Tagged: advice

50 Shades of Bad Advice

r-avatarWe’ve been enjoying Jenny Trout’s 50 Shades recaps: all of the shadenfreude and none of the actual slogging through those books. (Thanks, Jenny!) And in the course of those recaps, something that’s always seemed frustratingly opaque has now started to make a lot more sense. While bad advice certainly begets bad writing, bad writing in turn begets bad advice.

The 50 Shades books are written in first person, present tense. And, they’re poor examples of craft. Correlation is not causation, but it’s painfully clear that in this case an inexperienced author got in over her head with the constraints of that mode. We look upon this and see that if someone had just told her not to do it like that, some of the problems could have been avoided.

Some of them, probably. But wouldn’t the world be a better place if, instead of blanket prohibitions, our newbie writers had guidance about how much additional work they give themselves when they choose a first-person viewpoint? (And how to tell if their particular first-person narrator is sufficiently compelling to carry an entire book.) How the use of present tense impacts plot development?

With writers so vastly outnumbering editors, we really need to up our game. We need to see the cause-and-effect of bad advice accurately and break the cycle. Telling novices, “Yeah, don’t do that,” isn’t helping them.

You Think Italicized? You Should See the Other Guy!

r-avatarIt’s easy to decide when to put speech in quotation marks. For us, it’s much less obvious when to put characters’ thoughts in italics. You’re probably saying right now, “Direct thoughts go in italics, and indirect thoughts don’t.” Duh.

Helpful as that is (and here’s a great writeup on the direct/indirect thing), it still leaves Rune Skelley at loose ends. One of the telltales for direct thought is viewpoint. We write in a very tight third-person, deliberately blurring the distinction between the POV character and the narrator. With that line blurred, we have a judgement call about when something should get italicized.

If that sounds like it’s a problem of our own creation, that’s only because it is. We do it on purpose, and we do it to ourselves. And before you ask, it’s not that we just haven’t realized it should be in first person. We’d typically end up with eight or ten first-person narrators, and that’s not how we roll.

So, okay, you think this is how it needs to be, and it makes the decision hard. Fine, it’s hard. Just make the decision and move on. Well, you’ve just gotten to the heart of the matter. (Thanks!) Making the decision.

This is one way that working with a partner becomes more complicated. A soloist author needs to fret (maybe) about where to draw the in/direct line, and then just go forth and make it happen. Whereas for us, in addition to the fretting, there’s debate and sometimes disagreement. We struggle to agree on where the line should be drawn, and then we struggle over where it actually winds up. Mostly, this problem is Kent’s fault. He admits it (that’s the first step, so maybe he’s not beyond help). He really dislikes the appearance of italicized text, and finds it very distracting. He also wants to point out that, unlike quotation marks, italics are used for multiple things — foreign words, titles, emphasis, excerpted text — all of which come up in Rune Skelley’s fiction often enough to make it an issue. Jen has a far less complicated relationship with oblique letterforms and is a paragon of patience. She just wishes we could settle on a technique and stick to it.

Seven Good Tips for Writers Who Want to Write Well

r-avatarBelieve it or not, there are some common writerly recommendations that Rune Skelley agrees with.

  1. Read a lot, and read outside of your favorite genre.
  2. Write every day.
  3. Create a pleasant and functional workspace, a place you will want to go.
  4. Revise. Revise. Revise. Writing = rewriting.
  5. Document your process, whatever it is.
  6. Plan how you’ll answer “So what’s your book about?” (you know they’ll ask)
  7. Don’t go it alone.

That last one bears expansion.

There’s a romanticized notion of novel writing as a noble, solitary quest for beauty. Bullshit. Everybody needs a support system, and for a project as deep and wide as crafting a novel you bet you’ll need help. It doesn’t have to mean a coauthor, and even if you do collaborate with a partner you’ll (both) find needs for further resources.

Critique groups are a fantastic way to get feedback about your work, from fellow writers, your peers. In a properly structured critique session, no one is going to pull any punches. Their job is to help you find and fix the problems with your text, and unlike a spouse or a parent or a sibling or a coworker, they aren’t putting a relationship at risk by being blunt.

Beta readers serve a different function. Rather than advising on craft, they give you an impression of how your target audience will respond. After hearing from them in their own words about what worked and what didn’t, follow up with a more structured questionnaire to make sure the points you’re concerned about get addressed.

Internet research is seductive in its convenience, but there’s no substitute for sitting with an expert and digging really deep into her particular specialty. Build a network of people you can consult with on technical matters, be they scientific, medical, historical, psychological, culinary, etc. Take a look at the acknowledgements section of a Neal Stephenson book sometime!