Elements to Better Writing Style

I started writing this and it really got away from me, in terms of length. So sorry, or, you’re welcome, depending on how you feel about that.

Based on last week’s post about being an Aurealis Award judge and how I found writing ‘style’ to be the most important factor when determining quality, I have tried to write a guide to help you improve your writing style.

Obviously there are people who would debate some of these points. That’s fine, just don’t do it here. Here are my tips to a better writing style:

Show don’t tell:

One of the oldest refrains in writing advice, yet I still meet writers who are confused by exactly what it means. Telling refers to a writing style that feels like someone is repeating a story second hand, as if you are listening to someone tell you about past events. Showing means the reader feels present in the scene, as if it is happening right in front of them.

Imagine you are watching a movie and the heroine is walking down a filthy corridor toward where you both suspect the killer is. The music is tense; the door is slightly ajar... now imagine there is a voice-over saying:

“She’s walking down the corridor. The killer might be in there. She’s afraid. What if he is killing someone RIGHT NOW?”

The scene would be much less tense. In fact, it would be f-ing annoying.

A lot of older stories, particularly fables and myths, have a very ‘telling’ style because that’s how they were designed. People would be sitting around together in a group and the storyteller would be telling everyone about things that supposedly happened somewhere else. They were supposed to feel second hand.

These days, people are used to entertainment in the form of movies and TV. They don’t want to hear a story second hand, they want to see it, feel it, be there for it; as they feel they are during a movie or TV show.

Writing a book in a ‘telling’ style today is much the same as being told by someone else what happened in your favourite TV show last night.

Hopefully now you understand what telling is and why you shouldn’t do it, so here are some examples of HOW to show instead of tell:

Telling: He was cold.

Showing: He shivered, lips turning blue.

Telling: It stroked her face. She’d never been more scared.

Showing: Its coarse fur tickled as it stroked her cheek. She gave an involuntary whimper and piss, hot and stinking, soaked her jeans and pooled around her knees.

The best way to fix this in your writing now is to go through, line by line, and fix it in the second draft stage. After you’ve fixed an entire, 100k novel, line by painful line, you’ll probably have learned your lesson and use more showing in your next first draft.

Deeper character Point of View:

This is a little trickier to explain, so you’re going to have to fumble along with me. Taking the reader deeper into the character POV makes the story more immersive. Often, we use language that keeps the reader one step removed from the character POV. This can be really hard to unlearn too, but it’s worth putting the effort in. The results are quite powerful.

The best way to fix this issue is to try and avoid filler words that tell the reader what the character is thinking/feeling rather than just showing it. EG:

‘She wondered how to avoid it.’

‘It seemed unavoidable.’

The best way to fix this is to make a list of filler words that can indicate a problem and then search through your manuscript, fixing problems as you find them. My non exhaustive list of filer words is:

Felt

Heard

Noticed

Saw

Thought

Wondered

Knew

You may have different habitual filler words to me, so you may have to add more.

Explaining too much:

Lynn Flewelling’s ‘Luck in the Shadows’ opens with these two sentences:

Asengai’s tortures were regular in their habits—they always left off at sunset. Chained again in his corner of the draughty cell, Alec turned his face to the rough stone wall and cried.

Brilliant. Two sentences give us so much information. We know the main character is Alec, we know the villain is Asengai. We know Alex is being tortured and housed in a cold stone cell and has been there for long enough to learn his torturers habits. We know Alec is not the sort of man who is strong and stoic and that probably makes us feel some empathy for him. We know the story is set somewhere with torturers and stone cells, so it’s more likely to be fantasy. There is present action (Alec crying) and a hook/mystery: Who is Alec and why is Asengai having him tortured? She also uses the words ‘his corner of the draughty cell’ and in the next few lines we learn that is because other people are also in the cell, in their respective places.

