02.22.08
Posted in writing
at 12:20 am
There are five writing rules. Some of them don’t involve writing at all.
Read.
Read read read. Back of the milk carton. Tattoos. The Onion. Go back and read all the books you hated in high school. Read my blog. Read other people’s blogs. Read porno stories. You don’t learn to sing your favorite song by pressing the CD to your ear, and you will not learn to write by refusing to read. Often you will find the writing style you identify with is the style you’ll write with. As an added bonus, you’ll have things to write about. Umberto Eco, my personal writing god, once said that books often speak of other books. Imagine that the words you write today are responses to the first phrases of the Dead Sea Scrolls. All writing is one text, unbroken since the beginning of time. And what you write in response will be reflected for another 5,000 years.
So no pressure there, Skip.
Don’t try to write.
Remember Yoda? There he was, on Dagobah, training young tow-headed Skywalker, clamped firmly on the Jedi kid’s shoulders, little alien genitals pressed firmly into the back of Luke’s head. What did he say? He said “Do, or do not; there is no try.”
I hear people say “I wish I could write, but everytime I try, it sucks.” Rubbish. If you sorta-kinda try to fly a plane there’s a 90/10 chance you’re gonna die and take out everybody in the plane, too. If you try to make a relationship work you should probably keep your stuff in boxes. Writing, like murder, cooking and dancing, is defined by effort. Put your pen to the paper and just write. Write, write write. If you have nothing to say, then write down “I have nothing to say,” then write about how much you hate to write. What’s important is that you just bleed ink all over the page. Don’t worry about infusing your writing with meaning; most of the stuff you read every day is mindless. Just write. When you get tired, stop. You may not be Shakespeare, but you’re almost there. Use periods and commas and exclamation points if you know how to use them. If not…DON’T USE THEM. We’ll cover punctuation later.
If it sounds dumb in your mouth, it’s dumb on paper.
This is the killer for most aspiring writers of any kind; the dreaded speaking test. I had to write in tandem once for a class in high school (oh, god…high school….*shudder) where I wrote the first half of a story and my co-writer took over.
The last words of my half were “The figure emerged from the shadows…knife glittering in the moonlight like silver death. His intentions were clear.”
The first words of my co-writer were “He was going to kill her.”
*sigh*
Read your work aloud. If it makes you cringe - or even better, makes you go up at the end of the sentence, like “The sun rose, really high, like taller than…a SWAN IN THE SKY?” in sort of disbelief, then you’ve mastered the first great step: realizing that you need to take some suck out of your writing.
Go back; say it again.
Nobody writes brilliantly the first time. Everybody has problems. Even great writers have problems. My method is to flood the page with whatever’s in my head, then I go back and carve great chunks out of the text. Sometimes I’ll carve 50 percent down in an effort to streamline. And my knife is a simple tool called “What I meant to say was ____”
Try it with your writing. Write, then read. When you get to a point where you think “What was I thinking?”, say (aloud) “no…what I meant to say was — ” and continue onward. Por ejemplo, I’ve written the following phrase. “The night was hot and still and dark and creeped me out when I went there to see them.”
And I say “Wait…what I really wanted to say was that the night was hot and dark, and creepy when I was waiting for my girlfriend.”
Here’s the magic trick: what you just said is what you should write down. Suddenly you go from awkward to “The night was hot, dark and creepy when I was waiting for my girlfriend.” It’s an improvement. It makes sense. It’s still a little thick, though, so you go to the next trick.
Use less.
One of my favorite all time sentences has to be “Jesus wept.” It’s the shortest verse in the Bible (a good book; gets a little long in the middle but the end is a revelation) and it’s a stunning example of the concept “Use less.”
We have our sentence. “The night was hot, dark and creepy when I was waiting for my girlfriend.” Can we use less? Yes we can.
We can’t get rid of ‘night’, ‘hot’, ‘creepy’, ‘waiting’, or ‘my girlfriend’ Think of them as those fridge magnet poetry words. You can rearrange them but not lose them. Lose ‘dark’ altogether; it’s night, so it’s reasonable to assume it’s dark. You might be able to drop ‘I’ though. Often the ‘I’ is one of those overused words stuck in a sentence. Pare the rest away.
