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delphiI was utterly delighted to get an anon question:
If you accept anonymous questions, could you perhaps tell us your three (or more) pieces of advice for improving one's writing?
Okay, so writing's a weird and personal thing. Everyone goes about it differently, and advice is just a shot in the dark. But I've been writing creatively as a hobby for...uh, wow, almost twenty years, and here are some of the things that helped me get better at it.
1. Playing with the building blocks.
When I learned about how to formally read a story in school, it was all about the big picture: plot, character, theme, and motif. When I learned about how to write a story in school, it was all about the little embellishments: adjectives, adverbs, similes, and metaphors.
These were good lessons, but I didn’t feel like I had a handle on how stories worked until I started paying attention to the structural basics: punctuation, sentence type and length, narrative voice, point of view, and diction. What’s the difference between a dependent and independent clause? According to the grammar books, how is a semi-colon supposed to be employed? When do you use a set of em dashes and when do you use parentheses? How does the same phrase read in passive versus active voice, or in present versus past tense, or as direct speech versus indirect speech? Who uses "just" and who uses "only"? What’s with all these interrogative sentences here?
(I didn’t get a lot of grammatical education in school, so even just learning these terms involved hitting up the reference section of the library and, later, looking things up on Wikipedia.)
I’m not a prescriptivist. Language is there to experiment with. However, learning the “official” way of doing things made me more thoughtful about my writing choices. Heck, it made me realize that writing is by definition about making choices. When I’m writing at my best, I can justify these choices.
“I chose present tense because I want the reader to feel a sense of immersion and immediacy. I chose to write this from Character A’s point of view because he’s the one having an internal revelation while Character B’s feelings are going to be obvious from his speech and actions. I’m going to keep that point of view limited because I want the reader to be entirely inside Character A’s head and share his confusion about the situation. I’m using contractions and casual language because I want the narration to remind readers of the way Character A speaks, since we’re inside his head. I strung four clauses together here because Character A is freaking out, and that’s how people often speak when their mind is racing. I used a short declarative sentence afterwards to indicate that he’s come to a sudden, clear conclusion. I took out that semi-colon because people stop and pay attention to a semi-colon in a way that they don’t with a period; I don’t want people to pause. I also took out that semi-colon because it has the connotation of being formal, or at least very precise; Character A is not in a precise state of mind right now.”
Plus, grammar is just cool.
2. Reading a lot and thinking about what I’m reading.
“Read a lot” is the advice you always hear if you want to write. That’s because it’s good advice. Reading widely made me love stories and made me want to write. It also helped give me a gut sense of what a story is supposed to look and feel like.
For me, reading is only half of it. I’ve learned a lot by stopping and thinking about what I’m reading.
“I’m skimming. Why? Huh. Because this chapter started by telling me there was going to be a murder, and now I’ve just spent three pages reading about this character’s boring day at work. I’m trying to skip ahead to the excitement. If I were writing this, how would I set it up differently?”
Or:
“Oh man, I’m tearing up a little. What was it about the way that scene was written that hit me so hard? I think it’s because the current point of view character doesn’t know that her girlfriend is never coming back, but because of the omniscient viewpoint, I know from the last section that she’s doomed. If I didn’t know that here, I wouldn’t be nearly as sad about the characters parting ways.”
Or:
“Wow, that was a really good description. If I were writing this scene, would I have thought of that? Nah, my take on it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting. I probably would have compared those bare tree branches to skeletal hands, and that's been done a hundred times before. This is the first time I’ve seen them compared to tangled hair. What other interesting comparisons are there?”
3. Editing.
Just...editing. The more open I’ve been to other people’s feedback and the more willing I’ve been to rearrange, erase, or swap out the words I’ve written, the happier I’ve been with the end result.
It’s not easy. When I’ve finished a piece of writing, I want to post it right away. I want to stop staring at the same words I’ve been looking at for weeks or months. I want the immediate gratification of seeing people read it and (hopefully) hearing that they enjoyed it. I want the pride and relief of having completed something.
Moreover, getting constructive criticism is still really difficult. Writing is important to me, and I put a lot of time and energy into a story. Seeing that I did something “wrong” will always make me feel a little anxious and embarrassed and exposed. But that’s why it’s so important. I feel those unpleasant feelings at first because I care about what I’m doing. And since I care so deeply, I know that listening to the criticism as objectively as possible will help me to make more thoughtful choices in the future.
When I don’t have someone else to give me constructive criticism, I try to be my own critic. I let a story sit for a few days so I can look at it with fresh eyes. I think about what I’m reading in the same way I do with other people’s work. “I’m skimming this section. Why? Because there’s four huge paragraphs of description sitting there like hills and I can see some dialogue below on the horizon, which is grabbing my attention. What if I move the dialogue up instead and snip out that description of the storm entirely. It has some nice phrases in it, so I’ll put in my odds and ends folder and use it in a future story...”
