words ‘n stuff

Nick Mamatas says it better than I ever could: Ten Bits of Advice Writers Should Stop Giving Aspiring Writers.

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I was talking to a friend about my upcoming writing projects, one of which includes novelising Tag, the screenplay I wrote seven years ago. I got to thinking about some of the pitfalls of a taking a script as a basis of a novel. I have already had one stab at writing the novel version of Tag, three or four years ago, but wasn’t quite in the right mental space for it.

But starting to think about it again, I had a flash of understanding: What is shown in a script can only too easily be told in its novelisation. Authors alway say “Show, don’t tell”, but what is showing in one medium may mutate into telling in another.

A script is a starting point, a sketch, which a whole host of other people turn into a fully-fledged story. A script just has to say “An English soldier crouches in a WWI trench, up to his ankles in fetid water”; the scene itself is realised by the set designer, the costumer designer, the actor, the lighting designer, the director of photography, the sound designer… All these people, and more, affect how this single line comes across on screen.

In a novelisation, the very worst thing one could do would be to simply write, “An English soldier crouches in a WWI trench, up to his ankles in fetid water” and then move on to the next line. What is sufficient in a script may need significant unpacking in a novel. What does the soldier feel? What can he smell? How does the water feel seeping into his boots? Can he hear the enemy nearby? Or his comrades, recently wounded, screaming in agony?

This might all sound blindingly obvious, but I think it’s an easy pit to fall into. It’s also a thought that I suspect will make novelising Tag a lot easier when I finally get round to it.

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Suzannah Windsor Freeman, writer of Write It Sideways, has a post about how important it is to avoid cliché in writing. She splits clichés into three main types:

• Overused expressions
• Hackneyed plots
• Stereotypical characters

And she gives her readers some good advice on how to avoid them.

But clichés aren’t all bad. The human brain uses heuristics – rules of thumb – to help it efficiently deal with the world without having to work everything through from first principles. For example, if someone throws a ball at you, you don’t do differential calculus in your brain to figure out where you need to be in order to catch it, you just keep your eye on the ball and your brain figures it out. This is the ‘gaze heuristic’.

Wikipedia says:

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, hard-coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases.

Clichés are a kind of heuristic: They are shortcuts to an understanding of the world that is roughly in line with reality. Clichés becomes clichés because we see a nugget of truth in them.

For example, Suzannah says:

Common sayings (or idioms) like “All’s fair in love and war” and “Blood is thicker than water” are cliched. They once held truth and meaning, but through overuse have become meaningless.

Now, “All’s fair in love and war” and “Blood is thicker than water” might be overused, but they do still have meaning and we all instantaneously understand what the writer is trying to say when using them. The problem is not so much with the phrases themselves, but with the context in which they are used. In a quotidian context, quotidian phrases fall flat. In a compelling context, quotidian phrases can move the story along quickly and seamlessly, and the reader won’t even notice that they’ve just been run over by a cliché.

(As an aside, I’ll note that some of Suzannah’s examples, such as “Needless to say,” “At this point in time,” “Each and every one,” are actually pleonasms, or needless phrases, rather than straight clichés. Allan Guthrie has the most awesome tipsheet on pleonasms which every writers should read.)

In rejecting cliché, there’s a serious risk that the inexperienced writer concocts something even worse to replace it with. Instead of “The sun set behind the hawthorn” you end up with “The golden orb had almost disappeared behind the interlacing fingers of the hawthorn”. If a cliché doesn’t interrupt the flow of reading, if it’s not noticeable, or if a replacement would be worse, then there’s nothing wrong with letting a sleeping cliché lie.

Clichés of character, aka stereotypes, are similar: the buxom barmaid, the ornery farmer, the dashing young man. They are heuristics which exist because there’s some reality in them. Buxom barmaids may not be the only type of barmaid, but they’re the type that most men (and probably a lot of women) will remember. Farmers are stubborn and ornery because so are cattle. And dashing young men dash because they are young and male (cf barmaids and selective memory).