So, let’s trim it down. “The night was cool and scary; waiting for my girlfriend.” read that aloud and you think “Oof…bad sentence.” because the night, while cool and scary, was definitely not waiting for your girlfriend. You’ll have to put the word ‘I’ back in there.
Have at it again; this time rearranging the words. “I was waiting for my girlfriend, and the night was cool and scary.” Better, but still non-pretty.
Go again, this time maybe dropping out some more words. “I was waiting for my girlfriend on a hot, creepy night.” And you’ve got a sentence! Not a great sentence, but a sentence nonetheless. Don’t feel too bad; eventually you’ll be able to dash off a sentence like “Night fell, hot and cruel; I awaited my lover.” without batting an eye.
So that’s five rules to writing better. I did not say this was going to be easy. But you can and will write better if you follow them.
- Read
- Write
- Read what you write
- Say what you mean
- Use less of what you say
Print this out. Tape it to your monitor. Live it. Remember Yoda and stop trying so damned hard.
Next time: More ways into your own head.
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02.15.08
Posted in writing
at 1:54 pm
You’ll have to let me rant a little more before I start helping you write better. I’m sorry - but I have unlimited electronic ink and lots of free time. So just bear with me and I promise I’ll get to brass tacks when I can.
I also feel the need to say to you that this isn’t a series about how to write novels. Or tech manuals. Or blogs. It’s about how to write so you don’t throw up a little in your mouth at your own keystrokes. It’s about how to write what you know.
Everybody Good? Good…let’s go on.
Anne Rice is an awful, AWFUL book-writer. Her first works were edited heavily by the publishers and as a result, the Vampire Trilogy of Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned are toned, statuesque beasts. They’re deserving of the cult following they’ve garnered since the late 70’s. Her later works suffered as a direct consequence of her success; her renegotiated publishing contracts allowed her to print completely unedited works. She’s prolific, but she’s gotten leggy, like the bougainvillea she vainly tries to capture in her Southern Gothic idylls. Invariably somebody gets violated in each book she’s written. At least Clive Barker and Stephen King murder their characters when they get onerous and dull. I can’t imagine what the hell you do when all your subjects are immortal, sexy and immortally sexy. Eventually she’ll start writing books like “Sexy Vampire Drinks Tea,” a 900-page tome about tea cozies of the undead.
Anne’s talent is not the issue. She’s obviously talented. Her stories are entertaining, that’s for sure. They’re just not very good. Kinda like the difference between Hamlet and The Golden Girls. I leave it to you to choose which is which.
The issue at hand is that Anne is a brilliantly messy writer who needs the outside eye of a publisher. Many writers do, and there’s no shame in this. Those who weave fabric usually don’t know how to make couture fashion, and vice versa. It is more important to get messy, make mistakes and clean up later than it is to struggle for ‘perfect’ the very first time. Unfortunately, some people see editors as some sort of evil. They assume that talent needs no editing.
That’s a crock of &^%$. It’s perpetuated by those who can’t write. It allows them to say “well, my book was edited and they cut out the best parts. Hogwash. If you had a best part then you’re blatantly acknowledging that your work was 90 percent “suck.” Don’t jerk yourself or your reader around.
Deciding very early on what sort of writer you’re going to be, and exploring every possible facet of that choice is something any successful writer has to do. If you find out that you’re a excellent short-story writer, don’t spend 25 years struggling to write a 500-page novel. If you blog well, don’t struggle to write techno-babble. Learn to use the natural inner voice you have inside you every day to speak up and out. If that inner voice is screaming “Let me write tech manuals!” then you’re gonna be rich and you owe me a percentage. More often than not, however, you’re gonna find that your inner voice rambles, travels over some odd terrain, comes back to the road and relaxes for a bit, then dodges into the roadside fields yet again. Trying to rein in your inner writer is like trying to paint a cat: nothing good can come of the effort.
