A while back I received an email from a young man who was all in a tizzy to get his work out to the awaiting public. So incredible was his works of fiction it would make The Lord Of The Rings seem like a tale scribbled on the back of a paper bag by a homeless man with a twitch. Indeed, this was going to totally rearrange the world of literature in a manner that had never been seen before. Once I read it, the author assured me, my life would never be the same again.
Self -confidence, apparently, is not the man's problem.
Honestly, the story wasn't half bad. But even more honestly, the story wasn't that good either. Clearly, the young man had imagination. He wasn't lacking vision at all, but he did lack writing skills to speak of. The craft of writing had suffered a cruel fate to be tricked into being the medium by which the Grand Design was to be revealed to the rest of us. I greatly feared that many people would be injured had his novel exploded because of the many sentence fragments within. Were everyone allowed a certain number of commas I would suggest that chapter one will be the last that any of the critters would call home. Someone left a number of homophones off the hook and his metaphors were like a ill dressed child at a funeral for the accessory impaired.
Alas! Poor Yorick, I knew him good.
Look at this sentence: The gallant knight rides into the dark night and he thought about turning around and perhaps riding back, he decided to continue onward, and was glad he decides to do so.
Run this mess through a grammar checker and it's clean, but my god the thing is a disaster. I've seen train wrecks with more hope. This doesn't mean the story of the knight at night is a bad story, but there is almost no amount of passion that can fix it. Moreover, isn't the very term "gallant knight" a bit cliché'? Adjectives are great tools but there are some things a writer is just going to have to accept sounds corny as hell.
I cut one paragraph from the tale and ran it through a grammar check, which he obviously didn't own, did a little surgery on the rest of it, and pared down three hundred words to about two hundred fifty or about a fifteen percent cut. I'm a writer, Jim, not an editor, but the going rate is about eight cents a word. The man is going to lose a lot of money.
I haven't heard back from him. I suspect he either realized his writing skills need to catch up with his imagination, or he thinks I'm an idiot and he's off trying to peddle the mess elsewhere. No matter how good you are, your readers aren't going to stick around if they have to work around the way you write to get to your story. If your story reads like some lunch break fantasy of a High School stoner, it doesn't matter how great the plot might be.
Don't get me wrong here, I encourage bad writers to write more, not less. Nevertheless, a writer has to come to terms with the idea that words go together a certain way. There is a process to this craft that has to be obeyed if a reader is to ride upon the words as if transported via magic carpet. Moreover, if a writer truly knows the craft then almost any subject matter will carry the day. A poem on walking in the woods may not seem earthshaking but written well it may reveal a road less traveled.
Writing well is your ultimate message. The beauty of your imagination clothed in a well-constructed paragraph will quicken heartbeats, and inspire passion. If you have the vision, if you have the dream, if you have within you something that will change the way human beings think about literature, then you have it in you to do it right.
Take Care,
Mike
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Comments: 36
I can't find his Gather account. I hope he didn't stop writing, but I do hope he learns alittle more about how to go about it.
Writing is like sex. It's not how good you think you are that counts. Tell your students that!
Well, maybe not.
I have some of the tools, but I am never that satisfied with a piece that I go out and tell the world about it. Can I suggest the young man tries to hone his grammar, sorts out the punctuation rules and reads a lot more.
I've written all sorts of prose since my school days, but I enjoyed the process more when I actually left school; I wrote for myself then and not for a teacher or a qualification. I joined a couple of writing workshops where I also heard the developing efforts of other writers. I helped to form a poetry workshop because it seemed there were quite a few around who were good at that. We went to a local cultural festival, where we all faced the public and read our own work for thew first time, some with more confidence than others. After a couple more years we had a poetry performance group, delivering a selection of poems in pubs and clubs, theatres and halls. We put on regular, and popular, poetry shows.
Those poets have all gone off to do other things but I continue writing and have performed poetry in many gigs, for example, in the Lake District, London, Leeds, Sheffield and at the Edinburgh Festival. I find 'open mike' evenings great fun and still a bit of a challenge. Nearly every town or city have a version of 'spoken word', 'stand up poetry', cultural festivals and the like. Youtube does a good range if you check.
