Writing

One of the most difficult concepts for a lot of writers (myself included) to internalize is simple but powerful: Bad writing is subjective.

Let that sink in for a moment. We’d all like to think that great writing is somehow measurable, something we can apply science! to and create a formula that will allow us to accurately detect it. One of my secret fears as an author—and I can’t possibly be alone in this—is that I am secretly a terrible, terrible writer, and history will remember me as the 21st century Edward Bulwer-Lytton—the guy who wrote the famous line “It was a dark and stormy night” that is now used as shorthand for purple, tortured prose. It would be comforting to think there was a test for bad writing that would either confirm or refute this—but there isn’t. It’s subjective. All we have is general consensus.

The Sentence

After all, let’s consider Bulwer-Lytton’s famous sentence. The short version isn’t actually bad, is it? “It was a dark and stormy night” may not be the most inspired phrase ever composed, but it certainly isn’t so terrible. In fact, Wikipedia points out that the phrase had actually been used by Washington Irving decades earlier, and yet Irving isn’t pilloried for it. Part of that has to do with Irving’s generally higher literary reputation, of course, and part of it has to do with the rest of Bulwer-Lytton’s sentence, that is usually left out for brevity’s sake:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Okay, the terribleness of that sentence is more apparent now; it sort of just staggers to a period, doesn’t it? And yet, it is really the worst thing you’ve ever read? I doubt it. A few relatively minor edits and it would be an unremarkable but totally workable sentence.

It’s good to keep this in mind—there’s no scientific way of nailing down what, exactly, bad writing is—and styles come and go, making it more complicated. What was once a perfectly acceptable sentence in the style and genre of the time can slowly become the most-mocked sentence in history. So when you get feedback on your work in progress—or a review of a published book—and someone hates a sentence or a whole raft of sentences, remind yourself that bad writing is subjective. Revision and editing are often exercises in re-arranging perfectly fine words. And if you’re destined to be the next Edward Bulwer-Lytton, at least you’ll be famous.

LEST we forget, movies and TV shows get written too. And plays. And advertising jingles—the term writing covers a lot of ground, some of it sad and strewn with rotting carcasses, some of it merry and lined with beautiful gardens. This wide field means there’s also a lot of room for bad writing, about which Your Humble Editor here knows entirely too much.

When you do something on a professional level, you tend to lose some of your wonder for it. It’s an unfortunate consequence: Magicians don’t get wide-eyed when cards are made to disappear, computer programmers don’t get excited when email pops up on their screens, and writers wince and groan a lot when terrible dialog afflicts our television shows, books, or movies. We see the connective tissue, and we know all the tricks.

Normally, I can keep my mouth shut. Normally, I can manage to swallow clunky lines that fall to the ground with an ear-popping thud. Normally, I can handle a surfeit of cliché and a heavy hand with the purple—this because I am a firm believer in the Rules of Polite Society, that web of semi-transparent rules that keeps our world functioning, and one of those rules is that you don’t bother other folks with endless snobbish assessments of the quality of your entertainments. We’re writers, after all; for a lot of us, the reason we started writing in the first place was dissatisfaction with the stuff on TV and in the theaters, leading us to try and do it right.

Recently, though, I’m losing control of my temper when it comes to one time-honored tradition of Bad Writing: The Moron Line.

Morons, All of them

The Moron Line is, quite simply, a line of dialog that is spoken only to help those in the audience who either haven’t been paying close attention or are mentally incapable of understanding anything even remotely complex or fanciful. Here’s a totally made up example:

<In the sewers beneath Los Angeles, The Villain is seen placing a large bomb against one slimy wall. A few scenes later, the Hero and his Sidekick stumble upon the bomb.>

HERO: Look!

SIDEKICK: Jeepers! A BOMB!

HERO: It must have been left here by the villain, earlier, when we weren’t here.

Most of that dialog is not only unnecessary if you have a heartbeat and an attention span of any length, it’s actually annoying, because it’s like that guy at a party who keeps telling you things you already know in a tone of voice that strongly implies he doubts you have the brainpower to know such things. It’s like an echo.