Two brilliant opening lines. Let’s see if I can re-write them to be shite:

Alec had been captured by Asengai and his guards two weeks ago and chained up in the corner of a cold, draughty cell. The walls were rough stone and the manacles were made of forged steel. Alec was very scared. He wasn’t a brave man, he’d never suffered this sort of treatment before. After they tortured him and chained him up again, he cried.

Same information. Terrible presentation.

You need to be able to recognise the latter in your writing and turn it into the former.

I find one of the best ways to do this is to find bad writing by someone else, choose a paragraph or two and re-write it to be awesome. You probably shouldn’t show your version to the original author. When you have mastered the art of doing it to someone else’s work, it is MUCH easier to fix in your own. We all have a huge blind spot where our own writing is concerned.

This is why giving feedback in writer’s groups is so much more valuable than receiving feedback.

Explaining too little:

Clarity is key to good writing. There is a huge difference between a mystery and being deliberately omissive. You generally want some mysteries in your writing, and I don’t mean a whodunit, I mean some twist or secret the reader is dying to find out. However deliberately confusing the reader, is not a mystery. Hiding elements of the story they would be able to see or hear if they were present, for example, is just frustrating. It takes away from the feeling of immersion. Deliberately hiding elements of setting and character gender or identity isn’t clever, even if it makes your readers feel dumb.

Occasionally it may be tempting to play to a particular audience that is well educated on your topic. However if you do that, you limit your readership. Try and write every scene so it can be understood by, not only an average person, but a tired person, who has just worked a 14 hour shift, is eating a microwave dinner with one hand and is reading your book for a half hour before bed to relax.

However remember to explain well. Reread the above section on ‘explaining too much’ if you have to.

Simple style:

Stephen King talks about this in ‘On Writing’. Things such as ‘omit needless words’, ‘kill adverbs’ and ‘just use the dialogue tag “said” where possible’ all fall into this category. However I think all of those things are just a way of making sentences easier to read and understand. Most of the extreme best sellers, the ones that sell millions of copies, use very simple language and very simple language structure. They are accessible to a broader range of people. They are easy to read. They are, sometimes excessively, easy to understand.

I think each writer needs to find their place between ‘accessibility’ and ‘poetic turn of phrase’. It’s probably a bit simplistic to say it boils down to ‘marketability’ and ‘literary merit’ because I believe the simplistic best sellers do have literary merit, even if it is a different kind of merit to the beautiful-but-tiring-to-read masterpieces. However on a very basic level, when deciding how simple you want your style to be, ask yourself if you want to be read by millions or win awards.

Interesting style:

I’m lumping passive voice and copulas together in one boring mishmash here. In passive voice, something is being done to the subject. What you want is the active voice, the subject is doing something. Examples:

Passive: The path was obscured by bushes.

Active: Bushes obscured the path.

Passive: The Frisbee was thrown by Peter.

Active: Peter threw the Frisbee.

Passive: I’ll always remember the first day of summer as the best day of my life.

Active: The first of summer was the best day of my life.

Copulas are according to Websters: “The connecting link between subject and predicate of a proposition”. When it comes to writing, they are the ‘was’ in the first two passive examples. Which is why ‘was’ can be a great word to search for when looking for passive voice in your manuscript.  

I could expand on this at lot, but there are better articles on it, by more educated people.

Less words, more atmosphere:

Once an editor said to me: ‘I want you to half the word count in this scene, but make it more descriptive.’

After I stopped quietly hating her, I did it. And I learned an extremely valuable lesson that I am still grateful for. Take this opening paragraph from chapter 16 of Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld:

His Majesty’s London Zoo was squawking like a bag of budgies on fire. Deryn skidded to a halt at the entry gate, stunned by the tumult of hoots and roars and shrieks.

Now my weaker re-write:

All the animals in His Majesty’s London zoo were making noise. Deryn stopped running at the wide entry gates, completely shocked by all the different sounds. She could hear lions and bears roaring, the hoots of monkeys and shrieks of something unidentifiable.

