How Not to Write #2 – The In-joke.

I was reading a free e-book: it was impenetrable. Couldn’t understand a single thing the writer was trying to say. Oh, I did get the setting: a universe with few people in it. I also understood that the author’s characters were playing a game. There was a listing of the game’s rules, but I suspect the game was never tested out by the author. The game made no sense to me. Maybe the rules were just badly described. But were the rules important to the story, and if they were, is it a good idea to base a story on rules? And the author’s tone of voice was most irritating, like listening to someone tell an elaborate joke that only the in-crowd could understand; it was like having someone shouting at you, “I know something you don’t know.”

This reader failed to understand the joke; there wasn’t enough relevant information, explanation, description, characterization, motivation—we don’t want too much, but we want enough. It is quite possible that after the first thirty pages or so things might have become clear, pellucid even, but my time is precious to me and I want the story to start in the first sentence, and I want to be intrigued, even if the story is not yet fully explained: something must ring true, immediately. If one wants to capture a reader’s attention, and leave him or her wanting more, then one had better learn all the skills of the art and craft of writing.

What I perceived as the book’s faults can probably be put down to the author’s inability to imagine the reader’s response. Even the writer’s tone was likely only an accidental effect that arose from the pleasure he/she had at getting something down on the page: he/she had a first draft, and in neophyte excitement, mistook the draft for a finished piece. And the authors’ excitement got garbled into a seeming of smugness by the author’s lack of control over word usage, sentence construction, and an inability to read the piece critically.

Being a beginner is not a problem, but thinking you are not a beginner is. Right now I am reading everything I can get my hands on about writing and reading. This is something I learned from martial arts: the beginner’s mind. Come at everything you do as if you are empty, no preconceived ideas. I don’t mean be clumsy, I mean be open to seeing ones own limitations and strengths. Get help from a teacher. For a writer that means get a critic. If you have trouble remaining calm, objective, in the face of criticism, don’t ask a friend—if you want to keep that friend—they’ll probably just lie to you. And if you can’t sell an e-book, if you have to give it away, then either readers can’t stay with your story because you haven’t been critical enough, or you haven’t done enough marketing. But that’s another story.

Use and Abuse

I have just finished reading The Use and Abuse of The English Language, (Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, Second edition, Paragon House, NY. 1990).

Oh, my.

Originally and aptly titled, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, that is what you get. Or at least, after reading this book, one starts to develop the uncomfortable feeling that someone is looking over ones shoulder and critically watching every word one types into the computer. Admittedly, the book was written by two Englishmen in 1943, and so it is written in a style of English that is not currently used in North America. But the importance of this work, and its usefulness, is that it shows how easy it is to write something that is incoherent, unintelligible, or meaningless.

In this book, Graves and Hodge categorize the various components that go into making writing intelligible to a reader. They list twenty five principles concerning the clarity of statement, and sixteen principles concerning the graces of expression. They then give examples of common errors in writing that transgress these principles; they use examples of writing by some rather famous authors—Graves and Hodge even include examples from their own published works; I suppose they do this so one does not become overly paranoid about how hard it is to stay on top of the craft of writing—and the book thereby welcomes every writer into the presence of famous authors who make mistakes. You could be one of them. Better yet, by avoiding all the errors listed, your writing could become clearer and more coherent (although, referring back to the information in the book I am discussing, I suspect that one is either coherent or not, there is nothing more or less about it. Maybe I should write that after reading Graves and Hodge’s book, more of ones own passages might become coherent?)

All well and good. The benefit (and the trouble) comes when, after reading this book, one starts to look at everything one writes with a more finely-honed, (hyper)critical eye.

I hate to think about the errors in writing that I have, no doubt, committed in this piece.