cblj_backup | (no subject)

I got a question via email the other day asking whether I'd ever posted anything on how to become a better writer, especially with the long-term goal of being published or self-publishing. I had a lot of thoughts about it, so maybe it's time I wrote them out.

FOUR THOUSAND WORDS LATER...

Introduction!

(I love subheadings.)

I've generally shied away from writing about "how to write" or how to be a "better writer", in part because I don't really see myself as any kind of authority about it. Sometimes I think, well, I do write a lot, and I've sold books, so maybe. But then I look at actual writers who have contracts and such, and I think, putting yourself up a little high there, aren't you, Sam? Plus there's always the little voice that goes Shit, really? How do I fix that? when someone calls me boring or pretentious.

The other reason I haven't written much about it is that it's a personal process for everyone. Communicating creativity is nearly impossible, and offering you a structure that is useful to me is at least halfway to being pointless because it might be useless for you. You cannot take a whole system from one person as gospel.

It's also difficult because these are my opinions, and when you post an opinion, out of 3000 readers, at least a few are likely to disagree. So when I post something like this, I am in essence stepping up to argue with the entire internet, which is exhausting and scary.

So this is not my descent from the mount to hand you commandments. I'm going to talk like I know what I'm talking about, and you can pick and choose what (if anything) you find useful. It's just like college!

The general advice that people will give you about writing breaks down into basically two parts: write a lot, and also get all the feedback you possibly can from everyone you can pin down. I'd like to argue with those and augment them a little and make some additional suggestions, so let's see if I can do it coherently. This isn't a deconstruction of those ideas, just an occasional acknowledgement that they exist.

Commitment

Writing a lot is good. It's practice, of course, and it also teaches you commitment, so that when you know you have to write something you really don't want to in order to get to the bits you do want to write, you're able to whip yourself through it. But that's really most of what repetitive or continuous writing teaches you. You will not learn to be a good writer by writing all day long, there's just plain more to it. (I'll discuss what "more" is in a bit.) But it has its benefits.

I've long thought that NaNoWriMo isn't about writing a book, but about committing to getting a book's worth of writing done, so that you know how you work and what you need to do in order to finish something. It makes a difficult thing into a comfortable habit. I can't really do NaNo anymore because I know my systems and they don't respond well to enforced word counts and timelines; I'm capable of writing a novel in a month but it has to be the right month, and the right novel, and the two rarely collide, almost never in November when any sensible person is spending their time having snowball fights.

Still, writing for the sake of writing does help: you learn not to get tied up in details you can fix later, and you learn not to worry too much about research until the thing is done. Stephen King, in On Writing, devotes a lot of time to what you shouldn't get bogged down in, like his process for writing From A Buick 8, a story about a group of PA State Troopers:

It was a grand idea and has developed into a strong novel [...] of course there were a few minor problems -- the fact that I knew absolutely zilch about the Pennsylvania State Police, for one thing -- but I didn't let any of that bother me. I simply made up all the stuff I didn't know.

He goes back later and does the research, but the point of writing a lot or writing fast or under pressure is to get the frame built. A lot of people are down on NaNo because they assume writers think at the end of it they'll have a publishable book, but both the haters and the attitude they hate (frequently mistaking the attitude for the entire system of NaNo) are wrong about the ultimate goal: to prove to yourself that you can get some god damned words on the god damned page.

Patience

Commitment is what gets books written. Patience is what gets a good book written.

A common problem I see especially in young fanfic writers, and a problem I had myself as a young fanfic writer, is that they have one scene, one concept, that they desperately want to convey. Or they have a story they breathlessly want to tell. Look at any cross-section of fanfiction.net and you can find this: a sloppily written story with one gorgeous scene, one brilliant concept, or one driving idea.

There's an urgency about storytelling that makes you want to be the first to get there, or makes you want to skip the boring stuff to get to the meat. But patience is what enables a writer to build a story, to write it with care, or to revise it until it doesn't suck. The urgency can drive you on and make you write, but tempering it with patience allows you to write it better.

