Cat Star: If You Want to Improve Your Craft of Writing

Read

Read Wide, but Read Smart too

Everyone has a favorite type of thing to read. Discover your favorite poison – both particular pieces of writing and the authors that produce them – and keep reading, but branch out into related areas. Make sure you are getting some non-fiction as well as fiction, and it is best to make a plan. If you are not a meticulous planner, don’t worry – mine is simply keeping several private Amazon wish lists and having a method for my shopping cart before I click on “Proceed to Checkout.” One person who was very serious about his reading plan was Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States – by all accounts a genius. He designed Monticello, his home, and had an extensive library installed. Then he methodically read all of his books and kept copious notes. My guess is that he ended up being an acknowledged genius but started out as just as someone like you and me, but also “a man on a mission” – which was neither to become a genius or President but rather to read the best books possible and get as much out of them as he could. Yes, check out the “education” section of Wikipedia on Jefferson – it confirms what I have said and more – for example, when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812, Jefferson sold 6,000 of his books to the Library of Congress to help them get going again. After that, he kept on building up his own collection of books again! For you, the modern writer, a love a reading and love of books will stand you in good stead because from the various styles and ways authors put together their stories and even sentences, you will grow, like a seedling breaking through good soil towards the bright sun.

Travel

Go West Young Man, until the West Becomes the East (see Psalm 103:11-12)

One of the best ways to experience the life and the world is to travel. Doing it for short times is fine, but also have longer stays abroad as part of your life experience. Shorter trips will get you out of your normal routine, put you into contact with new people and their ways of doing things, and you will likely see beautiful sights, both man-made and natural. But the longer stay abroad does something else – it forces you to adopt a different way of doing things, even a different way of communicating. You end up learning about that new place, yes, but you end up learning about yourself and, surprisingly, about your home country because now you have a means of comparison. While this is good for life experience, for your writing it is particularly good if you are in the habit of using a journal of some kind, or taking notes on your experiences. Writing short vignettes of places, people, and even snippets of conversation are all ammunition to be stored in your arsenal for future use – they could become characters or settings in future stories, with real, vivid dialogue. And when choosing how far afield to go – try to go for cultures that are quite different than your own. That’s where more learning happens.

Write Frequently

Write Daily, especially after a Beethovenesque walk in a Pastoral Setting

Beethoven had a very particular routine in his day – he would get up quite early and have a strong coffee for which he counted out 60 coffee beans. Then he would work composing all morning and into the mid-afternoon. After that, he would go for a walk in nature – in the warmer months especially – he would often stay out until supper time and then have dinner out, where he would read the paper before returning home. He would almost never compose in the evenings and pretty much always was asleep by 10 PM. The walks actually helped his productivity, as is shown by the fact that his musical output was higher during warmer months – when it was cold he would just stay home and read. This interesting summary of what I read in “Daily Rituals, How Artists Work” had one more fact that makes it useful for us – Beethoven would always carry a small pocket-sized notebook that he would use to write down any musical ideas he got along the way while walking. Now today we have all kinds of electronic devices, but I still find that the traditional small pad of paper with pen is quite useful and easy to carry along – it also seems less troublesome and serious than sitting down with a lap-top and plugging into the world. I think the idea is to write down your idea and keep on walking here. But when I say Write Frequently, I am not saying “take a walk and then do some writing” – what I mean is that the more serious you are about something the more in infuses your every hour of every day. Beethoven’s work was his composing – towards the end of his life he did not even want to leave his piano bench, so he had a hole put in it so he could easily poop through it into a waiting bucket below. I suppose one you are aware you have that kind of talent – let’s say after you win your Nobel Prize for Literature or the equivalent – don’t go there. However, a serious writer will get up and treat it as a job – not just write when a good writing feeling hits him. Yet, as you are working on writing something, it is a very nice idea to get up and shake up your surroundings by getting into nature – just bring along your pen and paper in case you get ideas you want to write down – and eventually you will get very good at your craft. One poet, e.e. cummings, published almost 3000 poems, and he wrote one poem every day from age 8 to 22, before going to Harvard to study modern poetic forms.

Revise

Use Fresh Eyes to Revise – Revise alone, Revise with friends, then do it all again!

