Advice on Writing. Part 1.

Advice on writing. Part 1.

A good place to start is with Hemingway.

Not that I claim to be an expert, but people read my articles or blog posts and ask me all the time about writing. First, on how to get started, then on how to get good at it. My advice is simple: read, read again, then read s’more. Repeat. In other words, read one hundred and write one. And I don’t mean read for pleasure. I suggest you read critically and find out how it’s really done: figure out how the author introduces a topic, why he repeats the same word, when and why he uses a particular word, how long is the sentence, determine if it’s easy or not to understand, feel the smoothness of the words, their ebb and flow, then ruminate, let it sink in and see if you can do better: you have to be both a student and a critic. Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that reading will make you a good writer (perhaps better), the only guarantee is that without reading you can’t write.

And as long as you’re reading, read the best. There’s no point reading crapola. These are just a few: Farewell to Arms, Hemingway. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain. Moby Dick, Melville. Two years Before the Mast, Dana. A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee.

Note: These are generalizations, simplifications if you will, and there are exceptions to every rule. But then again, don’t forget that to break the rules, it’s helpful to know them first.

27 Gems On Writing. (Assembled by Amanda Patterson). From Ernest Hemingway (in bold). The comments are my own.

Part 1.

1.  Start with the simplest things.  This is critical. The most famous beginning line of any book in the English language has three words. “Call me Ishmael,” Moby Dick, by H. Melville (must reading). – All at once you know something’s up, even if only a name: the gate slams open and we’re off and racing. Plus, it’s an unusual name, interesting perhaps, maybe Biblical? Also, it’s going to be a first person narrative, in the present tense, and maybe even a story, meaning informal, otherwise it might have begun: “My given name is Mr. Ishmael” . . . or worse . . . “From the get-go I was nearly drowned by my parents in holy water and christened Sir Ishmael.” (Okay, I’m having a little fun).

Other great opening lines.

 “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” From The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” From A Tale of Two cities by Charles Dickens. – Wow! Not short but Wow! nevertheless. Good literature is all about exceptions anyway.

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” From The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S Lewis. – You’ve got to love it.

“HOW IS IT POSSIBLE to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start; there can be no other.’ …So the name shall be Nungwe —as good as any other —entered like this in the log, lending reality, if not order, to memory. But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names…” From West with the Night by Beryl Markham. Ok, so not one sentence, but they go together. Also, in her book every word is placed with care and necessary to keep the structure: to move or delete any one of them changes the whole book.

2.  Boil it down. Ironic, but this kind of goes with # 4. Hemingway, in his short story Hills Like White Elephants (recommended reading), didn’t call it “These very hills that jog my memory of some big white lumbering elephants I once saw in . . .. No, in his title, were one word omitted, it would make no sense. (Also, I might as well tell you that hyperbole is my career choice, so if you read on, get used to it).

Speaking of Hills Like White Elephants: an English professor mentor of mine told me that in this story there is one extra word. He wanted to see if I could find it. Needless to say, I couldn’t for the life of me, and got so frustrated I told him all the words were extra, it was a stupid story, you have to be mad to . . . etc., etc. Lots of PhD dissertations have been written on this one story alone, and most of them agree on which one word is extra. Anyway, it frustrated me to no end. Even so, the point is that Hemingway sticks to the essentials and does not elaborate. In short, he says a lot in as few words as the language allows.

3.  Know what to leave out. Adverbs is a good place to start. Example: don’t ever use “very.” Mark Twain said that instead of “very” he preferred to use “damn,” then his editor would strike it out and the sentence would be just right. “Very”, as an adjective, is also iffy. “The very thought of getting married sent him into severe epileptic shock.”  Leave ‘very’ out, and as long as you’re leaving that out, leave out ‘severe’. Now show the reader how he babbled, slobbered, driveled and drooled, then shook uncontrollably from head to toe and was unable to stand up, or even sit.

