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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.