By themselves, even stereotypes are no bad thing when you’re drawing a cartoon of a character, rather than a painting a portrait. In the right context, and with the right characterisation, stereotypes can even be fascinating central characters in their own right.

Take wizards. You have the wise, white-haired, long-bearded types like Gandalf, and you have the ditzy, inept, self-aggrandising types like Ridcully, and you have the kindly, paternal, caring type like Dumbledore. These three archetypal wizards are all stereotypes (they are actually stereotypes of academics with added magic), but in the right places, these stereotypes work. You might argue that these characters themselves created the stereotypes, and you might be right, but if you’re writing a wizard character now, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a completely unique take on the wizard format, because the chances are someone has done it already.

Again, that’s no big deal, because although someone might already have written a wizard a bit like your wizard, they haven’t written your story, with your wizard, his dialogue, his backstory, his character arc. So long as he fits into the story as he should, it’s all good.

Indeed, the search for the unique again often results in the painful. The young boy coming into his powers as an Old One amidst a loving and supportive family might seem trite and clichéd. But when you turn that character’s family into an arguing, divided, sullen mess, you actually undermine the very qualities that make Will Stanton capable of success and turn him into the kind of stereotype that makes Susan Cooper fans want to tear their eyes out.

Furthermore, if you subsume your storytelling into a search for the unique, well, you’re fucked. The unique is as attainable as The Way of the Dao De Jing – it is only possible to find The Way if you are not looking for it. The Story is as The Way. You cannot seek to be ‘different’ and ‘unique’ and find The Story. Only in telling The Story as it demands to be told may you perhaps find something different and unique.

Finally, clichéd plot. Well, let’s be brutally honest here. If you want to sell, a bit of clichéd plot can go a long way towards your success. Not everyone wants to have their preconceptions challenged, and some of the most successful books have some of the most hackneyed plots. And as you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, some of those books have the most hackneyed characters and prose too.

We might look down on some of these books, but there’s no denying that an easy, fast read which is compelling enough to keep you turning pages does not have to have unique characters, does not have to have plot that’s different, and can be written in the clunkiest prose, and still sell well. Truth is that, so long as you’re not too egregious, or at least not so egregious that a publisher can’t look past the cliché and see the pound signs, you should be fine.

I’m reminded at this point of the advice I was giving by my photography tutor a many years back: No professional photographer is surprised by what’s in the background of his/her photographs, because s/he has seen it all through the lens before the photo was taken. No professional writer should be surprised by the clichés they read in their own work, because they should have been aware of them as they were writing or on first read through.

The question is not, “Is it a cliché?”, but “Does this piece of writing seamlessly serve a purpose?” If the cliché works, it’s not a cliché.

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I’m writing this biog post not on my laptop, or my iPad, or on my iPhone, but with a pen in a notebook. As I write, the pen tracks my movements by referring to a special pattern of dots on the paper, and when I plug it in to my computer it will upload an exact copy of each page. I can even use handwriting recognition software to turn my scrawl into editable text.

My Livescribe Echo pen was a Christmas present from Kevin, along with some journals and a carry case that his family gave me. It has the potential to change forever the way I write by letting me write both longhand and digitally at once. So far, I love it. I’ve already written pages of research notes for my next fiction project and have successfully transferred them to Scrivener for future reference. It has let me work in places where getting even an iPad would be a little awkward, e.g. in A&E, and in a way that would be difficult with a laptop, e.g. taking notes from a book as I’m reading it.

There’s just one drawback: It is difficult to get hold of the special dotted paper that the pen requires in order to work. In the UK, only three types of notebooks are available and all of them are lined. I prefer to use unlined notebooks: A5 for desk notes, A6 for taking out and about. I dislike using lined paper, but although plain notebooks are available in the US, I have yet to find a supplier in the UK. Kevin can probably get me a few next time he’s on the other side of the Pond, but even in the US, there are only a few types of notebook for sale.

This strikes me as a bit bonkers. It’s like inventing the world’s best razor and not selling the blades. Livescribe should be all over the stationery aspect of their business, with lots of choice and wide availability. After all, the success of their pen depends on users having access to lots and lots of paper.