A couple of nights ago I sat down and began to play with the concept of that superhero AU idea I posted. I got about two thousand words written, but those two thousand words are pure exposition. When (if) I write it as a fic, or even as a book, those two thousand words will probably be the first ten to twenty thousand words of the story, written properly. It's the difference between saying "Lisa had green hair this week, because she liked to change her hair colour a lot" and an entire scene where some friend teases Lisa about how often she changes her hair colour, while she gets bashful or defensive or evangelical about it. It takes time. Sometimes you have to jump ahead to write the scene you want, then go back and work up the rest of the story.

It's absolutely one of the most annoying things ever that the story isn't just REALLY GOOD RIGHT NOW. That's why I sometimes post "stories I'll never write", because really I don't want to write the whole thing, I just want to get a scene or a concept out there. I make sure what I post is still good, still conveys meaning, but I know that the decision is between spending a week writing five interesting scenes or three months writing five interesting fanfics.

Cultivating patience is, for me, a requisite of good writing.

A Momentary Digression: Excuses

"But I'm not a patient person!"

This is one of those things that's up there with "but the muse told me to do it" on my short list of Dumbest Excuses Writers Try To Pass. I have had fights about that second one which have got me banned from certain portions of fandom, but I still believe creativity is a matter of personal responsibility. You control what you write and to a larger-than-expected extent you control how good it is. You're responsible for it, and you don't get to blame a) a failing which can be corrected, such as patience, or b) an imaginary friend. (Can you tell the muse thing pushes my buttons.)

Look, this isn't an essay about how to have fun writing. That comes naturally if you like doing it, and you don't need me to tell you how to have fun. If you just want to write to get the idea out there, or because it's fun, that's okay. Frustrating to me, but I'm not the reason you're writing: you are. If you like what you've done and you had a good time doing it, godspeed, write all you want. If you're happy with the result, that's fantastic. People should be happy as often as humanly possible.

But you can't necessarily expect praise for it, and you have to be willing to walk on by whistling "haters gonna hate" if someone doesn't like it. (Technically you have to be ready to do that anyway; no writer is universally beloved. It's just easier to do if you know you did your best.)

There is, I think, a fairly common transitional phase where writers want to be better but aren't willing, or don't know how, to put in the work -- to write with discipline and patience, to revise before posting, to listen to betas. It's difficult and troubling, and it's where a lot of excuses get made. "Oh, I just had to write it" is fine, but you can't tag "why don't I get comments on it" onto that if you know you didn't do your best work, or haven't put in the effort to learn how to make it better.

Writing that enchants, captivates, and entertains takes work. Nobody does it effortlessly. The work can still be fun, but won't always be. I find it worth it, because the end result gratifies me.

Critical Reading

So I said there was more to being a better writer than just writing. One of the primary things I think people forget to do is to read, and more importantly, read critically.

When I was studying theatre, most students only worked on shows, never attended them, and that was a problem in theatre schools across the country. I read an article about how graduate schools were beginning to ask not just "what have you done" but "what have you seen", so I started going to shows I hadn't worked on whenever I could, financing them by writing reviews for the school paper. And I became a much better artist and thinker because of it.

I was a voracious reader, always; I learned to read young and my parents, while not great readers themselves, always made sure I had enough books. By the time I started writing at fourteen, I had read a lot of really great books -- classics, popular literature, genre novels. I'd been reading above my grade level my whole life, and at fourteen was working my way through the books the Seniors were reading that year. I'd never studied grammar formally, but I'd had paragons of English grammar and storytelling in front of my eyes my whole life.

AND I SUCKED OUT LOUD.

My story structure, my grammar, and my prose were dreadful, and that's not modesty. I can say that, because I was fourteen and a dumbass, and I own my dumbassery since it led me to my current state of lesser dumbassery at thirty-one.

How could I not comprehend the basic grammar of dialogue? I'd have three people speaking in one paragraph. I had been reading books for twelve and a half years. How is it that I didn't look at every book I owned and go "Welp, one person talks per paragraph, okay."

