Writing Gooder

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So, today the world is ending for like the billionth time. Fire is raining from the sky, demons or monsters are flooding the world, the earth is splitting, the sun is exploding, the oceans are rising, blah blah blah. The More important question is why. Why are all these things happening. Is it magical? Is it scientific?

Who doesn’t like a good doomsday book. I know I do, but I want some substance for my last few hours on Earth. I’ve read so many novels that face the extinction of all life on Earth and most of them seem to lack any real explanation as to why we’re facing the end of days. It’s not a difficult question to answer, but some stories seem to settle with simply saying “that’s just how it is.” Unacceptable.

If you have a super villain trying to destroy the world there had better be a very good reason why he’s trying to destroy the world. That was something I could never understand in the hero and villain apocalypse set up. There never seemed to be any real reason for the end of the world. Other than the fact that the bad guy was bad and all bad guys want to destroy the world. For a story to connect to the reader there needs to be something that makes sense. What deep psychological reason is there that causes this character to want to destroy everything.

If we’re facing a global natural disaster kind of end of the world there needs to be some moderately believable scientific basis in it. We see stories about all the volcanoes on earth erupting at once or massive earthquakes all over the world and I always ask why. And unexplainable scientific events really don’t fly with me. Cataclysmic natural disasters like that have warning signs. Research is required for this sort of end of the world. What’s a little research to an amazingly good story?

These are just two examples. The main point in this is simple. If you’re writing a story or novel on the world coming to a devastating end, make it seem real. Have possible reasons that the reader can believe. If you ever have an issue where you have trouble understanding why the world is ending then examine the situation. Look at the characters and follow the trail backwards to what is causing the conflict that is creating the apocalyptic event. Happy endings.

I recently had the opportunity to ask January’s featured member, Karsten, for advice on writing, and she was kind enough to provide me with five excellent tips for young writers. Thanks again for taking the time to help me out, Karsten!

• Finish what you start. You learn a ton from finishing a piece: how to write endings, how to revise a piece as a whole, how to move on to the next. Also, when you’ve finished one you know you can finish another. A track record of finishing projects gives you confidence and experience.

When I mentioned “learning how to write endings” to another writer, she thought it was “entirely ridiculous” of me to assume that she couldn’t write an ending. I wasn’t assuming she couldn’t write an ending; I was intending to stress the importance of knowing how to write an ending. Do you ever read stories, and the end feels like the author got bored of having you as their audience, and picked you up (with a back hoe) and dropped you over the side of a cliff?

How about when it feels like the ending is “tacked on”, as in it has a final rush of events that have had no prior hinting and are entirely unexpected and don’t fit the story at all. Or, maybe you’ve written a story and cannot find a good closing, and go for the anti climatic approach, and while it’s not a cliff hanger, it certainly doesn’t feel like you closed the story.

Finishing what you write is good practice for endings, as well as everything else. If you begin different works, you practice beginnings, (perhaps) middles, but no endings. You can’t expect someone to play the final note of Moonlight Sonata if they never practice it. You gain a “complete eye” when you finish, an eye that allows you to step back from your writing and dig under the surface for flaws.

• Take pride in small achievements. It’s easy to keep your eyes on the final goal (a book deal, for example) and forget to celebrate all the smaller stages of success. Finishing a chapter is important. Creating a new character is important. Learning to recognise show vs tell problems is important. Your final goal may be years and years away, so be proud of what you’ve accomplished today.

Work in stages — it’s easy to see your smaller accomplishments when you do. Writing is a long journey, not a one time deal where once the words are out, it takes a single read over, and it’s done. Reward yourself with breaks after you finish a chapter, so that when you return to writing, you approach it relaxed, with fresh interest, rather than what carried over from your previous chapter.

• Have realistic expectations. Don’t expect to write brilliantly during your first draft or your first ever story. Writing is a process: every new thing you write is (or should be) better than the last. So once you finish your novel, be proud, but also know that you now need to write another, better novel.

If you’re shooting for a book deal, then, tell yourself that the book deal can wait. More importantly, work on suiting your work so that it’s appreciated by peers, then reach for an outer audience. Take the process gradually, and it’s not about how fast you get there. If you move too fast, you’re bound to miss out some important part or another; take it like training for a race. You’ll crash midway if you don’t give yourself the time to train and prepare.

• Give back to the writing community. If somebody reviewed you, encouraged you or showed you how to improve, return the favour. SF writer Robert Heinlein suggested that you can’t always pay back the people who helped you when you were starting out, because they’re already a step ahead of you — in which case, pay it forward. Find a deserving person and help them the way you were helped.

