How to Write Good

Found this on the Villanova website (university in America) and had to share.


How to Write Good

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.

2. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

3. Employ the vernacular.

4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

5. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

6. Remember to never split an infinitive.

7. Contractions aren't necessary.

8. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

9. One should never generalize.

10. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

11. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

12. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

13. Be more or less specific.

14. Understatement is always best.

15. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

16. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

17. The passive voice is to be avoided.

18. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

19. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

20. Who needs rhetorical questions?

21. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

22. Don't never use a double negation.

23. capitalize every sentence and remember always end it with point

24. Do not put statements in the negative form.

25. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.

26. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.

27. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.

28. A writer must not shift your point of view.

29. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)

30. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!

31. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to the irantecedents.

32. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

33. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

34. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.

35. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

36. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.

37. Always pick on the correct idiom.

38. The adverb always follows the verb.

39. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; They're old hat; seek viable alternatives.

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The Art of the Short Story Part II Plot

I covered the first part of The Art of the Short Story, mostly insights from the 52 authors featured in this brilliant book yesterday and didn't get around to talking about the last section of the book, Part III "Writing".

The Elements of Short Fiction

Plot

Characterization

Point of View

Setting

Theme

Style

An interesting note from looking at the Table of Contents for this section is that Plot is covered over a total of 6 pages, Characterization over 3 pages, and Point of View over 2 pages while Setting, Theme, and Style are given a mere page each.

The section on Plot opens up with Aristotle's "Poetics", which also gives first importance to Plot.

"A beginning is that which does not come necessarily after something else, but after which it is natural for another thing to exist or come to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which naturally comes after something else, either as its necessary sequel or as its usual (and hence probable) sequel, but itself has nothing after it. A middle is that which both comes after something else and has another thing following it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, will neither begin at some chance point nor end at some chance point, but will observe the principles here stated."

The book states that it is rare for a first attempt at a short story to observe such "obvious" balances of proportion. "A typical first attempt at a short story may include an elaborate beginning of four or five pages, a page or two of summarized dramatic events, and a slam-bang ending of a single paragraph that includes a hail of gunfire and screeching brakes".

The plot of the story, the book says "is first a movement in time; second a movement in casuality; and, third, a movement in dramatic tension".

The section goes on to list stories contained within the book that present unified plots, that is, plots where events happen in real-time. Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" takes place in one continuous hour. Jack London's "To Build a Fire" closely follows the last hours of a Yukon traveler's life.  Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" is the real-time confession of a deranged killer.  Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" takes place between supper-time and bedtime. Another thing to note is that stories with a unified plot also tend to take place in a carefully limited locale.

Plots with longer periods of time are called episodic plots, which oblige the writer to make transitions between scenes. As a writer when I read whether it's a short story or a novel I tend to find that a good number of writers have difficulties making transitions. 

One writer who springs to mind is George RR Martin, author of A Song of Fire and Ice (aka Game of Thrones, which is the first book in this series). I'm convinced that his "Point of View" style is simply because he cannot make transitions - not from one character to another nor from one locale to another. I can understand how this would be a problem given that no one character is the main anything - who the protagonist or antagonist is depends almost entirely on locale. This interests me because as the series begins to draw to a close it's obvious that the various characters will have to come closer and closer together and that there will be less and less locales. I'm interested to see how Martin handles the transitions or if he will switch from an episodic plot to a more unified one as many epic stories tend to do towards the end.

Take for example the author that Martin has seemed to borrow from primarily, JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings". There are a number of changes in locale and the transitions seem logical and streamlined. I think Martin will make a similar attempt to unify in the vein of LOTR meaning that eventually Martin's characters will move towards the Iron Throne in the same way the characters of LOTR move towards Mordor, as the Iron Throne is what unifies the majority of the characters in terms of their motives.

A primary feature of an episodic plot is the ability to move backwards and forwards through time. Additional information is provided by flashbacks while the author is free to leap forward over periods of time that hold little dramatic interest.

The book cites Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilych" as a story that finds its punch using flashbacks. It begins at the title character's wake and continues backwards through the character's childhood, education, marriage, rise to prominence, and finally his fatal illness. The unusual time scheme underscores his assertion that his protagonist's life "had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible".

I can cite a number of stories and novels that fall flat when using flashbacks and if the advise of agents or writers or the desires of publishers are to be taken into consideration, writers are encouraged to not use flashbacks especially in the beginning of the story. 

I cannot necessarily agree with this idea, but one example I can cite is JK Rowling's first book in the Harry Potter series. I don't like the Prologue much but at the same time, the information contained therein about the circumstances that bring Harry to the Dursleys door are extremely important to the story. The next time we see Harry he's a boy of 10, but because of the previous exposition of the essential information  - the who, what, when, where - the reader knows what they need to know to keep on reading.

If the Prologue to the Harry Potter books is exposition in the theme of the traditional fairy tale "Once upon a time", there is another variation, one which seems more in favour these days called the in medias res (in the middle of things). These stories and novels open after the conventions of the old epic poems in the midst of some event or other and it is not until later that the characters and their relationship to the one another or to the story itself are made clear.

