How-To: Economy Writing

“Omit needless words,” William Strunk, Jr. advised in The Elements of Style. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words…for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines.”

This advice is like a writer’s hazing. How do you know which words to cut? You rip out every word that might not be needed, and suddenly your draft is a mess.

I don’t know, officer. They said, “omit needless words,” and I just lost it.

In Keys to Great Writing, Stephen Wilbers explains how to obliterate the crap sinking your sentences. There are fourteen techniques (double digits? really Steve?), but he divides them into three easy categories. It’s like winning the writer’s lottery!

Never shall I write “pink in color” again!
(Image courtesy of posterize/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

1. You Already Said That
Wilbers’s first category urges eliminating redundant words. You know, things like terrible tragedy, heavy in weight, true and accurate. When isn’t a tragedy terrible, anyway?

Condense. If you’re using six words to say “because,” just say because. Do you really need that “very” there? Does extremely happy sound as good as ecstatic? No? Right.

2. Get to the Point
Is that first sentence/word/paragraph really needed? Does it change anything if you take it out? No? Get rid of it.

Be equally merciless with the ends of sentences. You want to get in a good last word, don’t you? Don’t you?

3. Shut Up

“I am of the opinion that cake is delicious.”

“Cake rocks my socks!”

These sentences say the same thing, only sentence one sucks. Use action verbs. Keep personal commentary to yourself. If someone “does not like” something, can’t they just like it instead?

Remember: If it annoys you when someone does it in person, don’t do it in writing. It’ll just annoy someone else.

[This post is taken from my "professional" blog, aewrites.wordpress.com]

The Importance of Prewriting

Let's face it: prewriting is important.

I was struck last week in my fiction writing course. My professor, Andrew Ervin, started the week by stressing the importance of writing before you write. We even looked at the Freytag triangle.

Story by formula=Something that looks like a story

It seems basic, but it's useful advice. Unless a story has a plot, conflict, and crisis, it isn't really a story. If you, the writer, don't know everything going on, you can't choose the best place to start or end. You can't choose the best time to reveal things. You know nothing about your character outside the context of your story.

Personally, I like stories that leave things unresolved at the end. I like walking away with a little mystery, and trying to figure out what happened for myself. It's not effective, though, unless all the clues have been placed. I can't debate what would have happened if the groundwork isn't laid. To leave a story unresolved, there needs to be only a few options presented, and of those options, a reasonable person needs to be able to make an argument for the outcome they see most likely.

It's important, too, for establishing conflict. I love reading, but I like very few stories. They often fall short on expectations because something doesn't ring true for me. Like Harry Potter and all the romance in the sixth and seventh volumes. Were there hints that Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione would end up together? Absolutely. But I felt I was told this would happen, and I never emotionally believed it.

It was clearly love at first sight

I don't pretend to know how things were supposed to go. J.K. Rowling is famous for her extensive notes and prewriting. But just because I don't emotionally buy something, doesn't mean there aren't plenty others who do, and if you want a reader to buy anything, you need to know the expanse of your story first, even if you never use it. Especially if it's science fiction, fantasy, or some other high-concept idea.

I've done prewriting, character profiles, drawn maps, etc. for years, but I'm guilty of doing this, too. When it comes to short stories, I often dash off my prewriting instead of really focusing on it like I would for a novel. But it's important here, too. It's important any time you try to convince someone that your fiction is some kind of reality.

What really surprised me was that my teacher stressed this so emphatically, like he'd run across reluctance to prewriting in the past. I remember meeting people when I was in community college who said they never planned anything before they wrote it. It destroyed the organic quality of the writing.

There were no pesticides involved in the making of these radishes

Honestly, prewriting can only strengthen a story. Trust me. You don't need to keep to the outline. It's a flexible frame. You will never do so much prewriting to avoid getting to an important part of a story and realize you didn't prepare for this.

