Unless life, death or the end of the world as we know it — and then only if I don’t feel fine! — intervenes, the next few weeks, months and possibly — intermittently — years will see me posting semi-coherently on my theory of writing and style.
Good writing is a lot like art. I know it when I see it and it’s highly personal. I’m sure it’s the same for most of us, except those people who take their directive from a higher source in the form of received wisdom. For those this whole thing is much easier — good writing is whatever the authority says.
I wish I could — in good conscience — bow down to the Nobel committee, the Nebula voters, the critics, the “people who know better” TM. But the fact is, ultimately, either as a writer or as a reader, I don’t like to be told what to think, and — to my clear and informed mind — with a few exceptions, most of the decisions of any award committee — yes, that does include the Oscars — seems like the entire group went into a room and smoked a truly gigantic bong possibly while sniffing glue. There are exceptions — there are always exceptions — but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
And as for going with “what sells” these days so many things influence the market, from distribution to hype, that I have trouble finding any solid thread of “good” in what tops the blockbuster lists. And these days when books are almost universally — Baen excepted — taken out of print in a year, there’s very little room for sleeping hits. You either get the push to be everywhere at once or… you don’t. This means bestsellers tend to be books that someone in NYC — and for mega bestsellers someone very big in NYC — put muscle behind. All that is required past a certain level of push is that they be halfway decent. In fact most of them do not command my attention for more than ten minutes. Possibly this is because I am an unabashed reader of genre literature.
Why should I even care what’s good or how to evaluate style? Good question. (The bright boy on row five gets a star!)
The problem comes in as a writer. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a bestseller. Heck, I don’t know if I’ll ever have an audience that I can’t count by removing my shoes. Don’t care. I do care about being GOOD.
Look, this writing thing is a compulsion. There is no sane reason why anyone should do this, and, despite occasional vehement denials to the contrary, I am sane. Pragmatic, even.
So why am I getting up early and going to bed late and spending my weekends researching the lives of long-dead people, or reading yet another depressing tome on how societies come unglued? I mean, I could be out, refinishing some furniture, going for walks with the boys and generally terrorizing the known world or at least the neighborhood.
I’ve now tried to give up writing DOZENS of times. About half of them before I was ever published. The rest… well… about twice a year. I confess that for health reasons, one of the more serious considerations I gave it was last year, while my hormones were acting up. But I was considering giving up on everything else, at that point, breathing included. Everything was too much effort.
Allergy meds will also stop me from writing. In fact, one four-hour dosage will damper the need for three or four days. And yes, I have considered becoming addicted to benedryl. But overall, it doesn’t seem to answer.
So, I’m writing. I’m writing blindly and without any expectations of ever reaching a significant enough audience for my writing to make any difference. I’m writing as an act of faith that yes, there is something beyond us, some grand plan, if you wish, or at least some loosely scripted outline, and that my writing fits in there somewhere. Perhaps a fragment of it will fall in the hands of someone at some point and that will trigger something. (How specific is that, uh?)
But for me, for my own peace of mind, if I’m going to spend this much time doing something and devoting myself to a craft, then by BOG I’m going to make it good. Which brings me to what is good.
This is where I should explain that, like most writers I know, I’m a serial and compulsive user of “how to” books. It did not help with my habit that the single most influential and important book of my career — Dwight Swain’s Writing To Sell — came my way at a library sale in a box of discarded books that I bought for $5.
I buy “how to write books” on the recommendation of friends; because I find them used atop a neat table at the local thrift store; at library sales; on the recommendation of total strangers at Amazon. Remember that scene in trainspotting where the guy said something about diving into a toilet in search of drug? Well… I wouldn’t go that far. But I would probably pick up the torn, walked-upon pages of a writing book off the sidewalk, in the hope that here — here at last — there would be something to make it all clear to me. SOMETHING that would tell me “GOOD” and “BAD” and separate the two widely. Something I could memorize or practice and learn, so I would never write anything bad again and all my stuff would be gold.
Yes, yes, the sane part of me is aware this is illusory. The sane part of me, that has favorite writers, knows very well that I wouldn’t cross the street to read some of Heinlein’s books, while I would walk across a knife-covered room for others. And Heinlein is, admittedly, my favorite author. The same could be said for all my favorites. Pratchett, Heyer, Christie — EVERYONE of them. Some books are gold and some are “uh. What was he/she thinking?” So it is inevitable that some — or most of mine — will be that way to my fifteen or sixteen devoted readers.
