I understand that some people dont like a dvice from others, that they want to carve their own way. That they find advice like that stultifying.

I never said I didn't take advice. I've been happy and grateful, to have my work read and commented on. But at those points it received specific feedback, not generalised comments which may well not have applied to my personal style at all.

A writer who doesn't read, Naomi? Surely not????

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'I've been happy and grateful, at various point, to have my work read and commented on.' Sorry: an edit too far!

...received specific feedback, not generalised comments which may well not have applied to my personal style at all.

And actually, that sounds like what you received too, Vanessa.

I think one of my biggest fears with people deciding there are stylistic 'shalt-nots' is that it interferes with their reading as well as their writing, which then loops back into a vicious circle. It's easy to over-sensitise yourself to a part of speech or device so that it jumps out at you and interrupts the flow of the text, and so then, yes, you effectively prove yourself right - "adverbs are clunky" (or whatever's your bug).

And if you come across a writer who's using the device you've been told is bad, then you start to avoid them, and others like them, so you end up only reading a narrow canon that reflects your prejudices. That's a shame, because reading out of your comfort zone is a great way to shake up your own writing, imo.

aaagh!

Snowbell... there seem to be loads of contributors to this thread saying the same thing... that 'rules' are bad things.

I didn't mean to take just one post and make it into a fall guy... so apologies if that was takn the wrong way.



Emma... I attended a well -respected beginners course.. The certificate in CW at Sussex University.

They put forward this advice "We advise our students to write novels, not short stories".

So a whole year group except for two, struggled to write 75000 to 80000 words, without learning first to write good fiction.

None finished their novels. Four years on, I know of none that are still writing.


Except me. Who left, THEN learned a few basics.



vanessa

Nessie, I don't think a 'beginners' course should be telling people to write novels, yikes! Even an MA with any sense doesn't expect its students to submit a whole novel by the end.

In fact I don't think anyone should tell anyone to write a novel, any more than they should tell them to go on the stage. The only ones who'll get anywhere are the ones who can't stop themselves.

If you're talking to people who hope to earn a living from writing, it's worth pointing out that they won't with short fiction (or, probably, with novels, but you do have a small hope that with the latter they just might). But to my mind that should just be a reality-check, not a reason not to get down and dirty with their writing.

Emma

That sounds like a rubbish course. (Whatever did you do for a year?) But there's a big difference between getting personal feedback + discussing craft, which is what you obviously needed and benefited from, and simply embracing a set of rules.

Incidentally, I've been reaquainting myself with Strunk and White - now there were two guys to took prescriptiveness to a high art form. Lord above. That we should prefer the word 'trifling' over 'not important'?

Of course... the series of seeions I've been co-tutoring have made it abundantly clear that making a living with words is very tough.... but we're making headway in helping a few people earn a little, or start a CV.

And of all the options, fiction seems to be the hardest to 'sell' for real live money.

But so far, we've chalked up one pitch to a 'paying' local newspaper for a feature... and the writer has been given a double page spread.

We've had ten short, snappy factual submissions to BBC local radio, and the promise of recording and a slot for them if they are of a standard. Unpaid, but brilliant for CV.

One writer has had two publications in the last ten weeks in newpapers in Surrey... unpaid, but again, good on the CV.

The same one has pitched an interview with a local writer to a local paper.

Four have submitted fiction pieces to various outlets.

Most of these writers are homeless. Living in hostels. Have had mental health issues and are battling those.


hats off to you, guys.

vanessa

Hats off to those guys indeed!

Emma

Well done, Vanessa. That sounds like a very worthwhile thing you are doing.

Well done as well for starting this discussion. I know exactly what you mean about the guidelines given in writing classes, I've heard them too. I know they may be useful and helpful for some people but, for me, I found them stifling.

It reminds me of when I had my first daughter. I wanted to breast-feed very much and followed the guidelines to the button to make sure I did it right; make sure there's a maximum of 2 and a half hours between feeds, maximum of 10-15 mins on each breast, alternate between left and right first on each feed etc etc, there were lots more. I was so stressed by trying to do all this stuff that I almost gave up. A very close friend who had a baby the month before me is very much a rule-respecter and she really liked the certainty that this routine gave her. In desperation in the end I threw my egg-timer in the bin and did whatever suited my daughter and me for as long as either of us felt like it and it worked just great for us that way. Each to their own.

I admit to being delighted to see adverbs and adjectives being defended. I never liked to see them relegated to second-class status in the English language.

But, Emma, while these guidelines are up for analysis, I'd like to discuss something you've often advocated and that I've never before dared to challenge. That is that every sentence in the novel should be absolutely necessary. I have a problem with this firstly because there are lots of long meandering books that I love. In every book there are oodles of sentences or even passages that could easily be cut without changing the book or story but because they are well-written and a joy to read I wouldn't want them cut. 'Alias Grace', which I'm reading at the moment, is 545 pages long for a very straightforward story and I think some of the passages could be shortened without any loss to the story but I wouldn't want them to be.
Secondly, how can the writer know what's necessary or not? One of my favourite writers, John McGahern, has little or no plot in his books, his characters don't change or follow an arc, they just live their daily lives and he writes scenes that each show us another tiny aspect of the character but he could have more or fewer of them without any problem.