Good writers are flexible writers that allow that inner voice to take them on a journey, but also allow the journey to color and flavor the writing until you’re not sure who wrote which chapter. Look at Stephen King as opposed to Anne Rice. Once again, King’s works are wildly different in scope and nature, keeping only King’s wry uber-narrator as an omniscient overpresence, and even that God-voice isn’t always heavily invoked. Look at King’s early works; Thinner, The Shining, The Stand - and then enjoy his wild turn to the theatrical with books like Dolores Claiborne or Gerald’s Game. Yes, they’re all Stephen King; his spade-shaped face is imprinted into our brains as we open each book. But the joy of a King novel lies in the incredible flexibility of his voice, like an operatic baritone reaching for tenor notes only to fall to bass in mock despair. Even his repeaters, like Eyes of the Dragon and its contemporary child Needful Things are driven in different ways. Both are about fighting the Nameless Evil; the only thing in common is the simple bravery of the characters who choose to fight.
Don’t understand me? Start reading.
Next time: tiny tools and simple rules.
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02.09.08
Posted in writing
at 5:02 am
I was lucky enough to attend an event featuring notable author and playwright David Mamet. If you don’t know who he is, just go away now; if you have an inkling of who he is, keep reading. This is the man who wrote some of the most incredible plays of the past 20 years, including screenplays for Wag the Dog and Glengarry Glen Ross. He’s written a few bombshell books about writing and performing, notably 3 Uses of the Knife and Truth and Lies: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor.
If you read or watch Mamet’s plays, they’re incredible things. Concise, brilliant, true-life reproductions of how humans speak. It’s unnerving. Speak the text out loud and you find yourself thinking the man just dropped a tape recorder in the bushes and transcribed it all later, down to the minor vocal interjections.
But his books…well…honestly, I thought they sucked.
No, really…on your first (who am i kidding…tenth) read, they’re ponderous, twelve-syllable intellectual pieces of poo that barely qualify as human. One can imagine that Mamet descends among the rabble to write his coarse plays, then back on his intellectual cloud back to heaven. They’re really really hard to read. I put him right next to Umberto Eco on the shelf and then try not to think about them too much.
But then I heard Mamet speak at this event I mentioned earlier, and changed my perceptions of him immediately. Because even though he writes like a semiotician’s wet dream, he talks like a Chicago beat cop from the 1930’s. Suddenly I realize that he’s far more fascinating than I could have imagined. His books are fugues of intensity, written by someone with a great mind and a very simple voice. He described writing as a schizophrenic act; you’re forced to split yourself into many voices to tell a story. He’s capable of spanning both worlds because he’s painfully aware that academic writing is nothing remotely related to writing for the masses. The difference between Mamet and most writers is that he makes money doing both.
You do not have David Mamet’s problems. Nor do I…thank God. We only need so many geniuses.
But you do have a problem, Gentle Reader. You can’t write for shit. And you know it. You pore over things you’ve written, desperately hoping they’re “okay.” You ask yourself “is that a real sentence?” or inane things like “Gee, am I using the right punctuation?” Or worse, you think a colon is on a keyboard because it’s used in web addresses.
In an era where literacy is at an all time high, writing sucks more than ever. And the proliferation of web-publishing doesn’t help. I swear to High Holy God that the first time I crack open a newspaper and find the acronyms OMG or ROFL, I’m gonna murder some copywriters.
I’m not here to teach you anything. This is my website for me, and my sanity, and I’m writing purely to keep my brain solid. I’m also doing a favor to a couple of dear friends. But I will write about writing, and try to explain what I think about when I write. And maybe that’ll help you. I cannot give advice; I am not an advisor. I can speak only from the benefit of 27 years of writing, since I first picked up my big Red #1 and started scrawling.
Along the way I’ll add things like literary criticism and how to tell the difference between effective writing on multiple platforms, including business writing for literary anarchists like me.
Next time I’m gonna bash on Anne Rice. Stay tuned. Should be fun.
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