4.  Write the tip of the ice-berg, leave the rest under the water. Assume the reader knows something, perhaps a lot, consequently, if you are going to write a story about the civil war, leave out, at least at the beginning, that it was in America, between the North and the South, or who won. Don’t explain everything. Example. “I hit him so hard, I knocked him out, meaning he was on the floor.” Write instead “I hit him so hard, I knocked him out; when he hit the floor he bounced.”

5.  Watch what happens today. Hemingway was a war correspondent (Spanish civil War – 1936, WW-II -1944. He landed in Normandy on D day) and aware of what was going on around him: he had to be, in order to stay alive. Lesson: write what you see, what you know. Don’t guess or make predictions. Predictions is a risky business.

6.  Write what you see. This is damn important. Personally, I don’t like second hand info. Example: when Plato writes about the death of Socrates, he lets you believe he was there, going on and on, recounting the events like a witness, which he wasn’t. Bad move Plato! He’s basically retelling what someone else told him and worse, he doesn’t own up and let the reader know.

7.  Listen completely. A good writer can repeat word for word what he just heard, whether it’s a question or a statement. If asked “Do you know what time it is?” say “yes.” It will let the other person know you are paying more attention with your answer than they are with their question.

8.  Write when there is something you know, and not before. I just spent a month researching Climate Change on an essay for the Denton Record Chronicle. In the end, I was more confused than ever and decided to scrap it. However, all is not lost, as it was a good lesson. In a separate blog, I will list the things I learned . . . if there’s room.

9.  Look at words as if seeing them for the first time. “There’s magic in them there words.” I don’t know who said that first, maybe I did, but it’s true. Also, don’t be afraid to make words up, if it’s called for (as in “s’more” in my intro). Think of “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Some genius once made this up and it took guts. From Merrian Webster: In fact, the earliest known written record of a variant is for supercaliflawjalisticexpialidoshus from an “A-muse-ings” column by Helen Herman in The Syracuse Daily Orange (Syracuse University), March 10, 1931. The columnist muses about her made-up word, describing it as including “all words in the category of something wonderful” and “though rather long and tiring before one reaches its conclusion, … once you arrive at the end, you have said in one word what it would ordinarily take four paragraphs to explain.”

Made up words are also especially good in dialogue, where the author, through his characters, can say anything, express any opinion, and speak any lingo, any way he wants. If he mispronounces a word, it’s not Mark Twain, it’s Huckleberry Finn: “What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”

Note that Huck speaks the same way  throughout the book. He doesn’t finish speaking Havard (sic) Educated in the last chapter.

10. Use the most conventional punctuation you can. Self-explanatory. On the other hand, my brother Pablo would sometimes not use any, but include a list of punctuation marks at the end of a letter instead, i.e. comas, periods, exclamation points and the like, a whole line full of them, then tell me, the reader, whomever, to use them as they saw fit. Or in his own words, “to put them where the sun don’t shine.” He hated them. 🙂

11. Ditch the dictionary. If it’s not a word you’re familiar with, it comes out fake and fabricated. Readers can tell the difference. Best stick to what you know, until you know more.

12. Distrust adjectives. See # 3. But that’s not all: in grammar, an adjective’s job is to modify nouns and pronouns. In other words, it’s a way for the author to tell the reader what to think, and this is tricky. Example: don’t say that it’s a “huge, mammoth” building. Better say it’s a 20 story building that takes up half a block: no adjectives. If the reader is from Hong Kong, it might be a tiny building, by their standards.

Remember, no amount of colorful adjectives can fix poor writing. It’s best to paint the picture and let the reader see for himself: I don’t want to know the guy was “blind” drunk. I want to hear him hit the floor instead, and bust his nose, blood and gore going every which way, the splatter turning the walls crimson and his wife screaming at him while hitting him on the head time and again with her purse, for being a stupid moron, then kicking him in the groin once, for good measure, the ambulance sirens getting louder in the background. (I did warn you about hyperbole).

13. Learn to write a simple declarative sentence. “It’s hot in there, the reason we need a drink”.Short, simple, and to the point, also hard to misunderstand.

