Writers with Hammers

There’s an old saying that goes something like, “To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

The subtext of this particular idiom is usually that it isn’t a good idea to expect one tool to be able to fix absolutely everything that you want to fix. This is fairly obvious when it comes to physical tools – you can pound a screw in with a hammer, but the result won’t hold nearly as well as it would have if you’d screwed the screw in with a screwdriver; you can break a board into two pieces with a hammer, but a saw is a lot more useful for getting boards that will fit together properly.

Unfortunately, the fact that one particular tool isn’t always the most effective one seems to be less obvious when one is talking about writing techniques. I’ve heard a lot of writers make comments to the effect that “Whatever is wrong, you can fix it with X” where X is their favorite technique or approach. “Just do a jump cut.” “Change the viewpoint character.” “Change it to third person.” “Have ninjas jump through the window.” “Do it with all dialog, like a play.” “Use a flashback/flashforward.” “Change the structure.”

These people aren’t using all the tools in their toolbox. (Some of them don’t even have a toolbox.) They have one tool – one hammer – that they’re trying to use for everything.

Sometimes, the tool that they’ve chosen is broad enough, general enough, and flexible enough that it can actually solve a lot of problems fairly effectively. In metaphorical terms, most of the writer’s problems are nails, or close enough, so the hammer works well. The writer may end up with a couple of hammered-in screws that won’t hold up as well as a screwed-in screw, but they’re okay with that. You can repair a surprisingly large number of story flaws by changing various aspects of viewpoint, for instance, or by rearranging the structure. Not all of the fixes will be perfect, but they’ll mostly be good enough to go on with. For a while.

When a writer has been using a tool like “viewpoint” for a long time – one that covers a broad collection of approaches that can be used with great flexibility – they tend to get attached to their tool of choice. They have plenty of evidence that their assertion that “X can fix anything” is correct, because so far they’ve been able to fix every problem they’ve had by using it.

Sooner or later, however, one of two things happens: either the writer needs a fix that they cannot make with their hammer (like sawing a board in half or smoothing down a flat surface), or the writer reaches a skill level where they can see just how wobbly that nailed-in screw is going to be, and they are no longer happy with doing it that way.

In the first case – when faced with the metaphorical need to saw a board in half – some writers will simply remove the subplot that requires it. The justifications I have heard for this amount to “If X can’t fix it, it must be Really Bad Writing and something I shouldn’t do at all.” If the scene or subplot is integral to the story and really can’t be removed, some writers abandon the project as unwriteable.

In the second case, where the writer has begun to see that hammering in that metaphorical screw leaves things a bit wobblier than they like, it’s much harder  to justify sticking to “X can fix anything.” Writers whose tool-of-choice is more specific and/or more specialized reach this point a lot faster than those who’ve chosen more versatile tools. If your tool-of-choice is a pair of needle-nosed pliers, and you need to pound a nail, it’s fairly obvious fairly quickly that you should really look for a hammer.

A few writers try to stick to their guns anyway. They decide that if their preferred technique isn’t working as well as they’d like, it’s because they are lacking the skill to use it properly, not because it’s the wrong tool for the job. So they focus on learning to pound nails with needle-nose pliers. Most, though, recognize the need to develop new writing tools, instead of always, always trying to fix the problem with a flashback or an internal monolog.

My personal opinion is that there’s no such thing as a perfect tool that will fix anything. There’s no universal solution to all writing problems. There are, however, writing tools that, like a hammer, are useful in a lot of different situations – structure, backstory, viewpoint, dialog – and writing tools that, like a plane or a socket wrench, are more specialized and only useful for particular kinds of problems – flashback, stream-of-consciousness, jump-cut. My advice, in most cases, is to learn to use as many different tools as possible to at least a basic level of competency. It doesn’t hurt to have a favorite choice (especially if one gets really, really good at using it) … unless always using one’s favorite technique or approach prevents one from getting to a basic competence level with all the other tools.

Because sooner or later, everybody hits a story that requires a different tool. And I am not okay with walking away from a challenging story just because I don’t have the chops to handle the specialized techniques it needs. (Those projects scare the heck out of me, but I’d rather tackle acquiring the chops than giving up on the story.)