I believe the main reason for this to be that people now attribute ownership to a creator’s online channel. They don’t criticize you on your blog the same way they won’t comment on your (bad) taste when they’re visiting you at your home. Two photographers I follow – Olivia Bee and lightsongs receive  praise – and only praise – every time they release a photo on their Flickr photostream, and I must say that it gets pretty annoying after two or three months, to scroll down and see a whole heap of amazing! piled upon them – upload after upload after upload.

There’s also the possibility that these people filter out their comments, and only approve the positive ones – but I don’t believe that to be the case. I wonder, though – how likely is a reader to post a negative review in an overwhelmingly positive comment thread? A creator’s loyal community is the best defense against trolls, but it also a deterrent from negative commentary on the creator’s work. And – if this is true, and it’s true for all creators – then wouldn’t the Internet be the ideal home for the narcissistic writer?

Note that this trend doesn’t seem to apply to Novelr, nor to any of the non-fiction idea blogs you have out there. People have no problems with arguing against ideas they don’t agree with. It’s the fiction – the creative work – that suffers from this dearth of online critique, and this means that the writers who blog for improvement aren’t likely to find it … not unless they ask for it, and ask for it regularly. There is one exception, however, on the Internet: writing forums and communities not clustered around the writer are good places to ask for writing feedback. Which means, then, that the trick to getting C&C isn’t to ask for opinions from the community clustered around your blook, but to ask for it at other places – neutral ones – where people do not feel that they’re intruding on your digital turf.

When I first started writing, I reasoned that the blank page was a beautiful thing; an invention that gave the outside world the inner workings of my head. I could give a gift of imagination - my imagination – to others; to allow them a smell of the flowers planted outside the palace of Samarkand, to give them a taste of stolen cloud, taken from underneath a flying monkey God. And indeed that was the ideal that I strove for, that little imagined place where both writer and reader could meet; not over ideas, but over stories and shared experiences.

But then take non-fiction, where you’re still writing, and you’re still using the same tools of the craft, but you’re not actually telling any story. I find that non-fiction is often a weaker substitute for fiction, in the same way some people may chew gum to make up for an addiction to nicotene; or watch porn to make up for a lack of human love. Writing essays and blog posts are easier; they’re instant gratification to the slow-release pleasure of writing a novel; they make you feel as if you’re still engaged in the act of writing, with one crucial difference: you’re not actually doing any storytelling. And we all know how much harder storytelling really is, compared to the direct, non-fiction electricity of ideas from head to hand. This could be one reason why so many novelists turn to essays in their downtime, between books. It could also be one reason why I’d been writing so little fiction over the past 6 months. And it was true, and it was painful – the crux of the matter was that between Novelr and my blog I didn’t feel any need to ease myself into the hard grind of crafting and telling a good story. And that was sad indeed.

I wonder now if writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin write non-fiction because they believe in this lie. Or if they’d examined themselves as fiction writers, found themselves wanting, and settled for the still-respectable, instantly-gratifying joy of non-fiction. Because to me it suddenly seemed that if you were not writing fiction you weren’t partaking of the most powerful thing writing had on offer: the ability to take yourself out of time, to live beyond your years in the curls of your letters and the ozone of your paragraphs. I believe now that stories last forever; that only ideas grow old and die. And what I was doing, I found, was that I was writing so much non-fiction that I was putting aside almost nothing of myself for the timeless craft of the fiction writer.

So what made me come back? Two things, I suppose. The first was a 43 folders podcast, How To (…) Turbocharge your blog with Credibility!, a punchy, inspiring chat between two old-time bloggers that reminded me of everything I had started out to do when I first launched Novelr. But that’s personal, and you aren’t likely to identify with me on my reasons. It’s the solution to my second problem that I find worthy of sharing: I decided that no matter how much work I was going to do on Novelr, or how many essays I wrote for myself, I would always, always set aside some time for wrtiting fiction.

And the thought of this – the very idea of it – made me instantly happier. I’m sorry for the hiatus. But I’m back now, and writing again. Thank you for sticking with me.