Having others review you is one thing– they point out what they see in your writing, and you paying it forward to others lets you do the same. If you spot a common usage, mechanics, or grammar error in someone else’s writing, check your story for it. It’s easier to see a mistake when you realize someone else is making it, and it’s better to be safe than sorry later on.

• Learn to fish. You know the saying, give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for today, teach him to fish and you’ve fed him for a lifetime? You can’t constantly ask for fish (help and advice) from more experienced fishermen (writers). You have to learn to fish for yourself. The sea is full of fish if you know how to catch them. Learn to google. Track down writing resources like Holly Lisle’s excellent website for writers. Get writing books like Stephen King’s On Writing or Browne & King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers out of the library. Educate yourself.

Many a good writer has been ruined by reading James Joyce.  All of a sudden, the lack of punctuation and rambling sentence structure seems to become not only artistic, but desirable.

James Joyce is one of my favorite authors, but one of the many things I recognize is that I am not James Joyce.  Stuff he could get away with is stuff I could never get away with, and for good reason.  Once you begin to mess with the rules of grammar, the reader becomes disoriented and confused.  This is bad.  However, most grammar benders are not intentional, and that’s the focus of this article.

Obtaining clarity through format is often overlooked.  For some reason, we tend to forget that paragraphs, punctuation, and other devices are meant to make the text more comprehensible to readers.  Arguably, this movement to aid comprehension began with Julius Caesar.  In his time, there was no punctuation, including spaces.  Insteadtextranlikethiswiththereaderhavingtoguesswhereonewordendedandthenextbegan.  Caesar recognized the problems this entailed, and solved it by placing a dot under the first letter of each word.

Today, we are fortunate to have an incredibly well-developed system of grammar.  This system has been developed not only to aid the reader, but also to aid the writer in conveying their thoughts.  So what is the biggest mistake?

The Run-On Paragraph. In school, many of us learn the five paragraph essay method: one introduction paragraph, three body, and one concluding.  For most, this is their first introduction to real writing, and some never come to understand that the five paragraph method is simply a way to teach you how to develop ideas.

Breaking up paragraphs not only allows you to easily separate ideas, but it also presents a less imposing text to the reader.  Simply put, one page of text with no paragraphs will be less appealing to read than a book where the writer uses paragraphs.  So do yourself a favor and avoid the run-on paragraph.

For today’s update of Writing Gooder, I thought I’d try to tackle the big kahuna: passive & active voice.  It’s often misunderstood, but knowing the difference and how to avoid passive voice will be a big benefit to your writing.

Firstly, what is passive voice?  Passive voice is not merely writing in the past tense.  Nor is avoiding passive voice just a fancy way of saying “avoid the verb to be.”  Passive voice instead has to do with clarity.  Whenever it’s unclear who is doing the action, you’re using passive voice.  It can be unclear when you put the person (or thing) doing the action at the end of the sentence, or just don’t mention the person (or thing) at all.

Lets look at some examples, shall we?  First up, passive voice:

The prickly porcupine was destroyed by Godzilla.

Okay, so at this point, you may be thinking: “What’s unclear about that?  Godzilla destroyed the prickly porcupine.”  You’re somewhat correct.  What you are doing is looking at the sentence in hindsight, and in hindsight, it seems clear.  Yet, none of the relevant information (who is doing the action, and what the action is) is shown until the end of the sentence.  This is a problem.  Another example:

The prickly porcupine was destroyed.

If the last sentence didn’t, this sentence should definitely stand out to you as passive voice.  Who destroyed the prickly porcupine!?  That’s information your reader will want to know.  One more example:

Nate’s miniature Canadian totem pole that he got in Niagara Falls has been destroyed by his prickly porcupine.

This sentence is structurally just like the first example.  I started out by describing the object, but didn’t tell you the purpose of the sentence (the prickly porcupine destroying the totem pole) until the very end.

So, how can we rewrite these sentences?  Easy.  You put the actor at the front, then the action, then the object of the action.  If you think about it, it only makes sense to write sentences this way.  Plus, they’re more interesting to read.  Observe:

Godzilla destroyed the prickly porcupine.

This fixes our first two examples.  See how it seems more action-oriented and more interesting?  Our two examples from before were yawn-fests.  Now to rewrite the third example:

Nate’s prickly porcupine destroyed his miniature Canadian totem pole that he got in Niagara Falls.

More interesting, eh?  Plus, it has the added benefit of being shorter, which is always good.