Stories that begin in medias res skip the first part of plot (exposition) to the complication or conflict. The rising action of the story (or what Aristotle would have called the essential middle) may or may not be the bulk of the story, but it is always building towards the next part of the plot the climax.

The climax is the greatest point of tension in the story, which brings about the falling action of the story, in which the built up tension is finally released.

The final part of a plot is the dénouement or resolution. The word dénouement refers to the untying of a knot which returns the characters to another stable situation.  Just as fairy tales traditionally end with something akin to "and they lived happily ever after", many stories conclude with what the future holds for its characters.

The dénouement may be either closed or open. A closed dénouement ties everything up in a bow and explains all unanswered questions the reader might have, as in the "Elementary, my dear Watson" explanation found in any of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales.  On the other hand an open dénouement leaves us with a few tantalizing loose ends.

I can think of any number of stories or novels that end by tying up everything nicely, but fewer who manage to pull off the trick of leaving the readers questions unanswered in a way that is successful that isn't in the genre of sci-fi and or about dystopian futures, which I think are more inclined because of the impending future that cannot be answered to be able to pull this off.

Many of Borges' stories come to no neat conclusion, such as "The Immortal". Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", contained within this book comes to a conclusion without providing answers to the reader as well. If you can think of others that do this successfully, please leave suggestions as I'm very curious about this mostly because at the end of six seasons of LOST I wanted to hunt the writers down and torture them for answers.

What this book doesn't really say is what makes a good plot? Should I worry that as a writer I myself can't define or distinguish a good plot from a bad plot even though I'm able to nitpick other elements of stories to excess?

A search on Google for "What makes a good plot" turns up a number of answers and I've clicked through a good number of them now without finding any answer better than the definition of plot itself:

plot: is a literary term defined as the events that make up a story, particularly as they relate to one another in a pattern, in a sequence, through cause and effect, how the reader views the story, or simply by coincidence

* I'd also like to mention that the "elements" of plot in this post taken from The Art of the Short Story were taken from Gustav Freytag, which you an read about on Wikipedia here. Also Aristotle's Poetics is a must read for well, everyone.

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This Month's Posts

Found this today on GadgetHovel and thought it was wildly appropriate as I'm dedicating all this month's posts to NaNoWriMo related stuff. I'm tripling the challenge of writing 50,000 words before November 31st with writing a daily blog, and Twitter'ing helpful tips to other "NaNoWriMos" across the globe in 140 characters or less.  You can follow me @LaFemmeFlaneuse on Twitter!

If you missed today's NaNoWriMo inspired post about Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules of Writing Fiction you can read it here.

Keep on writing NaNoWriMos!

I'm going to get back to it myself now.

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Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. Last year I had all these plans to participate, but of course life is what happens when you're making other plans, but this year my other plans were all about getting ready for NaNoWriMo.

Now technically speaking you're not supposed to start early, but planning and notes are allowed, so that's what I've been working on. All my notes, clippings, post-its, random napkin scribblings, and the like are now starting to amass. I keep anything I write on, so eventually I'll take all these "things" and use them. Or I won't and maybe I'll use them somewhere else another time.

Now 50,000 words isn't going to be the length of my novel. I have calculated my novel will be around 65 - 70,000 words. The 50,000 words are supposed to be a rough draft too. Since I've decided to rewrite the 130,000+ words I've already written, I'm basically starting a new novel.

Last week I worked on writing a synopsis. I called myself out by asking friends on Facebook if they would be willing to read my novel. A few of them said send it over. I wanted to send a synopsis first, so I had to write one. It's damn hard work mostly because you're not supposed to write a synopsis until you have a finished book. I wrote a synopsis and now I'm using it as an outline. My friends are impatient.

One month of writing not for quality, but for quantity. Catharsis. Respite from the pursuit. 50,000 words just for fun. A challenge. A deadine.

I can't wait.

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Beyond the Nuts & Bolts

Since producing a rough draft of a manuscript, I've been more and more aware of what the heck I should be paying attention to as the time approaches for me to seek representation and eventually, publication.

It's a vast and confusing world out there for writers. What kind of agent should you be looking for? What kind of contests can be a springboard for your career? What should you avoid? All kinds of questions are filling my head these days, and I've been dedicating one hour a day to answering these questions.

I found a very useful resource for this kind of information, but I can't repost anything here without permission. Hopefully I'll hear back soon and will be given permission to share, but in the meantime, here are a few things I've learned from my searches this past week that I've noted as particularly important for us first timers:

• Start learning how to read contracts and fine print.
• It might not be a bad idea to have a lawyer in mind that is used to working within the publishing industry for when you need one, and undoubtedly you will.
• Same goes for an accountant.
• Make sure the agents you query are "reputable" meaning:

1. They've sold work for other authors to commercial publishers. There are a lot of scams out there. Agents who try to refer you to vanity presses they own for example. In the end you pay an agent and you pay to publish your own book.
2. The fees they charge are not out of the ordinary. You have to find out exactly what fees the agent would charge you in advance. While certain fees are just outright scams there are some fees which appear to be "okay". Such as fees incurred over the ordinary cost of business to market your manuscript to potential publishers. In this case you need to know if they're going to charge you, what for, and how you will be billed. Ideally your agent believes in your work and agrees to deduct fees from your advance.
3. The agent provides a service worth paying for. Is your agent going to represent your manuscript? Or is the agent going to shove it with a bunch of others and send them off? Very few publishers accept non-solicited (meaning agent represented) manuscripts. An agent is almost mandatory. Is your agent going to make sure your manuscript gets read? Do they already have ideas of which publisher might want to accept your manuscript for publication? These are questions you have to ask and answer before signing anything.

