The Blank Page

The last Thoughts on Fiction post I made had to do with writing forums and social media, and the scurrilous types that slime their way along the bottom, leaving their sluglike, ochre fluid trails of shit-takes and propagandized bad information.

So, like before, avoid these brothels of iniquity — these echo chambers of the poorly aspiring — and seek your critiques and criticisms elsewhere.

I want to piggyback off of that last post I made; because, surely, this advice — these horrible interpretations of what may have at one time been good advice — is common enough to be problematic for people who think they want to be writers.

I’d like to take a minute to highlight some common pieces of bad advice (mostly perpetuated by inexperienced writers who really, really like the sound of their own voices), what that advice probably means, and what that advice should look like in implementation.

Show Don’t Tell
This is one of the most misunderstood pieces of writing advice, and new writers either completely ignore it, or take it literally to the point where it cripples their writing. Some will scream it from the rooftops at anyone who seeks a critique, and they’ll scream it whether the writer told instead of showed, or whether they showed instead of told. It doesn’t matter, because most of the people constantly talking about showing vs telling don’t actually know what it means.

Telling is when you give the reader concrete information that’s pretty much impervious to the reader’s interpretation.

Showing is when you give supporting details that allow the reader to come to the same declarative conclusion, using their own imagination and interpretations. It allows them to paint their own picture of the thing you are telling them.

Lets do some examples:

Telling – The monster was hiding on the tree limb above the path. Jane could sense it and she was scared. She heard it move, and she began to run.

Showing – The woods were dark as pitch and the longer Jane stared, the more the darkness seemed to call to her. Was something whispering, or was that just the dried leaves shuddering in the wind? Shuddering like Jane as she wrapped her jacket tighter around her shoulders — shaking like her knees as she took one wobbly step after another. A low thump broke through the quiet of the forest, and above her head, she swore she could feel something lying in wait. Patient. Watchful. Another thump — loud this time, closer, high up in the trees. A shiver razed up her spine, and ^before she’d even thought to move, her feet were pounding the packed dirt of the trail, kicking rocks and dust behind her as she fled.

When you write something that needs to be shown to the reader, you are lacking a visual medium. You have to be as specific as you can without simply telling the reader exactly what to see. Write with your senses and show what the character is thinking and feeling. When you’re done, remove the shit that makes it feel contrived.

Now, with this in mind, you need to know that writers must use both showing and telling to write effectively. Telling moves the story along in places where the details aren’t important or particularly interesting. Showing adds important details and visualization to the scenes you’re trying to portray. Use both judiciously.

A simple example of this is a change of scenery or time, or the little steps that add to the creation of the important parts of each major scene. If someone, say, drives back to their house, you can just tell your reader that. Or, even better, you can just start the next scene with the character at their house. You don’t need to show the whole act of them getting there, unless, of course, something important happens on the way.

This segues into my next most hated piece of advice:

Every Single Word Needs to Have a Purpose

Pro tip: no the fuck they don’t.

Here’s the deal. Writing is an art form. It is a creative action. Your job as a writer isn’t to just tell a story. Your job is to tell that story as interestingly, and as engagingly as possible.

The idea behind this shit piece of advice is “beauty in brevity,” I guess. Call me what you will, but I’ll take a Nabakov over a Hemingway any goddamn day of the week.

This piece of advice is supposed to implore you to be succinct. However, I think even telling writers they need to be succinct is bad advice, as well. The only good part of this advice is reaffirming the importance of clarity. If you’re too wordy, too descriptive, too whatever, you can muddy the clarity of the scene.

It doesn’t mean you can’t fuckin’ wax poetic if your little heart so desires. There are plenty of people who will call you wordy, or call your prose purple, or pretentious, but if your style is to write poetically, and you prefer flowery words over their baser versions, by all means: you do you.

*A quick side-note on pretentious prose: 87% of the people that call a book PrEtEnTiOuS can’t read the damn thing anyway. They’re fine with reading the word “chagrin” 673 times in a single novel (looking at you Twilight) after they looked up what it meant the first time, but you can fuck right off if your vocabularic proclivities involve more than what a first-grade thesaurus has to offer.

Pretentious prose is when the prose itself takes over the book — as if the book itself is meant to showcase the writing style instead of the story contained within. That’s it. Stop calling books above your grade level pretentious.

Sorry.

I’m done ranting.

Anyway…

There isn’t just one way to crack an egg if you get what I’m saying. You can write with a narrator that no one will notice. A voice that just tells you the story and sprinkles in the important details in a meaningful way. Or, you can write with a narrator who paints with reckless abandon — who sings operatically, and catches you breathless to dance under the embered stars.