I wasn't reading critically. There's nothing wrong with reading for pleasure, but reading for pleasure had not actually helped me become a good writer. Reading critically is not just forming reactions to the prose, but studying how it's put together, how information is conveyed, when information is conveyed. My problems with grammar could have been fixed if I'd ever had a class in it, but shouldn't have existed anyway, given how much I read. If I couldn't absorb grammar from books, what else wasn't I absorbing? And it's not like this is uncommon -- terrible grammar abounds in fanfic, and indicates a lack of bigger things. Critical reading may be a given for some of us, but not nearly for the majority.

That's not an inherent character flaw or something to be ashamed of. It's something to fix, by thinking about what you read and studying how it functions. It takes practice to internalise it all, but if you love reading anyway that shouldn't be much of a chore. And this can extend, of course, to other media -- being able to dismantle a TV show or film to figure out why and how it works is a natural outgrowth of critical reading.

Emulation

Plenty of people say that you should learn to write by imitating your favourite writers. Why hello there, fandom.

Emulation does work. It gives you a greater understanding of a writer's style and the way they put things together. It allows you to see, in some writers, how they express their ideologies through their work, and it encourages you to reinterpret their characters in your own words.

I think a lot of people forget to talk, however, about the next step after emulation: independence. In order to write original fiction, you can't lean too heavily on another canon. It rarely works. Even when it does, it never quite feels complete. I don't know how this happens for people who emulate style without writing fanfic, but taking the step away from fanfic and into original fic is a difficult one. It's not about abandoning fanfic -- I still write it, and there's no reason anyone shouldn't -- but in terms of training to be a writer, there is work involved in transitioning.

Fanfic depends on common touchstones derived from canon. There are givens that almost everyone reading the story already knows -- basic personalities and appearances associated with names, and usually a few things about the setting and way the universe functions. So if you have only written fanfic, there are skills that have likely been underdeveloped: character-building, world-building, certain forms of exposition. These are things that fanfic writers coming to original fiction may need to work on.

A lot of it may simply be a matter of practice; if you've been working within fanfic to develop your craft, you should have developed good instincts about how to keep going on your own, too. I've found writing Alternate Universe stories to be worthwhile in that respect, because it's at least a start towards developing those skills: building new worlds, dealing with characters who are similar and yet different at the same time. And for the rest, there are books one can read (more on that in "Tools").

Feedback

Fandom is a fantastic way to learn to write, not just because of the benefits of emulation but because we have a culture of reciprocity. You post a story, people tell you what they think. This is a good way to get feedback because while you can bother your friends and family to read your stuff, it's easier (and in some ways, more polite) to put it out there and let people take it or leave it. I like blogging for the same reason -- I can air my opinions or tell my stories and only the people who actually want to hear them have to read them.

There are some problems with using fandom to get feedback on your writing, of course. When I started writing and posting in fandom on the Usenet, lo these many years ago, there was a more open exchange in terms of critical feedback, where readers would provide suggestions and corrections. I had a lot of great mentors who helped me stop being such a dumbass because they felt permitted to criticise. Fandom feeling has shifted in the past ten years to a more positivity-oriented system where critical feedback is often discouraged in favour of supportive-praise-or-silence. I don't want to argue with advocates of this, because I understand their position, and I don't want to lament the old days, because there was a lot about usenet fandom that I wouldn't take back if you paid me. But I do yearn for a community where crit is more acceptable, where it is encouraged. It's one reason I always encourage critical commentary on my work, because I want to set an example.

(Though most of the really brutal stuff still never shows up at my doorstep -- fannish culture keeps it to anonmemes and private discussions, which is sort of a shame. I'd like to engage anons who think I'm bland and overrated, to ask what I could be doing better, but that's not really allowed -- it's considered bad manners or seen as confrontation even when it's driven by a genuine desire to improve. It's a shame, but what can you do?)

In the end, I can't really tell you how to get more feedback. I'm not sure myself. I know there are certain things that help encourage people to comment, like engaging them with civility when they do and being open to commentary, posting to comms and commenting on others' fic, developing circles of friends who are willing to share their work and read yours. The way I came back into fandom and started making friends again was to post a fic in an active community, and then contact the first few people who commented intelligently to ask if they'd beta my next fic. That seems to work well.