‘Squawking like a bag of budgies on fire’ is much more evocative than ‘making noise’. ‘Skidded to a halt’ is a much more visual description than ‘stopped running’. My rewrite is longer too, though far weaker in terms of interest and atmosphere.

In many cases you will find stronger use of language, even if the word count is much shorter, gives readers a much more complete and intense feel for the scene. Whenever you are editing a description remember:

“Half the word count, but make it more descriptive.”

Giving characters individual voice:

You, as a writer, should have an individual voice. However your characters should also have individual voices. Particularly when it comes to dialogue. If your dialogue is very well written, you should be able to take out all identifying tags and it still be very obvious who is speaking. EG:

“Yeah-nah. He’s a derro fuckin’ ranga, mate.”

“Good evening, Lady Grace. Did you have a pleasant time at the theatre?”

“And he was like, we’re not buying you another phone, Kelsey, and I was like, whatever.”

Three characters, three very strong voices that give you ideas about them, their genders, their station in life and their ages. Different people may form slightly different ideas based on these sentences alone, but within the context of a story they would all be clearly distinguishable from one and other.

If all your characters think and speak the same, you have a big problem.

Final Thoughts:

It is hardest to learn to recognise these problems in your own writing. The best reason to join a writer’s group is not to get feedback on your work, but to have the privilege of learning to edit other people’s. Find someone else who’s work is comparable to yours and see if you can find and point out these issues in a chapter of their work.

Once you get good at recognising these problems in other people’s writing, you will finally start to see them in your own. It takes effort, so don’t be surprised if the first few times you try and apply these suggestions, you come away frustrated, tired and despondent. I did, but then suddenly I ‘got it’ and it stopped being such a struggle.

You can improve your writing. You can take good to amazing. It just takes hard work.

RPGs and Writing

What are RPGs and why are they good for writing?

When people hear the term RPG or Role Playing Game, they tend to think of one of three things:

- Computer games, like Dragon Age and Mass Effects.

- Sexual games couples play in the bedroom.

- Old style geek board games, like Dungeons and Dragons.

All of these are incorrect in this context, but the last one is the most accurate.

I am referring to ‘play by post’ RPGs, in which the players take turns writing about the actions and reactions of their characters in a fictional setting. These games are usually played on a forum, via email, in a chat room or via an instant messaging program.

I can hear many of you shutting down and turning off now, but bear with me to the end of the tutorial. You’re about to learn something.

When I talk about play-by-post RPGs, I am referring to ‘long post’, rather than ‘short post’ or ‘chat room post’ games. I will expand on this later. However for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, a long post RPG will read exactly like a published novel, it will just have numerous point-of-view changes in every scene.

I’ll get into the nitty gritty of how a game is played soon, but first, why are RPGs good for writing?

Imagine you are training for a marathon. Food can either be very good for you, or very bad. If you’re eating Tim Tams, sausage rolls and chips all day, it’s going to hurt your chances of completing the marathon. If you’re eating lots of lean protein, leafy vegetables and wholegrain, you’re priming your body to be the best it can be.

In this analogy, RPGs are food and writing at novel is the marathon. RPGs can be either very good or very bad for your writing skills. If you want to use them to improve your writing, you need to have a strategic approach and you need to do it the right way.

I’ve been playing with my primary RPing partner for ten years now. Usually we play for two or three hours, everyday. And in that time, we each write between 3000 and 5000 words. Each. Every single day. Are you crunching the numbers in your head yet? That means our RPing sessions are equal to almost 35, 000 words of writing exercises every week.

Am I a talented writer? God no. I am a very well practised one.

My RPing partner too, has flourished into a brilliant writer. She will always be my favourite writer to read and she does characterisation better than any other person I know. However in our games I am always the DM, which means I plot the action and events of the game, and her characters essentially react. So while my plotting and world developing skills are fantastic, hers have been neglected.