People are going to love you or hate you no matter what you do. Eminem is one of the most popular artists of all time, and as unpopular as it is to say, I can’t fucking stand his music. Doesn’t make his music good or bad. Like most things, art is subjective.

Write how your heart tells you to write.

If you want to write succinctly to appease the prose police, I think this advice — that every word needs to matter — can be boiled down and reduced into just avoiding adverbs and limiting prepositional phrases as much as possible, even just a little bit at a time, har har seewhatididthere

Anyway, those pieces of shit advices are my biggest pet peeves. But here’s a list of a few more that I don’t really want to waste a whole lot of words on explaining why they’re pieces of shit.

• Outline. For me, outlining kind of kills the magic of discovering how your characters will react when placed in a situation that requires action, and it stifles the flow of consequences of that action. (Obviously, this is a subjective opinion.) If you like outlining, make an outline. If you don’t, fuckin’ don’t.
• Get Beta Readers. Do, or don’t if you don’t want to. If you do, make sure they are voracious readers, or they are at least semi-successful writers themselves. You don’t want a bunch of people like the people of which I’m ranting to be your fucking Betas. They don’t read, and they don’t actually write. They’ll just give you advice they misinterpreted from some YouTube video about good writing.
• You have to know somebody, already have a massive online following, or be extremely lucky to be traditionally published. No, you don’t. 20% of people who actually sit down and complete a novel will go on to be traditionally published. I wouldn’t call 1 in 5 “extremely lucky.” Is it hard? Hell yes, it’s hard. But don’t think it’s some pipe dream.
• Self-publish in order to get recognized by a “big five” publisher. The success of E.L. James is an indicator of a garbage market that forced a business decision by traditional publishing — a business decision that hurt its soul. It’s not a recipe for success, and unlike the last dot on this list, it was a case of extreme luck. James’ writing is fucking awful. I have zero hate for people who decide to self-publish, but don’t do it out of fear of rejection from a trad publisher, and don’t think of it as an easy way out. There’s still a lot of work, e.g., marketing yourself, building a readership, etc. There are puh-lenty of very successful self-published authors, but they put in a hell of a lot more work than warrants an “easier than traditional” designation.
  

That about wraps it up, I suppose. I did want to end this with another little story though. I was browsing some writing group on Facebook, and there was a post that showcased all of these bullshit examples I just listed all in one beautiful place. Someone posted an excerpt from the critically acclaimed novel, The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West. I’m sure many of you know exactly what excerpt I’m talking about. The famous Trumpet. It’s beautiful, it’s hilarious, and goddamn is it well written.
The excerpt in question is this:

My husband plays the trumpet, which is a sort of loud pretzel originally invented to blow down the walls of fucking Jericho and, later, to let Civil War soldiers know it was time to kill each other in a river while you chilled eating pigeon in your officer’s tent twenty miles away, yet somehow, in modern times, it has become socially acceptable to toot the bad cone inside your house before 10:00 a.m. because “it’s your job” and your wife should “get up.” What a world! If one was feeling uncharitable, one might describe the trumpet as a machine where you put in compressed air and divorce comes out, but despite this—despite operating a piece of biblical demolition equipment inside the home every bright, cold morning of his wife’s one and only life—the trumpet is not the most annoying thing about my husband.

West, Lindy, The Witches Are Coming

Now, mind you, Lindy West has been published in everything from GQ to CRACKED to The Guardian. She is a world-renowned writer, whose memoir earned itself a Hulu special. Her books are published by Hatchette (who also claim JK Rowling), and she writes for the New York Times.

The comments this post received (directed to the poster, thinking she was the fucking author of the piece because none of these fucking people bother to do anything other than hear their own voices) were like this:

“SHOW DON’T TELL”
“Your sentences are too long. Try being more precise in your writing.”
“Learn proper grammar before embarrassing yourself here.”
“Your second sentence is a run-on. Break it up a bit.”
“Info-dumps are usually just glanced over by readers.”
“Some people really don’t know what show don’t tell means.”
“I learned in creative writing that your scenes should be action-driven.”

Yes. All of these aspiring people are telling a writer worth $20,000,000 (from writing) how she should actually write that one page of a book that was published four years ago to widespread applause, in order to make it “good.”

Moral of the story? Write your shit. Edit your shit. Publish your shit. The people who post all day in writing forums and Facebook groups are doing everything but writing. If you want to know if you’re good enough, you need to read a lot of books, and you need to write a lot. Keep submitting, and tape those rejections to the wall until you can staple one that says accepted to your forehead and wear it around all day like the badass you are.