This year, I am on my second uni course; the first was in Creative Writing and it showed how much better I could write, how many more prompts I could use, how many other ways of writing a poem there are and, equally important, how to tackle 'life writing' and the many 'voices' used in prose.
Finally, can I suggest the young man does an evening class in Writing or finds a Writing Workshop so he can give himself time to develop and mature as a writer. He has to be able to accept constructive criticism.
One day, he may actually find a publisher...but he will be in the queue among the rest of us! For every JK Rowling, there are thousands of writers still waiting for that special acceptance letter from their publishers! But don't give up hope.
(63 but who cares! I'm 35 inside and still a rebel!)
Delusion? Yes, perhaps, but what writer isn't? I think you're spot on with your assesment, however, and he does have much to endure before he can make that great change. I do admire his ambition, however blind it may be.
Perhaps one day he will be 63, and look back at your article...and smile.
My son was taught very little grammar in school and I cringed every time I read one of his papers.
The comma is such a powerful little critter when used properly. I don't think there is a single punctuation mark more abused in writing, either by excessive use or by omission.
I'll get off my soapbox now, but I really wish they would bring back English as a serious topic in school.
style does come into play though. some authors can get away with a few infractons if the story is really good and readers generally like what they write.
No doubt, writing takes the passion and determination of toil in order for it to be notorious. I feel great when I manage to do an article that draws a good response, particularly from the folks whose articles I admire...here on Gather
I don't think he's ever run into anyone who told him his verb tense sucked. I well admire his imagination, but damn, man, most word processors will tell you when you're limping around like a drunk.
Well said, Michelle.
What? And interefere with texting?
If someone sends your stuff back with a 15% cut, a lot of spelling errors corected, and a brief history on comma use, you are not carrying the day
I'd like to think so too. It would be great to read that story if it had been cleaned up just a bit. Maybe it will be a best seller one day and I'll get a mention in the liner.
You are real enough for me, Deb.
Yeah, but you made me spew coffee on my keyboard.
I still love the caption to the contrails.
I had plenty of aspiring writers in that class who did not read regularly. Reading books written by a variety of writers and taking note of the different techniques can serve writers well. I despair sometimes when I see what my son is required to read in school, watered down from what I had to read in high school, no meat or substance left.
I think reading is becoming a lost art, and certainly a lost form of fun
I try to be gentle with most new writers, as long as they are willing to learn from me making the effort. Most are, some are not, but this one seemed to think he was doing me a favor by letting me read his work.
I cannot wait to see what a publisher has to say about it.
geez I just dated myself.
Did you kiss on the first date?????
Comments from friends and family are encouraging but not necessarily accurate or useful. Comments from writers groups are discouraging but not necessarily accurate or useful. Feedback from teachers are discouraging even if they are encouraging but not necessarily accurate or useful. The feedback becomes useful when the same information comes from two or more sources showing that get you that's most likely making a mistake and not them.
Replicating stylistic elements from other authors you admire is not always a good idea. At the very least, they have internal motivation and understanding of their style whereas you are mimicking. By reading more, you will come to understand what you like and don't like about different authors. You'll find a series of things from different authors that resonate with something inside you and that will become your voice, your style.
Never stop writing, never give up. We all have our own unique challenges. Mine is that I'm disabled and I use speech recognition. Speech recognition adds a whole new set of errors such as changing the verb tense from what you said to something else. My education is also lacking. I was raised in a very blue collar town by an extremely blue-collar father who ran a rigging company. The local school system was designed to produce labor for the local businesses and if you went to college, it was expected you would come back and be a manager for some of the local factories. My wife, when she first met me, thought I was crude, ignorant, and very smart. After teaching myself almost everything I know the past 30 years, she now thinks I'm crude and very smart. Now I'm teaching myself how to write and, it's the pits. Placement of punctuation, verb tense frames, cliché avoidance would have been a lot easier to learn when I was 16 than it is now. I'm almost ready to find a course to help me refresh my knowledge. But I'm never going to give up. I'm going to keep writing, keep improving my work, and eventually get published again.
As my e-mail signature says: speech recognition use, it make mistakes, I correct some.
Just kidding. I'm not that dated :}
I doubt that I have wisdom, but I do know how to throw a decent sentence together on occasion.
Nice way to send that comment!