WriteHook

Ladies & germs, welcome to a most excellent piece of writing on what it takes to be a good writer -- from the brain of a a freakin' awesome one. My friend and, this week, partner in crime, RS Guthrie offers his A-side to my B-side -- his half of a joint blog post that we're sharing on our websites. If you want to read the B-side, visit Rob's page at RobOnWriting.com. And if you don't want to read it, drop by Rob's site anyway and get to know him. He's a rare creature in Writerworld -- an ass-kickin' writer with a huge streak of humanity.

All right, enough of the bromance, read this and listen:

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I know, I know—what’s up with the tricky negative? Well, this is a companion piece to writer Scott Morgan’s brilliant “5 Things Writers Should Do (When They Want To Suck)”—not only was I shooting for witty symmetry between our opposite angled views of the same issue, I also loved the pith of Morgan’s title and decided to suckle right up to it. I figure it’s only plagiarism if my counterpart says so, and he admires me too much to do that. Right, Scott?

Scott??

Best to get on with my own list and hope for my peer’s deep propensity to forgive.

In all seriousness, if you want to suck, please disregard the five suggested truths outlined below. Better yet, go out and do the exact opposite. I’m not saying your work will suck—I’m guaranteeing it. And you may be tempted to think I am pulling a Joe Namath here—allowing my arrogance to coerce me into making a bold prediction (particularly not knowing you, your writing, or anything about the market for which you intend to write). Don’t simply be tempted: know it. The five suggestions below are not complicated, nor are they really anyone’s secret. But I warn you: violate them at your own peril. Or at least the peril of your writing.

(In a ill-disguised knockoff of master David Letterman’s Top Ten lists, I have attempted to order mine from least to most egregious. This prioritization could easily be debated. What cannot be debated is that in doing so I flagrantly  violated my cohort’s fourth rule. Want to see for yourself? Afterward you can click here.)

#5. Read. A lot. If you are going to be a writer, you need to immerse yourself in the trade. The trade, dear readers, equates to the books. Not just those you write, but the entire canon of literature out there. (And yes, using the word literature just now in reference to “all” the books out there absolutely did make my skin crawl—but hopefully you get the point.)

The truth is, a writer can never read enough. The bad along with the good. The ugly along with the pristine. Most people know Shakespeare’s classic adage “learneth from thou mistakeths”. Or was that Monty Python? In any case, we writers can learn as much from other writer’s mistakes as we can from our own. Spend some time in a critique group, reading piles of other aspiring writers’ pieces. You’ll learn some invaluable lessons about what you definitely don’t want to be doing in your own writing (along with some great examples of what you do want to be doing, too).

Imagine a shipbuilder who, despite her amazing talents and potential, locked herself away in a building all of her life and never viewed so much as a single other ship. Unless she was a savant, chances are when she presents her brilliant masterpiece to the world, the last thing it will resemble is a seaworthy ship. They call them industry standards for a reason—you can’t “think outside the box” until you know where the box is.

#4. Write. A lot. Imagine a different shipbuilder who does nothing but watch and admire other builders’ work. One who signs up for every “How to Be the Next Best Ship Seller” seminar on the ‘Net. Such behavior equates to saying “show me the easy way to the money and success, please.” It doesn’t work that way in any other profession and I dare say in the creation of art it is even more crucial to polish your talents by doing what you do.

from ElHogar.org#3.  Show, don’t tell. Fiction writers should be disallowed the usage of adjectives, adverbs, and all dramatic prose for the first ten years of their writing careers. No, wait—twenty. In fact, these elements should be banned altogether—particularly the adverbs. The irony is, the  more elaborate the adverb or adjective, the weaker the writing becomes. Try it. Take the best piece you’ve ever written and throw in a whole gaggle of flashy descriptors. Have a tongue? Make it flailing, tomato-red, and obese. Your hero? How can he be a hero if he’s not devastatingly handsome, magnificently endowed, incredibly hilarious, wickedly smart, and excruciatingly debonair?

Never use a ten dollar word when a ten cent one will do. Seriously. People don’t seethe. They rarely rage. Weeping was a largely eighteenth century activity. Well-written characters hardly ever romp, gnash, prance, bludgeon, abhor, relinquish, fiddle, waddle, or wince. Objects never rocket (unless they are actually rockets). Only explosives explode. And eyes, no matter how angry or venomous, cannot act anything like lasers shooting laser beams.

Oh, and yes—snakes are venomous, but rarely human beings. (Never eyes.)

Don’t worry. A few of these words never killed a damn thing. But if your prose is littered with them? Not good. Not good at all. Venomous, actually.      

#2. Care. Write from the heart (or as my counterpart will tell you, for the jugular). Same difference. And no, doing this does NOT require any of the words from #3. It doesn’t say “write like you care”—you actually need to give a crap about what you are saying. You cannot simply write to sell. You can’t write only because it makes you happy to write, either. Trust me, it doesn’t make anyone else on earth (not related to you) happy to have you write. Not unless what you write makes them care. The reader won’t give two, uh, hoots about your words if they are just ink on white page. And that’s all they’ll ever be if you are writing a story that means nothing to you. A writer will never write anything stronger than the words that come from the depths of the writer.

#1. Create compelling characters. At this point you may be wondering why this necessary truth appears at number one. Don’t. In fact, if you take nothing away from this posting, take away this: no story ever mattered to anyone that contained flat, uninspiring, cookie-cutter characters. You must—read MUST—create characters the reader can root for and about whom they can care. In fact, when you have great characters, faux pas in #5-#3 can sometimes be forgiven by the reader (#2 was intentionally left off—it’s almost impossible to write great characters without the words coming from the heart).

This doesn’t mean you have to give every character who walks onstage a limp or an accent or a funny affectation. Far from it. Some of the most memorable characters are memorable simply because of how human they are. As readers, we love to relate to a character. That also doesn’t mean we want to relate to her prowess as a CPA. (Maybe, if that prowess is juxtaposed against a deep ethical dilemma because she is forced to cook the books in order to pay for her son’s bone marrow transplant.)

You get it. Live inside your characters’ skins. Infuse them with your own loves, fears, dreams, desires, and dilemmas. They need to have depth. Nothing leaves uncreative swampland in its wake like a story littered with shallow characters.

I’ll summarize this way: you can ignore the advice above. I’ll share something with you, however: I learned all of this from other writers who cared enough about my potential to share their experience with me. I didn’t discover these truths on my own. Heck, I don’t always follow them myself—none of us is perfect. But these gemstones come from the most sacred place of all: from mining the successes, failures, and infinite experiences of all the other writers who have come before us. The worst thing we can possibly do is ignore them.

Only contrarians and teenagers ignore the advice of those who have been there before them.

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