by
Nothing bothers me more than reading a good book by a reputed author and coming across a passage that with a little twisting could make sense. Does that ever happen to you? Ever flip through a King, a Barker, a Lovecraft, a Rice, and find a passage that makes you feel like a forgotten artist in the midst of over-bloated people who lucked into an agent or good timing?
It's easy, isn't it, to blame them? I do. Sometimes I blame myself, sometimes I blame the mailman, and often I blame a job. All too often, however, it is that which plagues these popular artists that plagues us, as writers...laziness.
And it's an easy laziness to accept. You spend four to five hours a day for six months working on something, a novel, a set of short stories, a screenplay, and man, you're just saying to yourself, if I spend one more week on this project, one more minute, I'll never write again. Besides, look what happened to George Lucas! The man went and toyed with his baby TOO much, and now everyone's turning against him! Don't take that wrong...I'm a big Star Wars fan, but you see my point here. It's really easy to consider something done.
You see a passage like this:
Robert crept slowly up the sides of the creaking stairs, attempting to carefully navigate past the body of his fallen beloved, Jessica. Managing barely, he held his cross forward gauntly, pressing on to the foyer, where Count Bessinger loomed, teeth bared, swept into frame in a rush of wind and his own horror.
And you, like I, am caught up in the good writing in the last sentence. Most people continue, unconscious to what is going on here. What's going on here, which you know after a good time in writing, is laziness.
All right, now I'll take a pause and segue into the past, so that my claim of laziness is justified and not as high flatutin' as it might be.
In college, I met a teacher who said much the same things. You likely have a similar teacher in your background, one who made you question your own writing, and I'm not meaning in a “Your participle is dangling, Jane! Zip up your fly!” kind of way, but in a “IF YOUR WORK IS NOT X, IT IS NOT WRITING!” way.
When I'd left his class, I couldn't write for six months. I questioned myself, wondered if I could continue.
This attitude has brought us to a state of confusion as writers, and I call it the prescription/description paradigm. It's from linguistics, which most of us are woeful in our inadequacy of. Basically, descriptive linguistics is the study of how powerful an interaction is, basing value in utility. For instance, if I go up to you and say
“What it is, man?”
And someone else comes up to you and says,
“It is a picture of madness to interact fully with anyone save you...”
You might think the second person smart, but the first person, you'll give a high five. The first man has more utility to a conversation, and is a descriptive saint.
Prescription is the school that says that you don't leave dangling participles, you don't start sentences with and. And you don't break those rules, or you're not a good writer.
This pickles a lot of us, and makes us rebel. On the one hand, you have the teachers, successes (to a degree) telling you what to do to make things right, and then you go out and read something by Chuck Pahlinuk or some other writer who's totally trumped them all to their resplendent idiocy and sent them packing for Prescriptia.
Enter this college teacher.
He explained to me that anything without form, meter, verse, rhyme, consonance or assonance was not a poem.
I of course, told him to eat his jockeys and beat out for better pastures. The rest of the class laughed at me, called me stupid, but now they're oiling boilers, teaching much like the teacher before them without critical writing success, and keeping literature exclusive. Let them.
But before I beat out, I listened. I did. And I took a good look at the sentence above, the form, meter, verse, rhyme, consonance or assonance one. AND, being the inherent logician I've tended to assume myself (without consequent proving otherwise, tee hee), I came up with something on my own.
Something without form, meter, verse, rhyme, consonance or assonance can certainly be a poem, and a good one, but there's nothing wrong with form, meter, verse, rhyme, consonance or assonance inherently. Ew. Adverb.
So what does this do to the paradigm?
Well, think of it this way. You need to know your prescription in order to usurp it. You and I (and if you're not this way, the article is possibly a waste to you) tend to think of literature as a malleable human force for change and common understanding. Prescription, at its very heart, rails against this. You hear “DO NOT” and communication stops, forces fail, and common understanding is taken apart at the seams by some diabolical imperative you don't necessarily agree with or understand.
