Great article for new writers (or writers who think they've nailed it but haven't)

[Dawnstorm]

Originally Posted by Pepper

I think people, like Roger, who write these articles are writing the article because they've had it up to here *points above head* with shitty writing. They know those writers have potential if only they were pointed in the right direction. Logic would say that if you do the opposite to what made your manuscript hopeless drivel, it might actually be good.

I thought that this was a given. Am I missing something? Keep this thread going, I want to see some points of view on writing articles like this one.

Well, since you ask...

It's things like "the right direction" and "opposite to what made your manuscript hopeless drivel" which I'm suspicious of. Both contain implied value judgements that, I think, should be left to writer. If you do the "opposite" of what someone else thought makes your manuscript hopeless drivel you shoot like a rocket into unfamiliar territory. You're going to make more "mistakes". In the end, you come undone.

There are many ways to do something; and they don't divide into shitty and great. Generally, when people make those "mistakes" they try to do something with this. Good critique tries to pinpoint the intended style (as if this was easy) and work from there, rather than give cliché blanket advice.

Clearly, such articles have nothing to go on, so they can't do that. But what they can do is refrain from evaluation before they finish explaining how the elements in question work. Once your finished, you can then give your opinion on what's good or bad style, but be sure to call it your opinion.

The problem is that there's so much cliché advice out there that has the ring of truth simply because you hear it so often. It's words without much meaning behind them, and most of the time they include their own disclaimers, so they have the "guideline" way out when someone corners them. The stuff that should be discussed is left to intuition, and since seasoned authors have better intuition than new authors, in the end this leads to some sort of elitism where confidence in your own writing - that is confidence that you know what you're doing - is the magic key. The rule becomes a rite of passage.

Let me demonstrate with the passive voice, since this is my pet subject ([url=http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=92036]see here[/url), for example):

Originally Posted by Article

Passive voice. This is the single most common error.

Step 1. Passive voice is an error of style.

This is where I say to myself, "No, it isn't, but try to convince me."

More people make this mistake, and make it more often, than any other error in the writing of fiction.

An assertion, designed to make you anxious. You really need to be vigilant, lest you use the evil passive voice.

Let me rephrase that sentence, so as to illustrate the problem: This is the mistake most commonly made in all fiction.

Now we demonstrate the passive voice. Where is this going?

Note that in my second rendition, no one makes the mistake.

Facepalm.

Groan.

This is nonsense. Of course, somebody makes the mistake. The very fact that you're using the passive voice tells you somebody makes the mistake. It's just that we're not, by default, told (<-- hah!) who does.

It is simply “made.” It is not clear that it is a mistake in writing. You could interpret the second rendition to mean that readers make the mistake.

What? The reading does not produce words. If you don't produce words, you don't produce the passive voice. This makes no sense whatsoever. If I'm reading in the papers that a thief was arrested, I don't wonder whether the thief arrested himself.

Not only is this poorly phrased, it's probably also a poor example.

In passive voice, nothing is ever anyone’s fault, because people do not do things. Things happen to people. “Irving ate the food” is active. “The food was eaten” is passive.

What happens to people in "The food was eaten."? I'm under the impression that the same thing happens; Irving does the eating. It's Irving's fault in both cases, though we don't know that in the second. If we need to know, we can add a "The food was eaten by Irving." Irving's fault. Want to make it more evident? "The food was eaten by Irving, not me."

Note that Irving has vanished completely.

Yes. And that's probably because I didn't want to talk about Irving. So what's the problem?

The food and the action of eating are made more important than the person who does them.

Exactly. That's the point of the passive voice. I repeat, what's the problem?

Writers most often drop into passive voice when they are unsure of themselves, when they don’t want anything bad to happen to one of their characters, when they don’t want their characters to do anything bad.

At this point I should probably do a random check of a few SYW pieces to test that assertion, but I'm lazy. I really doubt that's true, though. Any of you can go there and see for yourself. Does a passive voice verb avoid attributing bad actions to a character? If so, is this the point of the usage, or a side effect? (Are the bad effects later made clear?)

On the whole, this just goes on stigmatising the passive voice. Writers who use this are (often) weak-willed and unsure of themselves.

