I got over six hundred million hits.

That’s one heck of a lot of articles about the rules for writing fiction, and I’ll probably get to posting about that next time. This time, though, I’m going to talk about something else. Specifically, when I started looking at some of the “rules,” I found useful stuff like this:

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

–Margaret Atwood

This is the kind of writing advice I’ve loved ever since I read Ursula le Guin’s advice to would-be writers (“Learn to type”) back when I was a wannabe. (Fortunately for me, my mother made me take the secretarial typing class for one of my electives in high school; I doubt that I’d ever have taught myself to touch-type on my own. But Mom was a writer herself, and she made sure I had the tools I was going to need, even if I wasn’t really interested in learning to type when I was sixteen.)

It’s also the kind of writing advice that is a) unexpected and/or unwanted by a lot of folks (judging from the tone of some of the web sites I buzzed through) and b) undervalued by even more folks.

The undervalued part comes, I think, because of the unexpected/unwanted part. Looking at the interviews and FAQs and questions in general, it’s pretty obvious that when most people ask a published writer for advice, they want advice either about creativity or about craft. Not just any old advice, either: the Secrets of the Craft. Preferably in a list of five to ten pithy statements that can be applied cookbook fashion, like “never use adverbs” or “never use a dialog tag other than ‘said’” or “don’t use more than three exclamation points per book.”

Some writers, faced with the obvious expectations of the interviewer, give in and provide their personal list of pet peeves or bad habits, usually without appearing to realize that the peeves are a matter of opinion or that other folks have different “bad habits.”

Other writers try to fulfill the interviewer’s expectations while still telling the truth about what writing is like. So you get a few true-but-not-specific recommendations, like “Read a lot and write a lot” (Stephen King for that specific phrasing; the sentiment is common), and various contradictory and not-very-useful comments about the particular writer’s process, like the one writer who recommends going to cafés with a notebook and the other one who claims writing should only ever be done in total privacy.

(My non-favorite example of that last was the gentleman who stated very firmly that every writer should always have at least two stories in the first-draft stage at all times, so as to be able to switch from one to the other whenever the writer became stuck. It obviously works for him, but I’ve tried it, and for me it is beyond counter-productive except during the very, very early thrashing-around-in-search-of-a-plot stage. Past that point, having a second story in the works is, for me, like trying to make forward progress while towing a black hole. It generally ends in disaster for all concerned.)

And then there are the folks who, like le Guin and Atwood, confound the interviewer and the would-be writer’s expectations by telling them what they need to know, rather than what they think they want to know. Things like “Get an accountant” (Hilary Mantel), “Don’t wait for inspiration” (Esther Freud), “Create your own (rules), suitable for what you want to say” (Michael Moorcock), “Don’t let Google tempt you away (from your writing)” (A.M. Harte), “Don’t drink and write at the same time” (Richard Ford). And the things that nearly everyone says: Read. Write. Revise. Carry a writing implement and something to write on. Practice. Write. Make time, don’t wait for it. Work hard. Edit. Discipline. Write. Read. Learn to type. Write.

So here, unattributed and in no particular order, are a few things that caught my attention during the course of the weekend. Should this inspire anyone with interest in next year’s convention, the link is here.

On to the quotations:

I’ve been artificial for over a year now.

So if the monsters are human, and the humans are monsters, it’s really a definition problem?

In case you haven’t had breakfast yet, there are cheese blintzes in the consuite.

Some of us write by the seat of our pants.

Point of view solves all your problems.

If the author is being obviously sneaky, this is not a plus.

Genre books are built around secrets.

The author borrows the reader’s brain; if he leaves potato chips ground into the carpet, we have a right to be upset.

History will do what it wants, and so will I.

Cows on spaceships? OMG, the methane!

Yeast-risen bread is hard to make when you’re migrating.

Nobody is going to domesticate a wolverine.

Writers like audiences. They pay the bills.

I’m a writer; I don’t know how to retire.

Is this row knitting friendly?

I am not in this position, but I’d sure like to be.

I was trying to see how many genres I could fit into one series.