14. Tell a story in six words. I love this one. Lore has it that the best six word story is by Hemingway himself. The truth is that although it preceded him, he was the one that made it famous: “For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.” Packs a punch. Notice how the reader has to make up his own mind ‒ a mind being a place with no boundaries where anything is possible. He is reported to have won a $10 bet on this one, and one that his friends happily paid.

Another favorite of mine is Mark Twain’s description of a boy: “Skin wrapped tight around an appetite.” I’ve never seen a better one, or even close. Also six words. For more on brevity, I have a short essay on the subject. Here is the link: https://bit.ly/2YqJKu9

15. Write poetry into prose. Hah! If only it were that easy. Melville’s entire book Moby Dick, or The Whale, is nothing but poetry. If you don’t believe me, read it four times like I have. By the third time it’s pure poetry in motion. Then it only gets better. “For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”

16. Read everything so you know what you need to beat. See my intro.

17. Don’t try to beat Shakespeare. If you set your expectations that high, you’ll most likely be disappointed. I’m glad Hemingway didn’t say Melville, who sets my bar. Take heart, writing, same as playing the piano, improves with practice.

18. Accept that writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done. There comes a point where one has to say, “enough, that’s it, I’m done!” No more editing and reviewing. Otherwise there’s no end.

19. Go fishing in summer. Good idea. Speaking personally, my best ideas come to me when I’m away from my desk and doing something else. They arrive on their own, sometimes in the dark of night, other times when I’m driving to work, or watching a soccer game at a friend’s house. (I don’t have a TV). I always carry a notebook and jot them down.

20. Don’t drink when you’re writing. Tough advice coming from Hemingway. Sort of a “do as I say, not as I do”. But, let’s not be judgmental, who knows what snakes he had to stomp in the middle of the night. Still, good advice, and one that I follow because  . . . I have to: as soon as I have a drink, even half a glass of wine, my internal dictionary/thesaurus and spell check gets deleted and it’s all over ‒ adi os, till toorrow.

21. Finish what you start. I don’t know if Hemingway meant finish before you start something else, or finish eventually. Still, good advice and self-explanatory, but hard to do. I have lots of stuff half finished, almost finished, just started. Yet, I try to keep that to a minimum and always go back and finish.

22. Don’t worry. You’ve written before and you will write again. In other words, don’t get depressed if your book is not a best seller on the first go-around, or if Disney and Quentin Tarantino (what kind of name is that?) don’t run over, knock on your door at the same time and try to outbid each other on the movie rights. (Since this is free advice, I would go with Tarantino every time, even at half price).

23. Forget posterity. Think only of writing truly. Hemingway was big on telling the truth, no matter what. Perhaps the reason his writing is so sparse. He only writes up to a point, the point at which his knowledge ends and B.S. begins. With him, the reader has to fill in the blanks. No Plato he: Hemingway would have probably said, “My dear friend Socrates is dead” period. And here I am guessing: no Hemingway I.

24. Write as well as you can with no eye on the market. This way, what comes out will be real, genuine, factual, and most likely original ‒ no ulterior motives. Of course, it is widely understood that Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea with an eye on the Nobel Prize (1954). So, go figure.

25. Write clearly – and people will know if you are being true. See #23.In other words, a good way to obfuscate is to get wordy, to catch “the politician’s venereal disease” of double talk, obscure, complicate. No need to say he’s a “nattering nabob of negativism” if you mean he’s a total idiot.

26. Just write the truest sentence that you know. To accomplish this, be brief: there are no long complicated, convoluted truths.

27. Remember that nobody really knows or understands the secret. To each his own, I say. Then again, Henry Ford might have said that opportunity looked a lot like hard work. He did say “I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” And, speaking of his cars, “Any colour – so long as it’s black”: simple, boiled down, true, brief, clear, apparently no eye on the market, but seven words. . . oh well. I think Hemingway would have approved of Henry’s writing anyway.

mt

PS. Future advice from Mark Twain, Churchill, H.H. Munro, P.G. Wodehouse and others . . . in the works. Stay tuned.