Thoughts on Writing
#01: You're Going To Suck.
by Seanan McGuire
Aren't we kind around these parts? The original thought:
You're
going to suck when you start. Sucking when you start is okay. Every new
project, no matter how brilliant the idea at the heart of it happens to
be, is going to start by sucking. Just deal with it, and soldier
through. Every sentence is a learning experience.
Ready?
Let's begin.
My Spelling Sucks.
No
one is born knowing how to spell. Some people pick up on it faster than
others, which is how we get the scary first-grade spelling bee
champions, but even they weren't born with the intrinsic knowledge of
how spelling works. What's more, English is one of the most confusing
languages there is, spelling-wise. Words that sound the same aren't
spelled the same. Words that are spelled the same don't sound the same.
Stealthy little silent letters lurk everywhere, waiting to trip us up.
(I swear, the letter 'e' is totally a ninja in its spare time.) The
letter 'u' is either under-used or inserted in absolutely everything,
depending on where you learned to spell what is supposedly the exact
same word.
Oh, and in case all of the above wasn't enough? We periodically change
the way that words are spelled. Which means that if you've learned your
spelling through osmosis, you may have archaic or outdated word-forms
lurking in your hind-brain, just waiting to sneak out and make you look
like an idiot. You're trucking merrily along, and then WHAM, that word
doesn't actually have a 'z' in it anymore. Ha ha, fooled you.
I am here to tell you that your suspicions are correct. The English
language is out to get you.
It
starts innocently enough, with words like 'cat' and 'truck,' but the
evil is already lurking. Look at 'ball.' Why the hell does it need two
'l's? For that matter, why does 'hell' need two 'l's? You can make the
point just as efficiently with one. The word 'efficiently' is a
nightmare of spelling hazards waiting to happen. Face it: any language
where we need mnemonics like 'i before e, except after c, or when
sounding like a, as in neighborhood or weigh' is not playing fair.
English wants you to suffer. I don't know why, but there it is.
This
does not, sadly, absolve you from the need to at least pretend to know
what you're doing. If you spell words too bizarrely, your proofreaders
won't be able to figure out what you mean, and will consequentially
never be able to tell you what the correct spelling actually is.
Reading a lot will help with this. So will possession of a spellcheck,
although the more you rely on computerized tools, the more likely it is
that you're going to wind up using the wrong (but correctly spelled)
word. The adage about the spellcheck not caring what you mean, just how
it's spelled is entirely accurate.
How important is spelling? Very. Before you send a manuscript anywhere,
you should first go through and make sure that all your spelling is
correct, or as correct as you can possibly make it (your spellcheck may
not catch all those extra 'u's or antique 'z's, after all). I find that
running things through a spellchecker and looking for those little red
lines is a great way to start. Some words will still be red --
'improper' contractions used for dialog, character names, onomatopoetic
sounds -- but intentional misspelling is totally different.
Note
the stress on the word 'anywhere' in the previous paragraph. I don't
care whether you're sending your manuscript to your agent, publishing
house, best friend, or cat: you should try to fix your spelling before
you send that piece of paper out into the world. We judge people by
their spelling, whether we mean to or not. If something is heavily
misspelled, we're more likely to get confused, and we're also more
likely to dismiss the work as being inadequate. Let's not get our
darling textual babies dismissed just because that ninja 'e' keeps
kicking our asses.
A handy tip: everyone has words they just
can't seem to master. I have serious issues with 'adrenaline' and
'consciousness,' to name a few. (I used to have issues with 'cemetery'
and 'calendar,' but I've managed to get over those.) Try writing the
words you know you have trouble with on a post-it or piece of scratch
paper and sticking it up near your primary writing spot. It won't fix
things completely, but it's likely to reduce the frustration of typing
a word over and over and seeing it turn red every time.
My Vocabulary Sucks.
Here's
another thing no one is born knowing: how to say what they mean. We
basically start off with a set of weird cooing noises and an
ear-piercing scream, and we evolve communication from there. What words
and meanings we learn will be determined by our environment. Those of
us who started our reading careers early are likely to have larger
written vocabularies than spoken, just because we may not be certain
how things are actually pronounced. Those of us who learn purely
through osmosis may have matching vocabularies, and dammit, we know how
to say everything correctly. And those of us who are just starting out
as writers may have a spoken vocabulary in the thousands, but only use
a hundred words when we write. And that's okay.
Dr.
Seuss did awesome things with a really limited number of words.
Shakespeare was so busy trying to make himself understood that he invented
words. The man was the Thomas Edison of language -- if there wasn't a
word that meant what he wanted to say, he would by-God come up with
one. Most of us are going to fall somewhere in the middle. The urge to
measure your vocabulary against the vocabularies of others is always
going to be there, because hey, we're all only human. Try to resist it.
Seriously.