Remember that you story is all happening on paper. You can change everything later with a stroke of a pen. Don’t be afraid. Be bold and adventurous. If you make a mistake, you can fix it later. If you kill a character, you can bring her back to life in the next draft. If your character commits a murder, you can give him a really good lawyer.

Joe killed Bill. Bill was killed. --> Bill is dead either way. Joe did it either way, too, although the passive version doesn't say so. I'd be curious, though, how you go through a story with Joe as a character and the killing of Bill as an important action without ever making a connection between the two. What on earth does this have to do with the passive voice. If you have Joe kill Bill then it's in the story. And, yes, you can take it out.

Note that passive voice cannot — and need not — be completely eliminated. See previous sentence for an example. There are times when it works.

And here's the disclaimer. Since a lot of passive voice is appropriate you need one of these while you're merrily stigmatising it. Otherwise you'd lose your credibility.

Is the author wrong?

Not really. There are points in there that merit discussion. But the arguments don't show those up. There is really no opportunity to dive into the mechanics. There are assumptions at the bottom of advice of this sort, and the most prominent here is:

The subject of a verb should be the "doer" of the verb.

Which is confused with:

A sentence should attribute responsibility for the actions it expresses.

I don't think I've often seen people address this while they're condemning the passive voice.

An example: In Politics & Current events there is a thread about a gruesome article whose headline reads:

Puppy is kicked to death in park

According to the writing-article, I'd have to assume that the headline authors are scared to attribute responsibility. This is possible, but it doesn't make for a very interesting analysis of the sentence. Also, I think it's wrong; blame is an important part of headline, even if it's secondary.

I'd argue that what we have here is a two-pronged attack at the readers emotions.

First, we're supposed to sympathise with the puppy. So we have the puppy in the subject position. We read puppy and before we read on there is this awwww-moment.

Then we hit the "kicked to death". A shock. But since the puppy is "kicked to death", there is also a "kicker". This is implied in the verb. Compare this to:

Puppy dies violently in park

No kickers. Nobody at fault. We're left to mourn the puppy.

The choice of the verb-phrase "kicked to death", prepares for anger. At the point in the text when we do get to the culprits, how do you think we'll respond to them. This is strategic postponing of blame, while at the same time implying it already.

If you want to dodge responsibility, you're better off deflecting it by innocuous verb choices: studies show... bombs land... etc. All in the active voice, I might add.

Implied agency is an important aspect of the passive voice. You're saying that somebody/something is responsible, but you don't, by default, say who (although there is always the by-phrase available).

When and where and why to use the passive voice is a complex topic. It's interesting. But this article just brushes it aside as an error of style. Passive voice:grammar atrocity. It's sometimes necessary, like a mercy killing maybe?

As you can see with the puppy example, you can use the passive voice to align sympathies with the victims rather than the perpetrator.

Again, this does not mean that the article is wrong. I've recently come across an article that shows that people who buy into rape myths are more likely to use the passive voice when re-telling the rape than others (although they grouped passive voice together with nominalisations ["rape occurred"], so that's not quite about passive voice in the end, plus it was about German not English - but I don't think that makes much of a difference). This is fascinating, especially since English has the "get" passive, which does shift causation towards the subject:

The thief was arrested. --> The thief got arrested. --> The thief got himself arrested.

The article isn't wrong, but it's one-sided, and its most likely effect is to instill anxiety about the passive voice in new writers. It's stigmatising an important (but not essential) part of the English language.

You're not a good writer if you know to avoid the passive voice; you're a good writer when you know how to use it. I don't really like articles who do little but peeve about their pet dislikes in an unsystematic manner. This article is one of those.

And here's the rub: my post - this one - peeves about my pet dislikes in articles. Go figure. On the one hand, I feel moved to make posts like this one, to dispel what I consider harmful writing myths. On the other hand I end up disliking my own posts, because I feel they're engaging in the same sins as the articles I'm disliking - on a different level: I'm basically saying "Don't read articles like this one." Again and again. A dont. When according to my line of argument I should be telling you how to make the most of these articles.

For a couple of years now, I've been aware of that pattern, but it's so damn hard to break. I'm working at it. Meanwhile you get the occasional post like this one (though less than you'd have got a couple of years ago).

[bonitakale]

Well, I frequently see the same problems he points out. And I agree with John Joseph Bonforte/ Lorenzo Smythe in Heinlein's Double Star--"Truths cannot be too often repeated."

Besides, some of that stuff was aimed at my writing! Ouch.

Who said we need to be reminded more than we need to be educated? C.S. Lewis? Not sure. But it works in other spheres than the moral one.

[bearilou]

Originally Posted by Pepper

.......... Because 97% of the time when writers don't "follow the rules" at least to some degree, their writing is complete and utter shit on a stick?

Is that a good enough reason?

Not only is their writing shit, they then justify why they've made these decisions in disregarding learning the rules by (in many cases) screaming "OMGSTFU IT'S MY STYLE! GET OVER IT!"

*has NEVER been hit with that before*

[Pepper]

Wow Dawnstorm, that's one heck of a post! I agree with some of your points. I think that people who write articles like this should speak about both sides of the coin (albeit I think they should do it in separate articles). It's not fair to exclude certain tools as evil, or to make it seem that way, as Roger apparently does.

However.

I note what Bearilou said. I think this article is aimed towards people like she mentioned. The newbie writers who don't know good writing from bad, who've never heard of "rules". In fact, they don't even know that the "mistakes" they're committing have even been done before. They think that every word they write is pure gold, because they think that all that matters is that their story makes it to the page. 'Style' doesn't make it onto their radar.

IF an article goes into both sides of the argument, ie. "you CAN actually use passive voice sometimes", I foresee all the above mentioned writers skipping around in glee. Yay! All those seasoned, published writers who told me I should get rid of that passive sentence here, and that passive sentence there can all get screwed! Whee! I chose to do things that way!

This is why, at the bottom of these sort of articles, the writer usually states that one should learn the rules before one attempts to break them. It is showing that yes, while the rules can be broken (and broken well), one should be well-versed in the rules first.

I create illustrations and figure sculptures. Many times, I've seen newbies to these crafts plough in and draw/sculpt hoards of people, believing that every new work is a gallery piece. Except, they didn't learn human anatomy first. Their characters are skewed and out of proportion. They look wrong. Their work is unsaleable. But, god forbid someone critique it, the anatomy errors were deliberate. It's the artist's style. (I guarantee these defences occur more often in this industry than it does in the writing world- artists are CONSTANTLY being fed that "art is in the eye of the beholder", and that each artist "can express their personal vision") Why should someone tell them they should brush up on human anatomy? There are artists out there selling their work all the time, and the anatomy of their characters certainly aren't realistic!

They fail to realise that there is a difference between something that has been stylized, and something that looks downright wrong. There are conventions of anatomy to adhere to even when skewing a character's proportions. If you don't know those conventions in the first place, you can't possibly learn how to skew them.


I think this article does its job, because it is aimed at new writers who need to learn the writing conventions. More established writers often benefit from these articles because they were once new writers, and reminders never hurt anyone.

[Cuthbert]

Interesting thread, I opened a separate one abotu the EVil Passive Voice...

[Tina Marie]

The article was filled with some great stuff! Thanks

[Pepper]

I'm glad it helped.

[AZ_Dawn]

I really like that last one, especially this part:

Very rarely, this myth is true. It is, however, far more common for someone to crank out a mass of technically inadequate, self-indulgent, incoherent drivel, and then hide behind the myth, rather than accept the failure of his or her own work. It’s a tempting option. Writing crap makes you look stupid, whereas being a misunderstood artist makes you look cool, sort of the way wearing a beret does.

It makes me wonder if the slushpiles could be significantly reduced by including the words No geniuses need apply to the submissions guidelines.

[VileZero]

Originally Posted by Pepper

Roger MacBride Allen talks about common mistakes in writing. It's nothing we haven't all heard before, but Roger explains everything so thoroughly I feel it deserves a good read. And to all of us who say there should be no rules in writing, he makes this final statement:



http://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/mistakes-in-writing/

I apologise to those who have read this before- I'm aware the article has been around a while.

I have trouble taking this seriously, having read Allen's Star Wars novels.

[Chasing the Horizon]

I agree with a lot of what was said in the article, but at the same time I agree with almost everything Dawnstorm said. We have all these quite similar lists of 'rules', but none of them spend time explaining how too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing. They assume all beginning writers make the same set of mistakes, and the fact is they don't.

Showing comes extremely naturally to me. I was showing everything, never using summary or telling, before I came to AW and saw the 'show don't tell' rule everywhere. Cool, I was doing it right, then! Except, I wasn't doing it right. I was spending thousands and thousands of words showing unimportant things that could've been told in a few paragraphs. Because everyone said 'show don't tell', this was one of the very last major mistakes I realized and corrected. To this day, I can't recall ever having seen an article or long informative post on the very real danger of over-showing.

I had a similar problem with the advice against passive sentence structure. Active sentence structure came naturally to me, and it took me a long time to learn that some passive sentence structure was necessary to keep all the structures from being too similar.

I don't think it's coincidental that the parts of writing I mastered first were the ones where I was breaking the rules in the expected way. I'm too stubborn to change my style to conform with the rules, but seeing all the advice against what I was doing made me realize it was problematic and work extra hard to learn to do it well.

And, on a somewhat related note, I've seen way too many novels lately where the writer followed all the rules perfectly, thus sucking all life and uniqueness out of the prose.

[cptwentworth]

Was it just me, or did he seem a bit condescending? I was turned off and didn't want to read the whole article.

[Pepper]

A proposition, if you’ll indulge me.

A common complaint seems to be that these articles fall short in some way. They don't explain the whole story. They make perfectly valid (but sometimes risky) writing tools sound completely evil. The people who write the articles sound condescending. The people who write them know jack-all about writing themselves.

....................... an idea.

Why doesn't the AW community put together an all inclusive article for newbie writers? Like, "Common Things Writers Do That Make Their Manuscript Shitty & How To Fix It". Or how about, "Writing Tools: How To Use & Abuse"

We're all writers here, and a whole swag of us are published. What’s stopping the best of us from doing better than Roger did?

[dpaterso]

Eek! Can you imagine the eternal arguments and counter-arguments over every tiny little piece of advice that's offered?!

Not saying it's not a good idea, in theory. But, eek!

-Derek

[CaroGirl]

The article was interesting, if annoyingly didactic in tone.

The worst thing, for me, is that I know those rules but have NO IDEA if my writing is any good at all. Frustrating. It's like how I know all the rules of golf. Unfortunately, it's easier to know how much I SUCK at golf.

[bonitakale]

Originally Posted by Chasing the Horizon

Showing comes extremely naturally to me. I was showing everything, never using summary or telling, before I came to AW and saw the 'show don't tell' rule everywhere. Cool, I was doing it right, then! Except, I wasn't doing it right. I was spending thousands and thousands of words showing unimportant things that could've been told in a few paragraphs. Because everyone said 'show don't tell', this was one of the very last major mistakes I realized and corrected. To this day, I can't recall ever having seen an article or long informative post on the very real danger of over-showing.

This is a very important point. Any time you concentrate on one particular mistake, you're ignoring the opposite one.

And it's all too easy to write what happens next instead of what important thing happens next-- so you get pages in which all that happens is that A phones B and sets up a meeting at Charlie's Rib House, and then A goes to Charlie's Rib House, and sees B, and they say hello and shake hands, and A orders a beer.... When all that's needed is, "They met on Thursday at Charlie's Rib House."

[hmg]

I have seen it, but it's always a good reminder.

[Pepper]

Originally Posted by dpaterso

Eek! Can you imagine the eternal arguments and counter-arguments over every tiny little piece of advice that's offered?!

Not saying it's not a good idea, in theory. But, eek!

-Derek

Oh right! I forget that we writers are a stubborn lot. Move on, nothing to see here.

[blacbird]

Under Errors of Substance is this gem:

In The New Yorker, you have stories about people on Long Island who have no problems, whining to each other about their problems. With the exception of the final example, these stories are unpublishable because they have been done to death. (For some reason, The New Yorker just can’t get enough of whiny Long Islanders.)

I knew there was a reason I find The New Yorker mode of fiction boring and unreadable, but I've never seen it codified so well.

caw

[icerose]

Perhaps I enjoy a sarcastic tone because I rather liked the article.

As to include everything including the hows and whys that would easily fill a book.

Might I suggest to those who feel it's lacking to write their version of that subject and thoroughly cover it rather than be really irritated over an article they feel is incomplete?

[Pepper]

Originally Posted by icerose

Might I suggest to those who feel it's lacking to write their version of that subject and thoroughly cover it rather than be really irritated over an article they feel is incomplete?