Now when it comes to agents, I'm working on making my top three choices. I'm looking for agents who have a lot of experience with what I think of "after publication", meaning not only will they shop your book, but they will help you with film options, foreign rights, etc.

My weapon in finding an agent besides "The Writer's Market" is a little website I found www.querytracker.net.

I am really impressed with this website, and if you're going through the same process as me, you might be too. I didn't take a premium membership, but I'm not sure I'm not going to if only to toss a little money (it's $25 a year) towards the people who made this site.

Here's a quick run through of why I like this site:

1. You can search by author to see who represents them.
2. You can also search by agent.
3. Once you find the agent that represents the author, or you would like to represent you, there is an option to generate a "query report". The query report allows you see reponses of people who use the site as regards to their interaction with said agent/agency from the delay in response time, how they agent/agency prefers to be queried, how many people were asked to submit a partial MS or full MS, and whether or not they were offered representation.
4. You can see how people were rejected. Form letter, helpful rejection, etc.
5. You can keep track of agents you'd like to query in the future or have already queried.

Here's a snapshot of the querytracker website, click on it to enlarge for a closer look at the report the site generates or visit the site and perform your own search.

Now using this website has been a bit disheartening. The two agents on the top of my list aren't really accepting manuscripts at the moment. Great. They also have relatively small amounts of queries. I happen to know they're pretty good agents and rep some pretty fantastic authors, so to compare, I clicked on one of the most queried agents via querytracker, Diana Fox at Fox Literary.

Now keep in mind Diana Fox seems to accept almost every genre I can think of, and when I clicked on the Amazon links of her clients it came up with a lot of horror/sci-fi/fantasy type stuff mostly written by women. Now if that was my genre I'd take that as a good sign given I'm a woman, but it's not my genre.

When I generate the report for Diana Fox I learn that she prefers emails, doesn't send paper rejections anymore, and that she's been queried 1700+ times, of which she rejected 1400+. She did send out 85 helpful rejections though.

If you're in the querying phase now, be sure to check out this site. I however will never be in the querying phase if I don't get some actual writing done, so I'm off to walk the hound, and spend my afternoon doing exactly that.

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T-Minus 3 days until Amsterdam

I admit I love Amsterdam and Dutch people in general. I don't entirely get the sense of humor, but that's okay. Dutch people are fairly aware that most non-Dutch people don't get their humor and they're okay with that too.

That is what I love about Amsterdam. I feel free there. To dress as I want, eat what I want, and to generally do whatever I want while being respectful of the people who live in Amsterdam.
I've been going to Amsterdam since 2005 when a then friend who was living there asked me if I wanted to come hang out and detox with her after a particularly gruesome series of fashion weeks. I'd just got back to Paris and it began all over again. I was about to lose my mind.

I took the train with her and we hopped into a cab. I didn't know it at the time but this is a complete niet-niet in Amsterdam. We should have taken the tram or hoofed it.  I knew it was a mistake when I watched a buxom girl on a 10 speed strap her suitcase on and ride away. Lesson learned.

So this then friend was living in the Weteringstraats near the French consulate and for one week I just lazed about Amsterdam doing whatever I felt like and of course popping into coffeeshops here and there. I went to galleries, drank absinthe, pretended not to be peeking at the wares on display behind backlit panes of glass in the Red Light district lest someone think I was more than window shopping, and tried to pronounce words properly. When I realised I could also buy amazing vintage clothing from a street vendor for less than a Meal Deal at McDonald's I knew I would have to come back again and again...well played Holland.

That was the beginning of my love affair with Holland. In the six years since that visit I have spent all but two vacations either in part or in full in Holland. I've been considering for two years to move there for a few years, but when the little house became a possibility, I sort of shelved my longing.

I'm going to be in Amsterdam for two weeks and I can't wait. I've got a new laptop to write on and I feel like the Muse will be kind. The last time I was in Amsterdam for longer than a week was when I stayed for four months and wrote an entire non-fiction book that may or may not be published one day. So maybe this time I can write a chunk of a fiction novel that will be published one day sooner than later?

All because I found an ad on Craigslist where someone wanted to rent out their place for cheap to watch their cats.

If you're in Amsterdam, come find me. I will be the extremely happy girl in some Comme des Garcons clothing or a Justice League t-shirt trying to make my dreams come true. See if you can spot me!

(Just wait until Friday because I won't be there until then.)

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Writing Tip #1

Always put clarity before cleverness. Your reader will love you for it.

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