10 things I believe about writing

[tocryabout]

(Yes, spinning off from fabu's Things I Know About Writing.)

I should include a lot of caveats with this entry. Instead I'll just give you two. (1) I have never been published in anything that people have to pay to read. (2) This has all been said before, and better.

1. "Write every day" doesn't work for everyone. For sullen, resentful types like me, quotas and discipline are counter-productive. My stories bloat up, and I have to spend just as much time taking out the crap as I spent putting it in. I write when I feel like it. For people who feel like it often, this plan works. For people who don't, figure out something else.



2. Advice from my English teacher grandmother: "Don't use a thesaurus. The word you come up with organically is usually the right one."



3. Advice from my father, who wrote damn fine sermons: "HELP your reader." By this, he meant avoid convoluted sentences and make good friends with punctuation marks. Properly used punctuation helps the reader to no end.



4. Corollary to #3: when in doubt, break that long-ass sentence up and move on.



5. Advice from my mother, paraphrased, on drawing: Don't be a precious twit about the details. When you're drawing, you work fast and loose in order to preserve the vitality and liveliness of your style. Does this mean you should be sloppy and clumsy, or that you shouldn't edit? By no means! When you have your shitty first draft, take out all the stuff that doesn't belong there, and put in the stuff you forgot. That's it--maintain some trust in your own instincts. The artist sweeping her hand across the page can do it because she has spent enough time studying the masters, observing reality, and training her hand. Writers also do it by reading the good stuff, paying attention, and knowing the dumb rules of the English language.



6. More advice via visual arts: there's only one first sketch. Only one first draft. On the canvas, you adjust, highlight, darken, add subtlety, and so on, but what you don't do is rip it all to shreds and start over again, hoping to get it right on the first try this time. Moreover, too much fussing will spoil whatever virtues the flawed original had.



7. Don't write what you know. Write what you love. We've all read those smug asshole literary novels with the matte covers and the massive paragraphs of sneering description, in which it's obvious that the writer has observed his characters very closely and hated them. (In this, fans are way ahead of most students in a creative writing class.) Don't be a condescending shit. Write what you love, even if you're angry at it or afraid for it.



8. I buy a lot of books, more than I should. I'll be tempted by the pretty cover, sure. A good blurb might sucker me in. And yes, if I open it up and find a flood of beautifully-turned sentences inside, I'll probably buy it. And then when I get it home and crack that mofo open, it's usually stagnant and dull, in spite of the fabulous imagery and perfectly balanced paragraphs. I don't finish the book. The moral is that YOU ARE THE STORY'S BITCH and shit had better HAPPEN and people better be FUNNY. The only authors who I forgive for not being funny are Russians, and even then, Nabokov was hilarious. If you think your story's too fucking serious to give the reader a break, you read Hamlet and get back to me.



9. The story does not belong to you. Me, I think it belongs to God. He gives us the pattern and we work it with threads from our own lives, because God takes pleasure in sharing the process of creation with us. He helps us tell stories because he loves us. You might see things differently, but I think it's beneficial to treat a story as something not entirely under your power.



10. Corollary from #9: no matter how frustrated you get, you cannot destroy the story. The story will not abandon you, although it may take a sabbatical and come find you later, with new souvenir stickers on its suitcases. Breakthroughs happen just when you most want to kill all your characters and set your computer on fire. God will not stop telling you stories, so long as you want to listen and write them.

Comments

[youngest-one.livejournal.com]

I wonder how you could apply #3 to sermons.

#10 is both a source of benefit and frustration for me. On the one hand, it means I have plenty of stories to draw on; on the other hand, I might want to write about one thing and only have inspiration for another storyline entirely.

[waterstrider.livejournal.com]

When you're doing public speaking, the punctuation does count. Long sentences with poorly joined clauses are hard for the listener to follow. The listener should be able to hear the difference between a semicolon, a colon, a dash, and a period. If your context doesn't make it absolutely clear what that semicolon is doing there, then what you want is a period.

(I am not always so good at this, but it's sound advice anyway.)

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

We have a lot of the same thoughts. The one about humour is becoming increasingly important to me in all media and in choosing people I trust in life. Examples:

- Actors who can't do comedy can't do drama either.
- People who don't find life absurd some of the time are likely fascists.

Wow, I believe just about everything you've written here, too. Yes!

[drtristessa.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear to #2. When people stuff their writing with as many $1.00 words as they can think of (or look up), it is painfully obvious. There are some writers who would come up with, say, "cromulent" organically, but their writing tends not to reek of "I'm smart! No, really!"

As for #8, so many people use humor in everyday life and in dealing with tragedy that all seriousness all the time throws me out of a story. Even if one or two characters have no sense of humor, chances are, at least someone in the story does (and probably pokes fun at the humorless ones).

[ministry-victim.livejournal.com]

I should come here more often, methinks.

While I don't agree with all of the points, I can only found myself disagreeing with one - the first one. Given that we seem to rarely agree on anything, that's definitely something.

I've discovered that "writing everyday" doesn't necessarily mean keeping to the same story, but it could mean putting something down in livejournal, or just the act of writing itself, creative or not, to facilitate the flow of words.