This is what you srarted with:

It is said so often, isn't it, in one form or another... Learn 'the rules of writing' so that you know them without thinking. Only then can you break them'

I certainly wasted a lot of time and heartache breaking the rules before I'd learned them properly!

Then you said that the rules were things like writing tight prose, good dialogue, rounded characters. Clearly I'm missing something, but I don't see how writing badly is going to make any kind of meaningful connection with the reader.

And you can count all the story openers you have lying around and percentage them; it's an entirely meaningless activity. What matters is whether a particular opening works for that story.

Agree to differ, I think.

My point was that most good prose short story writers choose not to use dialogue openers.

we can ignore that as a fact, and say its meaningless. Or we can nod once, and acknowledge that there is a reason.

For me, there is a good reason for it, and that goes something like 'because it is hard to pull it off well. Many beginners think they can do it well.... and the evidence seems to point against that.'

You don't agree. Thats fine.

We seem to be going round in circles! I am not expecting you to agree with me... when it comes to the learning prtocess, we are all different (I hope) and I'm saying that for me, I needed to learn to write solid prose before breaking the rules. And I wondered what others felt about that.

I think I know now!

In a couple of weeks time I am teaching a writing workshop. And for that workshop's creative sessions, rules can go hang... its to show writers ways of opening up. Shedding constraints is necessary... and we wont be judging each other's work on rule based criteria... but on emotional response.



Vanessa

Vanessa,

Maybe those entrants to the competition are simply not good writers and never will be because they don't have the necessary ear and instinct. I agree that writing is a craft and that writers can improve with practice and teaching but there needs to be a minimum amount of basic talent too. I think I could improve my poor singing by attending singing lessons but no teacher could ever make me a good singer.

Sure...

and you wouldn't dream of entering a singing competition, right?

Writing is a funny thing. But also a wonderful, fascinating, annoying, overwhelming thing. And I can understand people just 'having to write'.... and maybe (just maybe) with a few tools in the toolbox rather then an empty one, those entrants would have written a little bit better?



v

Vanessa, no, I know my singing limitations although I do sing to my children and they don't object too much. But not everyone does judging from the aspiring X factor contestants.

an interesting article by Julian Gough (winner of national short story comp)

I read this article mentioned by Snowbell. Interesting stuff.

In Christian Europe, the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical texts occurred when the habit of submission to authority was at its most extreme. When printing was invented, no one thought to use it for anything other than the Christian Bible, for that was the myth of Europe, the one true myth. As writers began moving cautiously away from the theological shore, they still felt the need for a holy book to guide them, to tell them how to write. Aristotle's Poetics provided that. If you wanted to write tragedy or epic, here were the rules. You need not think for yourself... And then something astonishing happened: the invention of the novel privatised myth, because the novel, invented after Aristotle, did not have a holy book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he's even a she. There were no rules. The chaos of carnival had found its form... The early years of the novel look remarkably like a guerrilla war, as pro-Bible forces try to put down the insurgency of the novel across Europe. Both were fighting for the same piece of territory: the territory inside your head. Now a man could invent his own myth and spread it across the world. And the reader, head bowed over the novel, could have a vision without religion... The novel cannot submit to authority. It is written against official language, against officialdom, and against whatever fixed form the novel has begun to take—it is always dying, and always being born. If the literary novel has calcified into genre, the new novelists need to break its underlying, often unspoken rules. To not just question, but to overthrow authority... But the universities are authority or they are nothing... The problem is not that the universities are malevolent; they are not. They have no sinister intent in taking over the novel, professionalising it, academicising it. Like most of those who colonise territories that were getting on fine without them, they believe they do no great damage, they believe it's for the novel's good, they believe they are benign, idealistic and quite a bit cleverer than the natives. As ever, none of these beliefs is entirely true. The literary novel, by accepting the embrace of the universities, has moved inside the establishment and lost contact with what made it vital. It has, as a result, also lost the mass audience enjoyed by Twain and Dickens. The literary novel—born in Cervantes's prison cell, continued in cellars, bars and rented rooms by Dostoevsky, Joyce and Beckett—is now being written from on high. Not the useful height of the gods, with its sharp, gods'-eye view of all human classes, all human folly, but the distancing, merely human height of the ruling elite, just too high up to see what's happening on the street below.

