January 9, 2012
Advice From A Scribe
At the risk of casting myself in the role of some kind of grizzled bromide dispenser, I’ve been dealing with young writers for years—first as a hopelessly under-qualified volunteer instructor at a writing center in Seattle, more recently as an editor at my college’s newspaper and then at VICE Magazine. I’ve never thought of it as my place to teach anyone anything about writing, let alone pass alone hard and fast rules, but I’ve found that would-be make the same mistakes over and over again, and when I’m asked for my opinion on their work, I inevitably give the same advice.
I’ve been thinking lately that it might be a good idea to write my oft-repeated guidance down, both to clarify it for myself and in hopes that maybe one of the young writers I’ll deal with in the future will read it and save me the trouble of telling them how to write better. And who knows, it’s possible that some of this stuff will even be helpful to someone. So here are my “rules for young writers,” which I offer with two caveats: These aren’t really rules, and they might be helpful to more than just young writers.
1.Write simply.
This is the first commandment that gets ignored again and again by people who believe that writing is a special, secret art that demands complexity, that sentences need to be adorned with adjectives and adverbs and grammatical flourishes in order to be “good.” Inevitably these ambitious prose-smiths overload their sentences with so many metaphors and comparisons that meaning gets lost and the reader gets a headache. Sometimes you can have a man simply walk down a hallway, or sit down. Sometimes a house can be described as “big and ugly” and left at that. Besides simply making things clear for the reader, there’s another, deeper reason, to value simplicity: If you strip your prose of adjectives, adverbs, and similes, you’ll be able to figure out whether what you’re writing about is actually engaging or interesting. Chances are, if you need to gussy up your language in order to keep yourself interested in what you’re writing about, it isn’t worth writing about.
2. Write with transitions.
I’ve found that people who throw around fancy words and needlessly complex sentences also tend to ignore the nuts and bolts of writing. As much as writing is an often beautiful art form, it’s also a technical practice that demands mundane attention as well as inspiration. Just as impressionists and abstract painters could also draw a person that could be recognized as a person, if you’re trying to be a “great” writer you need to write sentences and paragraphs that people can follow. This means making sure that in a story, the action is clear—or unclear for a very specific reason—and if you’re writing nonfiction, the line of thought is easy to follow. This can be as simple and workmanlike in a piece of journalism as inserting the line “But some disagree” between two quotes representing opposing viewpoints. Or transition between scenes in a fiction story with, “Across town…” (Remember rule 1?)
3. Please, please think about your metaphors.
Once while in a writing class a poor fellow student wrote something like, “his empathy gleamed” and the teacher paraded the sentence in front of the class. “Does empathy gleam?” she asked. “Could someone please tell me what that looks like?” It was a humiliating experience for the student (the teacher later got fired for something unrelated), but the advice is still good: Before you write about a quagmire that’s between a rock and a hard place or a face spinning in confusion, think about the meaning of your words and what you’re saying, not just what you’re trying to say. English is an extraordinarily rich language and words can have .
