A short, but by no means definitive, guide to writing

[Phobos]

Currently I'm procrastinating, but what better thing to do while procrastinating than to make something that other people may find useful? What better, indeed, I hear you ask. Or at least, you should have asked.

This is going to be like it says on the tin, a short guide to writing in a way thats going to set your work apart from all the other morons who decide to go "I can write the alphabet, I can write a book!". Suffice to say, these fools are the worst kind of idiot, and really should have been drowned at birth.

1 - Construction.

Like with building a house out of bricks, your story has a basic building unit, the language. Rotten bricks means a ****e building. A quick MS Word or Open Office spellcheck is not sufficient, especially if you're trying to get published. You need to learn the language, or write it fluently, without any aid whatsoever. There are ways around this, of course. If you dont like trying to use the apostrophe ( ' ) in contractions, then you can always write the longhand. But this makes your writing far clunkier and less suave than it can be.

For instance:

"I know I should have done the homework, sir, but I could not as I do not have any kind of pen. I have had to beg, borrow or steal the things in the past but I now just cannot be bothered"

sounds far less natural than : "I know I should've done the homework, sir, but I couldn't as I don't have any kind of pen. I've had to beg, borrow or steal the things in the past but now I just can't be bothered."

Bad example, I know, but you get the gist. Misuse of the apostrophe accounts for maybe 20% of the errors I see, and thats a lot when you consider virtually every day I check the LO forums and one or two others.

Basic rules:

1) Use to indicate ownership. "Dominic's pen".
2) Plurals. "Are the Chris' coming tonight?" (Note that usually with words ending in S, the second S that you would put on the end of the word is discounted.)
3) Indicate dropped letters in a contraction. "Don't" < missing an O from "Do not".

For the majority of this Im not going to bother with the apostrophe, since basically I cant be arsed. Note this is bad practice, and you should avoid it! Grr! (Usually Word or whatever you use will fill these in, but you need knowledge of the language so you know where you have made errors while the computer will not.)

The other thing that really gets my goat is the confusal of homonyms (words that sound like one another but don't mean the same thing.) The most common are the confusions between your (possessive, your shoes) and you're (contraction of you are, you're an eejit, you're really starting to piss me orf), and between their (possession, their shoes), there (position, your shoes are over there) and they're (contraction, they are,they're over there you damn fool).

It sounds anal to learn, but at the end of the day if it means that if you submit it to publishers, or just to other people to read for free, you're far more likely to get accepted/read if you display more writing skills than your average brick with foaming sheep disease.

Having said that, you better be good in the other areas, otherwise they're write you off (GOD I knew I had to get that pun in here somewhere! BWAHAHAHA! *ahem*) as yet another fool with unrealistic expectations.

2 - Background.

There is something Ive noticed, as Im sure you will if you read enough stuff, is that people very rarely like things to be new. To quote Pratchett, or more accurately, Vetinari of the discworld series : "What is it they want, Vimes, deep in their hearts? Just that things go as normal and that tommorow is pretty much like today."

You can see ample evidence of this in the pulp fiction type techno-thrillers churned out in their dozens by the like of Andy McNab or the other major foolish guy whose name temporarily escapes me. You know the kind, its all basically butch macho hero saves the world from some bizarrely inexplicable problem. The same plot is basically re-used over and over and over, much like you would a car. Ford brought out a car in the UK called the Puma, and it was a "Sporty little racer" car. In reality they'd just plonked a new bodywork onto a slightly modified chassis formerly used for their best selling range of runaround cars, the Fiesta. Sold really well. Basically, they'd managed to sell the same concept twice - a poky little car with painfully average capabilities, but requiring little or no money (or indeed, effort) to make.

I digress. Basically, dont try and reinvent the wheel until you are sure, everyone you've sent the story to in the industry is sure, even the cat is sure, its going to be a best seller due to the style you've written it in. Keep to the usual premise but with an interesting spin on it.

One of the best books I've ever read, My Sisters Keeper by Jodi Picoult, is a good example of this. The story idea in itself is a simple one, but its a fantastic read due to the way its written with a variety of subplots and differing viewpoints from the five or six major characters in the story. Basically, dont try to break ground with your first story since you are not going to be credible enough in the industry for people to pick you up.