She also doesn’t want to write books. So one of the most enjoyable writers of our generation will probably never see print. And her epic steam punk novel, Brass City, will remain ever unpublished, languishing in my backup hard drive until the day she agrees to give it to me to finish and accept a co-author credit. Not that I could do it justice.

So what separates the good from the bad?

Essentially, the good are separated from the bad by effort. Take away pizza is easy and bad for you. Homemade pizza takes time and effort, but it’s tastier, healthier and more satisfying. To make an RPG post good, you need to strive to include all the elements that make a scene in your novel good. It needs good pacing, intelligent dialogue, good characterisation, interesting description that brings the scene alive and a strong, developed narrative.

Why RP instead of just writing then? Because long post RP posts are between 200 and 500 words, then the other player reacts and sends you a post back, giving you something (hopefully) unexpected and interesting to reply to. You feed off one and other, you excite one and other, you’re working together to develop a fascinating world and plot.

Do you ever feel like your characters are alive and controlling the scene? Imagine if you didn’t write them at all. Imagine if you made something happen and they reacted all on their own, the words appearing on the screen. Good RPing is like that. It’s thrilling and exasperating. You have to think on your feet, react to unexpected plot twists and keep things moving. You get instantaneous reader feedback and validation and you get rewarded with your partner’s posts, which are hopefully just as thrilling and exciting for you, as yours are for them.

RPGs are all the best parts of reading AND writing, rolled into one insane package.

There are also a lot of shitty RPers in the world. People who write poorly and selfishly. People who are boring and self obsessed. People who want to RP because they hate their own life and want to live in a fantasy one where they are perfect. People who are downright crazy. People who only want to RP sex scenes to get themselves off.

To enjoy RPing and to get the benefits of it, you need a good partner. You need someone with the same goals as you, so I suggest looking for other writers. I did not find my partner on a Role Play forum or community. She gave me feedback on a short story I wrote, and after reading a few of her short stories, I realised she would be a fantastic RPer. The rest is history.

But how are RPGs actually played?

This is going to be easiest to explain with examples. Each player has a character, or several characters, whom they play. Usually one player will be the DM, directing the plot and non character events, such as cyclones and alien invasions. Players can only post for the actions of their own characters. Posting the actions of another players character is called ‘bunnying’ and strictly against the rules. Players should communicate with each other regarding injuries and deaths of their characters. If my character and my partner’s character get into a physical fight, we’ll normally talk about the outcome on skype beforehand.

There is no ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ in this kind of rpg. The goal is only to tell a good story together. So sensible players agree to end character conflicts in a way that best serves the plot. Just like when two characters in a novel fight.

Here are three posts, from a recent RPG, to show you how they actually look in practise. In this scene I am playing Princess MacKenzie, her father King Winter Riviera and Winter’s men. My partner is playing Prince Griffon and the court of the Trident. King Winter has arrived at the Trident with his armada and is taking Prince Griffon hostage with the intention of forcing him to marry the princess and gaining access to the trident’s trade routes. It’s an incredibly hostile situation, though everyone is pretending to be friends to avoid a massacre.

POST ONE – My Post.

The King of the Floating Trash Heap, AKA the Trident said a lot of nice things to MacKenzie’s father and they were all—even the berserkers and assassins—led through the floating-trash corridors to a banquet hall that smelt overpoweringly of every slithery wet thing that could be dredged up from the watersea.

MacKenzie was introduced to some fancy men in warm, sensible clothing and she let them touch her hands and tried to ignore the fact she was so cold her nipples were showing through the front of her dress. She was seated beside a bitter looking young man whom she presumed she was going to be forced to marry and served a lot of things that still had their heads, such as fish and crabs. She ate nothing and tried not to stare at it like it was actively trying to eat HER, because that would be rude.

The octopus on her plate looked sad. Dead, but sad. She was hypnotized.

Belatedly, she realised her father was looking at her and quickly tried to recall what had been said. Her father had been talking about the young man beside her. Something about him spearing sharks or people or sea monsters.

