Filed under: publishing, rules of writing, Writers, martin amis, writing advice
05/19/2010 • 6:29 PM 0
Witness the power of a few lines of dialogue
When my mother dying, her patched hair thin and falling out, someone said, “Make sure she’s not hoarding pills.”
“Why?” I said.
“So she won’t kill herself, of course.”
I shrugged. “She’s inevitably dying a slow painful death.”
“It’s up to God to choose our time.” She saw my eyes and shrugged back at me. “I’m pro-life.”
“You’re pro-suffering,” I said.
Take a look at what’s going on here. You’re thinking cancer, but the word isn’t used. Did you picture two different kinds of shrugs? You don’t know who the speakers are, but you have an idea where each is coming from with little information. There’s no telling here. I don’t say the first speaker is “perplexed” or “angry” or “irritated.” I don’t state that the unwanted advisor is rigid or stern or oblivious. It’s not all spelled out for you. The reader has room to draw conclusions.
As a writer, you don’t want to leave the reader at sea for long as to who the speakers are, but passages like these draw people into your story very quickly.
Filed under: rules of writing, Writing exercise, writing dialogue
05/19/2010 • 12:29 AM 0
The “I Want to Watch You Suffer” Rant
Sure, I don’t like you. In fact, sometimes I hate your guts. Sometimes I want to stab you in the eye with a Number 2 pencil and then slit you open with an Exacto knife, take a blow torch to your pancreas and, while you’re thinking about that, slowly strangle you with loops of your own intestines. Look up the word decerebrate. That’s what’s next. (Yes, I’m talking about your characters.)
The many reasons I despise you make you more interesting, so I’ll be glad to read about you or watch you on-screen. Gee whiz, I sure hope I get to watch you suffer! As somebody pithy said, “TV allows you to have people in your livingroom you’d never want in your livingroom.” Writers are often told that it’s important your protagonist is a likeable character. Ahem. Fiction is full of people, heroes and anti-heroes, who have traits that are unappealing. I want to read about people dealing with complications who are full of doubt–just like me. Their flaws make them believable. I prefer psychotic Batman to the perfect, impervious boy scout that is Superman. Superman’s too hard to kill. Shoot Batman in the face and he’s dead. (Why don’t they just shoot him in the face? He’s more vulnerable so he’s more interesting.)
I haven’t seen a better illustration of this than the anti-hero bound for quasi-redemption in District 9. Here’s a guy who is a nerdy bureaucrat who gleefully kills little alien babies. <SPOILER ALERT> You don’t actually make it all the way to liking him, but amid the action you begin to feel sorry for him as he literally becomes his victim.
But what do I know? All through Star Wars I was cheering for Darth Vader to cut that simpering Jedi school dropout Luke Skywalker into light saber-diced cheese. Or is it really Mark Hamill I loathe?
BONUS:
Is your book a happy story? Those tend to suck.
Filed under: publishing, Rant, rules of writing, characters, plots, writing
05/18/2010 • 12:09 PM 0
What works, works.
If it plays, it plays.
Recently I read yet another agent banging on about how offensive writers were when they made the wrong word choices. Eh, well…her black and white thinking struck me as too narrow.
Often what brings writing alive is an unexpected word choice that may challenge its general use. For instance, today I wrote about a “tangent of sopranos taking off from the wider chorus.”It sounds like she’d reject my work based on my choice to use “tangent.” It’s not the right word. I know it’s not the right word. But I think it’s the perfect word.
Fitzgerald often threw in clichés. Then he would slip in a phrase like “deprecating palms” (the trees bending, not hands bending.) It worked.
Filed under: agents, rules of writing, good writing, queries, rules of writing
05/17/2010 • 3:11 PM 0
Cut That Out
I have several tics that show up in my writing first draft.
TICS THAT MUST BE DESTROYED:
1. In Nova Scotia we say, “I’m going right across the street right now.”
This becomes “I’ll walk across the street now.” Eliminate right and use a better verb.
2. Use active verbs. Not “The kid was sucking his thumb.” Write “The kid sucked his thumb.” (And you know not to use adverbs right? If you use an adverb, it means the verb you’re using is a weak sissy.)
3. Eliminate the unnecessary wherever you find it. Sometimes I fall into explaining explain too much or go for the too clever (i.e. obscure) joke.
My wife is my first reader. She went over a story I edited last night and noticed how my writing is now a faster read.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s improved immensely recently. A quantum leap, I think…which by the way used to mean a very small leap but somehow the meaning of quantum got converted to its antonym so, a very big leap. Ironically, this is exactly the sort of bullshit-who-cares tangent I no longer include in my writing.”
Cut that out right now.
