This isn't really a coherent argument here, just me pouring out a sequence of quite random reactions to some of the generally accepted writing advice that I've seen bandied about and embraced online, and my inklings as to how accepting that stuff wholesale can result in writing which is...not so good.
It seems as if most people believe that the Ultimate Form (the best and most desirable state) for a YA novel is to be fast-paced, and sparely written, and 'immediate'. It's supposed to put you 'right in the action'. Which obviously can be a great thing for certain kinds of stories in certain genres - and certain kinds of scenes in any book. But I don't think that 'fast-paced' is, or should be, the go-to choice in how to tell *all* stories. I also think that the ways people attempt to create the Ultimate Form can be detrimental to the quality of writing we see in new books, no matter what genre they are.
For a start, I see quite a lot of well-respected sources (agents, editors, writers) blogging about cutting as a kind of panacea for books that aren't 'immediate' and 'fast paced' enough. There's this sense that cutting stuff out is always a good thing, whether it's cutting out adverbs and adjectives, cutting something people call 'filter words', cutting out 'unnecessary' words, cutting out 'unncessary' authorial intrusion. A sense that any and all books can be improved by lessening their extent.
Which makes writers who resist suggested cuts to their work babies at best or unprofessional prima donnas at worst. Which means your editor or agent or critque partner is always right if they think you should cut, and not applying the scalpel forthwith is like letting the side down, failing to rise to the challenge.
But cutting isn't always the answer. Cutting lots of words from a scene (even if many of them are adjectives and adverbs and these 'filter' words that I'm still a bit unsure about) will not necessarily result in something fast paced and immediate. Especially if the scene was not intended to be - or even needed to be - fast paced and immediate. Instead it often results in something that feels bland and lacking in personality, as if it might have been written by the Ultimate Form computer rather than a person. Or worse, sometimes you end up with a scene from which the sense has inexorably disappeared until it's not only hard to understand what is actually being felt or expressed by the characters, but empty of any emotional resonance for the reader.
Why does 'fast paced and immediate' have to be the Ultimate Form in the first place? I think the idea behind creating immediacy and putting the reader right into the action is to create a strong sense of empathy between reader and characters. But there are many, many ways to do that. I worry that a lot of these slightly more subtle, interesting, skillful ways to create empathy and identification between the reader and the characters are being stamped out in the rush to create books which conform to the Ultimate Form.
All writers have - or should have! - different styles. The methods that I employ to create strong empathy between characters and readers are varied. I try to immerse the reader an emotional atmosphere - to show the unique way my point of view character interacts with their world and the other people within it. I try to gradually explain who they are, laying their deepest vulnerabilities open to the reader so that they can see who that character is, flaws and all, and how they came to be that way. I try to create a strong sensory impression in my writing, so that hopefully the reader experiences a ghost of what the character feels and smells and tastes and touches. And I glory in using language to its full extent, searching for imagery and descriptions and similes and metaphors which will create an 'eyeball kick' - that is, a phrase so beautifully expressed that for a moment the reader literally *sees* what I want them to see.
My work is not fast paced at all. I hope that it has immediacy where that is necessary for a scene to resonate, but that is not my primary goal in anything I write. That's just not who I am as a writer, and those are not the stories I want to write. And although my editor certainly asks me to cut as part of the editing process, usually we end up adding more scenes and increasing the word count of my books. Not because I 'write short' as some authors do, and turn in very spare first drafts. Just because cutting is not the only way to improve a book and my editor knows that.
I'm not saying anyone should look at my description of the way I write and try to imitate it. My way is not only way to write or the right way to write - in fact my methods are the merest tiny selection of a myriad of methods. That's the point. I'm still learning, and I'm still making mistakes, and I'm still figuring out which of the myriad of methods work for me and my stories. When I try something ambitious and different and mess up that teaches me a lesson and improves my skills so that next time I either know better than to try it again, or know much better how to go about it. Writing is an art and a craft, and that means it should always be an ongoing process. Each of us has our own unique ways of expressing our ideas, and each of us has a unique take on the ideas that it would be interesting to express, and figuring that out is also part of the process.
But It's very hard to develop such an ongoing process if you're wholly devoted to honing your work to the pinnacle of Ultimate Form instead of honing it to the pinnacle of Ultimate YOU.
Sometimes when I read books, I'll frown over stuff that strikes me as really weird. And as I look at it, all puzzled, I'll realise: this is another case of someone trying so desperately to get to Ultimate Form that they have butchered their own writing to get there.
For instance:
"Never!" John gritted.
He gritted what? His garden path? That piece of dialogue has no connection to the speech tag. 'John gritted', if taken at face value, would conjure up an image of John, as he is speaking, scattering salt/grit crystals. Of course, what the writer actually means is that the character is speaking through gritted teeth. They may even have originally written 'John said through gritted teeth'. Which is a plain, functional sort of speech tag that at least conveys something relevent about what John is doing as he speaks. But then the search for Ultimate Form interfered and it was cut down - probably at first to 'John gritted out' (which isn't great) and finally to 'John gritted' (which is even worse). Not only is it grammatically incorrect and rather silly, but it honestly conveys nothing worth conveying to the reader at all.