They should also provide more choice for the pen itself. Right now you can write with a biro… or a biro. I know a fountain pen would be too bulky, but even a gel pen would be an improvement!

Ultimately, though, this pen has the potential to revolutionise my writing life. I usually write my friction by planning and researching my story, then writing the first draft out by hand. For some reason, it comes out better that way. Maybe it’s because it slows my brain down a bit, forcing me to think things through more carefully as I write.

Once I have a complete first draft, I then have to type it up. This pen removes that stage completely and, whilst the handwriting recognition isn’t perfect, it’s at least as good as my transcription, during which I introduce errors of my own. It’s also easier to spot handwriting recognition errors as they tend to stand out – e.g. a K instead of an H, rather than ‘birth’ instead of ‘berth’.

It is possible to print dot paper from within the Livescribe software, but again it’s lined, you can only print 25 pages, and it’s the wrong size. In order to get blank paper (i.e. dots but no lines) I apparently need to download and install the SDK, download custom paper files others have put together, do something fiddly in the SDK, load them on to the pen, print them out and hope my Mac likes the end result. (The Livescribe support forums seem to say that maybe custom paper won’t work on my Mac.) That’s an awful lot of work, even if you’re used to dealing with SDKs, which I am not.

I can’t understand why Livescribe have made it so hard to get hold of their stationery, or why it’s so difficult to design one’s own. I hope this is a problem I can find a way to solve, because this pen shows promise and it would be a shame for it not to fulfil that promise for lack of stationery.

My advice to Livescribe: Hire a stationery geek and give them a big budget. A wide range of stationery is essential to the success of these digital pens – without it, they are just very heavy, very fat biros. But given enough stationery and, also importantly, an easy way to make and print my own custom paper so I can bind my own notebooks, I could be a convert. I wouldn’t just use this pen for a few months until my current stash of paper runs out, but could end up using Livescribe pens for the rest of my life.

Livescribe, it’s really up to you.

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I’ve never signed up to the belief that short words are in some way inherently better than long ones. George Orwell, in his essay Politics and the English Language, said, “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” But I always felt that he was being rather unfair to long words. Even the words used to describe their origins – Anglo Saxon and Latinate – are loaded with the very characteristics he says we are supposed to admire or avoid.

Yet you can’t always substitute the Anglo Saxon for the Latinate and retain exactly the same meaning. Take ‘build’, from the Anglo Saxon (i.e. Old English) verb byldan, and ‘construct’, from the Latin verb construere. They mean the same thing and are given as synonyms, but there are – to me, at least – subtle differences.

Constructing a house implies a methodical, replicable, approach with an emphasis on paying attention to detail. Building a house implies a more human, organic approach. Building a defence implies that the defendant is quite possibly innocent and just has to gather together the evidence to prove it. But constructing a defence implies artifice and calculation, qualities more likely found in a guilty defendant.

Which word is best to use is a matter of context. Which nuances most closely fit the scenario you are writing? What implications are you hoping to make? What sort of feeling do you wish to leave with the reader?

Simply avoiding Latinate words is far too simplistic. A good writer strives to use their understanding of implicit meaning to make choices as they write. But adhering slavishly to such rules robs work of its depth.

I’m personally much more sympathetic to the late Eric Thompson’s attitude to long words, described by his widow:

Phyllida [Law] says: “Once a lady wrote to him complaining that he used too many long words in The Magic Roundabout and how were children meant to understand them?

“He got out the Oxford English Dictionary and wrote back using all the longest and most difficult words he could find, like palimpsest and oxymoron, which sounds rude but isn’t.

“He held serious conversations with babies in prams because he said they had to start somewhere. They were not to be patronised because they were little and hadn’t lived as long as he had.”

If we, as authors, don’t use long words, how on earth will anyone (including us) learn them or become familiar with using them?

But there is, of course, another side. Long words – or archaic, obscure or exotic words – shouldn’t interrupt the flow of reading. There is nothing more annoying than being jolted out of a story and back to reality by a poorly chosen word.