You can improve your vocabulary in a lot of different
ways. Reading is good, although you should be careful to verify the
meanings of the words you learn that way; One For the Morning
Glory,
for example, is an excellent book that will happily teach you that a
'gazebo' is a type of game animal, and quite tasty. (This is not,
sadly, the case. Unless you're a termite.) They make awesome word-a-day
calendars. And there's always the glory of wandering around and just
listening to people.
I recommend trying out a word in
conversation a few times before you try to really make use of it, and
being aware of the cultural context that you learned that word from.
Slang is a part of vocabulary, after all, and there are some common
slang terms that border on affectionate in their original cultural
contexts but would get me decked if I tried making use of them in daily
life.
I know words today that I didn't know a year ago. I'll
know words in a year that I don't know today. Keep in mind that your
vocabulary is utterly and only yours; as long as you're making your
meaning clear, you're doing fine. (Mind, this doesn't address the issue
of purple prose or using too many modifiers -- that comes later, once
we've come to terms with our sucking.) Embrace your vocabulary. Feed
it, water it, and watch it grow.
Also, if everyone is telling you that you're using a word wrong, listen.
My Grammar Sucks.
Yes.
Yes, it does. So does mine. So does everyone's. The world is rife with
run-on sentences, sentence fragments, split infinitives, sentences
without verbs, and a thousand other violations of grammatical law, some
of which I don't even have names for. If there were grammar police,
we'd all owe millions of dollars by the time we turned
twenty-five...and that's assuming that all violations before the age of
eighteen are forgiven, wiped clean when we outgrow our juvenile
records. No one in the world, regardless of the language that they're
working in, is completely free of grammatical sin.
That being
said, there's a difference between 'everybody makes mistakes' and
'flagrant disregard of the rules.' Learn the basic rules of English
grammar. Learn how to produce sentences that aren't made of spaghetti.
Learn what the basic parts of a sentence are, and
why they're
important. There are a lot of books and a lot of websites that will
help you with this, and the websites tend to have a refreshingly low
bullshit quotient. They're telling you what a verb is. Full stop.
Everything else is for someone else to take care of.
You'll
learn some of the more complicated rules as much through osmosis as
anything else, much like spelling and vocabulary. Anyone who's done
enough reading to want to start writing is going to know basically what
a sentence should look like, at least in the
vaguest of terms.
If you actually compare a sample of competently-done writing to a book
of rules on grammar, you'll find that you're following as many rules as
you're breaking. Which is another thing to keep in mind: most of the
rules on grammar were devised for formal writing.
Something
like this -- a rambling, informal essay -- breaks a lot of grammatical
rules because frankly, following them all would make it dry and dull.
The goal is to produce something interesting and comprehensible, not to
be a model of grammatical perfection.
The idea is basically
this: learn the rules, because then, when you break them, you'll be
breaking them with full knowledge and understanding of what you're
doing. Understand that you're never going to be pefect. No matter how
hard I hammer on my text, I always get someone sending me a note that
reads 'this sentence no verb' or 'I don't understand what you're trying
to say here.' My biggest sin is probably run-on sentences. I do love a
run-on sentence. But since I'm aware of that flaw, and aware that it is
a flaw, I can watch for it. Knowing the rules is what makes it possible
to break them with impunity.
My Punctuation Sucks.
Punctuation
is exciting in the same way that spelling is exciting: the way that
makes me want to hit it repeatedly with a machete. You want an example?
Go into a room full of writers. Express an opinion, either positive or
negative, about the Oxford comma. Step back before you get yourself
hurt. The rules of punctuation are finicky and strange, and because of
that, almost everyone is willing to defend their personal set of rules
to the death. How much you care about punctuation is entirely up to
you. Here, however, are a few quick tips:
1. Oxford comma or no Oxford comma, pick one and stick with it.
2. Quotes go outside
punctuation in almost all cases. Cases where they go inside the
punctuation are fairly rare, and you're likely to make fewer mistakes
if you just assume 'outside unless told otherwise.'
3. The ellipse and the dash are powerful tools. Use them sparingly.
4. Try to minimize the use of colons and semi-colons on the same page.
5.
Not everything is said at the top of your lungs, unless you're
unhinged! Minimize exclamation points! That helps them stay effective!
I'd
try to offer more help, but frankly, my punctuation sucks, too. Find
someone with better punctuation, bribe them with cookies to read your
stuff, and learn everything you can from the red ink that they splash
liberally on your text.
My Characters Suck.
In the
beginning, yes, probably. I doubt there's anyone who's ever waved their
hand and had their very first character appear as a perfect, totally
nuanced human being, ready and raring to go. Try cruising around and
looking at the various Mary Sue Litmus Tests peppering the
Internet...but don't take them too seriously unless you're writing
fanfiction. Keep in mind that almost all original characters who are
focal in their original universes would score as Mary Sues on the
majority of these tests. It's vital, after all, that your protagonist
be interesting, skilled, and capable of surviving your story. That
said, if you make every character a gorgeous purple-eyed redhead with
super magical powers, you may want to consider working on your people
skills.
Look at the characters in your favorite books. What makes them
interesting? What makes them people?
