After four whole years of writing, I think I've only been producing quality work in this last year (2011). Everything before then has been practice and amassing ideas. I didn't think that was the case in my first year of writing full time; I thought I was producing great stuff, eminently worthy of publication. I wasn't. To show quite how far from professional work that early stuff was, here's an example of what I was writing in 2008:
Part 1: in which copper blacks out seven times
Copper reached up with his gauntlets and tightened the
crown of red mist about his head. He grabbed the reins and
turned his dragon around in the sky, swooping around in an
arc to attack the approaching Hippie master attack balloon,
crewed by men bent on slightly addled conquest of the Faery
world. He could see their slightly fuzzy shapes leaning
haphazardly from the wicket basket in the distance, armed
with strange objects that were half way between musical
instruments and chopped wood, weirdly shaped crafted items
that would produce sounds that turned Faery into nothing
more than goo with tinsel. He looked through his military
grade seeing glass and could count seven creatures wearing
long cloaks, tinkling bells and beards that you could sleep
in.
Copper let his anger well up as a cloud around him. His
faithful steed Mandragore reared up in response to his
master’s wave of animosity, the dragon’s skin rippling with
the dark umber shades of power and aggression. Copper
charged into the attack.
Dodging a cluster of gently aromatic herbal stress
relieving bombs on his port side Copper screamed through
the sky towards his target, his dragon flapping its great
wings and firing a gout of flame that incinerated a
floating zeppelin of community spirit, causing the craft to
spiral down to the ground, leaving a trail of smoke and a
slight smell of incense. Copper paid no attention, his mind
focussed on the enemy craft. He grasped the ancient
necklace charm of hostility hanging over his heart, letting
its strength course through him and spurred the dragon on.
Copper had no thoughts of failure, of loss or of fear. In
fact he had very few thoughts at all due to the power of
the Torc of Anger wrapped around his neck. He had blessed
its presence several time already in this battle for saving
him from the enemy worst, in fact only weapon.
Love.
His attendant early warning sprite chattered in alarm at
the approach of several empathy missiles, feared throughout
the Faery army for their power to turn an entire phalanx of
majestic warriors into one big group hug. Copper swung
Mandragore to the right to avoid them and at that point he
was hit.
"A RAGE
RELIEVING BOMB HAS STRUCK US!!"
Screamed Copper’s sprite. Copper cursed, knowing that he
had only moments now to destroy the balloon, sending its
bulbous canopy emblazoned with flowers and butterflies
crashing to the ground. He spurred Mandragore on, wild with
the desperate need to complete his mission before he, his
dragon and sprite would become nothing more than three
entities reaching out to bring a feeling of mutual
togetherness.
- END -
When I read it again this week, I winced several times. I
would have winced a lot more if it hadn't been so tiring to
read. It's not completely painful. I don't think
I've come up with any better ideas since that time. What I
think I've improved at is getting my ideas across
to a reader. That's a crucial difference; you can have the
most wonderful ideas in the world but if you can't make the
prose flow along effortlessly, drawing the reader quickly
and painlessly into the world you've created, you're
stuffed.
Here's a list of all the problems I've spotted (so far!) in
the above passage:
Fonts: I was dead keen on different fonts
in my manuscript and I even put a picture in the header.
Nice! Little did I know that obsessing about fonts and
fancy doodly pictures is the last thing a new writer should
be doing. What they should be concentrating on is making
the text easy to read and engrossing. Doh! I haven't
completely shaken my enthusiasm for fonts. For example, in
sample chapters of my fantasy comedy novel, everything is
Times New Roman 12 point apart from the novel's
name on the title page; that's in the copperplate font.
Setting the scene: At the start of this
story, I should have set the scene before
embarking on the action. That way, the reader would know
where these events were taking place, or at least
be clear on the situation that the story begins
in, before things kick off. The scene set-up doesn't have
to be a detailed, meticulous description but it must at
least give the reader a good idea. Ideally, the first
sentence in the passage will set things up for the reader.
For example, 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way', is the start of Anna
Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. For sci-fi fans, how about 'Far
out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of
the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lay a small,
unregarded yellow sun'; that's the first line of The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. We can
see from those two examples that the first sentence can do
a wonderful job of telling the reader multiple important
facets of the story to be. In the case of the Douglas Adams
first sentence, it sets the physical situation of the story
(invariably needed in science fiction) and, to a large
extent, its emotional framework (i.e. Earthlings aren't
very important and advanced galactic civilizations actually
worry about fashion).
Publishers and agents talk a lot about getting the first
line right and they're right. This isn't because publishers
and agents are lazy and can't be bothered to assess a story
beyond the first two lines. It's because an author
should want to hook the reader as soon as
possible. Why not? For example, I've tried to make the
first sentence of my fantasy comedy novel contain such
elements. In the latest version, its first sentence is 'A
dragon stood in the middle of Cannon Street station,
scratching its bottom.' In those thirteen words, I've told
the reader that the story will be in a familiar
environment, that it will contain fantasy elements and that
its tone will be irreverent, not scary and probably contain
some boy scout style humour. That way, the reader can move
on to the story's second sentence already confident of how
it will run for the remaining ten thousand sentences.