But overall, this process of developing a readership is one of the great mysteries of fandom.

What I can tell you about is how to deal with the feedback you do get. There are two things a writer has to do in order to interact with criticism: learn to accept it when it's genuinely helpful, and learn to tell genuinely helpful from genuine bullshit. This is haaaaard. It's so hard. Possibly The Hardest. The best advice I can give for both is to trust your instincts and be honest. If you find yourself getting defensive, take a long hard look at why. Sometimes it's justified! Often it's not. Most of the process is learning what to accept and accepting it in the spirit of improving the work.

One of the hardest pieces of criticism I ever got -- yes, on an anonmeme -- was someone saying "He can't kill his darlings." I still get defensive about it, and I still don't believe "murder your darlings" is always the answer, or even most-of-the-time the answer. But I also stopped and thought, well, yes, okay, sometimes that is true. It's something I work on (not, I admit, with any great success yet; aún aprendo).

Tools

So...there are things that writers should know, basic stuff about grammar and structure and composition and character, and I'm absolutely shit at outlining what it all is. But I do know books!

Undoubtedly some people are going to tell me I am SO WRONG about this, but the best book I have found for providing the fundamental tools of fiction writing is On Writing by Stephen King. By the time I read it I didn't actually need to be told a lot of what he was saying, but I did agree with a lot of it and he put it better than I would have. The book is split in half -- the first half is basically an autobiography, while the second half is concerned with composition. You don't like Stephen King, that's fine, just read the second half and ignore the personal bits (the way in which he became a professional writer is fast becoming obsolete anyway). It will introduce new writers to some very important concepts, and might freshen things up for experienced ones. Most of what I would say about actual story development would just be a retread of On Writing.

A good book for reading about the creative process is John Steinbeck's Journal Of A Novel, which is the journal he kept while writing East of Eden (I admit bias: I personally love Steinbeck's writing and East of Eden in particular). It's a fascinating poke around the mind of a veteran writer composing a story not just to be his magnum opus but also as a gift to his son, conveying all the lessons and feelings he wanted to share with a child he felt was drifting from his paternal reach. Again, if you don't like Steinbeck, just ignore the more personal bits; he might have been a misogynist and kind of a prick sometimes but he was undeniably a good writer and someone who'd been doing it for decades.

These are fiction books I really like and think, structurally, are worth a look: Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton, which is a perfect story with stunning, beautiful prose; The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, particularly the masterful corruption of Felton; and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which has one of the best examples of an unreliable narrator ever and is good for studying shifting POV. These impacted me. They may not do much for you, but if you can find or think of books that impact you, they're worthy of study to find out why.

One final personal tool, for what it's worth: when I was in college I deeply and thoroughly loathed Death of a Salesman. I'm very fond of Arthur Miller's work in general, it was just...THAT PLAY. I probably can't even tell you why at this point. But I was struck very much by a passage I read somewhere (god knows where, I don't) about a critic who had seen a translation of Death of a Salesman performed in Japan, and he'd been impressed to see so many people weeping at the end of it. The play is heavily rooted in American culture, but it touches on themes that are common across many cultures: loss, pride, ambition, obscurity, the plight of the misfit. The idea of writing specific stories that still address the universal has always stuck with me. I don't always do it, I don't always even try, but just keeping the concept in the back of my head has made me more capable of achieving it when I do.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

This is probably not actually relevant to the essay but it's been festering within me for years now and I have to get it out. It might as well go here.

Most writers disdain the question "Where do you get your ideas?" and have come up with a number of cutting and condescending replies. That is because writers are a) insecure, b) often unconscious of their own processes, and c) very frequently douchebags. (To balance the scales: Stephen King wrote a short story, The Road Virus Heads North, at least half of which is consumed with a writer's hatred of his fans in general and that question in particular. It's easily his douchiest short story ever.)