So next time you want to write a story but don't know what to write about, start with a character sketch. Draw a map. Draw a picture. Do some prewriting. It will help.

Or just screw it. It'll give me less competition.

Editorial Internship and Other Updates

So this week I started my editorial internship at Running Press, and so far, I love publishing. It's really interesting to see inside the industry, such as looking at proposals and copyeditting. It's definitely helping my grammar and punctuation skills. I think I have found my career. It's only been one week, yeah, but I've never been so excited about something before. This is definitely a dream job, so now I'm considering graduate school to get an M.S. in publishing. NYU's program, especially, looks great.

On a bigger note, I finished the first draft of the first book of the Aureole 53 series. I'm still in shock. I plan to write the second book before I start shopping around for agents/publishers, but this is monumental. It's still in a messy, revision stage, but now I have something complete to fix up. I am so excited about 2013 right now. I think this will be an awesome year.

Classes also start soon. Break went so fast, but I'm taking one literature class and two writing classes along with my internship so I'm prepared to be tired, but looking forward to it.

Love,

Lex

Book One Progress: That Part

It's been hard finding time to blog. Or to find something I feel like saying.

This week I wanted to write about writing ethnic minority characters, but I think I'll wait on that until later. It was applicable when I planned it, but now I'm working on something else. So look for that in the future, if you're interested.

Instead, I want to talk about my novel, or rather the progress of my novel. As you might know, I'm currently writing the first book of what I envision as a series of four. I'm not really sure what genre to label it--there's a blend of the paranormal, science fiction, and a little magic, but it's all very real-world based, so I guess it falls into magical realism. It is definitely teen lit. As a writer who hasn't been writing for some time, it's one of those pet projects I've had lying around for the last ten years (not exaggerating), but has changed so much it barely resembles the project it once was. I'm glad for that. I'm glad it took me so long to really work on it. I'm glad I scrapped beginning chapters, restructured the entire plot, the main character, and let it develop organically. It's at that stage now where I'm really excited about what I want to do with it, and where I see it going, and I know it's probably a big mess now, but that's what revision is for--fixing the mess. But that's all exposition and totally here just to provide some grounding for anyone reading this as to what my big project is all about.

My point is that I'm at that chapter. One of them, anyway. That chapter I've been dreaming about in my head for ages. That chapter I've been so excited to write that part of my motivation has been writing just to get here. At this moment. It's the second time I've hit this point in this book (there are three in the first book, and so many more in the entire series), but this is the really big one. The one that's going to set absolutely everything in motion for the remaining duration of the series even if it doesn't seem like it. I'm a little terrified to write it.

I have a problem with trusting my writing. I know what I want to say, and I'm pretty good at letting my characters say what they want to say, but I'm so bad about not editing my characters. I revise too soon (too often as I'm writing, which is a problem). I second-guess myself--that my writing isn't good enough. And I never feel this as strongly as when I get to these points--these important points that I'm dying to write but that I think I'll totally fuck up.

I can place blame for this one primarily in youthful arrogance. As a teenager I thought I was a pretty good writer, and now when I look back on that work, I want to gag myself with a spoon. It makes me wonder if all my writing was that bad (it wasn't--I am sometimes impressed by the work I did in my early twenties, mainly because it doesn't make me cringe, and while there are problematic areas I can recognize, I wish I could have seen my own progress at the time--maybe I wouldn't have quit). And here I jump again too far ahead of myself. Because now I'm second-guessing how my writing will come across now, and there's no way to know. Not now, anyway, and I really am of the belief it doesn't matter if I have a novel of crap because that's easier to revise than nothing. I need a complete story before I can solicit feedback. I know that, but it's hard for me to accept that.

So for a discussion topic, I find my weakness to be second-guessing myself. What are/were your writing-related weaknesses and what do you do to overcome them?

