Writing Like a Hack

So anyone who knows me well has heard that I'm trying to write a novel - if you know me really well, that I'm, madly, writing three novels simultaneously - and as I am one of these "plagued by self-doubt" types, I spend an awful lot of time thinking about writing.

In particular, I've spent a while thinking about bad writing, and what makes it bad, and thus how to avoid doing any of these things myself. Which to me is oddly more useful then writing a list of things *to* do. Here are the traps: Avoid them.

So these are my thoughts. I've mainly written them down for myself, but others may find them interesting/helpful/feel impelled to send me a long email explaining just how and why I am completely wrong.

I'll state now that I'm talking about prose and dialogue, not plot construction or character development. Which is a whole other ballgame.

1. Kitchen Sink

Word selection creates mood, of course it does. You just have to read Titus Groan to see Mervyn Peake using oppressive vocabulary and intricate syntax to turn the unprepared reader into a gibbering wreck. He creates an ancient, suffocating, tradition-laden castle, and hammers the prose into an appropriate shape.

However this does not mean that those wishing to create a moody atmosphere ought to resort to:

The jaundiced, choleric moon hung leeringly in a stark, affronted sky. Stars pocked its face like scars, and with the aching slowness of a leper, the moon passed in and out of fetid clouds, as a man would pass, stumbling, blind and sickly, through a voluminous fog of fetid, poison gas.

Must... throw... ALL... literary... techniques.. at... paragraph.

Note: All terrible examples are being made up by me, because to actually go find examples would be (1) Effort and (2) Mean.

2. Error: Dialogue Failure

'There is a monkey in the conservatory,' Alice said.
'My goodness. Is there?' Anna said.
'There is! I can see it through the glass,' Alice said.
'But how can it have got in here?' Anna said.
'Through the window, one assumes,' Alice said.
'No, Alice,' Anna replied. 'I mean into the country? It certainly couldn't apply for a Visa.'
'Maybe it's a Polish Monkey - that's the EU for you,' Alice said.

Yes, there are entire pages of dialogue in Dickens written like this, but that doesn't mean it's good. Writing has moved on. Sometimes you can do it deliberately, to create the feeling that a conversation is tedious or repetitive, but then you're being bad for effect.

3. You just said that.

To turn around the old George Orwell point about concision: Good writers aren't redundant. The easiest example is again dialogue:

'Why won't you all just leave me bloody alone? I hate you all, you've ruined my life, I wish you were dead!' he shouted angrily.

Basically, the adverb at the end of the paragraph makes everything exponentially less effective, even approaching ironic. If a person is clearly angry in their dialogue,  then adding "he said angrily" is not only pointless, but condescending to the reader. As if they're so thick they won't get the idea without the word "angry" being in the paragraph.

4. In Fact, Just Kill the Adverbs

Sometimes adverbs are necessary, sometimes they are a great addition to a sentence, but regularly using adverbs is like surviving on a heroin addiction, or trying to keep awake through caffeine. Each shot might achieve the purpose you want, but each also becomes steadily less and less effective, until eventually your life - and your prose - is a sordid, wretched, toneless mess.

(Well okay, perhaps not sordid.)

Suddenly the door was pulled open and Alejandro stepped rapidly inside. Had they followed him? He didn't know. Nervously he looked around and then quickly crossed the room. Clearly he needed to think fast.

Charlie Anders over at io9 has a personal crusade against adverbs, so I'll defer to her.

5. BANG!

Now, this is a bit of a wibbly one, but I'm going to go for it anyway. Very rarely, in a good novel, will you ever find "!". The way that I always end up thinking about it is that there is something fundamentally cartoonish about the exclamation mark. Like the cards in the old Batman TV series that went "BIFF!", "THWACK!", "KAPOW!" with Pop art garishness. Indeed, the old secretarial term for an exclamation mark is a "bang". They are just too exaggerated to take seriously.

As a result the places where exclamation marks work well  are normally (1) In dialogue, as said by a slightly over-the-top character, (2) in certain kinds of fantasy, sci-fi and comedy where characters are often slightly larger than life (I get the feeling I could be in so much trouble for saying that).

So this works (I think):

The professor was head deep in the pile of papers, leaning ever further forwards, as if he might at any moment topple in and swim in the sea of loose-leaf journal articles.
'Give up, sir. You're never going to find it.' His tired assistant looked dispiritedly at the man's disappearing torso.
'Diligence, my boy. Diligence!' The professor's voice came from somewhere deep within the pile. 'If at first you don't succeed, then try, try... Ah! I appear to be stuck.'

However:

The door swung open with terrible slowness, to reveal at last a ravaged body, swathed in blood. She was dead!

Just makes me snicker. Again, perhaps its a taste and period thing, because you get it in Poe and Lovecraft, but it looks damn silly if you ask me.

Note: Cash prizes will be awarded, however,  for use of an interrobang, the most awesome unused piece of punctuation in existence:

‽

6. Fictionland

This is often more of a problem in TV, but you see it in books too. We are now so overwhelmed by fiction that they have their own Lexicon, and increasingly you see people behaving in ways, or saying things, that you never do in real life. Whole emotional and dramatic beats have now become familiar to us, but that nobody ever actually does. The characters are living in Fictionland, not the real world.

As Mike was leaving the room, he suddenly turned and looked back.
'Oh, and by the way Tom,' he said. 'Thanks for everything.'

Have you ever done this? No.
Would you ever do this? No.
Why is your character doing it? I don't know, but he's the reason I'm about to stab you.

This one I've basically wholesale lifted from The Writer's Tale by Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook. Essential reading.

7. Dropping the Curtain

We're probably all familiar with the old Wizard of Oz concept of "the man behind the curtain", and writing is fundamentally that sort of a trick. You're getting someone to believe in a world that you're creating, in people who aren't real. The author should never be apparent, floating around like some form of God moving the story into position.

If this happens:

'Oh, this damned door,' Gale said, pulling at the handle exaggeratedly, as if to deliberately draw the reader's attention to the fact, 'It's always sticking.'

Then you know that inside of half an hour someone is going to get stuck because, at a vital moment, the door won't open. If you're in a horror film then you can write most of the scene without any more context than that.

Which leads to...


8. The Idea-Success Gap

Developing point 7, I would probably go so far as to say that being able to see the writer is basically the worst mistake of the lot. A reader can survive a dull passage of dialogue, or an overly-wordy few pages, but breaking the spell you've created really screws you up.

The worst iteration of this, then, is when you as the reader can see what the writer is trying to do, and can also see how s/he's failing.

'Oh John, I do declare that you've spent the last hour daydreaming and not listening to me at all.'
He looked at his companion with a wry smile. 'But how could I be day dreaming, Mary? It's two in the morning.'
She laughed. 'Oh John, you're just so funny.'

What the writer wants to do is demonstrate that their character, John, is a terribly witty person, so he dashes off a retort and then his companion tells us - just in case we missed it - just how funny it was. The writer has explicitly stated that s/he wants to create a certain effect and has clearly not done so - this is one of few cases where I will look at a book or script and be willing to declare that a writer has abjectly failed.

(That said: They're published and I'm not, so how do you like them apples, Mr McCartney?)

Basically, if your main character is supposed to be a modern day Oscar Wilde, you'd better be funny. Your  witticisms may take you half an hour to construct perfectly - and that is after all the secret, that you can create characters far smarter or more interesting than yourself through the magical ability to edit - but at the end of the day they need to be good enough to support the story and the characters.

Of course, regarding John and Mary, the other option is that Mary is just a hopeless sycophant who's trying to get into John's boxers, and would probably laugh at him singing the Birdie Song. With actions.