Basics of Writing Well

We've gone over why you should write poorly and bribe better if you intend to be published, but for the moment, let us assume that you aspire not to write a "franchise," but to write something like "art," which I must re-iterate will be something along the lines of "art I make for my own sake." There are a lot of things to talk about in this area, and what we need to do first, is to establish your first and most important principle, "It must be simple, if it is going to be effective." Now, your writing doesn't have to be simple-minded, but you need to be very clean and efficient if you want the piece of writing to work. We're going to amplify how to apply our "simple writing is effective writing," principle to specific circumstances, as the general principle and its meaning may not make a whole lot of sense to you without some examples. Just remember, simple is effective, and we'll go through some ways to apply that later.

A first question a young or aspiring author might have is, "What should I write?" That question is not a stupid question. It isn't even close to a stupid question. I recommend either getting out a notepad, or starting a word or text file and simply writing everything that interests you. List love, sex, war, the supernatural, whatever it happens to be, just write down what interests you, and try to make the list you brainstorm as long as you possibly can. Now just leave that file or set of notes aside for a minute, because we are going to hit on a next and rather tedious piece about writing in our next and rather tedious set of paragraphs, and that is "grammar and style."

As a young man who was an anarchist - literally - "take your rules and leave me alone," is not a foreign concept to me. However, we write at least in part to communicate to others, and so we have some basic conventions to apply to our writing in order to communicate effectively in our writing. Most of us do not get a good education in grammar and style at the high school level, and at the University level it is expected you already know how to write in grammar and style, so we as writers often end up with no one to really teach us how to do what really needs to be done if we are going to write well.

One easy way to get a good grip on grammar and style is a little paperback called "The Elements of Style," originally written by a man at around 1915 or so, whose last name was Strunk, and repeatedly updated by Oxford University up until the present day. There are longer books that deal with untying the knots of the terrible ambiguities present in the English language, but even for me, the 90 pages of "The Elements of Style," are not an easy read. It isn't so much because they can take their rules and go home as it is that reading about grammar and style is horribly tedious. You can almost always find a copy of this book at your local used-book reseller for around 3 to 6 dollars, or you can spring for a new copy for around 8 or 9 dollars, and it is really up to you.

While you're considering reading 90 pages of grammar and style, what a party! - let me give you a few pointers here and there. First, and this is really important, don't rely on expressions in your writing. I come from an Appalachian background, and even today when I'm conversing I have a tendency to use an expression for everything I want to communicate. Writing that way, even when you're writing "art my own sake," doesn't really produce "art," and also, that kind of writing really isn't in the English language. You might want to use expressions a great deal in dialogue, as even highly educated people tend to use mostly expressions in their parlance, but trust me, you will get some major results in your writing if you apply yourself to using true English grammar and vocabulary in your writing, instead of a string of expressions.

Let me give an example: "She was ready to walk out that door." Okay, fine. Now, in context, that might be better than what we're seeing of the sentence alone, but what exactly are you trying to say? Maybe you are trying to say that she is suicidal and doesn't want to live anymore. Maybe you are trying to say that she has finally decided to leave her husband. Maybe you are trying to say that she has decided to go on a journey instead of staying locked in her home.

A good exercise is to write just a couple of paragraphs, and then to remove the expressions from the paragraphs. This may be really difficult for you to do when you first start out, but don't let trying the exercise drive you insane. If you can't work out how to re-write the expression as an actual sentence, leave yourself a note somewhere and try again later. Trust me, functional illiteracy is not confined to any local area of the world, and even in many cases, it isn't confined to "lower class," versus "upper class." Try the exercise, and if you can't work it out, then make a note of it and come back to it.

I think it will be too complex to hit specific grammar issues here, but I want to mention just a couple of things. First, with pronouns, read it over and see if you can tell where the pronouns are pointing. Try to be objective, even though you are the one who wrote the piece of text. Alternating names and pronouns works on some level, but even then you can have amibiguities, or you might be able to have a cleaner looking text using more pronouns. The pronoun problem is one of the worst ambiguities in English, and could fill about 100 pages if we were to try to disambiguate the problem completely, and there are books that spend at least 100 pages on that disambiguation.

Second, English sentences should not end with a verb. Normally they should end with a noun or an infintive of some type (an infinitive being a verb conjugated as a noun) and there are a couple of other possibilities that are less frequently used but "legal." Often the way to cure a "verb ending," is to repeat part of the sentence that occurs before your second verb in the sentence. I'm having trouble thinking of an example at the moment, but this is a really common writing mistake. Look in a typical trade paperback, and you should pick out sentences ending with "be," in about a paragraph or two, and if anything is really rotten, then ending a sentence with the word "be," is really rotten. The repetition required is first, a bit more typing or writing to do, and second, can sometimes lead to a Dickens-esque grotesquerie of too many words, but the basic rule is, if the sentence ends in a verb, look to repeat a part of the beginning of the sentence.

Futher, look for passive voice, as this can also often lead to "verb endings." Using passive voice is almost always a mistake. Honestly, I can't even think of an instance when passive voice could be used for effect when it wouldn't be possible to get a better effect using another grammatical form. An example of passive voice would be, "The store had been open for 2 hours when the man arrived at the store." All you need to do to fix the problem is a flip-flop of the direct and indirect object. In this extreme example, it also sounds quite a bit less idiotic. "The man arrived at the store when it had been open for 2 hours."

Another important rule is to not use double-negatives in sentences at all. There are really obvious forms of the problem, but problems with double-negatives can be very subtle and hard to pick out. Your sentence may already mean what it says, but that ironing out of the double-negative will make the meaning clearer, and will also usually make the sentence less cumbersome to read.

One of the problems with "contemporary style," is that ease of readability is by far the focus of "contemporary style," rather than the beauty of the prose. In my opinion, "contemporary style," is too bland. The problem is that prose that isn't very clean and sleek as contemporary style is supposed to be, often turns into what is called "purple-prose." Purple-prose is prose where an attempt to be sophisticated in prose-style turns into tartuffery, and "too bland," actually is better than "purple prose."

A big purple-prose problem is "too many clauses," and yours truly loves the English dependent clause, so he has been through a very hard time with "too many clauses." At one time in English history, it was typical to simply put an entire paragraph into a series of dependent clauses and larger sets of dependent clauses separated by semi-colons. However, even if we might not love "contemporary style," we do not want to go back to that by-gone age.

Here is another one of my broad rules about writing, and that is "read it all out loud." When writing fiction or poetry, this is especially important, particularly when you are looking for a certain music and flow to the poetry or prose. Even in non-fiction writing, where you want technical clarity and precision rather than music, it can help to read the work aloud because it can highlight grammar or formal flaws, or simply flaws in the readability of the work.

So we have two broad rules, and two exercises so far.

The rules:

1. Keep your writing simple.
2. Read your writing aloud.

Also, I mentioned this principle in regards to doing writing excercises, but it also applies to writing in general. That principle is, "don't drive yourself insane doing your work as a writer."

3. Don't drive yourself insane doing your work as a writer.

The exercises:

1. Brainstorm all of your interests, no matter how many, even if the interest doesn't seem to be worth writing about.
2. Write a few paragraphs and look for some of the common errors I mentioned, and try to re-write the sentences to exclude those errors. If you can't figure out how to fix the error or errors, then make a note to yourself and come back and try again to fix the error or errors later.

I'll be back, with a post about organizing a writing lifestyle in just a few minutes, after I make a cup of coffee, and dig into the cupboards for a fresh pack of smokes. No, I do not advocate smoking cigarettes unless you are unfortunately addicted to smoking until you die. I am already addicted to smoking cigarettes in that exact manner.