02.22.08

Tiny tools and simple rules

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.

1. Read
2. Write
3. Read what you write
4. Say what you mean
5. 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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