Micro-level bad habits

A lot of story analysis and critique starts by focusing on macro-level aspects of storytelling: characterization, narrative, worldbuilding, plot, and the ways one develops or reveals these things over the course of a novel. Ultimately, though, how one presents characterization, growth, personality, action, worldbuilding, plot, and everything else in writing happens one word and one sentence at a time.

It is, therefore, a good idea to go back and look at the micro level every once in a while, no matter how experienced one is. I don’t pull my copies of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire or Modern English Usage (Second Edition) or The Elements of Style off my bookshelf as often as I did thirty years ago…but I do still keep them within easy reach of my computer and I do still pull them off the shelf to check things every so often.

More important (for me, anyway) is periodically checking my own work for awkward and infelicitous sentences and ancient bad habits that I thought I had gotten rid of ages ago. Almost all of them have to do with superfluous words that I use in an attempt to be clear … and which end up muddling things.

The first type of problem/bad habit creeps back in because common writing rules a) often have good reasons behind them, but b) are rarely, if ever, absolute. “There Is No One True Way” is practically my motto, and there are a lot of sentence-level “rules” that are often deliberately broken by fiction writers in order to produce an effect. At one end of the range are actual rules of grammar (for instance, sentence fragments are grammatically incorrect, and would certainly be frowned on in formal Standard English, but they are common in dialog because people actually talk this way, in action scenes to give the feel of things happening rapidly, and in internal monolog because people’s thoughts often jump around). At the other end of the range are common “good writing” shibboleths, like “don’t use adverbs, especially in dialog tags” (one cannot simply cut the adverb from “The band played badly” without changing the meaning of the sentence; the same goes for cutting the adverb out of the speech tag in “ ‘Of course I believe you,’ she said sarcastically.”).

Unfortunately, it is a whole lot easier to consistently apply an absolute never-ever-do-this rule than it is to apply advice that requires a judgement call regarding whether this is or isn’t the right place to break this rule. What tends to happen is, I start off only putting in the really necessary sentence fragments, adverbs, adjectives, or whatever. After a while, I start using a few more, because I’m doing it for clarity, right? “The band played badly” isn’t that different from “The band played loudly” or “The band played daily,” is it? Or “Daily, the band played loudly…”

Next thing you know, every speech tag has an adverb and every bit of dialog, character thoughts, and action is made up of sentence fragments, because it feels clearer and it’s faster to write (and uses fewer words) than “Every day at noon, the noise from the band’s playing rattled the windows.”

At some point, usually when I’m revising, I finally notice, make a few remarks that are not suitable for a public venue, fix everything, and go back to being abstemious with my adverbs, adjectives, sentence fragments, and so on. If I’m lucky, it occurs to me to check early in the first draft to make sure I’m not getting sloppy.

The second problem creeps back in when I am writing in a white heat, getting words down as fast as I can because this kind of thing doesn’t happen very often and I need to take full advantage of it when it does. Which means I don’t pause long enough to remember that nine times out of ten, “could” works just as well as “was able to,” that I don’t actually need or want two pages of description of the ballroom (even if what I am making up is absolutely, totally cool), or that conversely, that three-page vital conversation needs to be happening in an actual place, not between two talking heads in a thick fog bank.

Even when I do manage to remember that I’m going to need to simplify, cut, or add, I really don’t want to do it right then and lose the momentum. About all that helps with this one is leaving myself revision notes – [needs description] [too much, cut some] – and, when I finally get to the revisions phase, going back to my personal search-and-destroy list of phrases that I know from experience that I overuse, and doing the search-and-destroy. Ruthlessly.

The third problem/old-bad-habit isn’t so much to do with standard rules and advice as it is with process and productivity. I have two standard reactions to having trouble with What Happens Next. The first is to stop and ponder for a while, which is fine as long as the pondering takes a few days or weeks, rather than months and months. When I am feeling deadline pressure, though, I tend to push myself to Just Keep Going, which usually results in many pages of pointless arguing between the characters that, under normal circumstances, I would cover as “They argued for two hours before finally deciding to…” Writing out the whole argument feels like I’m being productive, and it is often fairly entertaining, but it doesn’t actually move the story forward in any useful way. Quite often, I end up reluctant to cut the entire thing (there are always amusing bits, or character development, that I can use as an excuse to not boil three to five pages down to “They argued for two hours…”). The result is wasting a lot more time and energy than stopping to ponder would have, as well as potentially sabotaging the pacing.