Explaining weird places: A familiar
environment is easier to describe to a reader since they
already know much of its content. The more strange the
environment, the more explanation will be needed. Also, the
explanation can't be too long. If there's a lot to tell,
the reader must be given it slowly, a steady stream of
information that develops and expands, ideally, as a
natural part of the unfolding story. You mustn't bombard
your reader with unfamiliar content. If you do, it's
another opportunity for them to lose interest, for the
reading spell to break.
Paragraphs: The piece included at the
start of this article has a terrible paragraph structure.
That, by itself, is enough to throw a reader off. When I
wrote them, I clearly didn't realise that a paragraph
normally centres around a particular person. If you want to
change the main subject of a paragraph, start a new
paragraph! Also, since a paragraph is usually centred
around a particular person, you only need to mention their
name at the beginning of the paragraph. After
that, you can use 'he' or 'she' throughout the paragraph.
Repeating their name only serves to confuse the reader.
They'll wonder why you keep mentioning the
character's name. Has the character changed? If the subject
of the paragraph hasn't changed, why does the author
keeping stating their name? It's another opportunity for
the reader to be put off the narrative.
Dialogue: As a professional reader
helpfully told me recently, dialogue fits inside normal
sentences. The last thing an author should do is stick a
piece of dialogue on its own line and add an explanation of
who said those words as a new paragraph! I think I got this
bizarre idea from writing scripts. In radio, television,
theatre and film scripts, the character description is
separated from the spoken lines. Also, I now avoid
capitalising whole words. I find it a bit crude. The only
alteration I make to text to emphasise it is the sparing
use of italics. There is very little dialogue in the above
piece so there isn't much more material to refer to. Still,
that's enough errors for the single line of the passage in
which there's dialogue!
Simple language: Simple and short
sentences are the ideal way to tell a story. I now realise
that you don't need to come up with new and more obscure
ways to describe actions and events. Basic sentences work
very well; he/she did 'something' to 'someone'. The extract
above is filled with excessively long sentences referring
to objects and people that haven't been properly
established. It's a whirlwind of content, filled with
phrases like 'bulbous canopy emblazoned with flowers'. With
a lot of alteration, I think some readers would enjoy its
technicolour narrative but that style would still put off a
lot of readers. Better to make it into something most
readers can happily enjoy, while still keeping the core
ideas that give it originality and flavour.
I wrote a blog
entry a year or so ago about bad writing. Here are
the problems I spotted at that time (I still
have to check I'm not putting them in my new work):
which: 'Which' has
been probably my biggest writing curse. It doesn’t seem to
be a problem word but it’s actually a creeping horror. In
the past, I've written sentences such as: ‘He went to the
shops which were about two miles from his house.’ That
sentence is very clunky. It has about as much
elan, as much engaging style as Long John Silver
trying to do a Fred Astaire routine. How about; ‘He left
his house and headed off to the shops, two miles away down
a right angled maze of suburban streets.’ Alternatively,
‘Mickey lifted up the pound coin in his small, freckly
hand. He knew that would buy him the latest issue of
‘Blitzkrieg War’, two cola bottles and a Curly Wurly. The
only problem was, they were in ‘Morran’s News Mart’, two
miles away at the other end of the village. For him, a boy
only just turned six, the moon was closer’. Neither of
those sentences have ‘which’ in them and they’re all the
better for it.
‘Which’ has been a word I've used when I want to write the
narrative on the page at the same speed that I think it up
in my head. That’s very useful, it prevents me losing the
flow of my imagination but it’s crap for the reader.
Nowadays, after writing the initial draft, I search for all
instances of ‘which’ in a manuscript and remove all but the
indispensable.
starting a paragraph with a verb: ‘Running down
the street, Tom knew that he had to get undercover.’ A
sentence like that sounds dynamic at first glance, at least
it did to me for several years. The problem is, the reader
can easily wonder if they’ve missed out. Did the first half
of the paragraph fall off the page due to a printing error?