N.B.: Have any of you struggled with this? Or has fiction/non-fiction been your one and only calling? I’m interested to know if anyone’s had similar doubts, and similar blocks. Drop me a line in the comments section; I’d be delighted to hear from you.

This article orginally appeared in Palm Sunday (New York, Dial Press 1999) from pages 65 to 72, 9 years before Vonnegut’s death. I thought I’d share it here.

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

In Sum:

1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

In this guest post Gavin Williams covers the basics of online fiction for beginners to the medium. Read on to find out more about him.

Hey, have you heard? Online fiction is the future!

Okay, maybe not. Online publishing is a non-traditional route for writers, and an emerging art form. Novelr’s creator, Eli, has asked me to share some of my experience as an online writer and reader with the Novelr community, in the interests of helping others who are hoping to start writing, and to facilitate the growth of the online book community.

Who am I? Glad you asked. My name is Gavin Williams, and I currently write “No Man an Island” and “The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin.” I read a lot of online fiction, and have a background in literature. A lifelong reader, I have a lot of interest in the future of the medium, and I think online writing will be a big part of that. It’s not the whole future, but it’s an intriguing facet.

Traditional publishing and online publishing are two very different mediums, even though their core material is the same: text. The written word. However, the way their text is presented, and the way their audiences interact with these two mediums, make them very different. We’re going to walk through those differences, in the interest of highlighting the strengths of online publishing, and educating writers in how to use these strengths to their benefit.

Part One: The Delivery

Traditional fiction comes to us in paperback and hardcover editions, on paper, usually in a bookstore. I love buying a new book (or getting an old favourite from a library) and then curling up in a chair and reading for hours. It’s a unique experience, as you get comfortable and let your imagination interact with the words on the page to create a world. It’s irreplaceable.

So, why should you read online then? Well, it’s got advantages too. A traditional writer might publish one or two books a year. You wait and wait for it to come, and that’s if you know about it ahead of time. Stephen King spent thirty years on the Dark Tower series, beginning it in college and ending it as a grandfather. J.K. Rowling started her seven book Harry Potter series in 1995, so it took about a decade to write seven novels.

But online fiction can be published every day, you don’t have to wait years or decades. It doles out its story one chapter at a time, but it’s immediate. This immediacy gives readers new material to look forward to, and can connect them deeply with a story while they wait for the next day’s instalment.

Charles Dickens wrote serial fiction, published in newspapers. It was greatly anticipated by the British audience, and connected people as they all eagerly awaited his continuing story. It gave them something to talk about and look forward to.

Online writers can create that same kind of excitement, by having a new chapter up for their waiting audience on a frequent basis. This suits online audiences quite well, as they will read episodes of their favourite stories during work breaks, or in-between checking their email. Short, intriguing chapters are ideal for the casual reader.

Part Two: Interaction

Traditional writers receive fan mail about their latest work. They might attend book signings or conferences. But the average reader never gets to speak to their favourite author.

With online fiction, interaction is built in. Chapters are usually set up to be commented on, and most writers answer their readers. An intimate communal experience develops, with audiences complimenting what they like, complaining about the things they hate, arguing over ideas, speculating on storylines, and then, actually hearing the writer’s two cents. Traditional publishing has nothing quite like it.

Some writers even set up forums for their audience, increasing their interaction and the development of community. Fan art, wikis and encyclopedias all become part of the experience.

Part Three: Structure

This might be the most important difference between online and traditional publishing, and one that writers might not be aware of right away. I certainly wasn’t, and learned it from experience. Now, hopefully that experience will benefit anyone thinking of starting a new story, and make your lives easier.

Originally, “No Man an Island” had a very busy opening scene, with eight separate characters competing for screen time. In a movie that almost wouldn’t matter, the camera would show them all and the story would move along. But for online readers, they couldn’t keep track of all the different names and find interest in the story. They weren’t sure who to care about, and where the story was going.

I had to sit down and analyze why this had happened. I knew plenty of traditional novels with big casts, and never had a problem. Indeed, they were often best-sellers, so audiences in general didn’t mind a big cast of characters. I listened to the comments (directly benefiting from Interaction) and tried again.