Writing about one main character is not limiting if that character provides what the author needs artistically.

Readers come at you from such different directions that it is catastrophic to pay attention to them.

If you worry about making your audience angry, you will bore them, and then it’s time to get a job at Walmart.

You can either leave readers wanting more, or leave them wanting less…and if you leave them wanting less, there is retroactive damage to the series.

People in most fantasy novels are strangely healthy with very good teeth.

I am impervious to your eyeballs.

The world is weirder than we thought.

Oh, are those fingers tasty?

A well executed death makes the world seem less messy.

I don’t write fiction. I’m not that brave.

Sometimes you just have to line your characters up against a wall and ask, OK, which one of you guys is screwing things up?

Not all experiments get you a parade in the streets.

Being miserable in a tent is intrinsic to the teen experience.

If you’re not a control freak, you’re not really a writer.

When society is monstrous, monsters become human.

If you want money, become a banker.

You’re not going to run a whole culture on nothing but mushrooms.

Having two publishers is like being a bigamist who doesn’t want to give up either wife.

Humans use magic; monsters are magic.

There is nothing less interesting than a universe in which no one ever grows, no one ever changes, and no one ever dies.

“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”
- Mark Twain

One of the things that a great many people seem to know for sure is that they don’t need any knowledge of the rules of grammar, punctuation, or syntax in order to write to a publishable standard. It is possible that I am overstating this; perhaps many of them merely know for sure that what they write is correct, or at least allowable. Whichever it is, it comes under the last part of that Twain quote: what these writers think they know for sure simply isn’t so, and it’s killing them…or at least, it’s killing their stories.

A glance through the various websites that allow writers to upload their fiction without any pre-screening requirements should be enough of a demonstration for anybody. I don’t know what some of these people are thinking. It’s obvious that they didn’t even bother to run the spelling checker before they put their stuff up for everybody to see. And I really don’t understand those writers who blast any reviewer who dares to mention the fact that they obviously don’t know what a run-on sentence is, or how to correctly punctuate dialog, or the difference between “affect” and “effect.” Are they trying to drive readers away?

But incomprehensible as this behavior is when I see it in amateur arenas, it pales beside the would-be professional writers who blithely send their un-proofread, un-reviewed, un-spell-checked work off to editors in hopes of selling it. What are they thinking? (Answer: They aren’t.) This is like going to a job interview for Ambassador to France dressed in stained and badly worn blue jeans, a muscle shirt, mismatched socks, and filthy old running shoes with the laces in knots. It doesn’t matter what your credentials are, or how well you might actually be able to do the job; you aren’t going to get in the door for the interview.

I have some sympathy for the writers who truly don’t know any better. It is very hard to improve your skill set when you don’t yet realize that it needs improving … and I’ve run into an unfortunately large number of younger writers who were never really taught grammar, punctuation, or syntax because their teachers were more concerned with encouraging them to be creative and get their stories down on paper. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging creativity, but in the long run, you still have to know the rules. At a bare minimum, you have to know that there are rules and that you don’t know what they are, or you will never realize that there are helpful things you still need to learn.

I have no sympathy at all for the prima donnas who do know their work is full of errors, but who are convinced that it doesn’t matter. “It’s fiction,” they say. “I don’t have to follow any rules.” (Wanna bet?) Or: “Oh, it’s the copyeditor’s job to fix all that.” (It isn’t.) Or “Editors are used to seeing unpolished manuscripts.” Well, yeah – editors see a lot of  manuscripts full of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspelled words, and incorrect punctuation. They see them in the slush pile. And what they do with them is, they pick them up out of the slush pile and move them into the “rejections” pile as fast as they can possibly manage. It’s an obvious and easy filter: if the writer didn’t care enough about the work to clean up the grammar, spelling and punctuation, the writer probably didn’t care enough about it to do a decent job on the plot, characterization, and setting, either.

The real trouble, though, isn’t with the inevitable editorial rejection. It comes earlier than that. The real trouble with ignoring the basic rules of English is that it limits a person’s ability to write effectively.