Filed under: rules of writing, Writing exercise, better writing, editing. writing exercise
05/15/2010 • 6:47 PM 0
Maybe too few people want to kill you
The brilliant Scott Adams of Dilbert fame says he learned something from a TV executive. Crazy, I know! He was trying to make Dilbert a TV hit. The exec told him that in his experience with focus groups, when everybody likes your work, you’ve got a dud on your hands.
It’s counterintuitive, sure, but I think he’s right. Merely competent work can make everybody nod and say, “It’s okay. That’s nice.” What you want is for a reasonable number of people to love it. Some can hate it. That’s okay. They aren’t the ones buying your books, T-shirts, CDs, subscribing on your website to bid on your belly button lint and making you a cult leader.
There have been several metric tons of TV shows about doctors and lawyers. A bunch of them fade into a teeming mass until you actually confuse them. Think of the lawyer shows with compelling characters. Not everybody was likeable. LA Law comes to mind. Boston Legal stood out because they had the magic trifecta: they dealt with serious issues, the writing was hilarious and the characters were memorable. Law & Order is finally cancelled, but the grating DA Sam Waterston plays has typecast the actor as a moralizing Johnny One-Note with OCD.
Or look at House. The medicine is fancy, but that’s not why most people watch. When the medicine gets deep, many people who love the show pay no attention. It’s the same thing that happens to you when the nerd at Best Buy starts talking technical computer jargon and you’re nodding but you’re not paying attention. You’re really thinking, what will this cost me and am I gonna be able to hook this sucker up?
It’s the characters that make House work and allows it to stand out. Gideon’s Crossing was a good show, but the hero doctor was too much of a hero. Dr. Gregory House is a flawed, brilliant, misanthropic atheist (in today’s America in primetime! YAY!) sociopath. The scary flawed genius tortures people until he finally gets an epiphany at five minutes to the top of each hour. If I was his patient, I’d tell him I’m coming back to see what he comes up with in 55 minutes.
Or Family Guy. There’s a delight that engenders naked hatred in some. For others, it’s only reason to have a TV.
When somebody hates your words, smile. If no one does, you probably aren’t saying anything much. If everybody hates it, yes you must retool. And if everybody just likes it, maybe you need to rework it so it’s a little more challenging. There are many of manuscripts to like, but your agent and editor want something that sets people on fire. Perhaps literally.
Filed under: rules of writing, TV Shows, writing to hate, writing to love
05/14/2010 • 1:28 PM 0
Writing Tips
You’re a writer? You want tips? Here’s a whole whack at Writer’s Digest.
Enjoy.
Filed under: rules of writing, Writers, writing rules, writing tips
05/11/2010 • 2:09 PM 0
I’m Telling (about bad writing advice)
“Write what you know” they say, which cuts out a lot of imaginative work. Dragons, unicorns and the heady world of quantitative surveying go down the toilet if you follow that bad writing advice. Instead, write what you care about. If you care about the subject, you’ll learn the details of the English saddle, vasectomies or animal husbandry.
“Show, don’t tell,” they say. Solid idea in general, but not always true.
Example:
“That was a hard time for Toby”
This is the opening sentence to a chapter. It’s telling, not showing. Sometimes you do that, despite the common wisdom that’s taken to the nth degree until the storytelling sounds unnatural. Your construction shouldn’t sound unnatural or it stops readers thinking about the story.
The above bit of telling is from Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. I recommend it. It’s part of a trilogy so, as long as Atwood and I stay healthy, I have number three to look forward to.
(Book 1 was Oryx and Crake.)
Filed under: rules of writing, writing rules
05/09/2010 • 4:43 PM 0
Rules are Rules
Rules of writing change, get bent or are broken. It’s not all bad. Language is a fluid medium. For instance, read some Young Adult books and you’ll find some authors who beat the old copy editor to death and made the new one accept dialogue without quotation marks. Things change. We can’t (and I don’t want to) freeze the language in amber.
One writing guru told his disciples: NEVER WRITE IN THE SECOND PERSON.
“Rules are rules!” he said. “Second person doesn’t work!”
Except when it does. Write in the second person if you want. Here’s the rule you should pay attention to:
If it plays it plays. Break rules if it works.
And to the guru: What?! You never read Bright Lights, Big City?!*
Bonehead.
*You’ll notice I broke a rule of punctuation there, but it conveys so it works. Your grammar and punctuation does not necessarily have to be as your eighth grade teacher prescribed. What it has to be is consistent so the reader receives the communication.
Filed under: rules of writing, writing rules
05/08/2010 • 5:49 PM 0
Be Wary of Writing Gurus
If your writing teacher is attempting to get you to write just like they do , you’ve got a lousy teacher with an ego that’s getting in your way.
Filed under: rules of writing, writing
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