How do I learn how to write?

Cafe Society
1

With the new Dan Brown’s book out, there are a lot of comments on his style sucks and poor choice of words. I mentioned long ago in a thread before that I don’t really get why some of his sentences are considered to be poorly written; now I have the same problem too (Ex: What’s wrong with ‘a lone figure’?)

So I am interested in narrative writing. Not for ‘publish myself as an author’ but more for recreational stuff. Anyway I can improve my skills (do I force myself to write a paragraph every day?) and or there any online groups which evaluate your work in a constructive manner?

Some context: English is my second language, with Mandarin being my first.

Examples of my recreational writings so far can be found here

2

Write a lot. Read a lot. Write some more. Read some more.

Repeat.

3

Interestingly, there’s an article about writers’ habits in today’s Toronto Star - Writers share the rituals of writing - or not .

Find out if there is a writers’ group that you can join - a deadline of ‘a few pages for next week’ is way less intimidating than ‘a novel that I need to finish.’ Having to read something to other people will do more to improve the clarity of your writing than any ‘How to…’ book can provide.

It helps me to separate ‘writing’ and ‘editing’ - I prefer to come back to something after a few weeks have passed and I can’t clearly remember what the idea behind the writing was. If I get the idea from the writing, that’s good. If I can’t understand what I was talking about, no one else is going to get it, either.

In my experience, the (few) people I know who became published writers are the ones who sat down and wrote for an hour a day. If you treat it like a job, you can turn it into your job; if you treat it like something you do when you’re inspired, it’s a lot harder to make that leap from ‘hobby standard’ to ‘professional standards’.

Hope this helps…

4

I recommend you join a writers group, on line or IRL. I belonged to one where people would post their work, and others would offer critiques and suggestions. You earned “points” by commenting on others’ work, and you used those points to post your own work. It led to a great sense of community. Alas, that site has since bitten the dust. I haven’t found a replacement yet.

There are also real-life ones where you get together once per week and share. I know of several in the Chicago area; if you live somewhere reasonably cosmopolitan, there are probably a few in your area too. Good luck!..TRM

5

In terms of grammar and descriptive ability, your writing seems fine. Not inspired, but you shouldn’t feel embarrassed by it.

There are a lot of different areas to tackle if you want to be a great writer. Becoming awesome at all of them is of course going to be far more difficult than if you choose one or two that you really care about. You’ll probably have a bigger audience by only choosing one or two to care about, to be honest.

The categories are:

  1. The fluidity of your writing. Some stuff just sounds good said out loud. Most writing, spoken, doesn’t sound all that impressive. But it’s not just whether it sounds good, but being able to vary the tempo so that the language becomes faster in the reader’s mind as the action becomes more and more powerfully intense. Or, then, to be able to mellow and relax and wend about in ease. You can write language that seems to tumble down from up on high as just a natural state of things, or shoots up all of a sudden in a mighty roar.

Generally, this is more the arena of poets and poetry than prose, but it doesn’t hurt to achieve it.

  1. The texture of your description. Just being able to describe something certainly isn’t bad, but by choosing your language and emphasizing certain aspects of a thing you can make it seem cold and hard edged, or whimsical and intricate. Some writers can spend pages talking about what they’re seeing out their window and make it sound interesting because just the way they describe it makes it compelling.

A good example would be the work of Honoré de Balzac. Others would be Douglas Adams or Andrew Vachss.

  1. Whether you have something to talk about. Most works simply have a story. Boy meets girl, boy gets into pickle, boy gets pickle into girl. Other works are discussing a topic with their reader in the semblance of a story. Almost all childrens’ books are this way, moralistic, as are nobel prize winning literature. Most other categories of book are generally lacking this.

Really you have to think that you have a message worth discussing, or a view of it worth presenting, which requires a bit of ego. Working that into a story that isn’t simply bashing the reader over the head with it (ala Ayn Rand) is difficult. And of course lots of writers generally just end up writing some blasé boy meets girl story, and have a few rants given by the main character that seem largely unrelated to what’s going on in the story. Ayn Rand happens to do this as well. But compare that to Watership Down where the subject of Communism is much more gently touched upon.

  1. Story structure. If you want to write a novel, then there is the issue of story structure. You need to be able to break down a story into “acts” and decide what needs to happen in that space. You need to be able to vary the pace between fast and slow, happy and sad. There are certain patterns of storytelling that work and are enjoyable. You can’t introduce a girl in the first act and not have the main character and her together in the third act–unless its a “Western” where he walks off into the sunset at the end. You can’t let the dog get killed. You don’t introduce the Gandalf/Merlin/Yoda character and have him end up solving all the main character’s problem for him at the end (only at the beginning). You need to know when a character is too dark and needs a merry sidekick to act as a conduit for the readers to understand and not hate the brooder.