This time I wrote a chapter featuring only three characters, and highlighting one in particular. But again there were complaints. There was too much description and not enough action. I analyzed my writing again, and looked at other examples. The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-loved stories of all time, and is full of description. My chapter had less!

But LOTR is not online fiction. I learned something important about the difference between the two mediums. With a traditional book, I can sit for hours and finish it. Or, I can put it down and read more later. But, I know there is more, and that the story is complete. I can be patient with it.

But online writing is designed to be immediate. Audiences get frequent chapters, often weekly or daily. Those chapters need to capture their attention quickly, and give them a reason to come back tomorrow. Otherwise, the audience will go elsewhere. The story isn’t complete, and you can’t sit down with it for hours. Most online readers are taking a fifteen minute break from work, or are in-between checking emails. They need a reason NOW to enjoy your story, not in three pages or another chapter.

“The medium is the message.” With traditional, offline fiction, you know that in a few pages more will happen. So, the busy crowd scene is endurable (and possibly enjoyable) so long as it contributes to plot and the audience knows where it’s going. But online fiction happens one short chapter at a time, leaving people waiting. They want to know something important about your characters in chapter one, something that makes coming back tomorrow worthwhile. And a change in scene and time can look disruptive, because each day is formatted like the one before. In a chapter book, you have the transition of the blank page and a big bold caption: Chapter Two!

My book gets more interesting to online readers as they go on, because I learned to create deliberate snapshots of action — interesting in themselves, complete enough in themselves, leading the reader on to the next day with small cliff-hangers or unanswered questions. I applied that theory to the beginning, making an active scene focus on one or two characters with the others relegated to the background. I brought them in bit by bit in the next few chapters, expanding their roles while keeping the story moving. I relegated slower chapters into Bonus Story territory, to keep the pacing faster but to also give readers more depth to investigate when they had time. And feedback tells me it’s working.

I think the way to sell online fiction is to work with its unique features. Interactivity and speed of Delivery. But it’s as an alternative experience to offline fiction, not a competition with it. Readers read. I’m not giving up print novels for the internet, but I’m also not going to stop enjoying reading a new chapter every day and then sharing comments with the author directly. Both are satisfying.

But hopefully my experience will make your online story that much better. All the best, and keep reading!

Gavin Williams writes No Man An Island and The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin. If you like his work feel free to drop by Pages Unbound and leave a review for him there.

When I first started writing on the Internet I owed a lot to Poynter Institutes’s 50 Tools That Can Improve Your Writing guide. The whole list was sadly taken down from the web to be sold as a book so I do suppose it’s lost forever, unless someone can figure out how to view the cached versions of the site. But back to the topic at hand: The Long Sentence. One of the first lessons I learnt from the Poynter guide was how to get long sentences right – how not to write one, how they work, and how to keep meaning clear even if your sentence is a paragraph long. Let’s start by comparing two long sentences:

A career that is spent primarily in the back office for troubleshooting for the benefit of the department can be detrimental to your advancement.

And this gem by Dave Eggers,

I fly past the smaller shops, past the men drinking wine on the benches, past the old men playing dominoes, past the restaurants and the Arabs selling clothes and rugs and shoes, past the twins my age, Ahok and Awach Ugieth, two very kind and hardworking girls carrying bundles of kindling on their heads, Hello, Hello, we say, and finally I step into the darkness of my father’s stores, completely out of breath.

Now the second example is a lot longer than the first, and yet it just seems to work. Why does it work? Why does it flow logically and not collapse inward?

Simple. It branches to the right. Branching to the right is a very important part of a good long sentence, and it is very easy to pull off – all you have to do is to put the subject and the verb as early on in the sentence as possible. It acts as an anchor and prevents the sentence from drifting out of control.

In the second sentence ‘I’ and ‘fly’ are placed at the start, and the rest of the sentence branches out from it. It prevents the sentence from spiraling out of control. In the first sentence, however, a whole chunk of text is placed between ‘career’ (the subject) and ‘can be’ (the verb). Result? An unreadable sentence.

Keeping a strong subject and verb together is a simple rule that should be applied to all forms of sentences when you’re writing to be clear. It helps give shape and direction to your text, particularly if it’s placed at the very front. But putting the verb at the end isn’t a completely evil thing to do – writers do it all the time when they’re trying to create suspense, or when they’re building tension for the reader. This works if it’s done well. Just use it carefully.

