The other day I was browsing writing web sites and came across one that made me blink. Every post for months had a title like “Seven Dialog Mistakes” “Five ways to a Great Scene” “Ten Resolutions for Career Writers” “Twelve Dynamite Endings.”
OK, I get that a lot of people really, in their heart of hearts, want a quick-and-dirty paint-by-numbers approach to writing a great book. I also realize that a lot of people don’t want to read more than one screen’s worth of blog post (or so several of the How To Do A Great Blog web sites claim). Lists of tips and tricks and common mistakes seem like a perfectly reasonable way to get at both things at the same time.
The trouble is that, in my experience, a short list of tips or mistakes just doesn’t work very well when it comes to helping people improve their writing. (I can’t speak to the thing about sticking to one screen per blog post, except to note that I obviously don’t follow that advice, either.)
Writing a short story or a novel is complicated; every bit of it affects everything else. It’s easy to focus down on one particular aspect of writing, like dialog or endings, and dash off a list of dos and don’ts. But in an actual story, it’s not so simple. That #3 “Don’t…” from the dialog list, for instance, may be both thematically appropriate and more perfectly in character than any of the alternatives, not to mention being the ideal way of moving the plot along. #10 “Do make sure you…” from the characterization list may be impossible to make work, given the constraints of the style and setting.
But there are several sorts of lists that I find extremely useful. They just don’t have anything much to do with writing technique.
The first set of lists is stuff I use during the first draft to save time. For instance, I have one possible-next-book that involves characters from several different imaginary countries/backgrounds. I want their names to sound as if they come from different places with different languages and naming conventions, and I don’t want any of them to be token representatives of their cultures. That means that eventually, when I’m making up secondary characters like the barman and the traveling salesman, I’m going to need more names that sound as if they came from the same places, and maybe a few others from completely different backgrounds.
So I make a set of lists: six to ten male and female names that would come from each country, along with six to ten family/clan/house/tribe names for each country that mix and match well with the personal names I’ve picked. When I need the traveling salesman, all I have to do is decide which country he’s from, and pick from the list.
Or I make a list of place-names so that when they pass by that small town, I can grab a name on the fly. I’ll also make lists of things I’ve mentioned in passing, like local foods or animals I’ve invented, so that I can use them again if I need to (and so I can make sure that I didn’t name the fish stew “kishta” and the tiger with antlers “kitsa” – far too confusing, not to mention the potential for tragically horrible typos…)
The other kind of lists I find useful are checklists of things to do during the first round of revisions. There’s an ongoing, ever-changing list of all the phrases I tend to overuse, so I can do a search-and-destroy on them easily. There’s a list of things to check for consistency and continuity (I have a really bad habit of changing the spelling of a character’s name by one letter somewhere in the middle of the story, or calling someone “Anthony” for two chapters and then switching to “Andrew” because I couldn’t be bothered to look up which male-name-beginning-with-A I’d used, and I was sure it was Andrew…)
In other words, all the lists I find useful have to do with the content of the story: names, places, descriptive phrases, etc. That’s what I need to keep track of when I’m writing, not the five dialog mistakes that I may or may not be making in any given scene, or the twelve dynamite endings that don’t fit the story I’m trying to tell.
Someone, somewhere discovered and spread the word that people read titles with numbers in them. Back when I cared about a corporate blog, those titles were always our most popular, and when I worked for a magazine, those titles were the ones people remembered during our follow-up research. But when I go to a website and all their blog posts are lists, I know not to bother to add it to my RSS feed. It’s an easy way to tell that the author cares more about traffic than about originality.
I do sometimes find these lists useful when I reach the point of editing. Then it’s handy to have a checklist to look at for the various editing passes I make before I let something go out the door to a potential market. I’m thinking in terms of stuff like checking for repeated words, adverbs that in most cases don’t improve the sentence (although there are always exceptions), and that sort of thing.
I am so glad you don’t limit your posts to one screen!
Sometimes all the formulas for writing remind me of a scene in the old public TV series on Henry VIII and his wives. Anne of Cleves is trying desperately to learn how to play a lute, since Henry loves music and as an ignorant wife at a sophisticated court she’d better improve her culture quotient.
She is making horrible noises. Finally she cries out, “I am willing to learn! Why will no one tell me, what is ‘in tune?'”
If she hears more music she may come to understand, but no one’s going to be able to tell her how in Seven Great Ways to Play a Lute.
Thank-you for writing longer-than-one-screen blog posts. I really like reading your blog, and am pleased that there is more to scroll down to.
Character lists are wonderful for remembering who the spiteful gossip in chapter three was, and that I made her hair red.
Complex stories have sometimes benefitted from a faction list: here are all the different people or groups that have something they want.
Oh! I make those kinds of lists too! That is: names of people and places from different geographic areas and lists of fixes that I know I need to go back and do once I get to the end of the first draft. Oh, and invented foods and animals.
I encountered one of those how-to blog lists while writing my current WIP and was seriously disoriented for a few days. It was like wearing glasses that make you see upside down! Hard to walk like that. And hard to write like that. I realized that the “story structure” list might be very valid. But I cannot connect with MY story, if I’m busy assessing whether it matches the “perfect” structure of set-up/reaction with first pinch point/action with second pinch point/resolution. Aaaah!
So I ditched the head “knowledge” and went back to connecting with my story.
I keep track of the stuff like character names and descriptions, places, dates, invented words and so forth in a customized MySQL database. Lists raised to the nth degree of geekiness. I’ve been thinking I need to add colloquialisms and common phrases to it, so that I don’t accidentally use them for more than one invented culture.
But… bad me!… I keep delaying on the creation of a simple and much needed list of copy-edit checks because I can’t decide where to PUT it. So I hearby make a resolution: Type up the list TODAY. Then I’ll have to save it somewhere. 🙂
…And speaking of copy-edit checks, I have a couple projects that I’ve been trying to whip into a readable state, and I’m looking for people willing to take a look at them and give me feedback. If anyone here would possibly be interested in doing some betareading, (negotiating an exchange of mss, perhaps?) please email me at mbottorff at lshelby dot com.
At least the lists were not forced into a magical number of items:
Top Ten List of Single-Digit Prime Numbers
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Axe Murderers