So you go descriptive. I can write whatever I want. And. If. You. Don't. Like. It. Eat. My. Beans. Moron. There's something to be said for that. But what if you could take prescription, usurp it, and feed the need to be descriptive at the same time?
THIS, I believe, is the primary failure of writing today. You go too far one way or the other. Writing is either horrible, inaccessible elitism, or badly written tripe that helps you get by on the bus.
And so we turn to people who blend the two in master fashion. The Kings, the Barkers, the Rice's, in my case the Bukowskis, perhaps...but you know the people I'm talking about.
The problem is, no one can tell you how to write like these people, nor can they hold your hands through the experience of becoming like them.
So you write entire books filled with passages like the one I cited above with Robert and Count Bessinger. Some of it shines, some of it doesn't, and you don't know what to do, because hey, your friends all tell you what a great writer you are (and they're plumbers or real estate agents or layabouts in daddy's flat, read: NOT WRITERS, friends), and all of your teachers try to conform you to their personal definition of prescription, as it is the general teacher's mandate that ideas are not their problem, your technicals are. The ideas are yours, and to change them imposes their will on your own, a no-no unless you're a really bad teacher, like the one I mentioned before.
Take it from me. I studied to be a teacher, then left when I realized this ultimate failure. All learning can be spurred on by teachers, but the motivation, and the leaping of that gap between the prescriptive and the descriptive can only come from you.
What I did was drastic. I quit my job or minimally attended it, at great risk and cost in many arenas, and wrote about six hours a day for five years. If you look back on this article, however, you're sure to find areas of improvement. Still,
TIME. Time helps. You get accustomed to the words, and you edit as you go, which saves a lot of time.
And then there are the maxims. The things from prescription which can help you. The things which you SHOULD use (prescription) but if it sounds better and you think it works otherwise, and others do as well, don't use them (description).
My favorites?
Kill adverbs,
Kill clichés, and
Kill “is, are, was, were, an, be, being, and been”, “has, have, had” and “and, but, or”.
Being a minimalist, the “and, but, or” probably doesn't apply to you, a primarily horror audience (I'm assuming), but generally, these are good things. For a larger series of things not to do, pick up any prescriptive tome, but buyer beware, and don't let them make you think you're a bad writer. Confidence in the face of adversity is most all that you have. Ask any writer who hits that fifty-page mark in their first book, and realizes what they've written is garbage. They have to push on; otherwise, the idea will lose interest. And then ask that writer how good it felt when she DID finish, went back, edited, and came up with something decent.
Apply the simple rules to my bad generalized fictive paragraph above, and let's see what happens.
Anything that ends with –ly goes, as does and, but, or, has, have, and had.
Version 1:
Robert crept slowly up the sides of the creaking stairs, attempting to carefully navigate past the body of his fallen beloved, Jessica. Managing barely, he held his cross forward gauntly, pressing on to the foyer, where Count Bessinger loomed, teeth bared, swept into frame in a rush of wind and his own horror.
Version 2:
Robert crept up the sides of the creaking stairs, attempting to navigate past the body of his fallen beloved, Jessica. Managing, he held his cross forward , pressing on to the foyer, where Count Bessinger loomed, teeth bared, swept into frame in a rush of wind and his own horror.
All right. That's a start. There weren't even any “and but or” or “has have had”s, right? But it's still a lot of cheese. Watch what I do here…
Version 3:
Robert crept the sides of the creaking stairs, edging past his fallen beloved, Jessica. He held his cross forward, moving to the foyer, where Bessinger loomed, teeth bared, swept into frame in rushes of wind and his own horror.