Fighting words! Any views on this?

For me, there is a good reason for it, and that goes something like 'because it is hard to pull it off well. Many beginners think they can do it well.... and the evidence seems to point against that.'

Well thank God no one told me that bit of erronoeus info, because the short story that got me my first agent, which was about the fourth story ever wrote, began with direct speech. (And, oh Lord above, contains a qualifier, lol).

"How many lovers have you had," asks Nicholas casually, his dark hair falling against the pillow. "Not that it matters."

That was a really important story for me because when it was published in a literary magazine, a publisher from one of the main houses saw it and contacted me asking to see my novel. I didn't have one then, but I wrote one PDQ, and in doing so met my second (current) agent.

If I'd been told to avoid this construction, I might have tried to 'fix' the story and so interfere with the rhythm and the tone of the opening, which even now I look back at and see is absolutely right for what follows. Ditto for the Bridport story. What I was learning to do in 1996, when the Nicolas story was written, was to trust my instinct and put the right opening for that story. Boy, did it pay off.

But Lammi... just because you could do it well enough, naturally, and follow it with a story good enough to pull in an agent, does not mean that every writer can.

And to be lucky enough to land an agent after writing only four stories is absolutely amazing, and I take my hat off to you.

Most writers have to work, learn, get it wrong, relearn, get it wroing again, get it a little better. And for most writers it takes years of hard work.

And all I have ever said in this thread and elsewhere is that to have a few helpful tools in the toolbox saves some writers both pain and time.

You seem to be making this thread into a competition between us... and I hold my hand up and acknowledge that no way could I have landed publishers, agents, and had successful book deals as fast as you must have.

I've had to work hard at what I do... slowly slowly. Little bits of success have trickled in slowly. OK, so one collection of short fiction will have taken four years of hard slog. No agents.

And I have been helped so so so much by the craft I have learned.... and what I am trying to say is that others may benefit as I did.

I am not saying that all writers are like me. I am trying to give a realistic account of how Ive got to the level I have.

We both recognise, surely, that no two writers are the same. That all our journeys are different. And I think it is amazing,and wonderful that you did it naturally, so fast... but the fact remains... you are among a talented minority.

How many other writers do you know who have published and landed agents after writing four stories?



Vanessa

Nessie, I think the proportion of the stories you read that start with dialogue is about what I'd expect. You could probably pick half a dozen other categories and find a similar proportion - how many stories don't start with a gerund, or do start with a subordinate clause, or an adverb of time or place (after, when,) or end with a conditional clause. How many have a subjunctive in the first sentence? I bet very few start with a conjuction and an awful lot with an article or a proper noun. But even if such a judgement were based on a statistical sample of several thousand, and even if the sample was based on a genuinely objective measurement of 'good' - which is impossible - all any statistic about any of these says is that a sample of good writers will use the full range of possibilities of grammar, vocabulary and syntax. Which I think we all know is true.

Emma

<Added>

Ashlinn, thanks for posting that Julian Gough statement - it was a laugh I needed this morning! It's is the most predictable load of literary posturing I've read in a long time, and it's only what the literary equivalent of ballroom communists have been saying since the dawn of time.

Hi Emma


Yep. Good writers will have the ability to do many things well.


The whole thrust of this thread is how do we become 'good writers' and we've come to the conclusion that there are many different ways. (I think)...

At one end is a natural talent that needs no help... at the other is talent that sharpens itself through hard work. No problems with that!

Vanessa

Most writers have to work, learn, get it wrong, relearn, get it wroing again, get it a little better. And for most writers it takes years of hard work.

- Did all that. I was writing novellas as well, and had been for about three years, so I'd got a lot of learning words under my belt. And it was another six years before I placed my first novel. (But there's clearly no prejudice at all re publishers about opening with dialogue.)