“Yes, a great many things,” she tried. Everyone seemed satisfied with her response.

“She wanted to come and meet him and I knew any young man valiant enough to inspire my daughter to travel so far from home must be a marvel.”

From anyone else her father’s words would have sounded gushy or cheap. Instead, they were almost threatening, as if the prince had set some trap to lure them here.

MacKenzie was used to it.

There was a berserker behind the prince. His face painted black and red, a ruff of black feathers around his hood. His eyes were blue. Their gaze met a moment and then the berserker went back to staring at the prince’s head.

She wondered if the berserker’s gaze was more off-putting than being expected to eat a sad octopus.

POST TWO – My Partner’s Post.

Griffon was wondering if anyone had ever been killed with the knife used to pry apart a mussel, though he was smiling and thanking the king for saying such kind things about him, his traitorous tongue pouring out compliments and pandering on automatic. He was aware of the man behind him and it killed his appetite, though he pushed his food around on his plate so he could look at it instead of King Riviera. He wondered if the man could see the hatred in his eyes, though he had no desire to look up and check.

He did glance at the princess next to him. She seemed aloof, cold and disinterested in anything they had to say. Still, he decided to try and pry some more comments out of her. "I'm surprised the princess is so interested in one young man from so far away, though I am honoured by her attention. How did you hear of me?"

POST THREE – My Post.

“Uhhhh,” MacKenzie stared at him, green eyes momentarily wide. She didn’t know his name, much less how she was supposed to have heard of him. She was pretty sure the Trident’s king was ‘Edwin’. Or something to that effect. Wasn’t the prince named after some kind of beast? Basilisk or Quinkin?

“Humorous hieroglyphs. Very popular in the port towns.”

Humorous hieroglyphs typically depicted royalty… though usually in acts of vice or depravity. Horse fucking or eating their own weight in cakes. She wondered what sort of humorous hieroglyphs there were of Prince Basilisk.

All the Floating Trash Heap people were staring at her. However she also knew she could say anything she liked to anyone but her father. She turned her plate so the sad octopus was looking at the Prince instead.

And on with the tutorial.

Hopefully you see how the game works. This particular game is currently around 350 pages long, probably close to 100, 000 words. That’s about average for a longish fantasy novel. The game could easily be as long as a trilogy before it’s done. The writing is quite raw—obviously editing is left to a minimum, as we’re firing off about twenty posts an hour.

In summary, RPGs can be an awesome tool to improve your writing. Some people will never ‘get it’ and some people will be lazy and actually make their writing worse by teaching themselves bad writing habits. However those who do it well, will not only find a great new pleasure in life, but will turn themselves into writing powerhouses.

Let me know how it goes for you.

Copyright. Talitha Kalago. 2012

Better Editing

WRITING TIP OF THE WEEK:

- Never get the same feedback twice.

When you get good feedback regarding a grammatical error or a weakness in your writing, it typically applies to all other simular instances. For example, if a reader says you need to capitalise a name, they shouldn’t have to point it out every time you use that name. Likewise, if someone points out that an info dump is boring or the description lacks sizzle—unless they say it’s only in that scene, you can assume all your description needs work and you should remove as many info dumps as possible.

When I get feedback from my edit, she’ll highlight an instance of something she wants changed—explain why she wants it changed and politely informs me she’s certain I can find and fix the rest on my own. Which I do.

In stark contrast, when I am giving friends feedback on their writing—I’ll address a number of issues in one chapter, only to have them hand me the next chapter two weeks later with the SAME ERRORS.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t editors and agents in the world who won’t hold your hand and point out the same mistakes to you over and over. However it’s just about the most lazy and unproductive approach I’ve ever heard of. Aren’t we all striving to be better writers? Do any of us really think we’ve peaked and further improvement is unnecessary?

Well, fixing those things you KNOW should be fixed is part of being a better writer. Remember the feedback you receive and apply it to future writing. Conscious editing is good editing.