Here are some more tips from my ongoing Online Writers' Conference.
I am still in that generous kind of mood.
I hope you are, too.
Last week, I told you one of the big infomercial lies they want you to believe: Show, don't tell.
Show, don't tell is the Sham-Wow of craft.
If you know what the hell Show, don't tell means, and you do it, you will be magical.
Today, I am going to tell you two more things that are lies. For some of you, I am re-gifting one of them. It is one thing I always talk about with the writers I coach.
Here it is: To be a writer, you need to have a thick skin.
That is a lie.
To be clueless and insensitive; to have an impermeable, monolithic ego, you need to have a thick skin. To dumbly believe that your story is brilliant and original, even though you cannot spell or use punctuation and set it in a place called "Middle Earth," you need to have a thick skin.
Those are the only things that thick skins are good for.
And maybe living in a malaria zone.
The only writers who are better off with thick skins are ones with lots of money who keep going back to expensive writers' conferences to share samples of their brilliant and original story (for they almost uniformly only have ONE story they've been carrying around since the fucking Reagan Administration) that has some spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors (but that's what editors are for, right?) and happens to be set in a place called "Middle Earth."
That was a really long sentence.
So I will inject a free third lie: Sentences are not allowed to be that long.
Not.
Allowed.
You must always count the words in your sentences. Once you have gone past the number seven, insert a little black dot followed by something you typed using the shift key.
How long was that sentence, anyway?
That was a baby. Only 76 words.
Maybe I should not say this. In my book, Winger, coming out from Simon and Schuster in spring 2013 (and, by the way, it is completely finished with edits and on its way to copy editing, page design, and illustration)... um... there is one sentence that has 233 words in it.
Heads will explode.
Where was I?
Oh yeah. The other lie.
I love Ernest Hemingway.
That is not the lie.
I really do love him.
So much he would undoubtedly be uncomfortable about it. If he had a pulse.
But this is wrong:
The first draft of anything is shit.
Hemingway said it. The big fat giant THEY keep repeating it at expensive writers' conferences.
I'll bet my house that some knucklehead with thick skin and a fat wallet even got that shit tattooed on his body somewhere.
But it is wrong.
No.
No, the first draft of anything is NOT shit, you moron.
The first draft of something that is going to always be shitty is shit.
That is the truth.
Try this:
Try making soup out of shit, Hemingway.
Even you wouldn't eat it.
Class dismissed.
8 comments:
These are all nostrums offered to wanna-be writers to convince them they can do it. There's a "you can do it" industry built up around writing that I increasingly resent. No one told me I could do it because I didn't ask, I just did it. The proof that you can do it is a published book and a check.
Also totally agree on sentence length. I use short sentences. Many aren't actually sentences. Because at those points I want to slow the reader down, make the reader want to go faster but not let him. I also use really long sentences because I want the reader rushing to try to keep up. I want the reader to be out of breath.
Did the reader understand the story you were telling? Did the story work? Yes? Then I guess you used the right length sentence.
I feel grateful that Michael Grant used the word "nostrums" because that just shows how cool he his. He knows words.
You are right about thick skins. I think it's better to have a thin skin and keep writing your story.
I so enjoy these fireside chats of yours.
At first I thought you wrote dangerous kind of mood. That would have been fun too.
Can't say that I've ever counted the words in a sentence before, afterall, as long as it works for what is needed, then there it is.
I'm enjoying your online conference here. Dispelling a few things that need to be broken.
Here's my experience with writing: Do what works for you. Honestly, you will write how you will write. Tailoring your writing for others, be they agents, editors, publishers, or even readers is refusing to be true to yourself. Which is the exact opposite purpose of writing.
Keep 'em comin, Drew!
Last year in a school proficiency exam (can't remember the name of it) my son wrote a short story that used short sentence fragments and single word sentences to give pace and "sound" to his work. He explained what he did to me and to his teacher. She knew his writing ability so she understood what he was doing but he was graded below his grade level because he did not write within the paradigm. He was only in third grade so it's not an important grade in any way to him but it was a fascinating experience in how the educational system works. The teacher, who was wonderful, said she wanted to encourage my son to write in ways that were creative and effective just as he'd done in the exam but that she' have to work more with him on the paradigm that exams would require him to work within so he could succeed in both worlds.
Fascinating.
Joe,
I can't even begin to tell you how infuriating that is.
Not only that, it is evil. Pure evil.
As wonderful as the teacher may be on the spectrum of humanity, the teacher has obviously swallowed heaping mouthfuls of the Kool-Aid.
Standardization = Success = Happiness
Thinking outside the box is wrong. Thinking inside the #2-Pencil Bubble is the way to grow up and play your part in America.
This is evil.
Yes. If she had truly been taking a stand for creativity then she would have changed the rating of his work and allowed for something outside of the paradigm... but she didn't. It is another example of forcing children at a young age to color within the lines. I understand the need for having different paradigms but at this age it seemed to stomp on creativity. The more I learn about how children are taught, even at progressive sounding schools, the more I worry about their future as creative thinkers.
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