This is the third blog post I’ve written today. The other two were Moved To Trash because I decided I didn’t want to go there in public. My mother will be relieved that I’ve stopped sharing (what she thinks is) every thought I have. So I’m going to share this other thought that really doesn’t apply to everyone but might offend some people.
Few people get on my nerves as much as writers who don’t/won’t read.
There may be more writers now, or it may be yellow volkswagon syndrome, I can’t say for sure. But I’ve definitely run across a lot more people who talk about being writers either for hobby or for work. For years I avoided being involved in writer blogs or writer workshop events because for me writing is a private affair. As Jill Domschot said the other day “I don’t write about writing because I don’t want to be a painter painting a painting of myself painting.” And that pretty much sums it up for me. But then I did decide that perhaps hanging around more writers might give me the impetus to get more serious about my own work.
Some days it helps; most days it doesn’t.
It wasn’t until I began hanging around all these writers that I found out about the New Rules that we couldn’t use anymore. And until this week I had patience with most of those rules. Then all of a sudden I realised that I don’t care. I write what I want to read. I don’t care if it tells and doesn’t show and “head hops” and has too many adverbs or whatever we’re avoiding now.
I read. I write for readers. I write what I like to read. And writers who spend more time talking about rules that are at their very core ARBITRARY GUIDELINES than they do knee-deep in good books are fast becoming the bane of my existence. Put down that workshop pamphlet, pick up a novel or three and learn to tell what you like about the reading experience.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I’ve been thinking along the same lines myself. I think the cautions are to know the rules you’re breaking and be consistent with the breakage. On Wednesday, Lynette Bonner wrote about all the rules Louis L’Amour broke, but you can’t argue that he wasn’t a great, prolific, important, /successful/ writer.
Which brings me to Cook’s Caveat: when it comes to breaking the rules, do what you must in service of the story, just be brilliant. 😉
http://authorculture.blogspot.com/2012/02/lessons-from-pros-louis-lamour-on.html
I think you are talking about two different things here. Writers who don’t read? That’s just plain weird and awful, unless you’re talking about someone like Nabokov when he had first left Russia. He was living in Germany but was still writing in Russian, and he wouldn’t read anything in German (which he actually could read, I believe) lest it affect his Russian writing style. Once he moved to the US and decided to write in English, that ceased to be an issue, of course.
But rule-breaking and Cook’s Caveat remind me of a discussion going on now about this week’s episode of Top Chef. The contestant who everyone expects to win just got into the finals by making cold soup. Which is sort of a “did this really involve cooking?” sort of thing, and something that it’s obvious one ought never do on Top Chef. But all the judges raved about the layering of flavors, presentation of the vegetables in the soup, etc., etc. So I would restate the Caveat as “if you break the rules, you’d better be brilliant,” but I do think it applies.
I don’t know who to credit this attribution to but I like the restated caveat.
You may have it, because I don’t remember who first phrased it that way wrt Top Chef but it wasn’t me.
Which was meant to be a response to Johne, of course.
My kids have tried several times to explain Show don’t Tell to me, and I think I get ‘Show’ but for the life of me I can’t figure out ‘Tell” .
If it the difference between:
“Sally gasped and placed her hand over her mouth.” and
“Sally was aghast.” ?
I don’t understand why either would be “wrong”.
I think both of those are telling. Showing would require you to make Sally act like someone who was aghast. Which includes more than just gasping and putting a hand over a mouth. Being aghast is a psychological state — what does Sally do or say next that’s different in any way from the way she has been acting (and will act again, after she calms down or gets used to the new information or whatever)? Either of those sentences sets the reader up to be shown Sally in the new state, but neither of them actually shows it.
From what I’ve been able to discern, “show don’t tell” is cross-pollination from scriptwriters and is most popular for folks aiming for a filmable novel. It breaks down a lot; the last Ken Follett novel was written around the same time he was adapting Pillars Of The Earth for television and the sdt style broke his usual flow in horrid ways.
It can be an effective tool when used well but on the downside it can turn a paragraph into three pages.
I marvel at how cinematically I can “read” (or rather, hear, as I am listening to the audiobook versions) The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings even though Tolkien doesn’t use a lot of fancy verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. His own style, sentence structure, and vocabulary somehow convey just what he’s trying to say. And though he sort of belabors the journeys that the characters take — describing so much of the scenery — he still doesn’t use all that many extra words to describe that scenery. He gets it done and then seems to move on. It goes much more quickly than I would think it would. Then again, I rather enjoy hearing it read to me and interpreted (through the creating of voices for the characters and the singing that Rob Inglis does)… so maybe I’m biased?
I’m glad you’re writing about this, Kat. It’s helped me understand “show; don’t tell” a lot more… and that ‘telling’ really is okay. If I ever teach a creative writing class again, I’ll remember these blog posts! 🙂
nm, I’m committing what I’m sure is the ultimate literary crime.
I’m writing a novel (for fun) and I haven’t read a work of fiction in at least 10 years. I have no doubt it’s going to be a train wreck, but what the heck.
I don’t hang around “real” writers (except Kat) or do writer’s workshops because that sort of thing RUINED my mother’s writing.
You haven’t read fiction in 10 years?
