Beginning Writer Errors--six writers speak

[sartorias]

Six writers offered their top three mistakes at a Loscon in Los Angeles a few years back.

I took these notes, and thought that posting their lists might kick off some discussion.

Comments

[sartorias]

Yeah. Judging by the number of doodles I find on these things, there was a lot of back and forth about that one.

[autopope]

I'm coming to the opinion in my dotage that if you run into show-not-tell head-first and can't simply show, then you might as well lapse into gonzo second-person and address the reader directly.

Sure, we know why show-not-tell is a wise dictum; but it's not always the solution when you need to get a complex abstraction across rapidly, and if you break into an impassioned rant the reader may stick with you just for style points. (Cf. Bob's camera-directed rant about government privatization as a form of corruption in "The Delirium Brief". The subject ought to be dry as the Sahara, and there's no way to show it in action easily because it's creeping and subtle, but sarcasm and vitriol works wonders for livening it up.)

[sartorias]

That's for sure. It's actually part of my ramble at Viable Paradise, that an interesting narrative voice can get away with anything. But too many writers, especially feeling that third person limited is the only POV, don't seem to realize that there is always a narrator, and so the action and dialogue will get the stylish treatment, but then the reflective or informative bits will fall into a bland journalese that causes the eye to skim. Nobody skims Terry Pratchett's data dumps, for ex. And indeed, one thing you do really well is get the data across in a bitingly entertaining way, especially when channeling Bob.

[whswhs]

Okay, I gotta get technical here: You mention one of the writers objecting to the use of very as an adjective. Now, that usage is possible-"the very thing!" is an ancient idiom-but almost every usage I can think of is as an adverb: very long, very huge, very incomprehensible. And I think the latter are more the thing I've see objected to elsewhere. I wonder if that writer was thinking of the adverbial usage and lost track of the correct grammatical label?

[sartorias]

The example the guy read out loud (and repeated later under the purple prose discussion) was "very soul" as in "It stabbed to his very soul". Nothing was said--or at least I didn't write it down--about very as adverb. Though someone else did mention overuse of 'quite' and 'still' and 'just' in the cluttered prose discussion.

[whswhs]

Oh, okay. That usage strikes me as archaic, and surviving only in a few formulaic phrases-and yes, I agree, they're mostly better avoided.

[sartorias]

One still sees it, usually in what often seems like overly labored prose.

[kalimac]

I like the point that "white room openings" are undesirable because the reader hasn't been given reason yet to care about the characters

[sartorias]

Yes, and your number two can go for writers, who also are fascinated by their world, and assume that readers will be, too, right off the bat. They need to be wooed.

[whswhs]

It's a problem for game masters, too. One of the classic temptations for GMs is to hand out a guide to their campaign setting that's tens of pages long, and demand that all the players read it and master its content before they create characters. This hardly ever works! I do sometimes ask my players to learn a little about an invented campaign world-but no more than I can explain in half an hour of exposition and Q&A, just enough to let them decide what kind of characters to create. Once that's done I have a hook to get them into the setting, where I can teach them more about the invented world. . . .

(Of course, as a GM, I also have the option of inviting the players to create part of the world, as the background for their characters. I don't think authors usually have that option.)

[sartorias]

I think to an extent the marketing hoopla cover art, etc, does that: lets the reader know generally what sort of story it is.

[pameladean]

Ha! I understand the elegance of the simple declarative sentence well enough to use it very sparingly.

P.

[sartorias]

*snerk*

[sollersuk]

Some of those give me some wry amusement.

How many of them have read Wayne C Booth's "The Rhetoric of Fiction"? I suppose they might not think something written in 1961 has anything to say to modern writers... but this was where the term "unreliable narrator" was apparently introduced, and also, it seems, the dictum "show, don't tell". Only the meaning there is "don't let the narrator tell the reader what to think of a character". And even then exceptions can be made (for example, the Book of Job).

Even with the common usage there are problems: even when showing, the writer is always telling to some extent, by their choice of words.

[sartorias]

That's exactly right, though I don't think many writers understand the function of narrator (or the existence of). But that's okay, some write smashing books anyway.