Stephen King says to write a draft, then let it rest. It’s a really good idea that after you finish something, you go away for at least a half-hour before coming back to reread it. Then get out your knife, and start cutting. George Orwell has said to not use long words when short ones will do – similarly, don’t use too many words when few will do. Some types of writing, like poetry, beg for constant revision and that flawless, final touch. Can’t we agree that words in poetry are like powder kegs, full of double-meanings, rhyme, and meter, that could blow at any moment? All I am saying is that we should endeavor to treat our longer works with equal care, if those words are to stand the test of time. Look at William Shakespeare’s wonderful Sonnets, or love poems, perhaps some of the best ever written in any language – “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (Sonnet 18) or “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” (Sonnet 29) – he is using a set pattern. This rigid pattern has iambic pentameter (ta DA ta DA ta DA ta DA ta DA), or five “iams” which are two-syllable pairs that have the stress on the second syllable, and three stanzas of four lines apiece followed by a two line couplet, or 14 lines in total. Follow this link to Sonnet 29, and this link to the Open Source Shakespeare site. To be a poet, remembered worldwide four centuries after your death is a great accomplishment, however, even more unbelievable is the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are nearly all written in this same poetic form. Have a look at Macbeth, from Open Source Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 1, and you can easily see the end rhymes, although it’s not quite Iambic pentameter that is spoken by the witches. Almost all of the characters are speaking all of their lines in iambic pentameter – except for some lower class characters to give them a different feeling – which means almost the entire play is a poem, in most cases. That kind of discipline, or attention to both the meaning and sound of the words used is rare indeed, and shows a dexterous virtuoso with words, whom we ought to emulate. Treat your writing as fine silver that needs polishing before use, or just as a matter of routine even if you are not using that silverware for dinner at all. When a guest arrives, you’ll be prepared to serve up your best meal of words.

Who’s the Audience? What’s the Message?

You must Know Your Readers if they are Ever to Know You – one writer says “know what they are passionate about and what pisses them off” which sums up “know your readers” quite well. But the readers will know fairly quickly how you are treating your subject and characters, and if you care about what you are doing – if not, chances are they won’t be reading for long. So remember to get their interest early – usually with techniques such as “in medias res,” which basically means to start in the middle of your story or with some action, or with dialogue, description that may include onomatopoeia, or perhaps a question – tell them something they are interested in reading about, and have a message you are trying to get across.

Good structure delivers

What’s the best ride today? If you are getting somewhere in a hurry, then maybe a quick sprint on foot for short distances will work, or a motorcycle for longer distances. If the weather is bad, or the distance is longer, or “the package” has multiple components, then go for a car with a good engine and safety features. If it’s a nice day, and the distance is not exorbitantly long or time too pressing, a bicycle works fine. Just like getting from point A to point B may require some thought in choice of transport, your choice of structure.

While students will likely need to practice how to have paragraphs centered on a topic sentence and papers centered on a thesis statement, and understand how to use 4 to 5 paragraph structure when quickly answering essay questions on timed writing tests, the fact is, much of your writing “after school” will not, um, exactly follow these rules. That brings us to another idea…

Break Rules

Know the Rules, So You Can Have Fun Obliterating Them at the Perfect Moment

I understand rules are good, because they can be easy to remember and useful in application, but understanding the ideas behind the rules is even better, if you have time. You can obviously spend your whole life studying writing and literature and not write anything worthwhile or nothing that earns you much acclaim or income. Aren't there lots of universities filled with a whole lot of professors who did not write much of anything worth noting? And they were probably the ones who wrote those books full of rules to begin with! No, seriously, some time must be spent learning such things as what makes a sentence tick – you got to be a good sentence doctor to your writing, and keep them thriving with proper methods.

If you don’t know what a simple, compound, and complex sentence is, then learn it now, before you suddenly die and people say you never knew that while you lived. After all, the complex sentence can be made pretty simple, once you know what a dependent clause is, and how we like to use them as adjectives pretty often, and sometimes even as nouns or even adverbs. It used to be a good middle school education at our school made all of this abundantly clear, and I think it still does, but we find some of our high school folks are transferring in after those middle school lessons have happened for their classmates, in all honesty. So we’ll try to address it, but in the end, if you don’t know, find out – one way is simply by speaking up, and another way is by writing terrible papers and letting me figure out you don’t know all by myself. Here is a memorable little grammar rule from Kurt Vonnegut that I found in a New York Times article called “Writing Rules! Advice from the Times on Writing Well.”

“Do not use semicolons,” he said. “They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”

Showing you've been to college can be pretty useful at times – like when applying for jobs that require a college education. But I am fairly certain they won’t have a semicolon test on your job application. Just remember what Albert Einstein said about education: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” And those school days of yours are coming to an end, faster than you think.

Learning from great writers includes reading great books about how to write, and here are some of the best out there:

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit –Brenda Ueland

Becoming a Writer – Dorothea Brande

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction – William Zinsser

Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott

Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers – John Gardner

The Classic Guide to Better Writing – Step-by-Step Techniques and Exercises to Write Simply, Clearly, and Correctly – Rudolph Flesch

Line by Line – How to Edit Your Own Writing – Claire Kehrwald Cook

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition – William Strunk, Jr.

Some Sources for this post:

Ten Secrets to Writing Well