I know there are other books that make you feel 'so what?' at the end of long passages but I wonder if this is because they are boringly written rather than unnecessary.

In every book there are oodles of sentences or even passages that could easily be cut without changing the book or story but because they are well-written and a joy to read I wouldn't want them cut... I know there are other books that make you feel 'so what?' at the end of long passages but I wonder if this is because they are boringly written rather than unnecessary.

I think we're using 'unnecessary' in two different senses, Ashlinn. Necessary to the story certainly isn't my only definition of necessary. I wouldn't love Possession or The Poisonwood Bible as I do, or half a dozen other great sprawling books - the complete works of Dickens, for one thing, tho' it took me till I was about forty to realise how necessary his apparent unnecessarinesses are.

There are so many other pleasures in reading: the musical ones of the sounds of the words; the half-page description of a room that tells you so much even before the character comes in; the shiver of recognition when the writer pins down something you've often thought but never heard expressed; the honest-to-goodness joke.

I think you're right that when non-story elements work, you just revel in them, and your pleasure in the book is infinitely richer than what a writer friend calls the queasy-making story-greed of the formula thriller. It's when they don't work for you that they seem boring or self-indulgent or self-consciously 'lit'ry'.

I do think it's necessary to carry the story forward, but no writer is going to please everyone all the time as to the balance s/he strikes between narrative drive and the other, equally important pleasures of reading. Henry James puts many people to sleep, but I love him, because actually a lot does happen in those great, long, elaborately constructed, beautifully flexible sentences and paragraphs, which if you're not paying attention seem to evade all possibility of physical action but nonetheless, at a micro-level, examine what happens within a single mind and soul with such sureness and exactitude that once you've read some of him it's hard to believe that any other writer will ever, this side of Eternity, approach a similar sharpness of perception and expressive delicacy.

There, that was all highly unnecessary, wasn't it?

What I'm usually trying to say is that every sentence should be doing something more than just conveying the facts of the story, and that you shouldn't let anything in that isn't. If you use a metaphor for how someone walks, for instance, it should do more than describe the movement accurately, it should echo with their character or add something to a pattern of images you're building up. If you use an unusual verb or noun for a common action or object then it must be for a better reason than to avoid repetition or sound grander. That's why I can't bear it when people write 'penned' when they mean written - that really is unnecessary!

That, to my mind, is the road to really exciting writing, writing that's worth reading for more kinds of pleasure than simply finding out what happens.

Emma

Thanks for that long, interesting reply, Emma. (not at all unnecessary )

I'm not thinking very well at the moment, I'm tired, but I suppose I'm questioning the idea of 'necessity' and 'purpose' for sentences in a novel which is something you've often commented on. One person's rambling prose may be another's precise, accurate one and it's hard for the writer to assess how it will come across. Somehow I prefer the idea of being a spendthrift with words rather than being frugal.

Yes, it is hard for the writer to know how it comes across: it's always going to depend on the reader's tastes too. But given that you can't second-guess that, at least till your editor takes a hand, it seems to me that the best way to make the writing as vivid and fully fleshed-out as possible, without risking a reader finding stuff over-written and the story too slow, is to make sure that everything in there is earning its keep. That certainly doesn't preclude lavishness, only that it should be lavishness with a purpose. I suppose it's the different between stirring the cream into a sauce, and piping squiggles of it on top of a cake. If the lavish words are earning their keep by adding to how the book works, rather than just sitting there announcing their lavishness, then, unless the reader's a writer, s/he won't notice that the action takes longer or that the words are lavish, just feel that wonderful sense of being deep in the world you're creating.

I've just, this minute, written a long paragraph, all of which, in a strict definition of plot-necessity, is unnecessary. It's a description of the narrator's aunt's household scrap-book. Its necessity is in colouring-in the family history that the scrap-book embodies, which is what the narrator's trying to understand now. And it's exploring the questions of how memory works and whether you can ever really understand the past, which are central to the whole novel. Frugal it certainly isn't.

Emma

make sure that everything in there is earning its keep

From the context of your post, Emma, this advice sounds close to 'make sure you write well and don't bore the reader' which, to be honest, strikes me as so general and obvious as to be not terribly useful. (I hope I don't sound narky here but I'm really interested in this. For me, most guidelines are so specific that they are restrictive or so general as to be useless.) How can I judge the usefulness (the ability to earn its keep) of a passage I write if I can't even judge it in other novels I read? For example, in Alias Grace, there are 15 pages describing Grace's crossing of the Atlantic with her family. Is this too many or too few? Could Margaret Atwood have done the same job in 10 pages or 20 pages? I'm sure she could but she made the choice to have 15 and, as a reader, I'm happy to go with that because it's entertaining. (Although I have a notion that if I objected, Margaret would virtually snap back at me 'so where's the gun to your head forcing you to read it?'