Mental Illness in Writing

As many of you will soon learn (or for anyone reading the sidebar), I'm currently a college student. With this being the case, I spend a significant amount of my time interacting with other students in my classes. This semester I'm taking a play-writing class in order to expand my writing horizons, and naturally, we discuss the process of writing for an audience, but also the content of our classmates’ work.

For the past two weeks my class has been working on structuring a five-point plot and writing at least ten pages of it. During discussions of our plot points and through reading my classmates' plays, I couldn't help but notice a trend. Many of these works dealt with mental illness in the climax, as the distinguishing characteristic of the protagonist, or within another character as a conflict the protagonist must overcome. Not any specific mental illness by name, generally, but with a clear suggestion that the mental illness was an issue.

Now, I can't deny that the spiral into madness is a classic drama/fiction technique. It is employed just as often as suicide and murder, both of which my classmates take advantage of almost as readily. Personally, though, this experience raised a lot of questions for me. I can't help but wonder to what level sensitivity to people with mental illnesses needs to be applied in today's age. How should mental illnesses be approached and utilized in different forms of creative writing? What purposes do and should they serve in building a story?

I've never been the most politically correct person, and sanitizing everything in art (no matter what its form) takes a little away from creativity and craft for me. I do think, however, that a certain level of sensitivity is required. When one of my classmates decides to write a play that employs a magical object called 'happy pills,' for example, and attention is called to the connotation this phrase colloquially bears with antidepressants, this is something that should be taken into account--not swept under the rug because they don't “work the same” as anti-depressants. When dealing with mental illness (or anything that can be construed as such) it's paramount to be aware that some people suffer from these illnesses, even if you don't. Personally, I do, and whether they work the same or not, a "happy pill" will always mean an "anti-depressant" to me. And if that connotation isn’t what you’re going for, then reworking some ideas is probably necessary, because if two people jump to same conclusion right away, more are sure to follow.

It's not just a matter of sensitivity, either. It's cheap to always fall back on insanity or a disorder. There are a thousand conflicts people encounter in life to draw from. While many people suffer from one or more disorders, most people don't "go crazy" from them, kill someone, or commit suicide. Locking people up in insane asylums doesn't work the same way it used to, either. While the use of mental illness can be compelling when dealing with the difficulties of that illness, using it for shock value or to explain a character’s motivation feels weak and rings hollow in current times. If you character does kill someone, I’d rather it be because of a culmination of events, rather than a mental illness. I’d rather something more grounded in common experience.

How do you feel about the use of mental illness in narrative? Tried and true or cheap and overdone? How much sensitivity should be given when dealing with mental illness? When is mental illness appropriate in writing? Sound off below.

Doing It "Right"

As I write this first post of my first writing blog, I'm still unsure of whether I'm doing it "right." 

I call myself a writer, but I have never been published, and I haven't even written much in many years.  I've been one of those non-writing writers, suffering from a bad case of writer's block, or maybe a lack of confidence in my writing.  Nevertheless, I'm trying to write now.  This blog is just one such attempt to make this thing happen.

As the customary first post, I thought it fitting to talk about starting.  Everywhere I look there are lists of dos and don'ts from the best ways to get published to the number of spaces to use after a period.

My most recent trouble with all the well-intentioned advice about choosing a pen name.  I had various reasons for choosing one. My real last name makes me spit when I say it. I wanted something gender neutral. Apparently there are right and wrong reasons to choose one, though, and a method to choosing. It's almost scientific.

Like this, but a lot less useful.

I picked Lex Morgan, but I still wonder. Is it the "right" one?  I wanted something short, easy to remember, and easy to spell.  I've always liked the name Alex, but the sound of the 'a' at the beginning of the name bothered me.  Morgan is a stock name I've used for years. I even had two characters in my novel until I renamed them both.

All of these people used to be named Morgan.

This blog will contain a sundry of personal posts and fiction. I'm working on a novel series, so progress updates will be here, too.

So that's me. Hi. Hope we get to know each other.