That is a fun cover, especially the alien’s expression. He looks like he does NOT want his picture taken, but he can’t think of a good way to get out of it.
In one of the early open mic’s, I said something about tight writing being one of the few things everyone needs to do, and a number of you quite rightly pushed back. Far too broad a statement on my part.
But since we’re not saying much this week, I thought I’d bring it up again. Keep in mind that a lot of my background was in teaching effective writing to government employees, and usually a good chunk of any class had been signed up and didn’t want to be there. So I got some doozies of bad writing that anyone wanting to be a professional writer is never going to produce.
Still, what do you think of this? Does it suggest that even in fiction there needs to be some tightness?
“It was on Easter Sunday it was, yes that’s right, it was Easter, and that certainly was a Sunday, yes indeed, that’s a fact. I was taking a walk, I might say ambling my way along, along down a boulevard lined with trees, a street right here in this town, with oaks or maybe maples planted in place along each sidewalk, and down the center too, they were, down the center, a median it is, that’s right, a median. As I say, it was Easter Sunday, and I was meandering along, you might say, or at least I might, and as a point of fact I just did. I was taking notice of all the Easter bonnets on the ladies and a few of the lads, bonnets they were wearing for Easter that Sunday…”
Okay, I’ll stop now. I just think there’s a limit, even in dialog, to just how many redundancies (Easter Sunday) and throwaways (that’s a fact), weak noun-verb combinations (taking notice), and so on readers will have patience for. Except in the briefest passages.
Am I making more sense this time? Feel free to clue me in, clue me in I might say.
I agree—and I’ve heard the same advice from famous authors, to cut words until you can’t cut any more without losing the sense of the story. I’m ok with some “extra” words for flavor, but clean, clear writing is really important. Not that I’ve mastered it, but it’s something to work toward.
Well, I actually rather enjoyed your sample “bad” passage. It has a lovely little rhythm going, and gives me a strong sense of the character who’s speaking. I’ll grant you a whole book of that would get old fast, but as, say, the opening of a novel that after that settles down into a less extreme but still verbose style, I’d keep reading.
I think you’re making sense fine; I just disagree. 😉
Or rather: I think advocates of “tight” writing, and even more so their victims beginner writers who adhere to their advice, take it much, much too far. Cut every word that doesn’t absolutely need to be there — well, what defines “need”? Is style a need? Is rhythm a need? Does the overall “flavor” of the book *need* to be there? I particularly kick back at so-called “weak” verbs or constructions; you might say that “taking notice” would be better replaced by “noticing”, and thus you’d say the same thing with half as many words. But “noticing” is *not* an exact synonym for “taking notice”; there’s a subtle difference in sense there. Such subtleties are a lot of what makes reading enjoyable to me, and it’s those subtleties that “tight writing” throws away, or indeed denies that they exist at all.
You could claim that my first sentence could be rewritten as “I liked your sample.” That would say the same thing in less than half as many words, so it must be better. But I say no; it would convey the same gross meaning, but it would obliterate all nuance and personality. Therefore, the common tight-writing advocation to say the same thing in fewer words falls at the gate, because to me, it is *not* saying the same thing.
I’ll give you a different ultimatum: One of the things every writer needs to do is write prose that is not boring. Of course, boring is very much in the eye of the beholder, so instead of decrying that a passage should be written more tightly, you’d have to settle for “I didn’t like that.” But it’s the same thing, right? 😉
Thank you for the compliments! I’ve worked hard for decades on sentence rhythms, and now it seems I can’t help myself. 😉
The thing about tight writing, which I always said in the classroom and should have mentioned here, is that “loose” writing is fine up to a point. That point is easily specified, but what’s a problem is when sentence after sentence uses too many words.
If the beginner writes about a group making arrangements to hold a meeting to make plans to devise an approach to making improvements on creating an organization to blah blah blah, all those weak noun-verb constructions are going to leave readers looking for something else to read.
So I don’t disagree with you, actually. Saying “make plans” instead of “plan” once in awhile doesn’t hurt. A redundancy like “blood-red color” is entirely harmless.
And it’s much less of a problem in fiction. Too many beginning technical writers think formal English is wordy English, and it isn’t.
But I do think every writer should be aware of tight writing. Then they can decide how tight they want to get.
I see both of your points but I will vote with Liz here a bit more. This is in part because I’ve had things that were edited until they no longer had the same meaning under the guise of tightening the writing. I have also read things that needed tightening up, but I agree with Liz that more often in my personal experience the tightening up that is pushed comes with too much loss of flavor. (I think this is high YMMV territory, however.)
Kevin – Okay, that time you got my eyes to glaze over. 😉
Technical writing is an entirely different species. Most of the people doing it shouldn’t be, IMO, and most of the people letting them should go back to second-grade English class. (Full disclosure: I do freelance tech writing myself, and frequently weep in despair at the state of language usage in the business world.) So I’m with you there.