There’s one last aspect to the long sentence that I must include before I close: you might not need to write long. I believe that there are three possible remedies when a writer frequently loses you with the long sentence:

1. The writer needs to learn how to write good long sentences
2. The writer should stick to short and snappy
3. The writer should stop squeezing in every imaginable detail into his/her prose

And the third is more often than not the problem. Know when to stop with your details. And fear not the long sentence.

I was reminded today that good writing isn’t everything. It was four in the afternoon and I was stuck at a turning point in one of my manuscripts, and it hit me that everything I’d done to improve my writing did not matter then and there. I could have just as easily messed up the entire project by tackling the scene the wrong way, even if I did write it beautifully. This wasn’t a matter of description or style or clarity of thought – it was something more. It was story.

Story is that extra something we writers don’t really understand. Take a stroll through any bookstore today and you’ll find writing titles jumping out at you: The Elements of Style, for instance. Or On Writing, that highly popular craft manual by Mr King. But pause for awhile and note that Mr King didn’t write a book called On Storytelling. Nobody has, in fact – I’m still looking for solid works on storytelling alone.

What I’ve realized is that writing is actually the easy part of the craft. The other part – the harder one – is the ability to create a mind-blowing good tale. And that isn’t something that can be captured in a book – I’ve yet to see manuals entitled How To Write Like Steinbeck, or Where To Find Story Ideas. Things like that fall from the sky, or they don’t fall at all.

I read an article last year by a writer turned editor complaining about how hard it was to filter short stories for a collection. She quickly identified two kinds of submissions – the first was by a good storyteller with bad writing (which she could work on), and the other was by the writer who could write beautifully but had nothing to say. The first needed a lot of polishing; the second, however, was impossible to work with. These 2nd category stories were beautiful on the outside, but in the end the aforementioned editor found them to be empty. Rotten apples. Hollow cores.

So I took a break from my manuscript today. I didn’t know how to go on from that turning point – the possibilities were just endless. But that’s not the point here. The point here is that I’m thankful for the storytelling department. For my storytelling department. There are people out there who can’t pull a good yarn even if it was staring them in the face, good writing or not. And I know my writing’s not perfect, but I’m working on it.

I’m just thankful I’ve got something to say.

Anybody creating on the Internet will have to face their audience sooner or later. This is particularly true if you’re using a blog – and yes, most of us do, whether we’re artists, writers, or musicians.

Now the problem with all this is that writing and feedback simply don’t mix. Writing is best done alone, with a cup of coffee at your favourite desk, and a cat curled up at your feet. I look for feedback only after I’m done with a story – and even then I have to be careful who I ask. I have five friends whom I ask for feedback. Each of them gives me a specific type of criticism – some I go to for their clarity, and others I go to just to gauge their reactions (these people are my Average Joe testbeds). I’m sure all of you have your own teams of feedbackers – these people may consist of your professors, your spouse, or your bestest friends. And these people are people you trust.

Now imagine an online situation, where you blook your story and this unknown dude comes up and says: “hey I like your story but can you please do this: *insert*” Or he comes up and he tells you how to improve your writing. The second is okay – hey, we’re all learning, aren’t we? – but the first is downright horrible. And the worst kind is the one that comes up and tells you: “I absolutely love your story. The way you handled this blah scene was amazing, and the way you construct your blah blew me away!”

The effect of all of this is to paint the writer into a corner. All writers have egos, and all bloggers have bigger egos than writers. We only take criticism from the people we know and we trust, and this applies to life as it does to writing. The first kind of comment distracts you from your story, the second kind annoys your ego (if that’s inflated this is a bad thing for said reader) and the third risks you doing something other than storytelling (like – I don’t know – showing off?).

On top of all of this is the simple fact that Internet criticism is propelled by the lowest common denominator. Youtube comments, for instance, are at monkey level. And blogs attract like comments: thinking blogs attract thinking discussion, self-help blogs have this ethos of helpfulness about its commenting section, and blogs that diss celebrities have equally mean feedback.