Like many artists, the vast majority of writers are terrified of the threat that one day they won't have any more ideas, or their writing will be no good, or nobody will like what they do. Especially for professional writers, whose livelihood and identity are wrapped up in Being A Writer, this is a dreadful thought. Neil Gaiman neatly inverted this in Calliope, when he told the story of a man cursed by a muse to have so many ideas he can never write any of them down fully.

So writers don't poke at their craft. They frequently don't investigate where ideas come from or their process of writing, because they're scared if they do the magic will go away. And those that do have an inkling of how Writing Happens are often scared that if they tell you how things work, you're going to steal the magic. Or at any rate be better at it than they are, which is practically the same thing.

I am deeply insecure on any number of fronts, but not in this. I don't think the magic is going to go away, and I'm not afraid of the day it might. A great deal of that is probably due to exposure as a teen to Alex Haley's remarkable essay The Shadowland Of Dreams, which talks about the difference between vocation and identity. Even so, this essay about not defining yourself as "a writer" still encourages creatives to depend only upon their creativity, which can make a person defensive.

Writing is only a part of my identity, not the heart of it. I have a day job. I also like art, and theatre, and cooking, and when people ask me what I "do", I don't say "writer". Maybe that makes me less of a writer than I could be, but I don't think so; in many ways, writing on my own time and self-publishing the results frees me to explore channels that contracted writers can't. I get to rummage in all the scary places most writers won't go.

So here is the secret of the magic: IDEAS ARE EVERYWHERE, and you can have them all the time if you want.

The vast majority of our communication at any given time is composed of stories. You get dozens of them in the newspaper every day. You hear them as you pass people on the street. You can see them just looking at some people. I know someone whose mother likes watching commercials because "they're like short little stories!" We talk in stories all the time. We live out stories every day. The trick is to know how to turn an experience into an idea -- to think, if this were a story, what would happen? What is that person's story? What can I take from this? And that's just a matter of habit.

Two examples:

-- While I was writing this, one of you commented to ask me what the hell one does with turkey tails, because they just received four of them and don't know how to cook them. I don't know either, but what a marvelously absurd predicament to be in. Adventures in Turkey Tails. That's a humorous blog entry at least. And the research! You google turkey tails, you're going to get stories. And really delicious-sounding soul-food recipes.

-- The other day we were discussing the news story about the stolen religious relic in California, and that got me onto Napoleon's infamous severed penis, and someone else linked me from there to the holy prepuce. Do you know how many stories about damaged or venerated dicks I now have bouncing around in my head? At least three, and that's not even counting the student I once had who broke his dick. How would one unite the stories of Napoleon and Rasputin's penes with the Holy Prepuce? Well, what if you were an expert in historical genitalia, and one was stolen, and you had to find out who did it? That's a novel. (One which incidentally I might write, so nobody nick the idea, ok?)

The best way to "get ideas" is to read, to go out and look at stuff, to research things that are interesting to you, to have fantasies of any kind you like, and all the while to be thinking, how is this a story? What makes it interesting? How does this speak to the way I feel, or the way I think? Would it do the same for others? Is this funny or tragic or both? Why?

Ideas are all around you all the time, and there's no real magic to having them. Just observation and habit. It's not easy at first, but it gets easier.

And that is the secret of Where Ideas Come From. I feel so much better now, you have no idea.

Conclusion

Holy shit you read all the way to this? I am sincerely impressed.

Conclusions are suppose to summarise and restate one's thesis, so let's see. These are the things I believe make people become better writers:

Be committed and patient. Understand that work is sometimes necessary. Study your chosen masters. Think critically, and understand criticism. Learn the tools of your craft and fit them to your needs. Don't fear the end of creativity. Train yourself to see the stories all around you.

And don't worry too much about conclusions.

Now I have to go reshelve all these books I took down to consult while writing this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

karadin.livejournal.com

Thank you! I really enjoyed this essay, and it's very informative, I agree with you that part of being a better writer is to read good work, and the reminder to read non-fiction as well as fiction to get ideas.

From:

copperbadge.livejournal.com

I do my best :) Reading and thinking about reading are definitely important. I only just really got back on the frequent-reading bus, but it's helping a lot.

(no subject)

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags