Bad Creative Writing Advice
March 18, 2006 @ 11:40 am
The Internet is full of bad advice for creative writers. Here’s just a small sampling of the nonsense you can find if you look for it.- “Show, don’t tell.” News flash: writing is telling. It’s a completely linguistic art form. There’s no showing involved, unless you’re writing illustrated books like Dr. Seuss or graphic novels like Neil Gaiman. The real distinction to be made here is between writing descriptive language (e.g. when your character is drinking whiskey from a canteen around a campfire) and dynamic language (e.g. when your character is fleeing from rampaging cannibals through the underbrush). Both forms have their time and place.
- “Stay away from synonyms for the word said.” This is just plain creative fascism. People don’t just say things, sometimes they exclaim, declare, thunder, growl, rage, ejaculate, expostulate, or enumerate. A novel is not a play. There are no actors to give expression to your dialogue, so it’s your job as the author to describe your character’s emotional state when speaking her lines.
- “Simplify your language.” Many people these days mistake novels for Hollywood screenplays. Hollywood screenplays are very much concerned with plot and keeping an audience’s attention. Screenplay writers like to condense things down to the smallest nugget possible to keep the film’s running time to a profitable 90 minutes rather than a money-losing 180. If you’re a novelist, you’ve got plenty of room to play with. Stretch out, relax, take your time, don’t rush things for someone else’s arbitrary notion of pacing.
- “Don’t be too wordy.” Telling a writer that she’s using too many words is like telling an artist she’s using too much paint.
- “Don’t use words in your writing that people don’t use in real life.” While it’s true that you shouldn’t pull out a thesaurus any old time and start plugging in multisyllabic words just for the hell of it, it’s pointless to confine yourself to the small subset of the English language that’s used in conversation. Novels are a stylized art form that aren’t necessarily supposed to reflect real life. They’re meant to be read, not spoken.
- “Don’t be pretentious.” Writing is pretentious. Fiction writing doubly so. In fact, one of the definitions of the word pretense (according to my MS Encarta) is “make-believe or things imagined.” If you don’t believe that your imaginings are of great import to the world, then we won’t care to read them. If you don’t act like your imaginings are of great import to the world, then we won’t give any significance to them. (You should, however, recognize when seriousness about your work gives way to smugness or condescension.)
- “Read your writing aloud.” I will admit that this tip can be helpful in many situations, especially when writing dialogue. But once again, remember that a novel is not a film. It’s not a radio play or a speech (or a blog post, for that matter). Some of our best living prose stylists (Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth) write in sentences that are difficult to read aloud. Take the first sentence of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, one of the twentieth century’s great novels: “One summer afternoon, Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”)
- “Use the active voice instead of the passive voice.” Okay, this one is actually probably true. (Passive voice: “It was decided by the Democrats that John Kerry would be the nominee for President.” Active voice: “The Democrats nominated Howard Dean for President instead.”)
The ironic thing about most of these specious writing tips is that they work quite well for straightforward journalism. When you’re writing a piece of hard news, for instance, the object is much different: take the writer out of the picture, bleach out any hint of bias or subjectivity, work in an inverted pyramid structure so your editor can start chopping column inches from the bottom without giving it too much thought.
But when you’re writing fiction, the ground rules are different. Name me a novelist who writes without a hint of bias or subjectivity, and I’ll name you an unread novelist.
The same probably goes for bloggers, too.
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Comments
“Don’t be too wordy.” Telling a writer that she’s using too many words is like telling an artist she’s using too much paint.
Um, well, sorta. In my line of work (technical writing), wordiness is a sin. There is something to be said to the use of “spare” language. Quoth the pop tune: “Sometimes words get in the way…”
Oh, definitely. I think that many of these tips are quite appropriate for technical writers (and business writers and press release writers and web writers and journalists and so on).
I guess my point is that these rules shouldn’t necessarily apply to *fiction* writers. Different audience, different message, different style.
How should construct sentences or paragraphs of someone talking on the phone.
Barbara, I’ve always just seen it done as one long monologue punctuated with ellipses (…) to denote when the person on the other end of the line is speaking.
Re: passive voice:
Strunk and White claims that “Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard.” (”There is” isn’t in the passive voice. And “can be made” is. Ironic? Just a little.)
People seem to think that just because some instances of passive voice (notably “X was done by Y” when the emphasis is on the doer, not the receiver, of the action), the passive voice is always bad. It isn’t. There is a time and a place for both active voice and passive voice.
Simple rule: if you’re putting the emphasis on the object of the action, put it in passive voice (useful if you’re trying to keep a certain POV in third person, but another character is doing something to the POV character), but if you’re putting the emphasis on the doer of the action, it goes in active voice.
“It was decided by the Democrats that John Kerry would be the nominee for president” is better as “The Democrats decided that John Kerry would be the nominee for president” (and better still as “that they would nominate John Kerry for president”) because “It was decided by X” is awkward and, yes, unnecessarily wordy when “X decided” is possible.
To take one famous document for examples: Sure, “that the Creator has endowed them with certain inalienable rights” works, but “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” puts the emphasis where it belongs, on the men among whom governments are instituted (the men among whom they institute governments?). “All men are created equal” should be what, exactly?
So when the agent of the action is either unknown, or multiple (”blog posts, articles on grammar, grammar textbooks, grammar books not meant for grammar classes, editorials, English teachers, and just about everyone else have all demonized the passive voice recently” vs. “the passive voice has been demonized recently” if you’re not trying to convey that a lot of people have demonized it recently but rather that it has been demonized at all), what’s wrong with the passive voice?
(It’s not weak-sounding, either, or wishy-washy, or anything that the word “passive” tends to connote in this phrase: see for instance a passive-voice analysis of Churchill’s descriptions of war at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003414.html.)
The passive voice myth should also be filed under “bad but well-meaning creative writing advice.” It holds true sometimes (and I have seen plently of people misuse it), but overall, it’s unhelpful to the point of being harmful when people bend over backwards to avoid making that “mistake.”
-Gwen.
Thanks for this, Gwen. You’re right, the passive voice is “demonized” too often when it should merely be mildly discouraged.
I’m a writer who likes to write long, complex sentences with lots of dependent clauses and extraneous adverbs. So using the active voice, for me, often has the added benefit of cutting the sentences down to a more easily digestible size.
ohhhhh. . . I thought the explanations were the nonsense found on the web. The tips are pretty good. I am a creative writer and I teach university writing, and if i used ejaculate/exclaim/whisper/breathe in long, convoluted, murkey, complicate sentences, you, dear, reader, might think that I thought a little too highly of myself and be turned away from the execellent prose of a many-lettered woman of exceptionalism.