However, hope springs eternal (which is why most of human intellectual achievement is devoted to cutting it down like kudzu) so I keep searching. And sometimes, sometimes, I even convince myself I’ve found something. Rarely but it happens. Sometimes I can almost believe if I stand on my left foot and utter three times before writing “No bad description shall pass these fingers” the result will be pure, refined gold. And sometimes I believe if I go through my manuscript and strike out every use of the word “pool” the book will be wonderful.
Again, these moments of unalloyed credulity are rare in me. But in the middle of the night, alone in your head with the books to be written… well, to quote Leonard Cohen (Another of my bad habits) “It’s lonely here, there’s no one left to torture.” So my mind turns on itself and searches for something to anchor to.
My last foray into attempting to do something about my writing is what brought me to this post and to the ones that will inevitably follow. It was actually several months ago. For reasons that were — after all — apparently physical, I found myself writing in a totally “joyless” way. I could write, and I knew what to do. I even knew what my characters were going through. And I sort of “liked” them. But it was like perceiving it all through a veil and none of it brought me any joy. For all the enjoyment I derived out of it, I might as well have been driving a truck.
Now, of course, sane people would have said “You’re just tired.” And that was part of the issue, though the tiredness had its roots in illness. But when writing is a compulsion, you can’t just walk away whistling and have a grand time. I take my alphasmart or at least a notepad — if I’m really forcing myself to relax — on any vacation of more than two days. And it’s fairly sure that I’ll wake up on the second or third morning, notepad in hand, scribbling an outline or the opening lines to a short story.
Right now, in addition to the books under contract — and two woefully late — I have notes for four that are still in the conception stage and about three more that are in that nebulous stage at the back of my mind, where I know they are waiting, but they haven’t yet given me more than a concept or a one-line pull. And an endless collection of bits that came to me on vacation.
So, “just tired” didn’t cut it. It was clear to me I was going to write for the rest of my life and, not knowing I needed meds, I wanted to figure out how to make it fun again. So I bought several books. One of those I bought was “From Where You Dream” — because I felt that’s what I needed. To make my writing more spontaneous again. To pull, literally, from my deep-dreams.
But the book, despite its lovely title, proved less than useful to my situation, at least. He’s all over “immediate writing” which anyone who has asked me for writing help knows I am as well. Immediate writing means removing as much of your “after thoughts” from it. As Pratchett would put it “The first sight and the second thoughts.” He stigmatized as wrong and bad every time you gave anything a character thought — rather than just what they felt or saw. At least he did by the middle of the book, which is when I gave up on reading it.
Now, this “human as a camera and collection of stimulus-reaction” might fit a behaviorist view of the world, but I was never a behaviorist. (“Every time a dog salivates, a Pavlovian rings a bell” — RAH) And this method of writing things concentrating mostly on direct sensations/events is DOUBTLESS the easiest way to draw a reader in and keep him focused.
But the key there is “mostly.” And how much “mostly” is depends on what you’re writing. I argued the other day with a friend who complained about David Weber’s long “infodumps” by pointing out that given the complexity of what Weber writes, and the history/sociology/science that he must bury in each book, the infodumps are, paradoxically, the least painful way of doing it. In fact, I can’t imagine anyone writing sf or other-world fantasy without resorting to some interior thoughts, some infodump, some tuck and pin to give the impression of the much larger canvas. (This is NOT a defense for belly-button gazing books! Things still must happen. And your character must be minimally competent in dealing with them, not just crying over them. One thing is being the underdog, the other the annoying b– well, you get it.)
Still, being a writer and therefore having the self-confidence of an overboiled noodle, at the point when it starts falling apart, I worried about this. And I worried about this for days. I worried that my books were what this man said every book by someone who reported “thoughts” and not primary impressions was: Very bad.
I knew he was wrong — intellectually — and I knew that a certain amount of thoughts and other facts needed to come in beyond stimulus-response. Unless all I wanted to write was about our very mundane, everyday life. For THAT this writing style is perfect. (And if you like reading that, what are you doing, reading my blog?)
But it wasn’t until today, while I was turning it over in my mind that I realized how wrong he was — not just wrong, but criminally, hideously wrong. It is true that for most situations you need an immediate style of narration, infodumps or not. BUT for some a deflected style of narration is BEST. Needed in fact.
Okay — say I have a character — Gulliver Bright — in a terrible situation. He’s in a room with no other door. The bad guys are closing in on him. There is nothing he can use to defend himself.
