About split sentences

    Nobody wants a writer to lose their voice in the edit, but there are several things to consider in a sentence with a comma in its middle. The sentence that I just wrote is a loose sentence in Strunk and White's view in The Elements of Style (page 25), because it's connected with a conjunction (but) and a comma. Get enough of these in a short stretch and you run the risk of letting the reader's focus drift. The best alternative for the comma-conjunction (such as ", and") is to break the sentence into two, or use a stronger break such as a long dash, or a colon or semicolon.
    It's a simple survey on your rewrite: just search for ", and." Some are fine, but too many of them will give you a chance to tighten the reader's focus.

Story rules? It certainly does, as much as an Empire

The path into a writing practice can be littered with a gauntlet of rules. In journalism school they told us never to write a headline that ended with a preposition, a rule that persists in every part of English that I know of. (Ha-Ha!) Except for poetry, of course. I'm reminded of the poets at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. They read their work in an open mike night, and each was commanded to add nothing other than this before they started to read: "This is fresh, but it smacks of genius."

The range of genius runs wide and rarely pays attention to rules while its sparks creations. That's why I like the scope of There Are No Rules, the blog by Writer's Digest editor Jane Friedman. Up on the blog's front page today are a long examination about the re-branding of Reader's Digest (good luck on that one), what makes her stop reading a blog (it has as much to do with how it looks as what's being said), and Great Storytelling 101.

Of the last, Friedman reminds us that Steven Spielberg has said that "people have forgotten how to tell a story." The blog entry includes a 9-minute YouTube movie that explains the fundamentals of storytelling's essential parts.

You may have been told a million times about the elements of a great story (e.g., protagonist, conflict), but this 9-minute clip has an immediate way of showing you what happens when those elements are missing! Fabulous.

It's a multi-part series, using Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and the middling prequels to illustrate how the elements of storytelling work -- or don't, if they're missing or mangled. I subscribe to the school that considers The Empire Strikes Back to be a seminal text of storytelling, so the problems of the Prequels stand right out. Are there rules to be observed for a writer? Yes there are, and as a storyteller you will need to know them. Use their Force, young Jedi.

Novelist as journalist

I've read two things of late which attribute a journalist's skill to writing a novel, and vice-versa. Details, handled with care, are what link these two approaches to writing.

In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler creates a world of 2025 with almost no technology advances, but terrible declines in safety, water supply and food. In her novel she lays out a California with so much detail that some reviewers compared the writing to reporting. It's a great read, easy to keep plowing through — and it even addresses some spiritual needs of a society in peril.

In The New York Times Magazine, novelist Alex Witchel uses the talents of a fiction writer to capture a dazzling portrait of Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. Lots of scene, peeking into the subject's psyche. Verisimilitude, indeed. A thick, juicy chunk of creative non-fiction, with the emphasis on creative. (And if you haven't seen Mad Men on AMC, watch. One blogger who writes screenplays calls the first season of this '60s-era Madison Avenue ad-men drama "a master class in character development.")

I come from journalism, so details and dialogue are old friends. Structure, though, is the real lesson which I work to learn and practice. Novelists, of course, know story structure but have to do their reporting in a newspaper's brevity. It's all writing, after all.

SF (and fiction) basics, books online

Tor Books is giving away free SF novels through Sunday. I am a big fan of Battlestar Galactica (a SF TV series that is more well-crafted war drama than SF). Downloaded the novel that Tor has published, based on the series, to enjoy the story in print. Well written, indeed.

The author of this Battlestar Galactica novelization, Jeffrey A. Carver, has a Web site with great advice on getting over basic missteps in any kind of writing, as well as the specifics of creating an entertaining SF world.

Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

And don't forget to download your free books. Tor is ending the program, which probably rattled some cages in sales for this Macmillan imprint, on Sunday. Maybe most important is what Tor is doing now: putting everything it sells in electronic format, if the big publisher has online rights.

Tor's Patrick Nielsen Hayden notes: "Tor parent company Macmillan is actively converting all titles to which we have digital rights. It really is just a matter of time before the majority of our library is available in e-book form.... There are issues of workflow and rights, just as there are everywhere else. I think you'll see lots more e-books in lots more formats in the next few months."

Prologue possibilities

I am taking a good hard stab at a prologue for my novel Viral Times this week. In the process I've discovered how few writing books address the nuances of this pseudo-beginning for a story.

Revision and Self Editing has a two-page section called "The Use and Abuse of Prologues." Good stuff. I found the advice in Manuscript Makeover even more helpful. "Some agents refuse to read manuscripts with prologues," Elizabeth Lyon warns, but the section also explains in significant detail how you can avoid undermining yourself by using a prologue. Also, Beginnings, Middles and Ends has good instruction on the subject.

In summary, a prologue has its mission: Tell parts of the story the reader wants to know before the main story commences. Set a tone with the best language you can craft. Raise questions, too, so readers are motivated to continue.

What merits come from critique?

A little while back I offered up an opinion about whether a Master's degree in writing will produce that book a writer pursues. It will not, and I have two comments to that post which concur.

But the second post from anonymous (we'd love to know who our readers are, by the way) says that

I fail to understand why a writer would develop better critique habits outside of an MFA program than inside one. I've taken many workshops with non-MFA writers, and plenty of them have no idea how to critique work. And there are enough MFA programs out there to conclude that there is diversity to the workshop experience and no monolithic approach to critiquing.

