flashboy dot org

Chris links to a writing guide by editorial consultant Pat Holt, describing the “Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)”. Now, the idea behind the piece is perfectly fine – identifying the most common blind spots that all writers have towards their own work – and it generally does a better job than most of the trite, second-hand and dogmatic collections of writing tips out there. And I can’t argue with Chris’s co-opting it as a j’accuse against Dan Brown; sweet lord above, he’s certainly guilty of all these sins, and many, many more.

But even given that, every few lines there’s something so screamingly, dunderheadedly small-minded, simplistic or just plain daft that it makes you want to go uuurghagahgnnngngngnrrr and smash yourself about the head with implements. As such, I suspect a diatribe may be in order. I’m afraid this is going to get rather long, for which my apologies:

1. REPEATS
Just about every writer unconsciously leans on a “crutch” word…

Okay, she starts out with something fairly non-controversial; those unconsciously repeated stylistic tics that do nothing but nag away at the reader, an intrusive reminder of the authorial presence. But her focus on individual words – rather than just sentence contructions – almost borders on the obsessive, with Holt at one point upbraiding an author for using the word “quickly” more than a dozen times… in a 336 page book. is it not possible that there were simply a lot of rather fast things happening in it? Sure, be on guard against needless repetition, but there’s one thing guaranteed to kill writing quicker than crutch words. That’s dragging out the thesaurus to sprinkle “posthastes”, “apaces” and “lickety-splits” around, because you used “quickly” 25 pages ago and you’re on a quota.

2. FLAT WRITING
“He wanted to know but couldn’t understand what she had to say, so he waited until she was ready to tell him before asking what she meant.”

Something is conveyed in this sentence, but who cares? The writing is so flat, it just dies on the page.

Or, to paraphrase: “this writing is rubbish. Don’t let your writing be rubbish!” Which would be roughly as useful. What exactly does Holt mean by “flat writing”? Too much exposition? Vagueness? Too few adjectives? Pointless description? Inexpert clause wrangling? Her second example is “Bob looked at the clock and wondered if he would have time to stop for gas before driving to school to pick up his son after band practice.” The first sentence is flat because it’s vague and poorly described; the second because it’s an over-precise piece of unwanted exposition. All they have in common is a deliberately amateurish construction, which has very little to do with flatness, but a lot to do with Holt disgusing the fact that she’s not actually sure what she means by “flat”, and certainly has no useful tips for what to do if you suspect you may have found it.

3. EMPTY ADVERBS
Actually, totally, absolutely, completely, continually, constantly, continuously, literally, really, unfortunately, ironically, incredibly, hopefully, finally – these and others are words that promise emphasis, but too often they do the reverse. They suck the meaning out of every sentence.

Yeah, I was pretty much with her on this one. Obviously, hyperbolic adverbs – oh, my beloved adverbs! – are the film critic’s stock-in-trade, but I find it hard to argue with any advice that slags off Dan Brown for

“Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino.”

- a sentence that should have been strangled at birth. But then Holt goes and says this:

Another problem with empty adverbs: You can’t just stick them at the beginning of a sentence to introduce a general idea or wishful thinking, as in “Hopefully, the clock will run out.” Adverbs have to modify a verb or other adverb, and in this sentence, “run out” ain’t it.

Largely, adverbs modify a verb or another adverb. But guess what? Occasionally, they can also modify an adjective. Nowadays they can sometimes modify a whole sentence (exactly as “Hopefully” does here). Mercifully, this perfectly fine form of usage is now so well established in common speech that there’s not the slightest thing Pat Holt can do about it.

(Frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn.)

4. PHONY DIALOGUE

This should be easy, right? Spotting dodgy dialogue is a piece of cake.

Avoid words that are fashionable in conversation. Ann Packer’s characters are so trendy the reader recoils. ” ‘What’s up with that?’ I said. ‘Is this a thing [love affair]?’ ” “We both smiled. ” ‘What is it with him?’ I said. ‘I mean, really.’ ” Her book is only a few years old, and already it’s dated.

Whaaaaaaaa? Yes, because God forbid that the reader should be able to identify what decade your book’s set in from the way the characters speak. All characters, no matter how contemporary and vibrant and edgy your work, must talk in a timeless manner that divorces them entirely from their era. Because nobody reads books that have outdated slang in them. This advice isn’t just overstated or vague, it’s staggeringly, crashingly, adverbingly wrong.

What’s worse is, she misses a good opportunity to discuss a real issue with the use of modern hep-speak in prose. A good deal of identifiably 1990s/2000s speech is extremely reliant on its vocal and physical delivery to provide context and meaning. The best known example is the much chattered about upspeak (where statements are inflected as though they were a question?), but there’s a huge range of different modes, and they’ve all got their own TV shows. Friends-speak is different from West Wing phrasing is different from the slang of the Buffyverse. How to approximate in prose the clipped, context-and contraction-heavy voices of scarily media-savvy teenagers? How do you cleanly convey the difference between “Nuh-huuuuh” [delivered with emphatic forward hand waving] and “Nuh-huuuh” [delivered with defensive raised-hand body posture]? And how would do you do that run-on sentence followed by embarrassed beat and lowering of voice for the conclusion thing that both Toby and Sam on The West Wing do so well without is seeming horribly gimmicky and annoying after the third time?