If an unusual word is used properly, its context gives it the meaning that the reader may otherwise lack. That gives you the choice to gloss over the unknown word and carry on if you don’t want to hunt down the definition in a dictionary. If a story is compelling, then that’s usually what I do – get the gist of it from context and carry on reading. But use too many obscure words, or use them in a way that leaves their meaning opaque, and you can ruin the reading experience.

I’m driven to write this blog post by Dan Abnett’s Triumff, Her Majesty’s Hero, which suffers this exact problem. In just two pages, he uses 16 words which jarr for one reason or another.

• galliards – from context, some sort of musical form. Dictionary says “a lively dance in triple time for two people, including complicated turns and steps.”
• rondeaus – same context as above, and whilst at least I’ve heard of a rondeau (or rondeaux), I couldn’t tell you exactly what one is. Dictionary says, “a thirteen-line poem, divided into three stanzas of 5, 3, and 5 lines, with only two rhymes throughout and with the opening words of the first line used as a refrain at the end of the second and third stanzas.”
• soused – I know this means ‘drunk’ from the context, but it’s hot on the heels of the previous two and quite jarring.
• Chatterton-esque – no idea what he’s referring to
• pinnace – something boat-related, from context, but no real idea what. Dictionary says, “a small boat, with sails or oars, forming part of the equipment of a warship or other large vessel.”
• Hawkins – again, something boat-related, but no idea what, and my dictionary is unclear.
• luggers – boat-related again. Dictionary says, “a small sailing ship with two or three masts and a lugsail on each.”
• galleasse – boat-related, yet again. Dictionary doesn’t have a clue.
• flota – understood this from context, but it’s the Spanish word from which we get diminutive ‘flotilla’. Given it’s not a widely used word, does it add anything to the narrative?
• netherstock – something to do with clothing, particularly hosiery. Dictionary says ‘Quack quack oops’
• canions – apparently they are patterned and again to do with clothing. Dictionary says nothing.
• peascod – something maybe to do with fabric, or clothing. Dictionary getting a bit sullen now.
• murray – not used as a name, but might refer to a type of fabric. Dictionary sulking in the corner.
• armillary – ok, this is finally a cool one. Dictionary leaps to its feet, stretches its hand in the air and shouts, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ It then goes on to say, “a model of the celestial globe constructed from rings and hoops representing the equator, the tropics, and other celestial circles, and able to revolve on its axis.” I sort of knew that already, but it’s good to have the detail.
• nantwich – I’m including this because it’s bloody annoying. It’s a play on the word ‘sandwich’ and is not only unnecessary, but not funny and not clever. By itself it might have been funny and clever, but not after such a slew of ridiculous words.
• Couteau Suisse – Not a clue. Dictionary back to sulking. May have been referenced earlier in the book but I really cannot be bothered to look.

The problem Abnett has is that he uses strange words as a way of world-building. Philip Pullman does this too, and it’s no less annoying. Oh, and Bruce Sterling and William Gibson did it in The Difference Engine, only one of the reasons why that book is so horrendous.

Good world-building doesn’t rely on using obscure language, writing in extreme dialect, or using impenetrable jargon. In Abnett’s case, he’s trying to illustrate that, in his world, it’s 2010 and the sun has yet to set on the British Empire, currently ruled over by Her Divine Majesty, Queen Elizabeth XXX. He could have achieved that without all but one or two of the above words. Instead, his central conceit is, well, conceited. His vocabulary seems to be more about the author proving how deeply he has researched his topic and, therefore, how clever he is, than about improving the experience for the reader.

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I thought I’d have a little play with Google Scribe, so I started off with “I was walking down the” and then accepted every suggestion Scribe had to offer. This is what I got:

I was walking down the street from them and they are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients is not known whether these are the only ones who can not afford to pay for their own users and groups to their Friends / Favorites list yet, so I’ma keep popping up in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached to their respective owners…

Scribe doesn’t understand context beyond a few words and has no facility for punctuation. They’ve clearly trained it on CiF commenters.

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