Creative writing - From think to ink - Lindstrom Simeon 2015

Writing blunders

And now, just for fun, let’s look at a few all-too-common yet easily avoidable writing mistakes that even the seasoned pros make occasionally. It’s the age of the Internet: I have no doubt that you can source obvious writing tips from literally anywhere, but I have nevertheless compiled a handy collection of those crimes I know are easy to commit — and how to avoid them.

As you work through your editing process, skim over these to make sure you haven’t inadvertently made a writing blunder.

·  Don’t introduce the reader to a character by having them stare at themselves in the mirror or get dressed in the morning. It’s boring and overdone. Put your character in a real life situation instead, to show their character.

·  Don’t date your work by referring to particular celebrities, the prices of things or Internet memes. Ask yourself if a reference to a song or product will hold up in 2 years or so. If not, drop it.

·  It goes without saying, but if you’re writing sex scenes, be very, very careful about your tone. Unless it’s obviously erotica, avoid rude slang and expletives and leave most of if to your readers’ imagination. Trust me. A good rule of thumb is to avoid writing about sex at all in regular fiction.

·  It’s dead basic, I know — but make sure you’re actually formatting paragraphs correctly. They should all be of roughly the same length, contain a topic sentence and have one idea per paragraph.

·  Choose a spelling convention — American or British — and stick to it.

·  Avoid making your characters speak in over-the-top slang/vernacular. It’s tiresome to read someone spelling out an accent, and can even be offensive. Throw in a little here and there if you want, but try to show character, ethnicity and social class in other ways.

·  I’ll say it again: show, don’t tell. Never write something like, “he was furious.” Instead, use your words to tell the reader about the exact red colour that went to his face and the vein that throbbed in his temple. Exercise 3 above is great for this.

·  Try to avoid second person voice. This involves writing things like, “You wake up to the smell of burning gas. You wonder what’s burning…” Although it can be a great way to create an immediacy and intimacy in writing, it’s not really suited to longer works and can be hard to get right. Most of the time, you can achieve the same result in more conventional ways.

·  Avoid the “as you know, Bob” mistake. This is when you get your characters to explain to the reader what’s going on, although to another character who would reasonably know it already. Think, “Oh, brother, ever since our mother died, you know I’ve been a little distant, and when we sold the farm last year it was worse…” Again, show instead of tell. Put clues here and there — your reader will figure things out for themselves.

·  Don’t have a crush on your characters. This might seem funny to some people, but it’s actually pretty common. Don’t launch into a description of a character that sounds like you’re a stalker admiring every mole and freckle. It’s a convention in some genres of romance to make the hero and heroine impossibly hot, but in all other writing, this is to be avoided. Regular people are more believable and relatable.

·  Don’t waste words and time on boring details. Begin scenes in the middle of action, rather than making the reader wade through a character arriving at a coffee shop and faffing around for 10 minutes before his friend arrives and the juicy dialogue begins. Don’t bother telling about the little actions they do, unless they’re applicable somehow. Your reader will fill in the gaps — focus on what’s important.

·  To make your dialogue authentic, read it aloud. Resist the urge to make characters grandstand and give soliloquys about your personal views. Believable dialogue is more fragmented.

·  Don’t be clever and try to change up the standard “dialogue tags” he said and she said. They’re good enough on their own, I promise, and will be invisible to most readers anyway. Try being fancy and saying, “she explained” or “he wondered” and it only looks clunky. Instead, try to embed those meanings into the quoted words themselves, or use punctuation (! Or ?) to communicate the way someone spoke.

·  In the same vein, kill adverbs. I love adverbs, and it’s my greatest failing in life. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “maybe I can just put an adverb in here…” but then I stop myself. Ask if there’s not a verb you can use instead. Kill adverbs and reincarnate them as noble verbs. If you really can’t, default to an adverb or nothing at all. For a very simple example, don’t say “she put her glass down loudly on the table,” say “she slammed her glass on the table.” And so on.

·  Keep variety in your sentence length. Keep a mix of long and short sentences. Those with the same length over and over and over again can be so boring they almost hypnotize the writer. Short sentences grab attention. Long, languid ones slow the tension down and ask the reader to wait a while…

·  I know it goes without saying, but if you’re bad at this, be extra extra doubly sure that you’re not making common grammatical mistakes (you’re vs. your for instance, or principal instead of principle) and be careful with easy-to-make errors like “I could care less” or “for all intensive purposes.”

·  Don’t put two punctuation marks together. Ever!!

·  Don’t write for nothing. After reading a scene, paragraph, chapter, whatever, something must have changed somehow. There must be some kind of development. Before you begin writing it, ask yourself what the point of that part is — to show a change in the character? To reveal new information? If you haven’t actually succeeded in doing that, scrap the paragraph entirely.

·  Make sure you’re not over using some words. Whip out your thesaurus. Word processors will let you search for every instance of a particular word. Don’t use “giggle” or “bright” or say how a character “shot back” in dialogue every few lines. Mix it up.

·  When naming characters, don’t spend half a year pondering on the perfect name as you would your own child. It’s incredibly awkward when a name seems like something fanciful and over-the-top, just to tickle the author. Long, unpronounceable names can be incredibly alienating — the reader will often skip over it mentally and lose that connection with them. This is bad especially if you have a lot of characters. Use an online random name generator or go through the phone book for natural sounding names, unless you’re writing fantasy or something similar. Avoid “stripper names” (“Melody Lovemore”, “Trixxie Jones”, “Brandi Griffyn”) …unless, you know, you’re writing about strippers.