Now as I said before, passive voice is sometimes necessary.  This is true whenever we aren’t sure who the actor is, or when we don’t necessarily care who the actor is.  As an example, lets say you’re buying a car from Bartemius.  One of the things you want to ask is, “Has this car ever been in a crash?”, which is passive voice.  You don’t want to ask, “Did Bartemius crash this car?” because that’s not the purpose of your question.  Indeed, Bartemius could answer “no” to that last question as long as he never crashed the car himself.  So sometimes, passive voice is acceptable.

Hopefully, this will help you.  Remember, good sentence structure goes as follows: Actor, then Action, then the Object of the Action.  And as always, the above is just the basic rule.  There are always exceptions, but I think it’ll help you at least 90% of the time.

I only really learned how to properly use semi-colons a few years ago.  Plus, I’m not sure if we actually ever covered it in school, but I certainly know I went a long time without knowing what “comma splice” meant either.  So it’s not much of a surprise to me when I see a lot of writers (journalists, published authors, young writers, etc.) misuse commas and semi-colons.

First, what is a comma splice?  A comma splice is when you use a comma to join together two independent clauses of a sentence.  An independent clause is a portion of a sentence that works as a sentence by itself.  Take the following example:

I went to the store, they didn’t have any porcupines.

Notice how each clause, separated by a comma, works as a sentence by itself.  However, we joined the two independent clauses with a comma, creating a comma splice.  This is wrong.

So we have two options: (1) use a period instead of a comma, or (2) use a semi-colon instead of a comma.  Either way is appropriate here, and sometimes it just comes down to preference.  For me, whenever I have two related sentences that are short, I either join them with a conjunctive (and, but, or), or I join them with a semi-colon.  However, note that to use a semi-colon, the two sentences must be related to one another.

Yet, there is one other time when it’s appropriate to use a semi-colon instead of a comma; that is, when you are using so many commas, it gets confusing what relates to what.  For example:

Someday, I want to visit Shanghai, China, Kyoto, Japan, and New Madrid, Missouri.

See how the over-abundance of commas makes the sentence more confusing?  We can fix that by separating the items with semi-colons:

Someday, I want to visit Shanghai, China; Kyoto, Japan; and New Madrid, Missouri.

Of course, this article is just a basic primer covering semi-colons.  There are plenty of exceptions, and even more rules as you can imagine.  But the two above rules will cover you 98% of the time.

‘Writing Gooder’ is a new regular series here on the YWS Blog, taking a look at the most common writing mistakes.  For the first article, I will be going over how to use modifiers so as to avoid ambiguity.

A modifier can be a word or phrase that defines the meaning for another word or phrase.  For example, the modifier in “The green grass,” is ‘green.’  However, problems arise when we are using a modifer to define a string of nouns or verbs.  For example, take my last sentence.  Did I mean problems arise when we use modifers to define a string of nouns and problems arise when we use modifers to define a string of verbs, or did I mean problems arise when we use a modifier to define a string of nouns or problems arise when we are using verbs?

It might seem silly, but take this sentence:

The store sells polka dot shoes, accessories, and hats.

Is the store selling ‘polka dot shoes,’ ‘polka dot accessories,’ and ‘polka dot hats’, or is the store selling ‘polka dot shoes,’ ‘accessories,’ and ‘hats’?  Or take this sentence:

Students taking Klingon and Spanish need to attend orientation on Wednesday.

Does it apply to students taking both Klingon and Spanish, or does it apply to students taking either Klingon or Spanish?  See how it can get confusing now?

Whenever you use a word to describe a series of nouns or verbs, you have to be careful.  In your story, you want to be as clear as possible so the reader isn’t having trouble reading your story.

Then there’s something called a ‘dangling modifier,’ which is a term we use when we aren’t sure what the modifier is modifying.  Take this sentence:

Poor little Ralph couldn’t decide whether to go to the movies or talk to his finger before going to sleep.

Here, ‘before going to sleep’ is the modifier.  Yet, is it modifying ‘talk to his finger’ or ‘go to the movies’?  Or both?  If the author means both, a better way to write it might be:

Poor little Ralph couldn’t decide before going to sleep whether to go the movies or talk to his finger.

In fact, that re-write is better as it puts the modifier at the beginning rather than the end.  Generally speaking, modifiers should always be placed before the word/phrase they modify rather than after.  Indeed, ‘The grass green’ doesn’t sound right, does it?

Using modifiers correctly will make your story more clear to the reader.  Always remember that your reader is relying on your words to make sense of what you write.  When your modifiers are ambigious, that creates an extra hurdle to reading your story.