Given that many around here are writers, some with high word counts notched into their writerly belts, I thought it’d be interesting to gather some personal truths about the craft that have been learned over time.

To make a start, here’s something that is quite obvious but which actually took me about two years now to understand, and which I still struggle with: Getting to the fucking point of a scene. That’s it. Simple, of course, but for me at least not easy. Far too often I meander in my writing in such a ridiculous way that a scene which could sufficiently be told in 2k words stretches into a 5k behemoth. I would urge everyone who wants to improve his craft to take a hard, critical look to identify superflous shit that reads nice but ultimately drags down the story.

What kind of knowledge have you picked up and put into your writer’s bandoleer? It can be anything, from a complex insight into the cosmic vortex of narrative honey, to the most basal thing that nevertheless struck you like the halitosis of an aged alley cat.

Personally I’m more interested in the narrative perspective, or things that fall, for the most part, outside the scope of style. But that’s just me. Feel free to inject whatever you feel is a good tidbit into the conversation.

 

I've written a few snippets on writing over the years, and while there's no hard or fast path to enlightenment, there are the occasional beaten, weatherworn signposts out in the badlands, pointing toward the promised land.

A point I consider important is to decide what writer you want to be - what your end game is, and with that in mind chart a course through the badlands in the footsteps of those who have gone before.

I decided fairly early on the kind of writer I wanted to be - a successful one, with an edge honed more toward commercial success than literary prowess. None of my stories are ever Michelin-starred, more produced to feed the hungry masses. As Stephen King said (perhaps the best example of commercial success), he's the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. McDonald's does not spend time considering expert plating, or fusion of flavours, showing the sear, no. They slap meat in a bun, douse it in sugary ketchup, and dump it in a brown paper bag. Quick, easy, not always good for you, but enjoyed by millions daily.

I'd rather be a writer that produces a decent story for millions, than a Michelin-starred chef who can only plate ten people a night.

Eilyfe's point about having one is good advice. And if you're determined to walk the road of commercial success, your name in bookshops, a few hundred Amazon reviews, occasional panel appearance, then heed the following:

Commercial fiction writing - where my bread is buttered - is fairly straightforward. The writing is simply efficiency and story. The more you have of one the less you need of the other.

 

I'm not incredibly successful by any means, but I have learned a few things over the years. I think one of the most important lessons I've learned is to let the characters dynamically lead the story forward.

Of course, you're going to start writing already knowing the skeleton of your plot, but beyond the very basic outline, it's important to ask yourself 'What would these characters do in X or Y situation and position?' rather than 'How do I get these characters into X or Y situation or position?"

When you force a plot development, it usually shows.

 

Before I found DLP I used to write heaps. I managed to get about 200k words out in my first year of fanfiction across about 10 fics. DLP though made me hypercritical of my own work so I've managed about 20k a year since then (if that).

So the lesson is don't become so critical of your own work it ties you to inaction. I've yet to figure out how to do that.

 

I agree, up to a point.

What of a situation where you want to implement an element in a narrative because you feel that it's the right thing for the story you want to tell, yet you also know that doing so will cost you, say, more than just a few readers, actually most of your readers.

Would you, at that point, stop writing the book? Or would you keep trucking, if only for yourself?

I totally want to be commercially succesful. However, I also want to write what I really believe in, not what I think the highest amount of people will approve of. And I think that, should not both principles overlap (which would be the best option of course), it'd be a difficult balancing act.

 

If it's something you want to read, the odds are good others will as well. As in, if you're enjoying what's on the page, so will the readers. If you're adding elements that are a struggle, or that you don't enjoy, odds are good you're adding the wrong elements.

The things is, writing is supremely subjective. And a story told well (or a cheap burger put together properly) can read better than an endless attempt at literary genius. Sometimes, most times, you just want that burger.

To keep the Stephen King trend going, here's an excerpt from one of his most successful and enduring novels, IT, about the elements of story telling. He's been known to take shots at those who see writing as something to mourn rather than celebrate. This is well worth the read:

Spoiler

Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There’s one guy who wants to be Updike. There’s another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner—only he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse. There’s a girl who admires Joyce Carol Oates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is “radioactive in a literary sense.” Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. There’s the short fat grad student who can’t or won’t speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there are nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with “War is the tool of the sexist death merchants.” This fellow’s play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master’s thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer’s play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters.

Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale, three science-fiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson—in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid-1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red.

One of the sf tales earns him a B.

“This is better,” the instructor writes on the title page. “In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the ‘needle-nosed’ spacecraft as a symbol of socio-sexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting.”

All the others do no better than a C.

Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman’s vignette about a cow’s examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class—and the instructor—agree, but still the discussion drones on.

When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tall, and has a certain presence.

Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: “I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics ... culture ... history ... aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean ...” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean ... can’t you guys just let a story be a story?”

No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.

Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.”

“I think that’s pretty close to the truth,” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.

“I suggest,” the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, “that you have a great deal to learn.”

The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room.

Bill leaves ... but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he has written a story called “The Dark,” a tale about a small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a kind of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut-off boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. “Going to knock the shit out of it,” he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a little—a shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just that—after ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isn’t careful, it will knock him down.

He rushes inside and finishes “The Dark” at white heat, writing until four o’clock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ring-binder. If someone had suggested to him that he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in years—or so he honestly believes.

The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the title page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other.

Bill takes the fifteen-page sheaf of manuscript over to the woodstove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The woods were full of it!

“Let them fucking trees fall!” Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face.

He retypes the title page, the one with the instructor’s judgment on it, and sends it off to a men’s magazine named White Tie (although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users). Yet his battered Writer’s Market says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local mom-and-pop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls and the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good.

He sends “The Dark” off with no real hopes—he has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection slips—and is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of White Tie buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it “the best damned horror story since Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Jar.’ ” He adds, “Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it,” but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars!

He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh-141. His advisor initials it. Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to the assistant fiction editor’s congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creative-writing instructor’s door. In the comer of the bulletin board he sees an anti-war cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this: If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I’m going to kill myself, because I won’t know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do. He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but unable to help himself), he adds: I suggest you have a lot to learn.

His drop card comes back to him in the campus mail three days later. The instructor has initialed it. On the space marked GRADE AT TIME OF DROP, the instructor has not given him an incomplete or the low C to which his run of grades at that time would have entitled him; instead, another F is slashed angrily across the grade line. Below it the instructor has written: Do you think money proves anything about anything, Denbrough?

“Well, actually, yes,” Bill Denbrough says to his empty apartment, and once more begins to laugh crazily.

 

I know that feeling, but I've made it a habit to crank out the most grammatically incorrect and stupid sentences that don't even make sense most of the time just to pass a certain point - because I nearly always know where to go from there. I trained myself to do that, in a way, to write on and revise the stupid section later, and I nearly always manage to at least write something. If it's up to any standards is another question...

However, the most important think I recently (finally) got is this very, very easy rule: Make your main character interesting from page one. I still struggle heavily to do that, but I at least know that I somehow have to create empathy right from the start, because there's no one that'll read ten pages of something he doesn't yet know featuring a character he can't feel any connection to.

That said, I'm by no means an experienced writer (well, I do have a word count clocking in around 350k words, but 320k of those aren't worth mentioning), nor do I have a particularly successful story, so my experiences most likely aren't that valuable.

 

That makes you every writer ever. We all add filler, we skip ahead and jump back, add words and take them away. That simple act of writing means you're a writer.

You're putting the bones of the story on the page. Even if they're misshapen, you can't edit a blank page. So those 'stupid sentences' aren't without purpose. They're the support posts you put in place to hold the cement while it sets. They'll come out later, once the structure is a little more stable.

 

There's a fair bit of tips I (and others) know in this thread: https://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?t=21085
It's about the most thinking I've ever done about the craft of writing, along with examples.

 

I said this a few months back in a different thread and I think it fits pretty well here too.

Remember, a knife becomes a knife through the act of cutting.

 

I know quite a few guys that just get stuck at a certain sentence, rewriting it time and time again until they think it's acceptable. That's what I was getting a, because in doing so, they only slow thenselves down quite a lot. Of course all writers edit their texts, but I sometimes just write bullshit only to be able to move on while others I know would spend half an hour to try and find a good way to phrase it.

I like the analogy you used for that principle in the second paragraph, though.