4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

Hold it hold it hold it!  Who said anything about effort? I put my very soul into my stories and I’ve been working for many years to improve my skills.

And I had a hard time reading through it so I thought I would give you some helpful advice from a reader’s perspective.

I really don’t think the argument that “anything different from what everybody does is invalid” is really a good argument.

Faulkner, Burroughs, and Ginsberg all departed from common formatting as well as e.e. cummings.  Don’t get me wrong, but the difference between you and James Joyce is that he had a vast knowledge of grammar and form before departing from the accepted styles.  He knew what rules to bend because he studied them and knew their purposes.

Let me illustrate.

There are people who drive professionally. They drive many different vehicles on many different courses. Some of them drive on very smooth courses, some on very rough ones. They know tricks that normal drivers couldn’t and shouldn’t use--tapping bumpers, passing on turns, etc. But none of them drive on these courses, or at those speeds, without a great deal of practice. All of them have studied and mastered the basics of driving, before they even begin to have a style.

But imagine if beginning drivers, in setting out to learn the craft of driving, tried to use professional tricks on normal roads, without any sort of prior preparation. Why, then you’d have lots and lots of horrible wrecks, just like much of the work posted on the Internet. And then, assuming the beginning driver survives his wreck, how do you think it would go over if he told the patrolman (who is by any measure a more accomplished driver) that the wreck wasn’t his fault, it’s just that the other drivers around him didn’t appreciate his unique driving style. Comedy would abound.

All I’m suggesting is that you read extensively in the area you wish to write.  Work with forms instead of belittling them. Work on rhythms, grammar, syntax, sounds, sense. It’s a slog, but there’s no way around it if you want to write well.  You will see drastic improvements to your work if you take this path.

This is a lot of hard work.  If, at times, it appears I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s largely because I don’t - not entirely anyway.  I’m attempting something I’ve never done before and that not too many authors have experimented with in quite the same way that I am.  I’ve really got nothing to draw upon as a guideline.

I could suggest some books.

The Elements of Style, Strunk and White. If you haven’t grasped the basics this book provides, write nothing more until you do.

Simple & Direct, Jacques Barzun. Will force you to pay attention to words; if you complete the rigorous course of exercises, you will find that along the way you have become a much more precise writer.

Poetics, Aristotle. No, it’s good. Honest.

Anatomy of Criticism, Northrup Frye. Monumental work of critical theory, almost every page containing at least one staggering insight. The first thorough treatment of criticism itself since Aristotle.

The Book of Literary Terms, Lewis Turco. Encyclopedic treatment of all literary genres besides poetry. Know what litotes and zeugma are? If not, this book will tell you that and lots more besides.

Honestly and above all else, read as many books in the genre you write.  Even the ones you hate, try to identify why you dislike certain plot devices or styles in literature.  Doing this will provide you with all the experience you need to make the soul of your stories translate from the magic you see to what the reader will eventually see.

Aha.  Now I see what you were getting at.  Now it’s starting to get interesting.
I’m not trying to belittle anything.  I’m an avid reader of just about everything; my favorites list includes both the Wheel of Time and Les Miserables among many others.  If I don’t spend at least three hours a day reading, I consider it a loss.  But all that is incidental, wouldn’t you say?
It would be even more useful, however, if you would not simply say what you would do different, but why.  Why is it hard to read and why would your way be better?  If there’s an established format, it must have a reason for its existence, correct?  Why do it your way?  Also, what do you mean by hard?  Are we saying it’s unclear, or uninteresting, or something else?
Forgive me if I seem a little excitable at the moment.  This is the first time that someone’s said anything that was really critical of my work and I wish to get as much from this encounter as possible.  Most of the time, all I get is, “I enjoyed it,” or “I don’t know why, but things about it bothered me,” or (I hate this condescending piece of trash most of all) “Whatever you want, it’s good for you.”

Clarity.  That’s the word that drives all books of editing and writing (like Strunk and White, Plotnik, and others).  The goal of the writer should be to tell a story so that a reader doesn’t have to work too hard to follow along.  Poetry is a different matter, but in fiction, your goal should be to present your story in such a way that anyone can follow along without getting lost.

By embedding dialogue into a paragraph, you buck a tradition that adds clarity.  If you have dialogue separated out from the descriptive, it’s generally easier to follow who is talking, what the conversation is about, and what is being said.  If you choose to place the dialogue in a large paragraph of descriptive text, that train can be easily lost.

Also - I’ll pick on one trope that you use that has been pretty much tossed aside by modern fiction crafters. 

“Come over here and duck,” he warned me.

“He warned me” is redundant.  It’s an unnecessary phrase; it does nothing but add words.  A better way to do that same thing is -

“Come over here and duck.”

I glanced up and saw Josh frantically waving his arms at the car he was hiding behind. 

“Come over here and duck” is already a warning, so you don’t use that term to describe the dialogue.  Now you have indicated who said it, why it was said, and given it some action to boot.

Except that his example wasn’t a large bit of descriptive text.  The narrator was making a comment on his own lack of sense.  My real question then, is the sentence really all that unclear?  Granted, there are parts of that sentence that can be removed because they don’t add anything, but, supposing it’s cleaned up a bit, is it really so difficult to understand?
I think my biggest problem here is that I first need to go back and edit the whole thing.  This piece has changed very little since I wrote it and it was really something I threw together because I was bored.  I just started writing whatever came to mind.  I kind of hit a point where I started writing really fast to get it out of my head and then forgot to clean it up.  As a result, I appear to be backsliding on a number of issues.

RJ Dalton - 16 January 2008 07:43 AM

I think my biggest problem here is that I first need to go back and edit the whole thing.  This piece has changed very little since I wrote it and it was really something I threw together because I was bored.  I just started writing whatever came to mind.  I kind of hit a point where I started writing really fast to get it out of my head and then forgot to clean it up.  As a result, I appear to be backsliding on a number of issues.

This is what I believe to be my biggest flaw as a writer. I tend to spew ideas from my head to the paper and never look through it again. Sometimes this even causes changes in things like tone and voice...which isn’t always a bad thing, just something that shouldn’t happen subconsciously and unknowingly.

You should always go back and edit your works at least twice before publishing them anywhere (even the web) and I like Stephen King’s formula for editing which is “2nd Draft=1st draft-10%”.

I typically don’t tend to have your problem of just writing whatever because I’m really OCD when it comes to things like that and I like to have things concise and make sense (and in the case of fiction, be internally coherent) but what I do when I get the itch to write is the same, I outline. I go up to my whiteboard (got one for New Year’s ) and start writing whatever comes to mind for the story, then when I run out of room I jot down what is good on paper and try to lay it all out in a clear order. If you outline more when your writing you’ll spend 1/2 as much time editing.

Eesh, that’s the other thing that’s bothering me now.  I actually don’t have an outline for this story.  Well, not in the general sense.  I have an idea about where it’s going to go and I know what I’m trying to do, but I haven’t got the details worked out clearly.  I usually work on an idea for a couple of years before I actually sit down and begin writing it out, but this time I jumped the gun.  I wanted some things to put on my deviantart page other than my crappy early concept art (which wasn’t anyway).  That actually might explain why my story appears to be wandering now.
Hmmm.
Gods, this was so much easier when I didn’t know what I was doing (or, perhaps I should say, when I didn’t know I didn’t know what I was doing).