And absolutely, no two writers are the same, which is why to say 'Avoid such and such an opener' doesn't work. Dialogue openers really suit my style. But neither would I tell anyone they 'ought to' begin that way. It's about what suits the individual story, and that includes beginners who are learning about their own style and voice.

<Added>

Btw, I'm sorry if I sounded as though I was showing off. I didn't mean to, it's just the way it happened.

But but but

look at the opener you wrote.

It makes clear instantly the name, the gender, the context, the place, the subject.

If you qualify the spoken words cleverly, and instantly, then of course it works!!!

Aaaagh. But that is precisely NOT what so many DOs do. And precisely why it is easier for a beginner to open a story with prose.




v

But that is precisely NOT what so many DOs do. And precisely why it is easier for a beginner to open a story with prose.

But is there any reason why, faced with a bad dialogue opener, a teacher shouldn't explain - even to a beginner - how to make it good, with all the elements you've pointed out, as Lammi's is?

Surely rather than telling a beginner not to do something that's hard, it's the perfect opportunity to explain how to do it? It's not as if it's difficult to explain - you've put it beautifully succinctly, Nessie.

Emma

Ashlinn, thanks for posting that Julian Gough statement - it was a laugh I needed this morning! It's is the most predictable load of literary posturing I've read in a long time

Yes, I do think he's being deliberately provocative as anyone who challenges the establishment is but I though he had some interesting ideas all the same. Oh well, back to writing.

Surely rather than telling a beginner not to do something that's hard, it's the perfect opportunity to explain how to do it? It's not as if it's difficult to explain -

Where have I said that writers ought to accept guidelines without explanation, example and reason? Nowhere.

Where have I said that writers have to accept them at all? Nowhere.

What I have said is that there are eminently sensible guidelines which have improved my writing as I have learned the craft. I am asked to explain what they are...and every time I explain,they are rubbished, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly.

I am being made to feel as though I have a large dartboard pinned on my tee shirt, here. That would be fine... if I was just writing and only had my opinions to be battered.

But I teach CW.

I spend hours and hours every week opening up creativity for groups of writers. I feel that statements such as the one above, added to pages and pages of slightly snide put-downs call what I do into question. And that is unacceptable.

It states above this screen that this is a public forum. If this was in a private space than fine, I would be happy to carry on trying somewhat unsuccessfully to state my case. But this is beginning to cross into something other than healthy debate, in my view. And as it is public, it is doing neither me, nor anyone else, any favours.

For the record then, before signing out.

I do NOT set out a series of set rules for CW. There is no such thing.

I do adhere to James Frey's advice to avoid the 'seven deadly mistakes' in writing fiction. Because they are eminently sensible. They are process-orientated rather than product-orientated, if there is such a thing.

I do NOT fail to explain if there is something that I think is questionable, something beginners need to guard against, and I advise them to take care purely because if the topic is hard enough for seasoned writers to do well, it is likely that they may not do it well at first.

I started this thread because it has always fascinated me, that point at which writers feel they can let go the hand that holds them, and start doing their own thing... even when it means 'breaking the rules'. When are ordinary writers like me brave enough to chuck out the books? It has been occasionally a good debate.

I wish all writers on Writewords, whichever genre they embrace, whichever level of writing they feel they are at, and however they feel they will learn best, the very best of luck, and happy writing. With or without guidelines!



Vanessa

It is never “unacceptable” to disagree during an academic debate. Emma’s was a perfectly reasonable question from an interested colleague, and didn’t deserve a response like that.

There is a world of a difference between opposing or criticizing an opinion, and criticizing the holder of that opinion. The one does not mean the other! If it did, this forum would quickly fall apart. But there are threads all over the site evidencing vigorous, passionate debate.

Speaking personally, I have put hours of my time into trying to follow your points and answer your questions to the best of my professional ability. The debate went on for pages because it was interesting and because the terms kept shifting and evolving. If the comment about ‘dartboards’ and ‘snidiness’ were directed at me, then I object in the strongest terms. I offered earlier on to leave the thread if you weren’t happy at my taking an opposing view from yours, but you said it was fine.