A writer whose work is littered with sentence fragments and run-ons because he/she doesn’t really understand what a sentence is (much less what fragments and run-on sentences are) cannot make effective use of sentence fragments to increase tension or pacing or emphasis, because there are already so many fragments in his/her stuff that another one isn’t going to have any effect at all. He/she can’t use a run-on sentence to give a breathless feel to a particular character’s dialog, because run-on sentences are all over the place already, and one more isn’t going to be a change. In extreme cases, such writers aren’t even aware enough of syntax and sentence structure to get adequate variation in their sentences, resulting in prose that just plods along, regardless of whatever exciting or emotional thing is happening.

It’s the contrast from standard English that makes sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and other non-grammatical techniques work. If everything else is in standard English, dropping some unusual syntax, punctuation, or grammar into the text has an impact because of the change. The less often the writer does it, the bigger the impact. Lots of non-standard syntax, grammar, etc. means no change, no contrast, and no effect.

Those problems are a severe handicap while writing. Even if the writer (or their tame English major best friend) goes over the story later on and fixes the punctuation, grammar, and spelling, the story won’t be as effective as it could be. The writer has lost the chance to get the maximum possible impact from his/her writing, because a bunch of really basic tools are missing from his/her toolbox and some things are nearly impossible to retrofit during revisions. Besides, if the writer doesn’t know what a run-on sentences is, and that they need to avoid it most of the time unless they’re looking for a particular effect, they aren’t going to be able to get that effect any better during revision than they were during the writing phase.

Of course, if a writer doesn’t care about doing the best work, or even about doing a good job, that “writer” doesn’t have to know the basic rules of English (or whatever language they’re using) and doesn’t need to think about learning them. I don’t really understand why such people want to write, though.

Those two famous quotes have been flung at writers and would-be writers for the last century, often with a smug certainty that no one would ever dare to argue with with them. I mean, it’s Flaubert! It’s Twain! And they agree! It would be hard to find anything more literarily respectable.

Nevertheless, I spent years being just a little uneasy about the whole notion of the need to find the perfect word, every time. It sounded good, but I didn’t trust it. Then one day I ran across a quotation from Ursula le Guin: “Flaubert has been set up as such a universal model, and his le mot juste has been made into such a shibboleth, that it’s salutary to watch the poor man founder in a quicksand consisting entirely of mots juste.”

“So,” I thought to myself, “this perfect right word thing isn’t something that works for everyone.” I felt relieved, but I wasn’t entirely sure why until a few days later, when I was pouring over my current chapter-in-process, struggling mightily with a recalcitrant sentence. I finally put down something or other as a placeholder and went to bed, figuring that if I got a good night’s sleep, I’d have a better chance at finding the really right way to say what I wanted. Lo and behold, morning came, and I looked at the placeholder sentence, and could not for the life of me see why I’d been in such a lather the day before, because it was perfectly fine.

I thought about that for a while, and realized that this happens to me at least half to three-quarters of the time. What is worse, sometimes I’ll work for half an hour trying to bring up that mot juste  that I know is buried in my brain somewhere, and then a day or two later, it will suddenly come to me…and when I flip back triumphantly intending to replace the pallid, limp, totally wrong word I’d ended up using instead, I find to my horror that this word I’ve spent so much time and anxiety on is not the right word at all. Indeed, whatever I ended up using is much, much better, most of the time. That “mot juste” was only the perfect word in my imagination; if I’d been able to call it up instantly, I’d have seen that and gone on and not ended up wasting half an hour.

A novel is a lot of words, and most of them, quite frankly, aren’t anything special. You have to go a long way to make a big thing out of “the” or “and” or “is/was,” which are generally right at the top of everybody’s list of “most often used words.” Even if it’s true that you really can’t use anything else most of the time. Also, if you do get one word a little bit wrong in a 100,000 word novel (or in one of those 300,000 word monsters that are currently so popular), you’re talking 0.001%, and most people just aren’t going to notice (or if they do, they’ll figure it was a typo).