Unfortunately, when everything’s going right, I spend more time editing than I do writing.
I’m lucky enough to have some seriously talented and skilled writers in my circle here. Does anyone else want to share some tips? Let me know in the comments what advice you have for improving your writing.
If you accept anonymous questions, could you perhaps tell us your three (or more) pieces of advice for improving one's writing?
Okay, so writing's a weird and personal thing. Everyone goes about it differently, and advice is just a shot in the dark. But I've been writing creatively as a hobby for...uh, wow, almost twenty years, and here are some of the things that helped me get better at it.
1. Playing with the building blocks.
When I learned about how to formally read a story in school, it was all about the big picture: plot, character, theme, and motif. When I learned about how to write a story in school, it was all about the little embellishments: adjectives, adverbs, similes, and metaphors.
These were good lessons, but I didn’t feel like I had a handle on how stories worked until I started paying attention to the structural basics: punctuation, sentence type and length, narrative voice, point of view, and diction. What’s the difference between a dependent and independent clause? According to the grammar books, how is a semi-colon supposed to be employed? When do you use a set of em dashes and when do you use parentheses? How does the same phrase read in passive versus active voice, or in present versus past tense, or as direct speech versus indirect speech? Who uses "just" and who uses "only"? What’s with all these interrogative sentences here?
(I didn’t get a lot of grammatical education in school, so even just learning these terms involved hitting up the reference section of the library and, later, looking things up on Wikipedia.)
I’m not a prescriptivist. Language is there to experiment with. However, learning the “official” way of doing things made me more thoughtful about my writing choices. Heck, it made me realize that writing is by definition about making choices. When I’m writing at my best, I can justify these choices.
“I chose present tense because I want the reader to feel a sense of immersion and immediacy. I chose to write this from Character A’s point of view because he’s the one having an internal revelation while Character B’s feelings are going to be obvious from his speech and actions. I’m going to keep that point of view limited because I want the reader to be entirely inside Character A’s head and share his confusion about the situation. I’m using contractions and casual language because I want the narration to remind readers of the way Character A speaks, since we’re inside his head. I strung four clauses together here because Character A is freaking out, and that’s how people often speak when their mind is racing. I used a short declarative sentence afterwards to indicate that he’s come to a sudden, clear conclusion. I took out that semi-colon because people stop and pay attention to a semi-colon in a way that they don’t with a period; I don’t want people to pause. I also took out that semi-colon because it has the connotation of being formal, or at least very precise; Character A is not in a precise state of mind right now.”
Plus, grammar is just cool.
2. Reading a lot and thinking about what I’m reading.
“Read a lot” is the advice you always hear if you want to write. That’s because it’s good advice. Reading widely made me love stories and made me want to write. It also helped give me a gut sense of what a story is supposed to look and feel like.
For me, reading is only half of it. I’ve learned a lot by stopping and thinking about what I’m reading.
“I’m skimming. Why? Huh. Because this chapter started by telling me there was going to be a murder, and now I’ve just spent three pages reading about this character’s boring day at work. I’m trying to skip ahead to the excitement. If I were writing this, how would I set it up differently?”
Or:
“Oh man, I’m tearing up a little. What was it about the way that scene was written that hit me so hard? I think it’s because the current point of view character doesn’t know that her girlfriend is never coming back, but because of the omniscient viewpoint, I know from the last section that she’s doomed. If I didn’t know that here, I wouldn’t be nearly as sad about the characters parting ways.”
Or:
“Wow, that was a really good description. If I were writing this scene, would I have thought of that? Nah, my take on it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting. I probably would have compared those bare tree branches to skeletal hands, and that's been done a hundred times before. This is the first time I’ve seen them compared to tangled hair. What other interesting comparisons are there?”
3. Editing.
Just...editing. The more open I’ve been to other people’s feedback and the more willing I’ve been to rearrange, erase, or swap out the words I’ve written, the happier I’ve been with the end result.
It’s not easy. When I’ve finished a piece of writing, I want to post it right away. I want to stop staring at the same words I’ve been looking at for weeks or months. I want the immediate gratification of seeing people read it and (hopefully) hearing that they enjoyed it. I want the pride and relief of having completed something.
Moreover, getting constructive criticism is still really difficult. Writing is important to me, and I put a lot of time and energy into a story. Seeing that I did something “wrong” will always make me feel a little anxious and embarrassed and exposed. But that’s why it’s so important. I feel those unpleasant feelings at first because I care about what I’m doing. And since I care so deeply, I know that listening to the criticism as objectively as possible will help me to make more thoughtful choices in the future.