If I write it like this:
They’re coming for me. Gulliver looked around wildly, at the smooth walls of the room he was in. Nothing. No way out.
From down the hall came the footsteps of his approaching enemies. As soon as they rounded the corner, he would see them. And they’d have a clear shot at him. Sweat dripped into his eyes. His gut clenched in a tight knot. I must find a way to get out.
You KNOW that not only is Gulliver fully aware and in possession of his faculties, but that he WILL somehow find a way to get out. But now suppose I want to foreshadow something different. Suppose that before running into that room Gully was wounded or perhaps drugged, and I want to signal to you that distancing from reality, that sense that the world is, as it were, running away from him. He might not know it. And I’m in his head. So, how do I signal to the reader that the character is off his rocker, and that this “will not end well” TM?
How about this, (which in the opinion of that theorist ranks as very bad writing indeed) —
They were coming for him. Gulliver knew it. Around him, the walls rose smooth and unbroken. He realized that he had no way out. There was nothing he could do. In his mind’s eye, he could see them, even as he heard their footsteps starting to round the corner of the hallway. Once they turned the corner they would be able to shoot him and there was no way at all he could defend himself. He felt sweat drip into his eyes. He felt his gut clench in a tight knot. He thought that he had to find a way out.
(And the next sentence for that would be something like “And then time ran out and the world went black.” But you get my point.)
And this got me thinking that I might actually have a theory of how to write. And what’s good and what’s bad. And why. Whether that’s true or not… who knows? I will be doing these entries, to be honest mostly for me, to codify the stuff at the back of my brain. But I don’t mind if all fifteen of you listen in…
So… with that in mind, see you next time.
Sarah
According To Hoyt 
I Like Your Style
Sarah – keep the old adage in mind – “Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach.” Ever seen a how to write book authored by Stephen King? Jerry Pournelle? Dean Koontz? David Weber? Unlikely you ever will. They write – that’s their raison d’etre – just like it seems to be yours. And, I might add, you do it better than about 90% of the hacks out there – so you’re in the best company! Theory is all well and good but reality is where the rubber hits the road and it’s the authors that engage you (as you do) that are the ones we prefer to read. I’m Canadian, so I’m biased but CanLit is a group of three authors and three readers who constantly sit around and navel gaze and talk about the greatness of Canadian Literature. Phooey – there ain’t no such thing! There are good writers – no matter the country or nationality and then there are the rest – who generally have to take refuge in the nationalism bit. Pretentious wannabe’s are the nationalists because they couldn’t sell a real book if their lives depended upon it and the rest of the authors in the world – who consistently sell their books. I would personally rather read what Sarah Hoyt has to say about the craft of writing than someone like Margaret Atwood – darling of CanLit circles – because that woman couldn’t write an entertaining novel to save her life. You just keep on keeping on – we’ll keep reading!
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Re: I Like Your Style
Stephen King does have an excellent book about writing out.
But you’re right on every other point.
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All this is so very confusing….then again….I -LIKE- to drive a truck.
Cutting to the chase….you write it….I’ll read it.
Bubba (#17)
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Dan Simmons has a blog where he talks about writing and what makes good writing. I’ve found myself agreeing with some of what he says, taking plenty of it with a grain of salt, and discarding much of it as his personal bias.
I think you’re pretty spot on with your assessment of “what is good writing”. I do a lot more business writing than I do fictional writing and have spent waaaaaay too much time in academic writing. All three have completely different styles, even when all of them involve a narrative or point of view.
When you write, you should write for yourself first, your intended audience second, and everyone else last.
Take sci-fi for example. You need to write a story that you want to tell or it’s going to lack… je ne sais quois… something. But you need to write for a sci-fi audience. You need some element of technology and exploration of the human condition… a “what if” element that is not present in fantasy.
But you also need to market to a specific audience within Sci-Fi. Are you writing for juveniles, milfic fans, or liberal space dramas? Hard science, or just enough hard science? A failure to target well will automatically exclude some readership just by that choice. Each of those choices also has a particular style to it. Hard science requires infodumps… that’s what people want. Action stories require fast pacing. The dramas and social commentaries can move a bit slower. The best of the writers can do two of the three at the same time. In moments of genius, the best can do all three, but never consistently. The delivery needs to match the medium.
Finally, if the stars align, and you do everything right, you’ll get the cross-over readers. The adults reading juvenile (Harry Potter) and the like.
But in the end, you have to start with the story you want to tell.
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Jeez, Sarah. Get a hobby.
