Writing is both an art and a craft. Since most people believe that the “art” part can’t really be taught, 99.9% of the advice out there focuses on the craft part – how do you make dialog sound real? What is a plot skeleton and how do you use it? What is the difference between third person personal viewpoint and omniscient viewpoint? How do you develop character arcs and subplots? I do this myself a lot.
This leads to a plethora of writing, plotting, planning, and characterization systems, and then to still more systems to integrate the first batch into a coherent outline, and then even more to break it all down into bite-sized scenes. Every system seems to have a dozen or more worksheets, spreadsheets, or apps that track different aspects of the story, so they will all stay in their proper order and balance (as defined by the system).
But art and craft aren’t that easy to separate in the writing process. Writers are always running into situations where what is, technically, the “right” way to do something is “wrong” from an artistic viewpoint. This is most obvious when one is talking about punctuation, spelling, and grammar, because there are clear this-is-correct-that-is-not rules that most of us learned in English or Language Arts class. Every so often, a writer runs into a situation where those rules just don’t work.
Sentence fragments. Frekin’ wit the spellin’. Using non-standard capitalization to emphasize the Important Stuff. Using non-standard punctuation to show that she is Just. That. Mad.
One-line paragraphs.
Then there are the things that aren’t clearly technically “wrong,” but that are considered hallmarks of “bad writing”: run-on sentences, passive voice, overuse of adverbs/adjectives, unusual word order (backwards the sentence runs), etc. All of them have their uses, no matter how often or how much they can be misused, yet it is trivially easy to find people issuing blanket prohibitions against all of them. Eventually you arrive at all the advice about structure, plotting, characterization, etc. that purports to tell you exactly how to write a novel. Only it doesn’t quite work in your novel.
And that is the fundamental problem: Sometimes, the choice that is technically correct has a result that is artistically dreadful. Other times, a technically incorrect but highly artistic choice will damage the story in minor or major ways, no matter how artistically right it felt to the author when they were writing it. (These are the things that make seasoned professionals cringe when you mention their early work.) When it comes to choosing between technically correct and artistically correct, there is no rule that will give you an answer that will always work.
A secondary problem is that most writers realize this on some level. This tends to separate people out into two groups. On the one side we have the writers who have convinced themselves that getting their manuscript technically perfect – no spelling mistakes, no incorrect grammar, no deviation from the Hero’s Journey plot-pattern or from some system’s “beat sheet” – will result in a good book, no matter how artistically dull or flat their story. On the other side are the writers who have convinced themselves that “artistic inspiration” is sufficient justification for whatever they want to do (or even, in some cases, that it isn’t Art unless there is something technically incorrect about it).
Each side gets defensive when someone points out that their approach is incomplete. I was recently treated to a rant by an author who defended her non-standard punctuation as “conveying poetic rhythm,” even though what it did for me was to make her novel manuscript virtually unreadable rather than poetic. And I can’t count the number of would-be writers who complain because they “followed the directions” and don’t understand why it didn’t sell. They can’t see that what they produced is technically correct but mediocre.
Yet neither group is completely right, and neither is completely wrong, because writing is both an art and a craft. A dull but technically perfect manuscript won’t sell; neither will a possibly brilliant but incomprehensible manuscript written entirely in the author’s made-up literary language (untranslated – and yes, someone supposedly did this, though the story may be apocryphal).
If the ultimate goal is to sell a story, the writer needs both the craft and the art. (On the other hand, if the writer’s goal is to work on just the craft, or just the art, and they are willing to accept that what they produce is going to be strictly a way of learning this part of writing … well, that’s a different [and perfectly reasonable] choice.)
However, spending the majority of one’s time talking only about one side of the equation – the craft part, in this case – gives the impression that it is the only important part (or at the least, the most important part) of writing. So I’m going to try talking about the art side for a post or two. It’s not exactly in my comfort zone, but it’s important.
See you next week.
Excellent essay, this.
…run-on sentences… I am currently struggling through the channeled scablands of what Julian Flood (remember him?) called Secondraftia. One of the things I have to do is to look at every long sentence, particularly if it bristles with semicolons, and see if it would read better if cut up into two or three. (I haven’t yet come to the point of having the computer search out every semicolon, on general principle, but that may come.)
Part of the problem is that I can *read* run-on sentences with no trouble at all, but I realize that not everybody can do that. I could read Faulkner with ease, only I don’t, not because of his syntax but because of his subject matter.
Looking forward to the next essay.
For me it’s sentence fragments. My writing is sprinkled heavily with them, and I have to wonder if the sprinkling is too heavy. My previous web searches have told me that they’re a legitimate technique in fiction, while being incorrect in formal non-fiction writing. So I can’t point to any one fragment as say that it is wrong, but in mass my fragments may be a problem.
I’ll second “Looking forward to the next essay.” (Which ironically is itself a sentence fragment.)
One must first thoroughly understand the rules in order to break them with elegance and panache.
…that sounds almost like an Ursula Le Guin quote? And, I’ll second that! (Although I seem to have settled, at least for now, for understanding most of the rules ~well enough to break a few of them gleefully and with loud entertaining crashing noises. And I’m not gonna fix these sentence fragments and double negatives neither.)
Atonal
Some folks think all you have to do is jump around
To get a new sound.
Others believe that, if you want to avoid singing sweetly,
You have to know all the rules in order to violate them completely.
Malvina Reynolds collected in The Muse of Parker Street
Reminds me of the gleefully ametric (is that a word? it is now) work of Ogden Nash. I checked their dates and they were more-or-less contemporaries; I wonder if they knew each other.
“When it comes to choosing between technically correct and artistically correct, there is no rule that will give you an answer that will always work.”
I suspect that’s true about just about everything in writing. (Not quite everything; “Use the English language in English-language markets” is pretty darned ironclad…)
‘Technically correct’ is not craft; I think it is a third component.
I’ve read books that were beautifully crafted, whose writers produced sentences and paragraphs that make me swoon and go green with envy; and yet I did not care for the story or the characters, but nor would I call them ‘technically correct’; they took too many liberties with the rules.
‘Technically correct’ is always being consistent in your PoV and cutting superfluous PoV characters.
Craft is being able to write from the PoV of a passing fox.
Art is keeping the fox in the manuscript of Lord of the Rings.
A run-on sentence is wrong, actually. It’s not a very long sentence. It’s a sentence that lacks sufficient structure for its content. “She laughed he ran.” is a run-on.
Long sentences can indeed be a problem, but not necessarily because they lack structure; I myself have perpetrated problem sentences that were so grammatically correct that you could diagram them and use them as coatracks.
I’m just finishing Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; that book has many page-long sentences that demand that the reader pay strict attention to each one’s structure along the journey so you can ferret out the meaning when you finally reach the end (not to mention Márquez’s chapter-long sentences). Although I sometimes had to re-read these in order to find an anchor point, they didn’t bother me as much as his sometimes excessively erudite vocabulary, which, like Powers, made it look as though he was just showing off.
There are different “technically right” procedures for different goals. For instance the instructions on how to assemble a bookcase are different from showing how Huckleberry Fin talks.
Communication can’t be lost though. I just read a book from a very famous author that has poor Victorian English people talking in the vernacular. I am guessing the language was technically accurate, but I had no idea what they were saying. Reading out loud didn’t help. I just don’t have the background to translate those sounds into words I could understand.