire village at two o'clock in the morning. On an iphone. Once you hit the groove, it doesn’t matter, because your surroundings will disappear. That’s the point of being a writer: it’s fun, an escape.
If you need an office, become an accountant.
Go through the following five/seven/four/thirty-eight stage process to develop your plot before you start writing.
No, don’t. Just write.
You can worry about the other stuff once you’ve got into a first draft. If you start out with a few ideas, the main characters and the arc of the thing, then that’s more than many. If you need to plot every chapter before beginning your book, fine. If you can, then I envy you. But it isn’t essential.
Writing is essential. Planning is a luxury.
And, sometimes, going the other way can be a revelation. I got a sixty-thousand word novella out of two characters, a setting and a bit of back-story, in seven weeks; it’s still my favourite thing I’ve ever written.
Always let your drafts “go cold” for a period after writing them.
Actually, that may be one of the few Rules that is almost universal. It works.
Don’t make your main character too perfect/flawed/likeable/unlikeable/strong/weak….
Don’t make your characters anything. Just make them a character. Stop fussing about whether people believe in them, or introducing flaws deliberately just because you have to have them, or giving them a mysterious superpower, just because they seem dull. A dull personality can still be a fascinating character, so long as you are interested in them. And so long as you know everything about them, even stuff that you’ve no intention of putting into the book in a million years.
Obsess about them as a person. Stalk them. Love them. Your readers aren’t going to if you don’t.
Write what you know.
If I hear one more self-satisfied published author tell a bunch of newbies this, I’m going to hurt someone. It’s nonsense. And limiting.
To take the fantasy genre as an example: If JK Rowling had written what she knew, we’d’ve got a gritty tale of a single mother growing up penniless in Edinburgh. Tolkein would have given us a million-word trilogy on the world of academia and scholarly debates about linguistics and religion with CS Lewis. Heaven knows what Michael Moorcock would have written. I don't want to speculate.
Writing fiction is a synthesis of three elements: experience; knowledge; and imagination. Don’t place limits on any of them, most of all the last one. And if you lack knowledge, go read some stuff and expand it. This is called research, and it works.
Experience is the stone from which fiction is built, knowledge the mortar which holds the stone together - and imagination is the leap which transforms those two basic materials into a cathedral. None of them works without the others.
Use short sentences and simple vocabulary.
The logical extension of this is the immortal five-book YA Fantasy series, Spot (coming soon to a Kindle near you, unless we can do something about it):
Here is Spot.
See Spot Run.
See Spot Sit.
See Spot Defeat The Terrible Armies Of The Dark Lord.
See Spot Count The Awful Human Cost of Victory
There is enough dumbness in the world without writers of fiction contributing to it. Stop it. Now.
Make your sentences and paragraphs as long as they need to be. Don’t be scared of expressing yourself elegantly or intelligently. Vary the length of your sentences and paragraphs, and the way in which you phrase them.
Use short, stark sentences for effect.
(See what I did there?)
Sub-clauses are not, actually, an invention of Satan and are perfectly readable: that’s what punctuation is for. Yes, there are more punctuation marks than just full stops and quotes; go look them up. Semicolons and colons are monstrously useful in breaking up longer sentences; and commas are possibly the most under-rated punctuation mark of all.
Consider this:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
By the Modern Rules Of Writing, this sentence would never have been written, and certainly not published. The modern version would read something like this:
Everyone knows a bachelor with money must be looking for a wife.
Read those two sentences. Ask yourself: would Jane Austen still be on the bookshelf two hundred years later if she’d written the second one?
Likewise, longer words - if defenestration is the mot juste, then use it - or unusual words, or unusual twists on words. Enjoy words. You’re a writer, not a bloody bricklayer (my earlier metaphor notwithstanding).
Example:
The spaceships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
That was Douglas Adams. My Dad loathed Douglas Adams. But that line made him laugh out loud. Stop assuming that all readers have a reading age of nine and the attention span of a puppy. Readers are intelligent people. That’s why they like books.
Avoid The Passive Voice.
Don’t worry about the passive voice. Just worry about developing your voice. Active, passive, sideways, upside-down, it doesn’t matter, so long as it’s unique. If you don’t know what I mean, go read Money, or London Fields by Martin Amis.
That’s a voice.
A tumbling, savage, funny, inventive cascade of words that could have been created by no other person. Be inventive and original. Be you.
Delete All Adverbs
Genocide is evil. Let’s stop this awful persecution of adverbs.
Adverbs were invented for a reason. They add colour and flavour – a bit like paprika. Like paprika, they should be used quite sparingly. But, also, Stroganoff without paprika is just beef in a cream sauce - bland.
Use adverbs, carefully, where they enhance the effect of what you’re writing – perhaps by adding a little extra tone to dialogue, or hinting at a character’s interior feelings. Use them intelligently. Too many is annoying: too few is colourless. But don’t just delete them all without thinking. Blanket bans are just dumb, whether they apply to adverbs in fiction or rock albums of which Presidents’ wives disapprove.
(Draws breath)
There is a serious point to this. If we all follow the same set of rules, then we will all end up sounding the same. Be interested in posts with titles like My Top Writing Tips. But also be wary. They will give you lots of Rules, and these rules are Useful To Know.
But writing fiction is not about following the rules without question: writing fiction is about knowing what you’re doing when you break them.
Remember – no-one ever broke the mould by slavishly following the rules.
Have a lovely weekend.