However, fiction writing is not technical writing, and the rules of one do not fit the needs of the other. I think a lot of harm is done by treating all writing as though it’s the same; how many people have had to overcome something a high-school teacher ground into their head about essay writing, in order to produce a decent story?
I think every writer should be aware of the range of word-options available to them, and understand the effects different constructions might have on the reader. A carpenter might have three hammers, and five saws, and a whole host of chisels; doubtless there are a few he uses most often, but he shouldn’t hesitate to reach for another if the job calls for it. That doesn’t make one chisel “better” than the others.
“I think every writer should be aware of the range of word-options available to them, and understand the effects different constructions might have on the reader.”
I completely agree.
Where tight writing is concerned, I think every writer worth their salt, fiction or not, ought to know how and be able to do it. They can then decide when and how much to apply it.
That way they don’t make eyes glaze over unless they mean to. 😉
@Kevin – But by that argument, every writer ought to be able to write overblown, profligately purple prose, too. So they can apply it when they need to. 🙂
You worked very hard to stretch credibility here long past its sell-by date, and while I would condense this a little (taking out the most obvious repetitions), I still like it much better than
“I walked along the Boulevard on Easter Sunday”
because while that is terse and has most of the relevant information, it also has no voice, no rhythm, and no character. Your example, though clearly meant to be ridiculous, tells me so much more:
– it’s a character with a meandering mind
– it’s important to them to establish the date without doubt
– they expect to be doubted
– they present themselves as observant (‘taking notice’) but are not (‘oaks or maybe maples’)
– they’re either confused, unobservant, or living in an alternate reality from mine (lads wearing easter bonnets)
– this is probably not contemporary, or else set in a specific community
And the thing is, that your example gives me so much more to work with as an editor. The cut down version, I’d ask for more detail, and probably would ask for the wrong detail. The meandering version I can cut down, but there’s so much more story there.
I honed my tight-writing skills editing multi-page documents written as badly as my example. Document after document, year after year, for about a quarter of a century. (Thank goodness most of them weren’t that bad. But too many were.)
When it comes to my position that people should know how to “write tight,” even if they don’t do so at all times, I’m not wrong. But it’s okay not to agree with me.
And don’t worry, I won’t bring this up again. The open mic didn’t seem to be getting a lot of use, and I hoped to spark some discussion. And I did.
That’s a pity, because I think this is a really interesting subject and you have inadvertently made a point against your own argument, or rather, you have opened up the question of what does ‘writing tight’ mean – ‘tightness’ or not is tied to the amount and kind of information you want/need to convey. Which is different for technical writing than for character-driven storytelling, and that’s before we touch on ‘show, don’t tell’ – you have masterfully shown a lot of things that could be told more tersely (but which would also lose flavour and work less well for many readers).
I’m always afraid of coming in here and overdoing it. It’s not my blog!
That said, I’m glad I didn’t wear out my welcome.
I think what it comes down to for me is, tight writing is a valuable tool, and so every writer should be able to apply it to some extent. (Because I’ve had to deal with too many who couldn’t/didn’t apply it at all.) But I certainly don’t see it as a tool for strict application in every situation.
It makes sense that you might use redundancies and repetition in dialogue to establish the speaker’s manner or personality (I’m thinking of Foghorn Leghorn, for example)– but yeah, you’d have to keep it tight to avoid glazing over your reader’s eyes.
I’d say that, in the passage you offered, you could achieve the same effect in half the lines.
LizV has made an important point when she asks what defines need in writing. Strictly speaking, I don’t need a BLT made with a tomato that I just picked in my garden, so juicy that I need sturdy toast to make the sandwich hold together. I don’t need crisp bacon playing off its salty-crispy self against that tomato. I can get my nutrition in other ways.
I want the flavors, though. I want them in writing also.
Exactly. The fresh garden tomato, hand-picked at the peak of ripeness, is technically the same thing as the grocery store tomato, picked while still a bit green so it’ll ship better and sprayed with preservative chemicals; both are tomatoes. Few tomato aficionados would consider them interchangeable, however.
Tight or loose has never been the issue for me. The real test is whether the writing calls attention to itself; if it does, it has failed. Good prose should invisibly carry the meaning and images the writer wishes to convey.
@Kevin – But by that argument, every writer ought to be able to write overblown, profligately purple prose, too. So they can apply it when they need to. ?
The cover art for an anthology I’m in has been released, and I love it.
https://twitter.com/MarlynnOfMany/status/1312525594790227969
That is a fun cover, especially the alien’s expression. He looks like he does NOT want his picture taken, but he can’t think of a good way to get out of it.
Okay, I’ll try to spark some discussion.