One of the popular uses for Moron Lines is to remind the audience of subtle plot points; having a character regurgitate a little exposition in the guise of summing up or arguing a point. Another is the time-honored Salazar Gambit, where a character—usually the villain—appears onscreen and, just in case you just wandered in from another movie—someone hisses their name:

<The Hero enters SALAZAR’s OFFICE. Cut to SALAZAR, grinning behind his desk.>

HERO: Salazar!

Again, the only people in the room who would be confused as to Salazar’s identity (assuming, of course, that he was in the story previously and this is not some complicated switch of identity or some other potentially confusing plot gymnastic) are folks who fell asleep shortly after the lights went down. Yet the Moron Line survives, because a) it often sounds dramatic to untrained ears and b) a lot of people creating entertainments for the rest of us have nothing but contempt for us, believe me.

ONCE YOU SEE IT …

Once you notice the Moron Line, you can’t unnotice it, and it starts popping up everywhere: Characters describing the clearly visible actions of other characters, characters repeating names and facts for no other reason than to make sure you remember something that happened, oh, fifteen minutes before in the narrative. Often these examples will be paired with quick-cut flashbacks, just to make sure you really notice what you’re being hit over the head with. This last technique could be called The Sixth Sense Are You Paying Attention Technique.

Are there people who need the Moron Line? Probably. I’ve been out to movies where future Nobel Laureates sit and have lengthy conversations about other movies while a movie is playing, and no doubt the Moron Line helps them keep track of at least the Bullet Points of the plot. And sure, there are probably a few functioning morons out there who need the Moron Line. Should these fine folks be abandoned? Of course not. What we need are a sort of reverse Director’s Cuts, where all the Moron Lines and redundant flashbacks are edited in, with a normal cut released for the rest of us with functioning brains.

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From The Inner Swine Volume 15, Issue 1, by the way.

The conundrum is classic: They tell you, as a young writer, that you should always “write what you know.” The idea is sound enough: If you stick to things you know something about from personal experience — be it people to base characters on, or outlandish stories that actually happened, or the infinite details of a trade or hobby — then your writing will always ring true. It was shimmer with that special realistic gravity that sucks people in.

There are limitations, of course. Say you’re halfway through your novel and the plot problems would be solved if someone, say, joined the army. Great! Except you’ve never joined the army. In fact, uniforms, exercise, and weapons — the three main ingredients of military service, peppered with humiliation, violence, and busy work — are so not your thing. You wind up facing the horror that Lazy Writers everywhere fear most: Research.

The Bad Old Days

Of course, in the Bad Old Days, research generally meant either hitting the books at a library or actually doing the thing you needed research on. The former, while affordable and possible no matter your circumstances, was often deadly dull. The latter was only possible if you were a Gentry Writer living off the fumes of a trust fund or something — the rest of us, proles all, were forced to work Day Jobs and do our research on the margins.

Ah, but then the Internet! Suddenly, Lazy Writers like me could just look stuff up. Need to know what a street looks like in a small town in France? Try Google Street View. Everything is out there if you dig hard enough, and you don’t have to put on pants and walk out into the sunlight to the library, or book a flight to France just to snap some photos.

The Bad Old Now

However, disaster looms for we Lazy Writers, because, as usual, Trolls are ruining everything. Wikipedia has always been a dubious place to do real research — you would never have used Wikipedia as the basis for anything serious. Novel research, however — why not. After all, 90% of a novel is made up anyway. Wikipedia was filled with misinformation and politically-motivated edits, yes, but for quick, basic stuff you could at least use it as a starting point.

No more; the Trolls have ruined it. A decline in working editors, an ever-expanding and torturous set of rules in an increasingly insulated Wikipedia, and a growing amount of bullshit going uncaught in the online encyclopedia has put the nail in it: If you want to be a Lazy Writer, you’re screwed.

Worse, a recent experiment found that small errors purposefully introduced to Wikipedia lingered for very long periods of time, meaning that your chances of picking up a detail you think makes you sound smart will actually make you sound incredibly stupid. This, of course, is the fear of the Lazy Writer.