This is the sort of thing that Dan Brown is most likely naturally good at or, that he happened to hit upon in the Da Vinci code.

But there’s a corollary to this. If a work follows the “formula” too closely, the work isn’t interesting. Understanding story structure and the rules of story telling is useful for knowing how to mix it up a bit so that people aren’t just seeing the same thing as they’ve already seen a hundred times.

  1. Well-rounded characters. A good, rounded character should be able to act in ways that aren’t expected based on what you know of him, and yet not just random. You should get the feeling that he’s going out and doing stuff because he cares or he’s really afraid or whatever, not just because he’s “the hero”.

A good example is Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. The man comes off as a total badass, and yet if you watch him, he’s really terrified through the whole ordeal. He’s largely just behaving reactively, but the choices he makes, on the spot, are heroic and so he’s interesting even though the story of the movie isn’t really all that impressive.

But how to get good at any of these? Essentially by actively working at it. Being able to see them as independent goals that have been separated out lets you go, “Okay, I’m going to write a story targetting <X> this time.” And then you can work on just that one skill. Concentrating on a particular area of improvement is far more effective than saying, “I just want to be better at writing.” That’s too amorphous. Once you’ve targeted a particular skill, and you’ve acquainted yourself with a master of that realm, you can grade yourself and either keep working at it, or saying you’re happy where you are.

My last item, story structure, is something about which there are lots of classes and books written. You can go and study these, and set a task to watch a movie, take it apart, and be able to talk about it analytically. But still the point is that you target something you want to work at, figure out what you need to do to get there, and go for it. Other areas of expertise that you don’t care about, don’t. Shakespeare wasn’t very good at #3, JK Rowling isn’t particularly awesome at items 1, 3, nor 5.

If you can vocalize what sort of work you want to write, you’ll be able to attain that, whatever it is. The first step is deciding what sort of writer it is you want to be.

6

You must kill a lot of trees to learn to write. Write something. Put it away. Read it again in two month’s time. Write it again.

“Learn how to punctuate dialogue,” he said. “It makes fiction much easier to read.”

“You also need a copy of Elements of Style,” she reminded everyone. “You may wish to have it tattooed on your skin.”

7

How to tell good from bad writing, and make sure your own falls into the former category rather than the latter?

Read Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”

Read books about writing, like the aforementioned Elements of Style, and Stephen King’s On Writing.

Read books that are generally acknowledged to be very well written.

And practice.

8

This is pretty much all you need to know. Do as GuanoLad suggests, and everything else will follow. Don’t get consumed with the idea of writing as Art - just concentrate on mastering the craft skills involved, and you will gradually get better.

The best rules for clear writing I’ve ever come across are those coined by George Orwell in a 1946 essay called Politics & The English Language. I’ve listed these below, and you can read the full essay here: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm.

Orwell’s Rules
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

9

Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird is also very good.

10

This is really the gist of it.

Read more than you write, but write every day.

11

One of my favorite college professors used to say “Writing is rewriting.” If you want to improve, read, write, review and rewrite. That’s going to help you improve with time.

Your English is good, CrazyChop. There are some minor rough spots here and there, but it’s good. The biggest thing for you to work on is the way you release information to the reader. I’ve never done a real mystery story and that is probably a difficult task, but I’d read some more mysteries to see how professional authors do this.

Dan Brown is often criticized for his dialogue: he’s pretty bad with exposition, and his characters have a lot of conversations that are not necessary in terms of the story. They only exist so the reader will find out something Brown needs them to know. They usually go something like this:

There’s some of this in the Ann Siang Hill conspiracy story.

12

And just to show you how ultimately useless it is to seek advice on such a subject, I personally couldn’t disagree more with Sage Rat’s advice here. The story must come first: the rest will follow if it’s in your “heart” when you’re writing. If you write clearly.

Starting out with a specific agenda is, in my mind, one of the greatest sins of bad writing. Start with characters; their thoughts will be your thoughts, your concerns will be their concerns. Your agenda will be treated without being consciously addressed. In fact it will be much better treated if you’re entirely unconscious of it. Fiction should not be a lecture.

Note: all the above is subject to exceptions. In fact, everything that’s been said in this thread–or that will be said–is just as likely to be wrong as it is to be right.