So what does this mean for us? How can we write and not be detracted by all the chatter coming back?

My solution is, unfortunately, multi-pronged. I would suggest finishing the whole damned story offline, edit it, bounce it off your circle of feedbackers and then blook it, and I would think this the best way to do blog fiction (feedback can come at the end of the story, at a comments page). But not everyone follows this model. Some of us come to blooking because we want to create never-ending novels, and another attraction to the medium of blog fiction is the flighty feeling of cooking up a story under heat of reader anticipation.

So my other suggestion would be to create an ethos on your site that promotes chatting with the author, but not monkey level communication. You can do this through many ways – for instance a commenting policy telling readers what not to comment on. But the best thing to do, I believe, is to interact only with the things you are comfortable with – the themes in your story, for instance, or a certain character’s ability to deal with tragedy, etc etc. Salinger said a good novel makes you feel like you want to chat with the author who wrote it – but the important point here is to keep it to a chat.

I no longer comment on writing when I visit a blook. Long experience has taught me not to, because it is disrespectful of the other writer’s process. So I keep it to discussion about the themes and ideas brought up in his or her story, or I ask her about the characters, and certain points of the story I might not be sure about. I would suggest other blook readers to do the same.

One last thing before I close on this topic: can online feedback ever help? And the answer is yes, absolutely. But the caveat is to get to know the people commenting first – to read their writing and understand their views and to trust their opinions. And then wonderful things can happen, and constructive feedback that doesn’t bring out the ego-lion in you can start coming back and forth. Part of my feedback circle is the Chawlk writing community, and I know and love and trust the people there, even if I’ve never met them in real life.

So writing online can be a real challenge, especially if you don’t plan to finish it and write in solitude beforehand. But, like all things, practice helps. And if you ever start thinking yourself Shakespeare – bounce off your feedbacker circle. They’ll kill you and you’ll be better for it.

Now go write. And leave me a comment.

A few weeks back I learnt the term ‘Purple Prose’. Never heard of it? Don’t worry. It’s strictly the domain of writing geeks, and now that you have we welcome you into the fold.

What exactly is purple prose? I find Wikipedia’s and Deb Stover’s explanations lacking (hell, I’m not going to reference something that confuses me), so I’ll just keep things simple.

Purple prose is prose that makes you wince.

There. One simple concept. It’s stilted prose; overcooked prose; writing that tries too hard and reads like a deflated gasbag. Following the excellent rule of showing and not telling:

The magnanimous attractive beauty of this voluptuous red rose in front of me, coupled by the intoxicating smell it emanated, pulled me closer to this divine entity. Its supple body, along with its delicate and tender appearance made me apprehensive towards feeling it. This was the first time I had encountered this monarch of flowers.

Ouch.

I was worried about writing purple prose for a bit. I reread every passage I penned, scribbled in the margins hurried notes and frightened question marks, and then it got so bad I didn’t touch my manuscripts for a week.

It took about that long for me to realize purple prose was not a problem.

In fact, it shouldn’t be a problem: it’s very, very easy to prevent it. While writing, any and all purple prose can be prevented by saying exactly what comes to mind.

Notice I did not say ‘write short’. Also notice I did not say ’stop using descriptive passages and start taking adverbial shortcuts.’ The rule to prevent purple prose is so bloody easy I had to hit myself on the head for wasting a week:

Say exactly what you mean to say.

If I want to say they had sex, I say they had sex. I don’t go out of my way to say they consummated their relationship with vigorous bonding in between sheets. If there’s a sandstorm in my story I say exactly that, not ’swirling twirling maelstrom of dust particles’.

This rule is in some ways related to KISS (Keep It Simple, Silly!), but not to the extent where everyone writes in simple, understated Hemingway style. If you want to write beautiful descriptions say things with words you actually use, not words you copy out of a thesaurus.

It became a lot easier for me to write again once I had this in mind. Purple prose is really just a fancy name for something I had recognized long before, but couldn’t place. I was relieved when I realized this. And I could write again.

The situation comes first. The characters – always flat and unfeatured, to begin with – come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it’s something I never expected. For a suspense novelist, this is a great thing. I am, after all, not just the novel’s creator but its first reader. And if I’m not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety. And why worry about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak? Sooner or later every story comes out somewhere.