Did the reader suffer some terrible amnesia after reading a
chunk of text and only regain their full faculties when
they got to ‘running’? During my early months and years of
writing I made a simple and profoundly stupid mistake. I
thought that writing sentences with unusual structure, such
as starting with a verb, would give my prose dynamism and
verve. I now realise that such an effect will work if
used sparingly. If used too much, the reader will
disengage from the story. Starting a paragraph with a verb
is like throwing a wave at a boat. Do it a few times and
the passengers get a heady thrill. Do it most of the time
and they’re overboard, screaming for a lifebelt. Probably
the worst thing you can do in a story is knock your reader
out of his or her reading trance. For a reader, it's better
that the prose is too straightforward than too eclectic; a
flat calm sea is better than eighty foot waves. If the sea
is calm, it might become a little dull, but at least the
passengers get to their destination. Nowadays, I try to
lean towards simple sentences and make those simple
sentences do everything needed to produce a good story.
slowly: Arrrrghhh! (I know that writing a
word like ‘Arrrrghhh!’ is bad English but I can’t resist
it. Then again, I have plans to write and illustrate a
graphic novel so I’m a lost cause). The use of the word
‘slowly’ has been almost as big a problem for me as
‘which’. A sentence such as ‘he turned around slowly’ is
fine but be very careful. Only put ‘slowly’ in if
it really needs it, if the reader will completely misread
the scene if it isn’t there. Like all adverbs,
‘slowly’ has got to be used sparingly. If you use it too
much, your story starts to look like it’s running in
sloooow moooootioooon....
and: ‘He opened his eyes and saw the room
lit up with a green glow and standing before him was a
tall, skeletal thin man with coal black eyes.’ Often when
I’m writing, I’ll put in the word ‘and’ a lot because the
images are streaming out of my head and I just want to keep
up with them. This is the same reason I put in ‘which’.
Maybe after a while I’ll stop this. I hope so. Sentences
with too many instances of ‘and' become a stretched out,
stringy mess. By the time the reader gets to the end,
they’ve forgotten what happened at the beginning of the
sentence. There’s no dramatic pauses, no time to catch the
breath. A better version would be ‘He opened his eyes. The
room around him was lit up with a green glow. A tall,
skeletal thin man stood at the foot of the bed, staring at
him with coal black eyes.’
ending a sentence with ‘was’: I’m not the
only person guilty of this trait. A recent BBC news article
ended with the line ‘He added that the results raised many
questions, such as what the chemical giving out the signal
was.’ Ow! That’s ugly; it's like making a table who’s edges
are a crumbling mess of splintered wood. Where’s the clean
finish, the beautifully rounded-off completion? A better
version would be ‘He added that the results raised many
questions, such as the identity of the chemical giving out
the signal.’ or ‘He added that the results raised many
questions, such as; ‘What was the chemical giving out the
signal?’. Ideally, if you can, end a sentence with a noun.
(see?)
‘then’ and ‘at that moment’: I’ve written
sentence like ‘They stood in the street, brushing the dust
off themselves, then an explosion threw them sideways’. The
use of ‘then’ or ‘at that moment’ is completely unnecessary
in that situation. One sentence follows another in time.
You don’t have to state that one event follows another.
They do it by default. You only ever need to point out if
one sentence isn’t following another in time. This
though is something that you should only ever do sparingly
unless you plan to be the next William Burroughs.
using words other than ‘he/she said or he/she
replied’: When someone writes a novel, they
usually write a lot of dialog. The downside of this is that
a writer writes ‘he/she said or he/she replied’ a lot; an
awful lot. After a while - about two pages in for me - it’s
easy to get bored writing ‘said’ or ‘replied’. It’s dull!
It doesn’t add anything apart from identifying who’s
talking! A writer can get a terrible urge to use something
else. Words such as ‘retorted’, ‘exclaimed’, ‘riposted’ and
‘declared’ spring to mind. That’ll stop the reading getting
bored, he or she thinks. The truth is that the reader
doesn’t get bored with ‘said’ or ‘replied’. He or
she needs them to keep track of who’s talking. Readers
don’t get bored with ‘said’ or ‘replied’ because they’re in
the trance of successful immersion in the story. It’s the
writer that’s bored with writing words such as
‘said’ and ‘replied’. I've realised that writers must never
write for their own benefit. They must write for the
readers’ benefit.
perhaps, just, really, ‘seemed to’ etc:
Don’t faff about when describing an action! Don’t write
‘the figure seemed to be coming towards him’. Instead,
write ‘the figure was coming towards him’. Don’t
write ‘It was really just a feeling he had that he liked
her’. Instead, write ‘he liked her’. If you can
remove a word from the sentence without affecting the
purpose of the sentence, remove it. If you pare your
sentences down, the significance of their simple words
shines out.
(brackets): Don’t use brackets in prose
unless you’re incredibly confident or its a fun,
light-hearted article. They make you look very self
indulgent.
That's all I can think of for now. I don't feel too bad
that it's taken me so long to produce respectable work. I
realise now that a writer, unless they're truly gifted,
needs to put in at least two thousand hours of
writing before that can reach a good standard. What's
important to me now is that I'm still doing it and I'm
getting better. To see if I have got better, have a read of
the latest version of my fantasy comedy novel here. Hopefully, you can see
how I've learnt from my previous mistakes. If it's clear
to you that I haven't, do please let me know!
- Jan 2012 note -
I've just read through this article and had to correct
loads of grammatical errors and poorly structures
sentences. Am I ever going to write flawless
prose? Probably not.