An electronic version (with a few small additions/changes). Enjoy.
A Completely Idiosyncratic, Slightly Off-Beat, Not Necessarily Original but Potentially Helpful Collection of Writing Advice~or~
A Few Tips about Writing I’ve Picked up along the WayEveryone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.
~Margaret J. Wheatley
To my mind, there is no system more complex—or more beautiful, intriguing, and beguiling—than our system(s) of language. Through the years, I have gathered a few little gems that I have taken to heart, made my own. What follows (in no particular order) is not formal advice; it is, perhaps, a revealing portrait of my own mind—but these scraps of writing wisdom, quilted together, inform my own writing practice, so I thought I’d share them with you. The point, of course, is not to ask you to adopt my criteria, but to inspire you to gather your own.
1. The better you understand the rules, the more liberated you are from them. This is a variant of the “you gotta know a rule before you can break it” philosophy, and there is something to it—making the conscientious decision to break/disregard a writing rule or to utilize a particular figure ‘reads’ very differently than haplessly stumbling onto something. Learn the conventions. Write with purpose. Break the rules with purpose. Make writing decisions, and be able to back them up. Doing so will give you confidence and will give your writing presence.
1 ½ . And yet . . . welcome, embrace those ‘happy accidents.’ Maybe it is your subconscious at work or maybe it is just serendipity, but every so often, despite one’s best intentions, a word comes out not as we intended . . . but so much better.
Rule 1 ¾: Read your work aloud: sometimes what you say differs from what you wrote . . . and it is much, much stronger. A simple detail can change the efficacy of entire piece of writing.
2. Heed this gruesome advice: murder your darlings. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch penned this little gem in 1914, and it has since been picked up by Faulkner (as “kill your darlings”), Mark Twain (allegedly), and countless creative writing instructors. Writing is sometimes about tough decisions; ‘cutting the fat,’ or culling your hard work may be the toughest of them all, but it is often the right thing to do. The moment we become enamored of our own brilliance, we have lost our objective edge. Take one for the team, and all that . . . very noble, very valuable.
3. Eschew Obfuscation. Huh? Exactly. This is an oldie but a goodie from the classic Elements of Style by Strunk and White (originally published in 1919):
Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. [. . .] In this, as in so many matters pertaining to style, one’s ear must be one’s guide: gut is a lustier noun than intestine, but the two words are not interchangeable, because gut is often inappropriate, being too coarse for the context. Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason (76-77).
4. To know and know well: the nature of the sentence and the power of strong verbs. To my mind, sentences and verbs are the DNA of writing—stunning in their simplicity, awe-inspiring in their logical complexity and potential. If one can master not only the grammatical types of sentences (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex) but also stylistic forms or modes (i.e. the periodic and the final free modifier) AND if one can come to understand the inherent power of verbs and their role in the internal logic of the sentence, then one can create life . . . on the page.
5. Appreciate the marriage of sound and sense. There is a reason Plato banned the poets from his utopia: language is inherently musical and music is mesmerizing, persuasive. Pay attention to how language works, what it does, how it sounds—not just what it means. As the poet Edward Hirsh observed in
How to Read a Poem an Fall in Love with Poetry, “writing fixes the evanescence of sound”— what an extraordinary phenomenon. Never underestimate the power of the auditory imagination.
6. Grammar is a part of language . . . and it can be fun (like a puzzle). Consider Joan Didion’s argument for grammar: “All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” Details make all the difference (i.e. ‘the devil is in the details’), and grammar represents one of the most nuanced, most influential, subclasses of ‘details.’ When it works, it supports and defines your writing; when it is flawed, it is distracting, like white noise or static.
7. Read! From Richard Hugo: “a writer learns from reading possibilities of technique, ways of execution, phrasing, rhythm, tonality, pace” (The Triggering Town, xi). Read what you like, what you admire. Read the work you wish you had written. Don’t imitate,
per se, but come to understand the nuances, the culture, of your favorite (or most serviceable) form or genre.
8. Don’t be lazy. Rhetorical questions try to be provocative without taking the time to craft an appeal . . . lazy. As Hugo notes, “If you can answer the question, to ask it is a waste of time.” Other ways to be lazy: relying on clichés, drawing on ‘canned’ arguments, using gratuitous slang. The choices you make affect your
ethos—choose wisely.
9. Always consider ethics. Language can be incredibly powerful, and there is an inherent trust between writer and reader that must be honored. To paraphrase Andrea Lunsford, language use must be principled, accurate, and fair.
10. Learning opportunities present themselves in unexpected places and ways. I learned much of what I know about rhetoric I learned from poetry. Much of what I know about poetry I learned from . . . sports. My writing education is grounded in what I learned in chemistry and pre-med (consider the beauty and extraordinary grace of molecular geometry). With that in mind . . . a few favorite, random (but nonetheless valuable) quotations (some about writing, some not) that guide my writing:
An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.
~F.Scott Fitzgerald
Make your own kind of music.
Sing your own special song.
Make your own kind of music—
Even if nobody else sings along.
~ ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot, 1969
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.
~Earnest Hemingway, The Paris Review
PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER—itty bitty living space.
~Robin Williams
as ‘Genie’ in Walt Disney’s Aladdin
To write [. . .] you must have a streak of arrogance—not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice.
~Richard Hugo
The language is perpetually in flux: it is a living stream, shifting, changing, receiving new strength from a thousand tributaries, losing old forms in the backwaters of time.
~Strunk and White
You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
~Robert Frost
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
~E.L. Doctorow
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightening and the lightening bug.
~Mark Twain
Verse forms do not define poetic forms: they simply express it. It is an important distinction. For many people what is off-putting about poetic form is the belief, sometimes based on an unlucky class or exam, that these are cold and arbitrary rules, imposed to close out readers rather than include them. [. . .] poetic form is not abstract, but human. [. . . ] This is the charm and power of poetic form. It is not imposed; it is rooted.
~Mark Strand, The Making of a Poem
The poet may legitimately step out into the universal only by first going through the narrow door of the particular.
~Cleanth Brooks, Irony as a Principle of Structure
And now for a bonus rule, one that is perhaps my favorite . . .
Embrace your own weirdness.I believe this, too, comes from Hugo, but I first learned it at the feet of my first true mentor, the poet and professor
Dr. Jonathan Johnson. What does it mean? Well, my friends, that's the point: that's for you to decide, as only you can.