King makes it seem so easy: why ever should you have to ‘be enslaved to the tyranny of the outline and the notebook filled with “Character Notes”?’ And I must admit, it does make writing sound fun. But after giving it a try and thinking about the possibilities of this technique – I have to say that the differences in story and plot really depend on what kind of writer you are, and what kind of stories you write.

Story

Story is what King advocates: he starts off with an idea, and instead of pulling up his sleeves and pushing characters around, he sits back and just ‘write what happens’. He alleges this is more organic and inspired, and some pretty complex books of his have come out of this style of writing (Doleres Claiborne). To his credit his arguments do make plenty of sense – and he throws in a caveat: “… each of the novels summarized above was smoothed out and detailed by the editorial process, of course, but most of the elements existed to begin with …”

Story works where there is a situational premise (Richard’s Undead Flowers, for instance: what happens if there are the undead and the living live together, side by side, in a village?). And I believe story also works when you’re writing a blook … for the reasons King gave, as well as its suitability to the medium.

Plot

Plot is what King calls the ‘jackhammer’ of the storyteller’s arsenal. But despite all the things he says against it there are authors out there for whom plot works well. Generational epics (like Steinbeck’s East Of Eden, for instance) have to be plotted, and couldn’t have been pulled off without some planning. And you have Jefferey Deaver, who swears by the importance of outlining before beginning a book. So plot does work, and is in fact needed for novels with a high levels of complexity. Even King admits to plotting (The Dead Zone), though he says this is the exception rather than the rule: ‘I have written plotted novels, but the results, in books like Insomnia and Rose Madder, have not been particularly inspiring.’

Plot … Story … Eh?

And me? I try to plot. Really I do. I outline and decide what happens in chapter 18, and which character gets killed off by chapter 23. But honestly, I have no discipline following any of the plotting I’ve done … so what King writes serves as a lovely excuse for me not to plot. Which I will, in my next manuscript.

Here’s a shoutout to you fiction writers out there: which works for you? Plot? Story? I’ve got one part of an interview with Authors on the Web on exactly that, and the replies are mixed. Are yours? I’m interested to know.

Take 24 (the TV series) as an example. The concept is pretty simple to grasp: each episode is 1 hour (of a day), and 24 makes up the entire season. This makes for pretty interesting plotting: you have the end in sight, now what is going to happen within those 24 hours?

Another example of this is Life Of Pi. Early on in the novel Yann Martel tells us he would give us Pi’s amazing story in exactly 100 chapters. As the book went on I found myself wanting the book to last longer, and I used the chapters as a yardstick for how much story there was left.

This has an interesting effect. In 24 the characters are plunged into a crisis, and the writers throw complication after complication at them. In writing, set periods coupled with non-stop hurdles prove for very interesting stories. When your characters are in deep, deep trouble readers are probably wondering how you’re going to get them out again … which is very good if you’re writing with a need of holding the reader’s attention.

Like, for instance, the computer screen.

I wonder how far I can push this concept – really short storytelling in … 25 chapters? Should be interesting, don’t you think?

So let me admit my guilt here: I use my action scenes as a way to tempt me into completing the ‘boring parts’. Ironic, then, that the boring parts are more important – characters come to life there, and if any emotional connection is to be made it’ll have to be made over the course of the first few chapters.

But action is easy. It is direct, fast, fun and hard hitting. I enjoy watching my friends reading action I’d written: their pupils dilate, and their body posture changes perceptively.

Let’s start with a snippet from the climax of Silence Of The Lambs:

Catherine Martin was keening again.

Wait here? Wait forever? Maybe he’s gone. He can’t be sure no backup’s coming. Yes he can. But soon I’ll be missed. Tonight. The stairs are in the direction of the screams. Solve it now.

She moved, quietly, her shoulder barely brushing the wall, brushing it too lightly for sound, one hand extended ahead, the gun at waist level, close to her in the confined hallway. Out into the workroom now. Feel the space opening up. Open room. In the crouch in the open room, arms out, both hands on the gun. You know exactly where the gun is, it’s just below eye level. Stop, listen. Head and body and arms turning together like a turret. Stop, listen.