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
I read a LOT of nonfiction. I think I re-read the Hitchhiker’s Guide series about 4 or 5 years ago, but I really can’t think of anything new. I TRIED to read Water For Elephants, but it couldn’t keep my interest (I found the modern-day story far more interesting than the flashbacks)
This is especially good advice to give yourself if you’re over-analytical in your thought processes, which I am. I think I’m going to scream if I hear one more person proclaim that you have to know the rules in order to break them. I’ve been taking creative writing classes and attending workshops for the last 20 yrs, and I will tell you something about the rules (actually style conventions): they change like secret handshakes.
The elements that dictate clarity and story-telling change at a very slow pace. Despite the constant flux in style conventions, you’ll find that story arcs have mostly been the same for 200 yrs or more (beginning, middle, climax, end). That seems to be the formula that works, despite early experiments in journalistic fiction (e.g. Defoe) and stories told through letters (e.g. Richardson). And, wow, that’s really oversimplifying things!
And thanks for the brilliant quote by me. I obviously have a wide vocabulary for 2-syllable words. 😉
I think that’s my main frustration: the secret handshake thing. And the sort of smugness I see from time to time when someone will snot all over a captivating piece of writing because it breaks some rule that everybody who’s anybody who’s been to Northwestern Gobbledygook Workshop knows is never to be broken.
I may not have gotten the quote exact; I ALSO need to go back and give you links.
The rules do have utility. The trick is knowing when to learn them and adhere to them and when to transgress them to accomplish something greater. Nobody wants to backslide to something lesser just to flout the rules.
The rules are an amalgamation of wisdom down through the ages. They change and grow and recede over time as the wisdom is refined. For a long time, the serial comma fell out of vogue among the literati until the pragmatists resurrected it and brought it back into style, but neither camp will excuse flatly incorrect comma usage. There was a reason writers left the final comma out of sentences in specific situations, and other reasons we added them back in.
Let’s talk about switching viewpoints and head hopping. Writers of a prior generation indulged in head hopping at their every whim. We don’t do that anymore to keep things clearer for the modern reader. However, there are reasons why indiscriminate head hopping was bad, and there are ways the modern writer can still employ something that looks like head hopping without confusing the poor modern reader. There are rules for that, too.
And that’s a good thing.
http://thewritepractice.com/head-hopping-and-hemingway-part-ii/
Okay. I’m going to cry. So head hopping (a technique I use) is okay with page breaks (which I always use when shifting perspective)?! Not that I would ever stop shifting perspective, just that now I guess it’s okay again.
Please help me here: what is head-hopping? Are we talking like… Faulkner and Joyce kind of shifting perspective w/ no warning? (Those books make my head hurt.)
Doesn’t the text styling really depend on what the publisher prefers?
Oh, wait… I’m thinking like an editor. (I forget that some folks publish their own stuff and have to style their text themselves.)
Well, I hadn’t even heard the term until earlier this week, so I can’t guarantee I’ve got it accurately defined. Especially when it means different things to different people. Jill is exactly right when she says these are Shibboleths. It’s really a sort of code to see which workshops you follow I think.
But near as I can tell “head hopping” is switching perspectives without warning. Although some blogs say it’s okay if you warn, others say no.
So I’m back to throwing up my hands and crafting a story I want to read. I think I have enough experience reading to feel the bones and flesh of a Goid story.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
I’m screaming now! Here are various things I’ve heard about head-hopping over the years: if you head-hop, you must change scenes and add an asterisk. If you head-hop, make certain that each pov is in its own paragraph and don’t use asterisks. Don’t ever head-hop in short stories–it’s no longer acceptable!! Don’t ever head-hop in longer fiction. Modern readers are too stupid to get it. What bugs me is not that there are better or worse ways of clarifying ideas and characters in fiction, but every time a suggestion is made, it’s made to seem that this is the new hard and fast rule. And new rules become Shibboleths to separate the professionals from the amateurs.
Heh. One of my favorite books head-hops within a single paragraph, is critically acclaimed, and no-one I know has ever called it confusing. 🙂
I think overall, that writing should be less about learning rules and more about learning craft. When I learn the craft… some of the learning is what people call rules. But I’m less learning rules than learning what works and what doesn’t. What people have gotten to sound good. What I can get to sound good. Following a rule by rote has always made my stuff sound terrible. Learning WHY someone decided it was a rule has allowed me to improve. 🙂
It’s not, ultimately, about breaking rules after that, but about pulling tools from the toolbox and understanding how they function within my writing. I have used the shorthand, ‘know the rules, then break them’, but I kind of think it’s a distracting way to look at the act of writing something good. Maybe it’s better to say, ‘know the tools, then break them.’?
There’s something about good books, good writing that transmits on so many levels. The synergy of the finished product does so much more than a Rules Workshop articulating the mechanics. I figure that can teach me so much more, if I take the time to listen. Whatever it is those writer’s have, I want it to infuse me. And the only way that’ll happen is if I immerse myself in their good work.
Re-read Jeff Vandermeer’s “Finch” recently and was again amazed at how he defies conventions and wrote – IMO – an outstanding book. Would to God…
K – you writing a story for Drop City? (he asked hopefully)
Oh, Drop City! Yes, I am. But I’m more nervous about it than most things because it’s not my usual genre to write in. At the same time I’m also excited. Because its not my usual genre. I’m stretching. But it has been interrupted by January (which is usually a month I don’t write finish work in anyway). But yes. I do include drop city in my labours.