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That smiley wasn't supposed to be there although it's not entirely inappropriate.

For me, most guidelines are so specific that they are restrictive or so general as to be useless.

Of course, because guidelines seem to have to be short. Since nothing about writing is simple enough to be reduced to a sentence, anything which does is always going to be immediately contradictable (there are times when you should tell, say), or so generally expressed that they're not much help. Really, 'show don't tell', say, is a shorthand - an aide memoire - for a really important, ongoing and sophisticated discussion about one aspect of how good writing works. What angers me is when books or teachers don't have that discussion first, reading lots of examples, before they say, 'A good way to remember this when you're writing is to think of showing and telling, and decide which you want to do.'

Similarly, 'Earning its keep' is my shorthand for another quite a complicated idea, which applies differently in different contexts: even my explanation in my last post is a simplification of what's actually going on.

It stems from my own attempts to write poetry, in fact, because when I really started thinking about it, I realised just how hard it's possible to make your words work. But it's the novels that I write reports on that have made me think about this most of all. Almost invariably in the less developed writers (and surprisingly often in the very developed ones) the biggest problem is that there are so many words that aren't doing enough, and my God! it can be boring to read. Either they're saying something that's already been said, or they're the wrong words for what the writer's trying to do, or they're words of such weakness that the reader can't feel the characters and situations vividly enough to care tuppence about them.

The repetition problem is straightforward, but the other two are more interesting. For example, the words used to describe the canal path don't add to the atmosphere - the feeling of the scene - because either they're bland, or they're clichéd, with words that once had strength but have lost it. In other places there are yards of conversation of the 'hello - would you like some coffee - milk and sugar?' variety, which rambles on without moving the scene on.

Many an editor would tell the writer to cut the coffee scene or the canal, but I don't, because you could make a fabulous spooky/beautiful/heartbreaking scene of that canal path, you could make a terrific scene of silent jealousy/sexual tension/impending bad news out of the coffee. But those words, in that order, don't do those things, or anything else. They're just boring. But if the writer would only ask each word what it's adding to the scene before they let it in, which means first deciding what the scene's purpose in the book is, then that purpose will shine through in all its spooky/heartbreaking/sexy glory, and the reader will keep reading. That's what I mean by earning its keep, and its one of the basic principles of my own writing, but it's taken me paragraphs to explain it properly, so that it's not too general useless.

For example, in Alias Grace, there are 15 pages describing Grace's crossing of the Atlantic with her family. Is this too many or too few? Could Margaret Atwood have done the same job in 10 pages or 20 pages? I'm sure she could but she made the choice to have 15 and, as a reader, I'm happy to go with that because it's entertaining.

If you're entertained, then for you, today, it was the right choice for her to make. You can't say in the abstract whether it's too many or too few, and I certainly can't because I haven't read it. The only question is, does it work? Are you bored because it's too much, or unengaged because it's too little? If not, those 15 pages are the right number. That's fundamentally a subjective judgement - how often have you loved a book and a friend hated it, though neither of you is 'right', or 'wrong'? - and the nearest to objectivity any of us can get, really, is when enough people find themselves thinking the same thing. Your editor's job is to read through as many of those eyes as possible.

It's reading it through others' eyes is so hard to do for your own work at the macro-level of counting pages, the only approach that makes sense to me is to concentrate on the micro-level of individual and phrases and sentences, because if they're working really well and to your larger purpose in the novel, the reader won't be bored, whether its two pages or twenty. You will still have to stand back and look at how the overall balance and pace of the novel is operating, of course, and that may mean sacrificing some gorgeous writing. But since readers read one word at a time, you have to write that way too.

Emma

'Show, don't tell' is another rule I have a problem with because every book does lots of telling. But I can see where it comes from, personally I prefer 'don't underestimate your reader, assume they are at least as intelligent as you are'.

I know what you mean when you describe the manuscripts you review as 'boring to read' but I think that means they're just badly written and there is no general panacea or guideline that can cure that.

You can't say in the abstract whether it's too many or too few

Emma, my point is: what's the point of having a guideline that can't be applied in the abstract? IMO, it should be specific contextual feedback and that, I totally agree, is very useful and valuable to the writer.

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sorry, don't mean to hog this debate, anyone else got any views?

One of the issues with show and tell is that, as I think was mentioned in another thread, it's sometimes impossible for the writer himself to judge how obvious he's being. Are the clues that have been dropped enough for the reader to get the whole and proper picture? Or, conversely, has the information been overstated? Given that the author already knows what's going on, it can be hard for him to be objective. That's where a trusted reader or an editor comes in. (But again, no fixed rules apply.)