So what can we take from this?

Thomas Harris makes good use of the short sentence – it captures the heat and confusion of the situation Clarice Starling is in, and it conveys strong panic. It hooks you, keeps you reading; the type of writing that brings you to the edge of your seat.

What else does Harris use? Look at the way he repeats stop, listen. It’s done tastefully, in a way that resembles gasping or panting – very human responses to a high tension environment. He also incorporates Starling’s thoughts into the narrative – the 2nd paragraph is basically a monologue that segues into action, and is far less intrusive then a “Is he still here?” she thought, breathing heavily kind of description.

Blooks cannot afford much dreamy prose – something has to happen to slice the monotony of the narrative. Anything to get the reader’s attention – and action is one of them.

Want emotional connection or character development in your blook? How about wrapping your action around that? So the boring parts won’t be so boring, and the exciting parts are almost everywhere.

And by segueing the two together – gosh, what a ride that’ll be!

I’m going to stop now and tell you outright that I’m a handsome fella, and I’ve broken many hearts and will continue to do so for the good part of the next 50 years. My hair is black and my eyes hazel brown, and a sight to see for many a mile, especially if you’re walking in a desolate wasteland.

Chances are good you don’t believe me at the moment. Even if you do … you’d be waiting for me to prove it to you, to break your heart, and to show you how dazzling I can be.

Well, no. I can’t prove it to you since all that was a lie.

But the above description makes a point I would like to share today: everytime I describe a character I create an expectation – a raised eyebrow that awaits proof of my statement. If I call Mr Green a ‘despicable, unagreeable old geezer, prone to fits of uncontrollable rage and quick to change his mind on any subject’ I’ll have a lot to cover, and most of it through actions and words and monologues.

It has been personal habit really, this reluctance to describe character attributes. Early on I found my character development to be limited – I just didn’t have the skill to paint real people onto the pages of my book. I know there are quite a few novelists who pull this off without batting an eyelid – Tolstoy’s War And Peace has believable characters, a true accomplishment when you realize the novel spans 900 plus pages and is littered with a hundred member cast.

So what did I do? I covered. I kept character descriptions to just the physical attributes, letting the reader pick up on how the character thought and moved and ticked throughout the course of the novel. It worked, and in the meantime I practised furiously the art of bringing my characters to life.

Now there are limitations to this technique, and I’m the first to admit that. If you have a huge cast of characters (and a relatively short plot) there just isn’t enough time to develop each and every one of them. And if it’s flash fiction or short stories don’t bother. You’re better off describing the character, since discrepancies aren’t likely to occur and you don’t need to aim for an emotional connection for such a small piece.

Want an example of this? I’ve just finished We Need To Talk About Kevin, a novel about the aftermath of a high school killing. In the series of letters that make up the book we grow to intimately understand Kevin – why he did what he did, what motivates him, how he grew up the way he did despite all the love his parents had for him.

We don’t develop this understanding because of a torrent of descriptions; rather Lionel Shriver gives example after example of what Kevin does, and slowly we piece together the person he is. It is an amazing book, with a powerful way of studying a character, stripping him down layer by layer, motivation by motivation.

You never love Kevin. You hate him. But you understand why he does the things he does, why he thinks the way he thinks.

You get under his skin, and you get under the skin of his mother. It’s not a comfortable place to be.

See the power of excluding descriptions? Some call it showing and not telling, but the best way to understand would be to dissect a 468 page, award winning example for yourself. Read it.

When I first started out writing it was impressed upon me how important detail was in my narrative.

I want to feel the flowers I want to smell the flowers I want to breath through your pages.

I can’t deny narrative is powerful stuff. Many a novel is saved by the sharp voice of the narrator alone – the whimsical flights of fancy that really has nothing to do with the story being told, but is charming nevertheless. But I cry out whenever I read a story with too much insignificant detail, each action of each character lovingly described until it becomes unbearably stilted.

It’s extremely hard to demonstrate in a post, but let me try my best:

She got up from bed and stared at the unfamiliar room. It was old and grey and smelt of talcum powder. With a rush she realized it reminded her of her childhood.