The ideal of developing "critique habits" is at the heart of this failure to understand. In fact, developing better critique habits is just the opposite of what my workshops do — and any workshops based on the Amherst Writers & Artists methods. (That's what Cary Tennis of Salon uses to lead, as do I.) The practices state that our workshops handle revised, second-draft work offered as a manuscript this way:

A thorough critique is offered only when a writer asks for it — after the work has been distributed in manuscript form. Critique is balanced; there is as much affirmation as suggestion for change.

Many MFA graduates share stories of the painful sessions when "my writing was up." Just as many, perhaps, as writers in critique groups which meet with no clear process for how to suggest changes to writing. Balance in these sometimes-grim classrooms proves to be a scant commodity. In "Narrative Design," Madison Smart Bell tells the story of being a visiting teacher for two semesters in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, known as the bellwether of critique-based workshops.

Within the limits of law and propriety, we were free to do what we pleased... However, there were enormous, crushing pressures to conform in those Iowa fiction workshops. The pressure came not from any teacher but from the students themselves. It was a largely unconscious exercise in groupthink, and in many aspects it really was quite frightening... Fiction workshops are inherently almost incapable of recognizing success.

We always ask in our workshops, "What was working well in that writing?" And we ask it before we move on to suggestions for change.

Bell's comments that will not hearten many an MFA applicant. Only one point of view, yes, but maybe being driven by critique is the highway to revision hell. Bell goes on to say that when he was a student in such a program, he considered 90 percent of the critique he received on his writing to be worthless. He would still be noodling a first draft if he considered matters of detail. Now, he tells his students in workshops to consider themselves fortunate if just one workshop member understands what the writer intends. "Your job," he says, "is to become the best judge of your own work."

Our anonymous commenter reports they are aiming at an exclusive MFA program, adding that "I have to produce that work, and it will be much easier for me to do so with mentors and peers, the resources of a large university, and fellowship money that will free me from the household drudgery and round-the-clock childcare that take up most of my time now."

That's a good course for the 2 percent of applicants who can clear the walls of these elite programs. For the rest of the world's hopeful writers, including some MFA aspirants, we offer practice toward publication, dedication, and community without an emphasis on the need to polish critique habits. We suggest, based on our individual reading of the writing. Our goal is to recognize the best in a writer's authentic voice, and then suggest how they might follow their own practiced voice when they succeed.

Elimination of household time and childcare can be an option for some, but the line for these fellowships is long and filled with talented writers. Yes, apply to win such money. Send your best work. Hope for the best — but remember in the meantime that art does not spring from critique, but in your expression of voice, mentored by suggestions for change. I believe everyone can write, and together we can be better.

Writing great sentences

Francine Prose wrote a fine book about writing, Reading Like a Writer, which includes a chapter on Sentences. (Chapters are titled with names such as Words, Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Gesture, Dialogue, and more.) In her book she celebrates the sentence and crafting wonderful ones.

To talk about sentences is to have a conversation about something far more meaningful and personal to most authors than the questions they're most often asked, such as: Do you have a work schedule? Do you use a computer? Where do you get your ideas?

Prose goes on to show an example of what a writer can do while ignoring the advice of writing craft books. Not just any writer, but Virginia Woolf, writing in her essay, On Being Ill. Not just any sentence, but one 181 words long, which appears at the opening of the essay. (It's shown at left; just click on it show a full-sized, readable page). Woolf's sentence is something I share with our weekly workshop members during our eight-week sessions. "It's not the sentence's gigantism but rather its lucidity that makes it so worth studying and breaking down into its component parts," Prose writes.

A good sentence is the meat on the bones of good writing. Prose writes, regarding the revision of sentences

Writers need to ask themselves

• Is this the best word I can find?
• Is my meaning clear?
• Can a word or phrase be cut without sacrificing something essential?

Perhaps the most important question is, "Is this grammatical?" A novelist friend of mine compares the rules of grammar, punctuation and usage to a sort of old fashioned etiquette. He says that writing is like inviting someone to your house. The writer is the host, the reader the guest, and you, the writer, follow the etiquette because you want your readers to be more comfortable, especially is you're planning to serve them something they might not be expecting.

Prose adds that she revisits Strunk and White's The Elements of Style from time to time. But most craft books like this tell a writer what not to do. Learning from reading is a way to enter a new league of writing, once the fundamentals of grammar are in your toolkit. Literature shows us what kind of great sentences are possible to write.

Gestures, or not?

I was surprised to learn today that Evan Marshall, a former agent who is now a writing coach, advises against using a lot of gesture in scenes.

Use Body Language Sparingly

New writers sprinkle their dialogue with a lot of gestures and mannerisms. Characters smile, grin, frown, shake their heads...

Most of the time the readers don't really care, unless the gesture or mannerism is important for conveying meaning. Keep body language to a minimum in your dialogue. Many aren't necessary because the words have already delivered the message.

Marshall, whose Marshall Plan for Novel Writing has a companion workbook, says that sometimes a gesture is useful to show us a pause.

"I couldn't leave Belinda. not after all she's done for me — medical school, raising our kids." Frank looked down at his cigarette, studied it a moment, then gave Susan a frank look. "I love you more than anything in the world, but I can't marry you."