Oh. Wait. . .
Um. . .
Get a life?
Get a pet?
Get a Volvo?
Damn. This isn’t quite going where I wanted.
Ah!
Get in the groove!
No, that’s not it either.
Gonna getcha?
Erg. This “humorous writing” crap’s tough.
I’m interested to see where your attempt to define “good” goes, although I suspect I already know the answer.
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I think the reason it’s impossible to categorize “good writing” and how to do it is that almost anyone with average verbal aptitude can learn to write, and can write a book if they stick to it. It would usually be a bad book, but they can follow rules and hack out a technically solid novel. See also: Clarion.
There are compulsive writers with average or even stellar verbal aptitude who can churn out manuscripts that follow the rules. Some can hack out many technically solid novels quickly.
The problem is that good writing goes beyond verbal aptitude, compulsion, and technical mastery.
There are creative people who have verbal aptitude, compulsion, and technical mastery who can and do churn out multiple technically solid, creative manuscripts that are just plain bad books.
A good book provides a good roller coaster ride for the reader because the writing is: Ringo calls it “visions of fire”, I call it “sparkly.”
Good writers have to: be high verbal aptitude; have technical mastery of the novel and/or short story; be creative; and usually be compulsive.
They also have to have the ability to impart felt emotions through their work. It’s what separates visual artists from wannabes, it’s what separates composers from wannabes, it’s what separates performers from wannabes, and it’s what separates good writers from wannabes.
You have to put your heart into it, but you can put your heart into it all day long and if you don’t have the spark that it’s impossible to beg, borrow, or steal, it’s not going to be good writing.
So talking about being “good” at writing, the true first cut is whether someone has the spark. Second cut is whether they’re creative. Third cut is whether they actually do write. After that we get to the point of discussing “good writing”–which is the technical fundamentals of language mastery, plot, characterization, and all those other lovely things we (hopefully) learned in school.
The reason writing books don’t do their job is that you don’t sell many writing books by telling your audience the unpopular facts about cuts one, two, and three–the ones they either have or they don’t.
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BTW–if you didn’t know, my degree is in Psychology. The research kind, not the clinical kind. My senior research project attempted to find a correlation between creativity and personality. It meant I had to learn a lot about both to pick out the tests I was going to administer to my subjects, and when I picked my tests, I had to understand them because creativity tests are hard to score.
People who are at the extreme lowest levels of intelligence are at the extreme lowest levels of creativity, and vice versa. As you go up the scale of either creativity or intelligence, once you get to the high end of either, there’s essentially zero relationship between the two. People have a hard time believing this, but it’s true. There are people you meet who are high in both. They’re just the dots that happen to be in that part of the population scatter plot. Neither causes the other.
That means an art that requires high levels of both cuts out the lion’s share of the population from the get-go.
Then there are different types of creativity. When you score a creativity test, it’s like an IQ test. People get sub-scores on different dimensions.
High creativity without the right balance, and that cuts someone out.
Then there’s hypergraphia. Compulsive writing. People with hypergraphia will write with blood on toilet paper–not an exaggeration, proven–if they have no other means to write.
Hypergraphia is a brain abnormality unrelated to talent–which really sucks for the people with hypergraphia and no talent.
You can’t teach high intelligence, high creativity, or hypergraphia. The only known case of an adult without it suddenly developing hypergraphia is a woman who got conked on the head and got brain damage in just the right place.
So anyway, I really do know what I’m talking about when I say before you talk about how to learn “good writing”, you first have to make the qualification: “If you have the requisite brain characteristics to ever write well.”
I doubt I’ve pegged all the elements of writing talent, but those are some of them.
That said, people shouldn’t run out and take IQ tests and creativity tests and get demoralized if their scores are too low. The tests are very imperfect and are renowned for getting it wrong in individual cases. As my psych testing prof said over and over, “IQ test results should never, ever be used to determine the fate or opportunities for an individual.” Creativity tests are even more primitive than IQ tests. But in a larger sense, there are real attributes those tests try to measure, and a real bell curve of individual distribution along those spectra.
You can’t talk about “good writing” usefully unless you cut for talent first.
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Oh, and the other cool fact about hypergraphia. Writer’s block is an illusion. Hypergraphs with “writer’s block” aren’t writing what they want to write, but they’re still making their output by writing letters, internet posts, diaries, unsaleable stuff–they’re only “blocked” on useful output or output on a particular project.
Example: Posting thousands of words of comments in someone else’s LJ. :-)
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