Right about then, I noticed that most of the people I knew who were pushing the whole mot juste thing were either poets themselves, or were people who gave poetry first place on their personal hierarchy of literary arts. And while there are very long poems, they tend to be the exception rather than the rule these days…and if you get one word a little bit wrong out of thirty or fifty or five hundred words, it sticks out a lot more than one or two or ten out of 100,000.

And then I found out that Virginia Wolf had some of the same reservations (or at least, I think that’s what she meant when she said “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.”

After I read that, I felt a lot better about my doubts. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, like everything else in writing, the whole question of Finding The Right Word is a balancing act. Because sometimes there really is a right word; it just happens a whole lot less often than I think it does. More important, I find that if I try to completely ignore the whole question of finding the perfect right word, and just write whatever seems close, I end up getting sloppier and sloppier, until my “first draft” is well nigh unreadable and requires more work in revision than I’d have done if I’d just taken a few minutes to consider alternatives the first time through.

So these days, I try to limit the amount of time I spend hunting for the perfect word. I give myself less time to agonize about it before I put in the “placeholder” and move on. Oddly enough, I seem to have just about the same (small) number of later revisons as I did before I instituted this policy, which says to me that I’ve got the balance right…for now.

For about ten minutes. And then I realize that the scene that wants to come next is not the scene I’d planned. Furthermore, it is another scene that I don’t actually want to write, which means it will be a slog even if I know what’s going to happen in it, which I don’t, exactly. I’m going to need a bunch of new characters, a new settlement, and something else (I’ll know it when I see it, but I haven’t seen it yet).

For years, whenever I got to this point in a book (and I always get to this point at some point, if that makes any sense), my mother would look at me as if I were three again and say, “Why don’t you just have them do something else?” or “Just make something up!” And I would sigh and explain that it’s not that easy.

Whenever I reach a point where things are not going according to plan, there’s a reason. The trouble is, I don’t always know what the reason is, let alone how to articulate it. Sometimes, I can figure out in hindsight why I couldn’t make the characters do that clever thing I’d planned for them to do, or why I ended up putting a particular scene before another instead of after, or whatever. More often, all I know is that this is how the story had to be told, and whatever I’d planned just wasn’t going to work.

In general, this actually a good thing, no matter how much I whine about it, because it saves ever so much time and effort if I just write the correct scene, instead of writing whatever I’d planned on and then needing to delete it later. But I have a tendency to be analytical (stop snickering) and I can’t help wishing I understood the reasons behind whatever I’m doing.

In this case, I can see some of them. I’ve been kind of focused on the action level of the plot for a while (not that this is a slam-bang action-adventure; on the contrary), and I need to develop some of the other plot-levels – emotional and spiritual growth, mainly – and possibly some more background before I get to the big mystery and the family catastrophe I expect to be coming up. Theoretically, I could cut straight to the mystery, but that would wreck the pacing on just about every level I’ve got in this story so far…not to mention messing up whatever thing is behind my backbrain’s insistence on doing this other stuff now, rather than later.

It’s taken me years to get to the point where I trust my backbrain even when I can’t see the reasons for what it’s doing (like I said, analytical personality here), and even now, I whine about it a lot. But I’ve learned through painful experience not to argue when my backbrain presents this sort of ultimatum.  Roger Zelazny said it better than I ever could:

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous, or brilliant – you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.

Trust your demon.

“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”  – W. Somerset Maugham

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
“And every single one of them is right!”   - Rudyard Kipling   (This one is practically my motto.)

 ”In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.” – George Orwell

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.” –  H. G. Wells

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find matter therein with which to hang him. ” – Cardinal Richelieu

“Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.” – Gene Wolfe

“Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.” – Samuel Johnson

“If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” – Stephen King

“Publishing is the only industry I can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don’t know how to do their jobs. ‘I don’t know how to sell this,’ they complain, frowning as though it’s your fault. ’I don’t know how to package this. I don’t know what the market is for this book. I don’t know how we’re going to draw attention to this.’  In most other occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job.” - Donald Westlake