In one of the early open mic’s, I said something about tight writing being one of the few things everyone needs to do, and a number of you quite rightly pushed back. Far too broad a statement on my part.
But since we’re not saying much this week, I thought I’d bring it up again. Keep in mind that a lot of my background was in teaching effective writing to government employees, and usually a good chunk of any class had been signed up and didn’t want to be there. So I got some doozies of bad writing that anyone wanting to be a professional writer is never going to produce.
Still, what do you think of this? Does it suggest that even in fiction there needs to be some tightness?
“It was on Easter Sunday it was, yes that’s right, it was Easter, and that certainly was a Sunday, yes indeed, that’s a fact. I was taking a walk, I might say ambling my way along, along down a boulevard lined with trees, a street right here in this town, with oaks or maybe maples planted in place along each sidewalk, and down the center too, they were, down the center, a median it is, that’s right, a median. As I say, it was Easter Sunday, and I was meandering along, you might say, or at least I might, and as a point of fact I just did. I was taking notice of all the Easter bonnets on the ladies and a few of the lads, bonnets they were wearing for Easter that Sunday…”
Okay, I’ll stop now. I just think there’s a limit, even in dialog, to just how many redundancies (Easter Sunday) and throwaways (that’s a fact), weak noun-verb combinations (taking notice), and so on readers will have patience for. Except in the briefest passages.
Am I making more sense this time? Feel free to clue me in, clue me in I might say.
I agree—and I’ve heard the same advice from famous authors, to cut words until you can’t cut any more without losing the sense of the story. I’m ok with some “extra” words for flavor, but clean, clear writing is really important. Not that I’ve mastered it, but it’s something to work toward.
Well, I actually rather enjoyed your sample “bad” passage. It has a lovely little rhythm going, and gives me a strong sense of the character who’s speaking. I’ll grant you a whole book of that would get old fast, but as, say, the opening of a novel that after that settles down into a less extreme but still verbose style, I’d keep reading.
I think you’re making sense fine; I just disagree. 😉
Or rather: I think advocates of “tight” writing, and even more so
their victimsbeginner writers who adhere to their advice, take it much, much too far. Cut every word that doesn’t absolutely need to be there — well, what defines “need”? Is style a need? Is rhythm a need? Does the overall “flavor” of the book *need* to be there? I particularly kick back at so-called “weak” verbs or constructions; you might say that “taking notice” would be better replaced by “noticing”, and thus you’d say the same thing with half as many words. But “noticing” is *not* an exact synonym for “taking notice”; there’s a subtle difference in sense there. Such subtleties are a lot of what makes reading enjoyable to me, and it’s those subtleties that “tight writing” throws away, or indeed denies that they exist at all.You could claim that my first sentence could be rewritten as “I liked your sample.” That would say the same thing in less than half as many words, so it must be better. But I say no; it would convey the same gross meaning, but it would obliterate all nuance and personality. Therefore, the common tight-writing advocation to say the same thing in fewer words falls at the gate, because to me, it is *not* saying the same thing.
I’ll give you a different ultimatum: One of the things every writer needs to do is write prose that is not boring. Of course, boring is very much in the eye of the beholder, so instead of decrying that a passage should be written more tightly, you’d have to settle for “I didn’t like that.” But it’s the same thing, right? 😉
Thank you for the compliments! I’ve worked hard for decades on sentence rhythms, and now it seems I can’t help myself. 😉
The thing about tight writing, which I always said in the classroom and should have mentioned here, is that “loose” writing is fine up to a point. That point is easily specified, but what’s a problem is when sentence after sentence uses too many words.
If the beginner writes about a group making arrangements to hold a meeting to make plans to devise an approach to making improvements on creating an organization to blah blah blah, all those weak noun-verb constructions are going to leave readers looking for something else to read.
So I don’t disagree with you, actually. Saying “make plans” instead of “plan” once in awhile doesn’t hurt. A redundancy like “blood-red color” is entirely harmless.
And it’s much less of a problem in fiction. Too many beginning technical writers think formal English is wordy English, and it isn’t.
But I do think every writer should be aware of tight writing. Then they can decide how tight they want to get.
Hm, maybe I should re-word that…
I see both of your points but I will vote with Liz here a bit more. This is in part because I’ve had things that were edited until they no longer had the same meaning under the guise of tightening the writing. I have also read things that needed tightening up, but I agree with Liz that more often in my personal experience the tightening up that is pushed comes with too much loss of flavor. (I think this is high YMMV territory, however.)
Kevin – Okay, that time you got my eyes to glaze over. 😉
Technical writing is an entirely different species. Most of the people doing it shouldn’t be, IMO, and most of the people letting them should go back to second-grade English class. (Full disclosure: I do freelance tech writing myself, and frequently weep in despair at the state of language usage in the business world.) So I’m with you there.