So what does it all leave us with? A lot of novels about being sad, mildly-employed alcoholics, because now all of us Lazy Writers have to Write What We Know.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how so few writers include modern stuff like the iPhone or Twitter in their stories.

My Avery Cates novels are sci-fi and thus by law chock full of all sorts of specious technology and psuedo-science. But I write other stuff, and lots of it. In those more reality-based, mainstream works, I actually purposefully avoid mentioning technology explicitly as much as I can. I don’t have a defined theory on this, but in my own reading I find that the easiest way to jolt someone out of a narrative flow is to mention some bygone technology that is no longer even the slightest bit relevant.

This may just be me, of course, my own experience, limited and shallow. It’s my blog, sadly, and limited and shallow is pretty much what you’ll get. I read a lot of older fiction, early 20th century stuff. Like, for example, Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers, of which I’m fond. The first book in that series came out in 1923. Strangely, I find very few things in those books jolt me out of my immersion in the story, and I realized that this is because most of the world described in the story still exists today, more or less similarly. There are cars, there are telephones, airplanes, world wars, etc. Most of the place names are the same, as are the drinks, food, clothing, etc. Not exactly the same. You do have to overlook some details, but in general, especially for the lazy minded (like me) it’s similar enough that you could set any one of those books in the modern age and change just slight details.

Certain things, like the aforementioned cars, planes, and phones, have existed for so long in basically similar forms that they don’t even seem like technology any more. They’re infrastructure. And thus I don’t hesitate to include them in stories. I don’t usually mention cell phones, or even computers, or, heaven forbid, the Internet. These all seem so recent and likely to be supplanted by newer and more garish forms, so I worry that having my characters rocking out to iPods or texting on their Sidekicks will make the story look very, very old in about ten years.

Naturally, I am no technological prophet, and may be wrong as often, or more so, than I’m right. Screw it.

As a result, a lot of my stories are set in a weird sort of 20th-century-on-a-Star-Trek-episode time frame. It’s obviously a modern city, but it’s kind of a lame one: No one has a cell phone, no one Googles anything, everyone walks or takes trains (okay, it’s a New York-on-a-Star-Trek-episode thing). I like the atmosphere this creates. I like the unrushed pacing that a lack of modern tech allows.

Of course, I myself am a slight luddite who hates cell phones, has never sent a text in his life, and thinks the iPod is a fucking abomination. So maybe I’m just engaging in some wish fulfillment in my writing. I mean, hell, no one has a cell phone in the Avery Cates book either. Hmmmn…..

FANS, I don’t claim to know much of anything at all.

I know a few things: I know that Warren Spahn is the winningnest lefthanded pitcher in Major League Baseball history. I know that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a given object to arbitrary precision. I know that irony is a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the words used. I know how to tie a Square Knot. I can write a Hello World program in BASIC. I know what a Fnord is. See, I know a few things, but nothing, really, of any importance, and nothing, really, that would convince you that I am qualified in any way to write intelligently about Serious Writing Topics. The fact that I’ve published a few literary gems doesn’t mean much, if you consider some of the crap that gets published these days-not just published, but the crap that wins awards. I don’t have any advanced degrees and I’ve rarely won an argument, usually descending to physical threats after about five minutes of stuttering impotence; I haven’t published any scholarly papers on the subject of writing and I’m not making millions through my art. So, there’s really no reason to pay any attention to me, is there? On this subject, I mean. If you need an essay on why a six-pack is good breakfast fare, I’m your man.

Of course, you’ve already started reading this blog. That doesn’t say much for your intellectual abilities, bubba. So I can assume you’re not too picky about what you read, and plunge straight ahead into the subject at hand, which, in case the introductory paragraph wasn’t very clear on the matter, is the usage of Pop Culture references in fiction, and why I think they’re bad, and avoid them.