Try and keep things reasonably normal. If you start like many people do in the RPG forum, its a sad case of seeing who can get the most obvious teen-angsty character. Theres not one normal character amongst them. They've all had their parents killed in bizarrely inexplicable accidents, or been kicked out of the house and been drug addicts since the age of five.

Dont try and emulate this.

As far as settings go, try and make it plausible, and by plausible I mean personable. People are much more likely to identify and like a character/setting that you write about if they have some kind of parralel to the sort of things normal people do, like putting your keys down in a bare room and not being able to find them thirty seconds later, the way they play with the strap of their watch when they're confused and/or nervous; the way that buses wont turn up for half an hour and then five'll come along at once.

You get the idea.

3 - Writing Style

Keep things reasonably short and to the point. People nowadays dont want to read miles about a poxy little watch on a desk like in the 19th century. As with almost anything, its far easier to create a charicature with words, and people's minds will fill in the rest of the detail without you needing to do it for them. Show, dont tell, the reader what things look like. People read in order to give their imagination a bit of exercise. IF you tell them, why bother to use it?

An example of this is speech. Its far better to give clues to a persons emotional state than to explicitly state it.

""I love you!" she hissed, warily watching the knife in his hand," is quite powerful, as Im sure you'll agree. Contrast with the impersonality of:

""I love you!" she said. Sarah was panicking now that Simon had drawn the butchers knife.""

Another thing is the viewpoint factor. Many writers choose to use an impersonal third person narrator type viewpoint, which is omnipotent and annoying, or the third person limited, in which the narrator kind of acts like a guy recounting stuff in the third person while looking over one persons shoulder. I always think of it like a video robot thing flying around over peoples shoulders, but tied to that person. They're going to see more or less what the guy sees and hears. Reasonably useful for crime thrillers/ whodunnits since things are revealed bit by bit instead of everything being told by the all knowing narrator and the other 300 pages of the book are a major waste of tree.

The other major writing viewpoint is in the first person, either as events unfold, or recounting them as though the events are happening in the past, like a guy is sitting there in an old rocking chair with whiskey (think Hard_Aun) telling you his memories, like defending the bakery and about how queers cant tapdance.The danger here is that you'll put into the story what you're thinking at the time or all the characters will take on your opinions and viewpoints, so it will be that your story is merely a carrier for you talking on your soapbox about XYZ issue; due to the overuse of " I ".

Sooo... Thats enough to be getting on with for the minute.

Basically, dont do it like any of these examples:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/pottersues/

[Lordofchange]

Originally Posted by Phobos

Rotten bricks means a ****e building

This quote made me smile - a very well written little article here, with excellent advice for any budding writer. Good job!

LoC

[Scuba T]

Thanks for the help. I'm one of those straight A in english class kinda guys, and this really helped me out, since I'm constantly trying to figure out how to write my stories.

[Cairocopter]

Great, it'll certainly help my writing.

[Adrian MalSeraph]

Hooray, I'm not the only one who finds bad grammar annoying. Hooray!

[Morkai]

This should actually help quite a few people. I've seen some decent works around here but nothing spellbinding. I have no claim to greatness as I haven't written a piece of fiction in ages (comes with having to write essays for 8 different classes) but I do agree with what you've put out here. Though I do realise my opinion truly matter little.

[Munch]

can I ask which viewpoint factor do you think is the most efficetive and why

[Phobos]

These days im plumping more for the first person narrative rather than the third person because it involves the reader more into the storyline, but thats not to say that third person cant be very good as well. It depends a lot on the writer, for certain.

Some first person writers are really poor, but others (Especially Nick Hornby, who i heartily recommend) are fantastic and you really can get sucked into a book for a couple of hours straight (this is why I love the Ciaphas Cain books.) Third person varies a lot, you get some writers who bore you to death with describing things that just arent relevant to the story, or pontificating about some issue that theyre blatantly using their book as a poor disguised carrier for; and again, you get some who keep things sharp and to the point, these are generally the more successful writers.

Again, you get some who will keep things tight, but occasionally go wandering for a short distance before snapping back to the storyline. Terry Pratchett has a clear progression in his work from the early nineties to the present where he'd take a lot more asides in the past, but as time has gone on he keeps his storylines tighter, and arguably in recent years, darker compared to the parody-type stories he wrote in the past.

As with anything, Your Mileage May Vary.