On this vital issue of our times, Holt is silent.

5. NO-GOOD SUFFIXES
Don’t take a perfectly good word and give it a new backside so it functions as something else…

Now, we all know that verbing weirds language, with nouning and adjectiving not too far behind. They’re frequently ugly, and Holt rightly picks up on horrors like “meticulousness” and “statementize”. When she attacks “-ness” words, she makes a valid (if slightly over-generalised) point about their frequent, um, ugliness. But then when she says:

The “ize” words are no better – finalize, conceptualize, fantasize, categorize. The “ize” hooks itself onto words as a short-cut but stays there like a parasite. Cops now say to each other about witnesses they’ve interrogated, “Did you statementize him?” Some shortcut. Not all “ize” words are bad, either, but they do have the ring of the vulgate to them – “he was brutalized by his father,” “she finalized her report.” Just try to use them rarely.

- it becomes quite clear that this is no reasoned style-guide, but an irrational set of personal preferences and prejudices that are being wheeled out under the guise of sound writing advice. “She finalized her report” has the ring of the vulgate about it? Jesus.

In any case, Holts effort to bowdlerize people’s writing has now banned adverbs, words with suffixes and words that are used in popular conemporary speech. Given that repetition is also outlawed, one begins to worry that the English language will very soon start running out of words. I mean, what will she ban next – the verb “to be”?

6. THE ‘TO BE’ WORDS:

Oh.

I’m not quite sure what her point here is, beyond the general assertion that all variants of “being” are essentially static, and are uncomfortable constantly shouldering the dramatic weight of every sentence. She has a point about thriller writing tending to place undue emphasis on fairly blunt sentences that involve being – “There was the gun” – but she ignores that this trend extends to many other basic verbs. “Then she saw the gun;” “That was when he heard the gun;” “Clive fired the gun;” and so on. It’s not just a being thing.

Anyhow, once again, the examples given have flaws that are nothing to do with her supposed criticism.

“He couldn’t believe there was furniture in the room. There was an open dresser drawer. There was a sock on the bed. There was a stack of laundry in the corner. There was a handkerchief on the floor….”

This sucks because of the repetition, not because of the phrase “there was”. It’s never entirely clear what level Holt’s pitching this advice at, but you have to feel sympathy for any writer klutzy enough to not have already realised that this sucks, because they’re probably also klutzy enough to then go through their manuscript and erase every single form of “to be”. Thus leaving themselves with a boldly experimental work in which many actions take place but nothing exists.

The point being, if Holt really had a problem with “to be”, she should have come up with more examples of poor usage which weren’t just lists. Otherwise, she should just have criticised the use of lists.

7. LISTS

Okay, this one gets a pass.

8. SHOW, DON’T TELL

As does this, which is pretty sound advice that actually gives well worked-out examples of what to avoid and how to improve it.

9. AWKWARD PHRASING
“Mrs. Fletcher’s face pinkened slightly.” Whoa. This is an author trying too hard. “I sat down and ran a finger up the bottom of his foot, and he startled so dramatically …. ” Egad, “he startled”? You mean “he started”?

That’s right, it’s another “you should try to avoid your writing being rubbish” suggestion. As Holt offers no tips on how to spot awkward phrasing beyond these two examples, one must assume that she chose them carefully. Which is why it’s odd that the second is just a malapropism (or possibly only a typo). And the first – well, context is everything. Is this phrasing awkward? Or might it, in fact, be a rather good was of describing someone blushing – I immediately imagine that Mrs. Fletcher is a rather proper Edwardian lady, terribly embarrassed, but far too well bred to do anything so vulgar as redden. Trollopes go red; ladies pinken slightly.

But yes, if Mrs. Fletcher is a hard-bitten, loose-cannon vice cop in Detroit, it’s probably awkward phrasing. But you’re either a good enough writer to recognise that, or you’re not; Pat Holt isn’t going to help you here.

10. COMMAS

And a remedial grammar lesson to finish off with. Which is fine by me, the more commas, the better, as far as I’m concerned. Yes I said yes always use commas yes and semicolons yes and all forms of parenthesis yes and I said yes I will yes yes yup alright then.

Holt finishes off with a dire warning, wrapped up in a justification.

The point to the List above is that even the best writers make these mistakes, but you can’t afford to. The way manuscripts are thrown into the Rejection pile on the basis of early mistakes is a crime. Don’t be a victim.

I’m not an editor. I’ve never had to read my way through a slush pile. I’ve never even submitted any fiction for professional publication, while Pat Holt has decades of experience in the publishing industry. But in my non-expert way, I can’t help feeling that a series of vaguely prescriptivist gropings towards a formula for writing that’s merely competent (and no more) isn’t going to help a single person get published. And that, moreover, the suggestion of an arcane and prejudiced process that unfairly discriminates against the inexperienced is little different from the literary snakeoil peddled by the disreputable, which has no effect beyond distracting would-be writers from addressing the real flaws in their work. It’s a mixture of sound advice and baseless personal preference, where the more cogent points are also the fuzziest, and the least useful for actually tracking down and correcting those failings.

Post Script: Some better advice (to my untrained mind) can be found here, from the ever-reliable Teresa Nielsen Hayden (more here and a linkdump here), while I’m also quite fond of Elmore Leonard’s piece here (which in turn come from this thread, wherein we had some fun with bad writing).