However, fiction writing is not technical writing, and the rules of one do not fit the needs of the other. I think a lot of harm is done by treating all writing as though it’s the same; how many people have had to overcome something a high-school teacher ground into their head about essay writing, in order to produce a decent story?
I think every writer should be aware of the range of word-options available to them, and understand the effects different constructions might have on the reader. A carpenter might have three hammers, and five saws, and a whole host of chisels; doubtless there are a few he uses most often, but he shouldn’t hesitate to reach for another if the job calls for it. That doesn’t make one chisel “better” than the others.
Then they can decide how tight they want to get.
Nope, that sounded fine to me….
“I think every writer should be aware of the range of word-options available to them, and understand the effects different constructions might have on the reader.”
I completely agree.
Where tight writing is concerned, I think every writer worth their salt, fiction or not, ought to know how and be able to do it. They can then decide when and how much to apply it.
That way they don’t make eyes glaze over unless they mean to. 😉
@Kevin – But by that argument, every writer ought to be able to write overblown, profligately purple prose, too. So they can apply it when they need to. 🙂
You worked very hard to stretch credibility here long past its sell-by date, and while I would condense this a little (taking out the most obvious repetitions), I still like it much better than
“I walked along the Boulevard on Easter Sunday”
because while that is terse and has most of the relevant information, it also has no voice, no rhythm, and no character. Your example, though clearly meant to be ridiculous, tells me so much more:
– it’s a character with a meandering mind
– it’s important to them to establish the date without doubt
– they expect to be doubted
– they present themselves as observant (‘taking notice’) but are not (‘oaks or maybe maples’)
– they’re either confused, unobservant, or living in an alternate reality from mine (lads wearing easter bonnets)
– this is probably not contemporary, or else set in a specific community
And the thing is, that your example gives me so much more to work with as an editor. The cut down version, I’d ask for more detail, and probably would ask for the wrong detail. The meandering version I can cut down, but there’s so much more story there.
I honed my tight-writing skills editing multi-page documents written as badly as my example. Document after document, year after year, for about a quarter of a century. (Thank goodness most of them weren’t that bad. But too many were.)
When it comes to my position that people should know how to “write tight,” even if they don’t do so at all times, I’m not wrong. But it’s okay not to agree with me.
And don’t worry, I won’t bring this up again. The open mic didn’t seem to be getting a lot of use, and I hoped to spark some discussion. And I did.
Hey, it was a good discussion. Thanks!
You’re welcome! 🙂
And don’t worry, I won’t bring this up again.
That’s a pity, because I think this is a really interesting subject and you have inadvertently made a point against your own argument, or rather, you have opened up the question of what does ‘writing tight’ mean – ‘tightness’ or not is tied to the amount and kind of information you want/need to convey. Which is different for technical writing than for character-driven storytelling, and that’s before we touch on ‘show, don’t tell’ – you have masterfully shown a lot of things that could be told more tersely (but which would also lose flavour and work less well for many readers).
I’m always afraid of coming in here and overdoing it. It’s not my blog!
That said, I’m glad I didn’t wear out my welcome.
I think what it comes down to for me is, tight writing is a valuable tool, and so every writer should be able to apply it to some extent. (Because I’ve had to deal with too many who couldn’t/didn’t apply it at all.) But I certainly don’t see it as a tool for strict application in every situation.
It makes sense that you might use redundancies and repetition in dialogue to establish the speaker’s manner or personality (I’m thinking of Foghorn Leghorn, for example)– but yeah, you’d have to keep it tight to avoid glazing over your reader’s eyes.
I’d say that, in the passage you offered, you could achieve the same effect in half the lines.
Good point. (And Eliza’s too!) And, yeah, I had Foghorn’s voice in my head while I wrote that!
LizV has made an important point when she asks what defines need in writing. Strictly speaking, I don’t need a BLT made with a tomato that I just picked in my garden, so juicy that I need sturdy toast to make the sandwich hold together. I don’t need crisp bacon playing off its salty-crispy self against that tomato. I can get my nutrition in other ways.
I want the flavors, though. I want them in writing also.
Exactly. The fresh garden tomato, hand-picked at the peak of ripeness, is technically the same thing as the grocery store tomato, picked while still a bit green so it’ll ship better and sprayed with preservative chemicals; both are tomatoes. Few tomato aficionados would consider them interchangeable, however.
Tight or loose has never been the issue for me. The real test is whether the writing calls attention to itself; if it does, it has failed. Good prose should invisibly carry the meaning and images the writer wishes to convey.
@Kevin – But by that argument, every writer ought to be able to write overblown, profligately purple prose, too. So they can apply it when they need to. ?
Sure, why not? Versatility! 🙂
I’ve been (digital vector) drawing rather than writing recently. Maybe I’ll get back to writing… real soon now…