When I don’t have someone else to give me constructive criticism, I try to be my own critic. I let a story sit for a few days so I can look at it with fresh eyes. I think about what I’m reading in the same way I do with other people’s work. “I’m skimming this section. Why? Because there’s four huge paragraphs of description sitting there like hills and I can see some dialogue below on the horizon, which is grabbing my attention. What if I move the dialogue up instead and snip out that description of the storm entirely. It has some nice phrases in it, so I’ll put in my odds and ends folder and use it in a future story...”
Unfortunately, when everything’s going right, I spend more time editing than I do writing.
I’m lucky enough to have some seriously talented and skilled writers in my circle here. Does anyone else want to share some tips? Let me know in the comments what advice you have for improving your writing.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-10 07:32 am (UTC)I applaud your anonymous enquirer! Questions of craft are a huge self-indulgent interest for me, and I love seeing what any given writer thinks is important, what comes to mind first as the lessons or epiphanies that have stuck with them. And of course I've been reading your work for a long time, and it's very easy to assume you arrived fully formed with your talent already in bloom.
1. I had very little training in grammar and rhetoric, and it took forever to dawn on me how much can be done simply by learning what holds a sentence together, how it can be taken apart, how parts within a sentence influence each other, how sentences build rhythm and mood and emotional beats via paragraphs, and so on. So I completely agree with you. It's not just about versatility; it's about having the tools to find your authorial voice, or control the voices within the story. It's the competence cliché. Once you master a set of skills, you can create things previously out of your reach, but it means you bump up against how many more things there are to learn, things you didn't realize until the new skills brought those possibilities into view.
Unfortunately, by the time I started truly paying attention, my internal defaults for sentence structure had mostly set. I still struggle to break my habits and remember that lines and phrases are more resilient and accommodating than my 'intuitive' arbiter of grammar seems to think. Betas and casual readers who encountered my earlier fics with their idiosyncratic comma usage and infatuation with semicolons and parentheses must have itched to take those stories over their knee and give them a good red penning.
For that matter, I still don't know the answer to many of your interrogatives, and I will often not have the slightest clue that I've committed a syntactical gaffe.
I have a friend who's been writing stories all her life but who grew up (in a commune) with even less exposure to grammar than I had, and zero guidance in spelling on top of that. I've been mentoring her for years now, and it was fascinating watching her at first resist the hard work of grammar, then struggle to memorize and apply it, and then have her eyes opened to how powerful the effect is on her writing and how vast the array in terms of small but crucial choices at every step. She found it daunting for a while. Still does, actually. But now she wants to make those rules her own so she can do the things she sees other writers doing.
(Argh. I am stupidly, stupidly tired, and I still have to get up in the morning to work, so I'll have to post my response in stages. Expect another ramble once I have a moment to myself and can do more than blink blearily at the monitor.)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-12 09:59 pm (UTC)And ha, I hear you about set internal defaults. Left to my own devices, it's all em dashes and parentheses. I know it's bad in my casual non-fiction writing when I find myself nesting multiple sets of parentheses.
I pay a lot less attention to prescriptive grammatical rules and conventions in other people's writing, but they're useful lenses for my own work. I like structure in general. As someone who starts a few dozen projects for every one I finish, I find that having some sort of measurement or framework helps me not get paralyzed by all the choices - helps me stop picking at this sentence or that, and helps me actually decide to be finished with something. That's probably why so many of my stories are 100-word drabbles, Five Times stories, metrical verse, or take place over the course of one year divided into months or seasons.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-07-02 03:54 pm (UTC)What you said about choices is such a useful way of looking at things while writing! Often when I write, I suffer from choice paralysis--when faced with a blank page and an infinite number of options, how to know where to start? It helps to narrow it down to a choice between just two options, both of which are valid but each of which would have a different impact on the story, if that makes sense? So this was incredibly helpful to me, thank you! :)
I also really needed to hear your advice about reading and editing; the reading especially is such a useful and flexible learning tool. I've been practising at analysing the books, fic and TV shows I consume in this manner. It's getting easier in most stories to determine what it is exactly that leaves me dissatisfied, but I can't always tell how to improve it. So I try and look at other stories that do the same thing very well, and that helps.
One thing I'm struggling with a lot at this point in my "journey" as a writer is theme and emotional arcs. I'm the sort of person that plot comes more naturally to, but I want to practise and get better at emotion, too, because my favorite stories (and that includes your stories in particular) are the ones that do this well.