Now look. It's a smaller paragraph. A lot of words are missing. Which ones? Well, common language tells us that prepositional phrases, while on the way to taking us in to the way up towards being someone on top of the rest of us, tend merely to stall for time and make a sentence sound more important than it really is...which is important in times when you need to draw out tension...something a lot of genre writers do, or when you DO need to falsely lure the reader into thinking something is more important than it is, but I really like to be direct, honest, evil, and most important, less passive. You'll notice that I've made it more personal, more direct. He's not attempting to navigate past the body of his fallen beloved; he's EDGING past his FALLEN BELOVED. Fallen beloved is a bit passive, but it shows he still loves her, it's part of the reason he's climbing up there despite his gut rising into his lungs to confront ole Bessinger, right? And note, Count Bassinger, a term of affection, is now just Bessinger. He lost the right to be Count when he took old Robert, you, and I on a trip we didn't want to go, seeing Jessica's death. So he's in for it. And one small thing… “a rush of” becomes “rushes of”
That's style. It depends on what you like to do, but such things can become the trademarks of what you write. I like to make things more urgent, more minimalist, more in-your-face.
That said; let's take it to the next level:
Robert crept the sides of the stairs. Gunshot cracks from worn risers sang him past his beloved Jessica. Cross forward, he entered the foyer where the Count loomed, and then:
Teeth bared, swept in rushes of wind, Bessinger held a hand up in warning. A last warning.
Now, this one breaks some rules, and it's less compact than you might like as a minimalist (cough me cough), but it's much more effective to your audience, it's got some rule breaking which makes it special (you're not supposed to colon for anything except a set of series, generally speaking, and here, well, we use it for an explanation. It's legal, by prescription, but it's almost out there. It's a “What it is, man?”
And it moves things into their quadrants. We return the Count his title, but only because he's scaring us, but when we confront him, in a completely different paragraph, he's there, and he's Bessinger.
That said, watch for pronouns as well. He entered the foyer, though it's clear in this passage, is unclear in another. KILL PRONOUNS! (generally, or when it's not absolutely clear).
Another tip: Dialogue. If you want to write lazy, write dialogue. Because really, we don't talk like I'm writing right now. I do, you know, but really, it makes it harder to get chicks. Most of us talk down in human, where the humans live. So do characters. Chracters use “is are was were an be being been” all the time, like most bad writing.
My lone stipulation on dialogue, being minimalist, is to kill speaker tags unless it's necessary. I usually insert an action to make it less passive.
“I just ate a tainted waffle!” Billy said. Or even Billy postulated.
Postulation is interesting, but what's more effective, postulating, or:
Billy dropped his fork, pushing away from the table. “I just ate a tainted waffle!”
These things seem ridiculous, I know, but they MEAN something to the reader.
They MEAN something.
There's no reason to have read the last paragraph as louder or more emphasized than the last, but that cadence, that subconscious play, is what gives Stephen King an advantage over you.
Now steal his book contracts.
My disclaimers? I'm a failure in the financial sense. If you want to get on the short road to money through writing, number one, get another profession and famous, number two, write to the masses. It's easy. Instead of what you like, read Romance novels and imitate them. They're so easily written that you can crank out four or five a year and make some money in time.
If you like romance novels, and think them literature, well, sorry. But odds of that (and I'm taking bets) are about 1000:1.
If you want to write for love of writing or to touch people on a deeper level, explore some of what I've said.
A further stipulation. If you haven't spent the time necessary to understand your basic grammar, spellings, and story elements, do it. I hated it. You'll hate it. But you have to. And it's done through mediums like the guy I mentioned, who'll suck your will to live. But it's part of the gamut.
And recommendation:
Go read On Writing by Stephen King. As a man who's read a hundred different books on the magic pill of making your writing beloved, this is the best. And hey, he's horror! (generally)
And one more recommendation:
Don't do this for the money. Do it for the love. Then (I hope, at least) the money will eventually come to you. I know that going out and looking for the money when writing for passion fails. 150 letters on my desk tell me that. Do it for the love.
And one, last, very last, FINAL recommendation:
Don't take anything I've said to heart, if it conflicts with what you truly believe. The last thing I want is to be that English teacher to you.
Thanks for reading.