Tag: writing community

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Tips on Instructions and Directions on Advice

Because I taught high school for a long time, I had to develop skills in writing instructions. I needed students all to approach tasks like exams in a consistent way for the sake of their own achievement. Then I had to figure out how to do the impossible, which is to get teenagers to actually read and then follow the directions I had written. 

I tried to have fun with it, because why not? I would write a long list of numbered directions with the pretext of familiarizing students with their textbooks, the sort of activity that will make the eyes of the most conscientious students glaze over. Included in the list would be instructions to stand up and say, “Yes, yes, yes” and to compliment their teacher’s (my) clothing. In the next few minutes we’d have fun as they discovered the first and last numbered instructions were crucial. Instruction number one said to read ALL of the instructions before doing anything. The final instruction was to ignore ALL of the previous instructions and simply sit and wait.

There are two ways to pass this test – you could be one of those who did everything and then laughed at themselves at the end, or be the person who actually read ALL of the instructions and sat bemused as everyone did strange things. The students who truly failed the task were those who maybe pretended to read the instructions but stopped, suspecting that there would be no consequence for doing so..

Anyway, it was an interesting lesson in following instructions. So, who cares?

Anyone in writing and publishing knows that often the only way to make any money is to support other writers. Write about writing. Edit. Conduct workshops. Organize events. The work product of the dizzying number of people who do this casually (not the paid in-depth editors, and not from people like Kurt Vonnegut who know and teach by doing) is to come up with a bunch of instructions, rules of writing if you will, a grab-bag of principles and tricks that help you.

I don’t need to get into them. We’ve all seen the authorial agony aunts littering the web with punchy quips and loads of advice. And they have some applications for sure. But I’ve always wondered if following all of them just means that I come up with the same drivel as everyone else, presented in the same way, with similar characters, themes, and style.

I have only ever found one tip really useful. The hardest thing of all is to cut out all the stuff that nobody wants to read, Elmore Leonard’s “parts that people tend to skip.” Thinking about that, distancing yourself from what you write to that degree is an ability most of us never fully realize. Certainly, some successful authors (no, not naming names, as if anyone cares what I think) reach a point where they refuse to be edited any longer, their books get longer and less interesting and readers feel mostly nothing but disappointment if they ever finish them.

So, what about this little post? Which parts will readers skip? 

All of it, of course.

So with a keystroke, I ….

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Two Journeys

I am increasingly critical of writing as I get older. While television writing has improved overall in the last few decades, a lot of screenwriting is only tolerable because it passes quickly as the director moves from one scene to the next, and the visual and aural context predominate.

Novels are different. The writing is all there is. As a result, I am increasingly discerning about what I read. I am one of those people who has no trouble not finishing a novel that isn’t going anywhere or is going somewhere I don’t care to go.

And I have discovered that going somewhere is vital for me. I want something to happen, I want to be curious, I want to be surprised, I want to be engaged in looking ahead at the consequences of conflicts and decisions. This sort of novel has a narrative landscape dominated by events and a journey of dynamic awareness.

The Big Question in this sort of novel from chapter to chapter is, “What are they going to do?”

There are a lot of people who don’t read that way. They are looking for depths of descriptions, depths of feelings, and depth of descriptions about feelings. The narrative landscape is dominated by emotion and the journey of affective awareness.

The Big Question from chapter to chapter is, “How are they going to feel?”

Of course, there’s lots of room to combine both, and good writers use characters to bridge the gap.

Writing is different from reading. I write with intent and my goal is to entertain, shock, surprise, or provoke using plot as my first, but not only, focus. The nameless reader for whom I am writing, that entity out there I am trying to satisfy because I cannot write for everyone, wants to know what happens next. They want to be shown, but they also want to participate, perhaps to see things that characters do not. I don’t mean solve a mystery, although mystery writers want to give readers the chance to do that, but rather to anticipate and then, I hope, to be pleasantly surprised even if the outcome is tragic.

And when feelings are involved, they are primarily shown by words and actions, not by pages of thoughtful description. Readers who want the other sort of novel, the one where internal dialogues and complex emotional development are paramount, won’t be satisfied by the thrust and parry of a plot-driven book. The thing is to keep them engaged by diving into the real emotional consequences of plot points and use them as motivation to drive the plot further.

Tricky stuff.

So, there are likely to be a lot of readers who don’t finish something I write because it doesn’t take a deep dive into the affective effects of all that plot.

That makes me feel bad. The question is, though, what will it make me do?