I know most readers can most probably work out what the writer intends to say here. But it's rather along the lines that most people can understand my meaning if I type: tihs snetecne is bdlay msipeleld.
Yes, you can figure it out. But as a professional writer, should I really be asking you to?
Similarly, when reading novels with romantic scenes, I've been struck by how many male leads do an odd thing:
John fisted Mary-Beth's hair...
My friends make very rude jokes when they see this sort of thing. But the sadness of it, for me, is that I can see the faint ghost of what this used to be. What it should be: a lovely image, a strong, sensory image, something along the lines of:
John's hands curled into fists in the heavy waves of Mary-Beth's hair...
When you read the second, you can imagine, if you have longish hair, the little tug as those fingers curl up against your scalp, and the way it would tilt your face up, just a little. If you're someone who likes playing with long hair, you can imagine the silky strands winding around your fingers and the way the person you touched would maybe shiver just a little.?
You don't get that from the first description, do you? It's been robbed of its poetry, and its sensory strength and becomes, frankly, a bit laughable.
We also get presented to us as unassailable wisdom: Show, don't tell.
It's a fair enough comment. Some things *must* be shown. Something things are so thrilling or vital or moving that to merely recount them is a tragedy for the story. But not everything. Sometimes telling - whether in plain language or with evocative lyricism, is the best and only thing to do. And tying yourself into a pretzel to avoid it results in craziness like Stephenie Meyer punctuating her main character's suicidal depression over her boyfriend leaving with blank pages with the name of the month on them. She certainly showed us something; but did that showing, at a technical level, create any kind of empathy or connection with her character? Show us the day to day realities of living with suicidal depression? Show us any hint of insight into Bella's world during those months? No, it did not.
Why couldn't she just have told us that for four months Bella barely lived? Barely noticed the passing of time, hardly remembered to eat, couldn't bear to sleep but only just found the strength to force herself out of bed each day? That she wandered through the days with no awareness of anything but longing for her pain to end and the vague wish that maybe, the next day, she wouldn't wake up at all? See how SIMPLE that was?
Following the Show Don't Tell rule leads many writers to go way over the top in how they convey an idea to the reader. Instead of telling us about a character's mood with a simple:
A deep, sucking void seemed to yawn open in Mary-Beth's chest. It hurt so much; she was sure, in that moment, that she would be better off dead.?
And then moving onto the actual crux of the scene, they get stuck showing us everything in excruciating detail. But the thing is? There's no real way to SHOW this emotional reaction. I mean, maybe Mary-Beth gasps, goes pale, staggers back... but those reactions are cliched and don't truly convey the depth of her despair. In order to 'show' how significant this moment is, you have to amp up Mary-Beth's reaction, make it something that can be expressed physically. Thus, you get:
Tears dripped down Mary-Beth's face as she rubbed compulsively at her aching, empty chest. Tiny whimpers fell from her lips and she rocked backward and forward, seeking comfort in the repetitive movement.?
Which immediately turns Mary-Beth from a normal girl experiencing horrible grief into someone who, regardless of her grief, probably needs psychological help if she's to function in normal society.
But even that transformation isn't enough! You see, there are adverbs and adjectives in that description, and that authorial intrusion too, because I'm interpreting Mary-Beth's actions to you! So in order to achieve Ultimate Form we have to revise again - replacing ad/verb/jectives with 'stronger' verbs and nouns to make up for it, and allowing only SHOWING, with no hints from me, the author:
Tears drizzed down Mary-Beth's face as she scrubbed at her chest. Whimpers fell from her lips and she rocked backward and forward.
The impression that Mary-Beth is unhinged is even greater and we have literally no idea what she's feeling anymore, or why she's reacting this way to her grief. The fact is, this isn't a piece of good writing for a novel.
It's an instruction from a screenplay.
As soon as I began to think that way, I realised that a lot of the tenants of Ultimate Form seem to come from the school of good screenwriting. Fast paced? Check. Immediate? Check. No authorial voice-overs? Check. Only show the character's external reactions? Check.
Ultimate Form - ultimately - wants us to write a book that is as much like a screenplay as possible. Dialogue heavy, fast moving, with directions for the actors on how to show the reader what they're feeling. But books are not screenplays and although all forms of writing can improve when they borrow the best techniques from other forms, this inexorable drift toward books which have as little personality and input from the author as possible is resulting in books that are less, much less, than they could be.The thing is? Books have have the ability to do something films and TV simply can't. Something that every actor and director and screenwriter and music director and make-up and costume and set designer is straining every nerve they have to try to replicate on the screen, but which they can never quite manage.
Books can tell you what's going on inside someone's heart.
Their mind.
Their soul.
That's why they call us story-tellers.
And sacrificing that for the Ultimate Form of a book which reads like a screenplay, with no trace of you as the individual author, and your unique hopes and dreams and fears and ideas, is the last thing any of us should do.
Source: http://thezoe-trope.blogspot.com/2012/08/more-writing-advice-that-annoys-me.html
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