Except this: read a lot, and write a lot. You’ll find your way, if it’s there to find.

13

Yes, but make sure that it’s a real workshop, not a support group. Make sure they’re willing to be vicious and cruel in their critiques. Nothing’s more dangerous to a writer than unearned praise.

14

Completely true, but I think it’s always a good idea to learn what the rules are so you can learn how to break them effectively.

15

The 1918 edition of Strunk’s Elements of Style is available here. It’s a good place to start though the later edition co-written with White adds some good stuff.

Other than that my main advice is to really think through whatever it is you are writing about. Make sure you understand it thoroughly and map it out either in your head or on paper before you start writing. When you do that, the words will flow more easily and your first drafts will be of higher quality. If you find yourself struggling over every word, that may be a signal that you don’t really understand your subject.

16

I tend to know what I want to write; I always have idea for a plot, how events should transpire and so on, but I usually struggle with details and getting my paragraphs to flow.

17

I think of it in terms that you’re more likely to come up with something banal if you haven’t analyzed what has come before. If you want to play around with story as an art, you have to have learned it.

It’s like saying that Leonardo da Vinci couldn’t possibly have been an artist because he learned meticulously how to create exactly what he wanted, while as some shlub who has never taken a lesson is going to be inherently better as an artist because he has nothing behind him but passion.

Technical proficiency + passion is always going to win over passion. The one doesn’t kill the other. And like I said, if you don’t want specialize in ornate and complex storylines, then don’t. I offered it as one of several categories to specialize in, not as a necessary category. If it doesn’t appeal to you personally, don’t go for it.

Personally, I love it. The Usual Suspects or Key: The Metal Idol are both great viewing experiences because the writer toyed around with story structure, craftily avoiding cliches while not forsaking the art of spinning a tale. While as you watch something like Wonder Boys where sure there’s a lot of passion there, but nothing happens. If you like the characters, you’ll like the movie, but if you think they’re a bunch of idiots, then you’re just bored. But at the same time, if you can’t follow something fairly complex or you dislike the conceit of being tricked by the writer, you won’t like The Usual Suspects. Neither one of these pictures is inherently better or worse, it’s just a question of what sort of thing the creator preferred. Both show a mastery of a particular skill set. Identifying that skill set and deciding to become technical awesome at it is good. You don’t have to drop your passion.

18

Yes, but I think it’s also good to keep what I said in mind, and not be discouraged by advice that seems to go against your instincts. Still, I agree, the above (and no doubt the below) represent a very good starting point to veer away from.

19

I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing. I said nothing at all against technical proficiency; I would never, ever do so. I agree with everything you’ve said, more or less.

I was talking about working out your subtext, your theme, your agenda, beforehand, and letting that drive the writing. That makes for bad writing. Whereas, as you say, learning the craft makes for good writing.

My biggest breakthrough as a writer? Learning to throw things away. Learning not to let my love of a certain phrase, or a certain approach, or an initial idea, get in the way of the true nature or the honest growth of whatever it is I’m writing. Written an utterly brilliant passage, but can’t find a way to work around it or through it? Throw it out. Or at the very least save it, but save it somewhere else. Don’t pervert the rest of what you’re working on just to shoehorn that one clever little bit into the wrong sized shoe.

Stumped on a story? Revisions become increasingly entangled, hydralike, each change necessitating nine more changes? Story going all Sorcerer’s Apprentice on you? Throw it out. Start over. Chances are the process of trying to revise it has refined it a bit, on a basic level, in your mind, and when you clean-slate it and begin afresh, it will land on the page a little more smoothly, a little straighter, a little stronger.

Here’s a needlepoint sampler to frame for the wall above wherever you write: WHEN IN DOUBT, THROW IT OUT.

20

Well so would you say that, for instance, The Glass Bead Game is a poorly written work? I highly highly doubt that it was written without the agenda being known at the beginning. Herman Melville’s works are mostly all specifically targeted to a specific topic. Stanley Kubrick definitely had an agenda going into making Dr. Strangelove, as did Orson Welles making Citizen Kane (and no, I don’t mean WR Hearst, more likely he was analyzing his own egotism). They knew what topics they wanted to discuss and they created a story that highlighted and discussed that topic in a way that was entertaining and masterful but wasn’t dogmatic and preferred to offer itself as a conversation piece rather than as an unassailable answer. But most certainly they didn’t just start writing willy-nilly and came up with a work that happened to discuss something they were interested in.

If you don’t disagree with anything I’ve said in this post, most likely you misunderstood me in my first post.