You don't want to copy them exactly -- that's sort of not the point
here -- but what traits do they have in common? What do they do that's
so enthralling? Real people don't have to make sense. We can have as
many contradictory and unlikely hobbies, traits and obsessions as we
want, because nobody's editing us. Fictional people are a bit more
constrained. The most nuanced fictional people will still be a little
more linear than your average real person, because sixty page
digressions to explain why Jane is a Pepsi girl instead of drinking
Coke just sort of kill the narrative. We don't want to kill the
narrative. Dead narratives are bad.
You may find that characters start out as one thing and evolve into
something else. That's okay. Actually, that's awesome,
because that means you're figuring out who your characters are.
It's entirely possible to be wrong about certain elements of your own
characters. I know one person who wrote about two-thirds of a fairly
substantial novel before realizing that oh, hell, their point-of-view
character was the wrong gender. I wrote the better part of a book
before realizing that my protagonist wasn't in love with the person
that I originally thought she was in love with. In both cases, going
back and revising to bring the early instances of the character into
line with the later instances of the character made the books much,
much stronger, and much more gripping reads.
We learn things
about our friends by spending time with them, and they always seem to
have the capacity to surprise us. Our characters, for all that they
come out of us, are basically the same way. If you want your characters
to stop sucking, spend as much time with them as you can. Put them into
weird situations and see what they do. If you're lucky, they'll
surprise you.
My Stories Suck.
We learn how to
tell a basic story when we're about two. Of course, those stories often
consist of dizzying leaps of illogic combined with a hearty tendency to
blame absolutely everything on the cat, but they're still stories. As
we get older, those stories mature, becoming (usually) more linear and
easier to understand. Or not -- there's a reason that there's a
surrealist movement. Still, sometimes we look at the stories that other
people tell and go 'how the hell did he manage
that?' The answer, of course, is practice.
Picture
telling a story as something like juggling. Most of us can manage to
toss one ball into the air and catch it as it comes down. "Dave went to
the store, bought milk, came home." After a little practice, most of us
can manage two balls at the same time. "Dave went to the store, bought
milk, came home. Meanwhile, Katie was in the process of contacting her
handlers at the KGB." But pretty much nobody picks up six balls and
gets them going on the very first try. It takes practice, and it takes
learning the fine art of keeping your balls from colliding mid-air. You
have to find that delicate balance between 'moving them fast enough'
and 'moving them so fast that they go out of control'...and if you're
learning to juggle for an audience, you have to make sure that your
balls don't go so fast that they become a blur.
There
are lazy storytelling tricks that everyone uses when they get stuck.
Sometimes we outgrow them. Other times, we learn enough about the rest
of what we're doing to get away with those one or two lazy little
habits. Much like breaking the laws of grammar, what matters is knowing
that we're dropping one ball to keep the rest moving faster, or that
we're rolling a ball behind our wrists to make it look like it's flying
with the others. I have my lazy tricks. Everyone
has their lazy tricks. It's just a matter of minimizing them, and
outgrowing them when we can.
Pacing
is a huge part of what makes our stories suck. Go too fast and the
story is over before you've had time to fully invest in enjoying it. Go
too slowly and you're going to wind up putting your readers to sleep.
Sadly, pacing is one of those things that we generally have to learn by
trial and error; more error than anything else. Brooke regularly marks
up my manuscripts with 'I have fallen asleep during this section,' thus
allowing me to improve my pacing by cutting the boring stuff. Diana
points out the places where I'm going so quickly that I've forgotten to
explain what I'm doing. And thus does my pacing improve. I've gotten
better at it -- their notes have become rarer -- but I'm never going to
be perfect. And that's okay, because I have embraced my suck, and
learned to compensate.
So Basically, You're Saying I Just Suck.
Basically, I'm saying we all
just suck...but that we all have the potential to improve. One of the
most destructive things I see people do -- and I know it's destructive,
because I've done it myself -- is compare themselves to people who've
had a lot more practice, and go 'well, if I'm not as good as _____,
there's no point.' There is every point. Practice
doesn't make
perfect, but practice makes a hell of a lot less sucktastic, and that's
really what the goal is: not to suck.
We started out having no
idea how to spell. Now, most of us can spell 'the cat and the dog had a
fight' without trouble, and those of us with learning disorders or
vendettas against the letter 'e' have had time to learn to compensate.
We started out having no idea how to construct a sentence or use
punctuation. Well, most of us can now make ourselves understood with
words, and we're all pretty good at using the period. Everything can be
learned, everything can be practiced, and the more you learn and the
more you practice, the more balls you can keep in the air.
Everybody sucks at first. Every idea has its flaws at first.
The only way to improve is to practice.
© 2008 Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire is an author, poet, and musician who lives in the San Francisco Bay area with two cats and a small army of plush dinosaurs. Her first studio album, Stars Fall Home was released last year, and her fantasy novel Rosmary and Rue will be published by DAW in 2009.
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