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Lord knows my public persona is a carefully constructed straw man made of assumptions, half-truths, ominously oblique remarks, and lurid facial expressions, which is to say there ain’t much meat to it. When confronted, in public, with a careful questioner who begins tugging gently at the loose threads that sprout from my opinions, declarations, and explanations, I can only run in fear and cower behind alcohol, meaning I pretend to pass out and refuse to be brought back to consciousness until the offending person is gone. It doesn’t help, certainly, that I am fact-challenged in most of my positions. I prefer to answer probing questions with brisk falsehoods, and hit the ground running hoping that no one bothers to follow up and discover how much bullshit is inside this wicker man.

This really only becomes a problem when I meet new people who previously have known me only through this zine. My established friends are used to my bullshit, and don’t even bother asking me questions any more—the common sense ones (“Would you like another beer?”) have obvious answers (“Yes, and be quick about it, damn your eyes!”) and the ridiculous ones never occur to them. One of the ridiculous questions which always occurs to strangers, however, is “How do you write?” or one of its tributary questions, like “How do you decide what to write about?” or “How much of your real life is in your writing?”

These questions are ridiculous because, to be honest, I can’t imagine their value to another human being. Write your way, baby, and don’t worry about mine.

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Elmore Leonard once famously included in his Ten Rules of Writing “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

The hard part for a writer, of course, is to figure out what those parts are. The first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust spends a lot of time noodling about remembering how a specific cake tastes and ruminating on things like sleeping habits—and if you haven’t read it, trust me when I say you spend the first few dozen pages or so wondering how in the world you got suckered into reading it. And then, IMHO, it clicks into place and you begin to really enjoy it, but there’s a bit of a hump to get over, and that hump could very easily look like he included a part that people skip.

And, certainly, many thousands of people have indeed skipped reading Proust, much to their delight and relief. And loss.

One common question I get when talking to writers at conferences and events and occasionally when I come home to find them hiding in my closet with a roll of duct tape and a bottle of chloroform is “does every scene and line need to be dramatic?” In other words, how do you tell a story that feels real if you don’t offer up the sort of mundane details that Leonard seems to be advising you to skip? You can’t tell a story that is 100% people fighting, saying witty things, and blowing things up. Or, sure, you can, but it would just be … well … kind of awesome, actually. But! Not really a story. So how do you write about characters who feel real without including some of the boring bits that we all deal with?

The answer’s surprisingly simple in concept, although complex in execution: You’re not supposed to skip the boring parts, you’re supposed to find a way to make the boring parts not boring.

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Writing advice is one of those things that a lot of people want from you but are then almost always disappointed by. I’ve seen it plenty of times: Someone says, oh hey, you’ve completed/sold novels, what kind of advice do you have for the aspiring writer? And they are clearly expecting me to say something like drink heavily all the time and the magic booze faeries will dictate stories to you or jot down this ancient Sumerian magic spell and you can summon magic booze faeries to dictate stories to you or possibly sit down and let me buy you expensive cocktails on my dime.

When I offer instead some chestnut about craft or reading widely or avoiding Tom Swifty constructions in your dialogue, their disappointment is obvious, and their eyes always say something akin to you sir are a fraud and I despise you.

So I’ve been trying to think of a piece of writing advice I can offer that is actually practical and useful but also concise and simple, the sort of immediate benefit I think many folks want. They don’t want to hear something that if you apply diligently for the next thirty years might offer some insight. They want something they can go home and do immediately. And in my role as professional bloviator, this is a tool I must have. And after much thought, I have it: Leave yourself hanging.

This is something I’ve done my whole life without actually thinking of it consciously, and it really does work. The concept is simple: When writing a story, always stop for the day at a point where you know what the next thing will be. In other words, never write until you’re unsure of the next step in your story. Whenever I’ve written until I had no idea what came next, when I sat down the next day I was stumped. If I leave even the slightest bit unwritten, I can swing into it easily the next day.

Simple? Yes, but surprisingly not obvious to many. So there you go: A bit of easily marketed writing advice I can apply my unique brand to. Said brand summed up with the phrase Cranky Inebriated Incompetence.