If I may ask, to what extent is theme or your character's emotional arc something you think consciously about? Do you determine them before you start writing, as part of the outline, or do you find that theme doesn't emerge until after you've finished the first draft?
If you do it consciously, how do you go about it? This may sound like a silly novice question, but once you've decided that you want a character to grow from point A to point B over the course of a story (e.g. from guilt to self-forgiveness), how do you actually get them from point A to point B? What if the transformation is something major (e.g. if the character has done something so bad that you're having a hard time imagining how anyone would forgive themselves for it)? Or should that not make a difference?
I only ask because I got the impression that you enjoyed talking about writing--of course, if you don't feel like answering more questions or if you're short on time, please feel free to ignore this. Either way, thank you so much for the helpful advice you've given me already!
--
disclaimer: English isn't my native language, sorry if the above sounds clunky :)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-07-28 07:07 am (UTC)I completely understand what you mean about choice paralysis. I have an embarrassing number of unfinished stories on my hard drive (as in, over a hundred) and a good portion of those are unfinished because I couldn’t make a very minor choice and simply stalled out. I find outlining helps me a lot on that front. I rarely start writing even a very short story these days without sketching it out from beginning to end. Making decisions early on in point form, before I’ve invested the time and energy of real prose, makes it easier for me to experiment with different choices until I find something that feels right. It’s easier to cut scenes or move them around when they’re just very short notes instead of full descriptions.
Theme and emotional arcs are a huge part of the outlining process for me. When I first get an idea for a story, it’s usually just a small element: a scene, a line of dialogue, or an image. My next step is to think about what sort of theme that could relate to. This is mostly done in the shower in the mornings or on my daily commute. I then usually spend a little time going back and forth in my head, sort of negotiating between the “what” and the “why”. More scenes develop based on my initial theme, and in turn the theme might shift or grow to accommodate the new scenes. It’s only when I feel confident about the theme that I start putting words down on paper.
If it’s going to be a longer story, that’s where I’ll start mapping out character arcs. The point form of what happens in the story will be accompanied with notes about where the character is at emotionally in those scenes. Having this down in an outline gives me a sort of bird’s-eye-view of the whole story and whether the emotional beats are spaced out in a way that makes sense (and by “makes sense” I mean whether they resemble the pacing and pattern in other things I’ve read and enjoyed). I’ll usually start with the beginning and the end - who the character is at the start and where I want them to be at the finish. Then I think about where that state would pivot. Would it be one dramatic thing that makes them change (a big blow-up argument or a near-death experience) or would it be a lot of small things that build up gradually (a series of kindnesses that lead to acceptance), or some combination of the two? Who or what prompts these moments and how can I weave them into the story? Are they primarily internal or external? What sort of feelings are accompanying the change, and how does that relate to what we know about the character - is some empty part of them being filled or an old wound being poked, is this an intellectual or emotional reaction, are they acting out of principle or out of spite? Thinking about these questions usually helps me narrow down the options for how the character could get from point A to point B and which of these options would be the most interesting to read and write about.
For instance, I’m working on a long project that has me making a lot of notes about a character’s arc. I know that the main theme is Identity, with three related sub-themes: Masculinity, Adulthood, and Family. I know that the character starts out secure in his family role but trying to “be a man” in a way that isn’t right for him. I know that at the end he’s found his own model of masculinity and adulthood and has redefined his role in the family based on this.
To help me figure out how to get him from here to there, I first sketched out the early scenes where he’s unfulfilled, then the last scenes where he’s succeeded. I brainstormed some midpoints - places where he was starting to get things right, but not quite - and put them in the middle to see how that flowed and where the gaps still were. I then made a list of all the other characters in the story and assigned them to one or more of the three sub-themes. (ex. His mother is Family, his boss is Adulthood, his uncle is Masculinity, his love interest is a support for all three and his brothers are foils for all three.) That solved a lot of problems, because then I just had to make sure that whatever scene the protagonist had with one of those characters was moving that sub-theme along.
While I have a theme in mind for every story I write, emotional arcs are a bit more opt-in for me. This is because I pretty much only write fanfiction, where canon is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I think you don’t always have to write out a whole emotional arc with fanfic, because people are bringing all their canon knowledge to the story when they read it, and your words are existing within or adjacent to the canon arc. A few light references or allusions and the reader builds bridges all on their own.
I don’t know if this is helpful at all. I’d be happy to try to drill down more on any of these ideas if they’re not making sense. If you let me know which of my stories you’ve read, I could probably pull some examples of how I went about writing it, and might even still have copies of my notes.
Now, plot. I’m terrible at plot. Can’t do it. Can’t think my way through it. It does not come naturally to me at all. I would love to hear about how you approach it. Any tricks and tips you could share with me?