She decided to go downstairs and make herself a cup of coffee. As she descended the grime on the windows by the staircases caught her eye. I’ll have to clean that up after I complete my paperwork, she told herself, and then she swept into the kitchen.

The kitchen was purple and tiled, and smelt of yesterday’s coffee. She wondered if coffee was all it was ever going to smell of. She flipped a switch and the humming of the coffee maker filled the room, mechanical and annoying.

She wondered how much of this house was of use to her. The cracked purple tile of the kitchen was charming when she first bought the house, but it was now starting to bore her. Her appliances were last decade, but the kitchen was last century. It was mismatched, and not in a good way. She filed away at her fingernails, watching the skin flake away. Must be the detergent I’m using, she thought, I’ll have to switch brands soon.

Okay. I admit there’s nothing wrong about the above extract, but there’s nothing unbelievably great about it either. It doesn’t hook you, it doesn’t give you an insight to how a character works – you can’t possibly tell if ’she’ is the type of woman to kill her husband in cold blood, or leave her boyfriend in a ditch after poisoning him. Scenes like this are unnecessary, not contributing to the plot of a romance or a thriller or a horror novel. In fact, this scene contributes nothing, and I hate it when an author fills up 5 chapters with this kind of dross. In a novel it’d be inane; in a blook unforgiveable.

Oh, wait. I’ve made a mistake. There is a purpose for scenes like this, really. In short snippets these minute studies of a character’s actions can slow down the pace of a novel, providing a nice contrast to explosive action. Personally I call such scenes wrappers – stuffed between high octane chase scenes or nerve-wrecking revelations.

For instance I might write the above passage after a harrowing night running away from a psychotic boyfriend, caught on a highway and now safe and sound back at home. Or I might write:

A dull thud as the grenade landed in the exact centre of the room, breaking the monotony of the coffee machine.

Ahh. Scenes where nothing happens and detail runs rampant may drive me bonkers, but chucked in at the right places and it works wonders.

Just don’t expect me to read five pages of it online. If words could kill I’d have died long ago. Oh, of what?

Of boredom.

On January 9 1977, Gail Godwin published a fascinating article in the New York Times entitled ‘The Watcher At The Gate‘. It was well written, to the point, and absolutely eye opening for me.

The Watcher at the Gate is your inner critic – the one who speaks up as you start to get an influx of ideas, who forces you to go back and revise what you’ve just written a paragraph ago and make little changes … or even rip the entire page out. I do this all the time, especially when I’ve been rusty and haven’t worked on a manuscript in ages.

Are my characters properly expressed? Are the actions snappy enough? Is the pace too slow? Too fast? What is the name of that Scandivanian flower that is so integral to my plot? I can’t possibly continue writing without first finding that out!

Gail talks about how important it is to silence the Watcher and let the words pour out of the Gate in one messy, convoluted pile. Only then should we unleash our Watchers, picking through the debris and correcting this detail here, that detail there …

Put simply: we should write badly. The correction and polishing should be done only after we’ve spat out that furball of ideas and dialogue and themes, to prevent us from limiting our creativity. Need to verify a fact? Do that after you finish the chapter/section/book.

It’s a lot easier to implement this for manuscripts hidden under stacks of books and bottles of ink, only to be sent off to an agent in a year (or four). But how about blooking? I found myself constantly making corrections as I typed out each chapter of Janus, reading through at least once before hitting the publish button. But I still don’t feel comfortable with the work – most books headed for a traditional publishing house took a year to edit to acheive such a sheen.

So what is the answer?

It depends on the focus of your blook. If you intend to use blooks as a method of writing your next novel it’ll give you the best of both worlds – you silence your Watcher by setting deadlines and posting up chapters in weekly time frames (Shut up, you! There’s no time left!). Editing only comes when you’re about to submit to an agent, which is really wonderful – even if it takes you up to a year to be positively happy with it.

However, if you’re intending to publish a high quality blook for readers to savour things might start to get a tad tricky. You’ll need a buffer of a few chapters in order to do proper editing, and this can be a tough balancing act.

It’ll be interesting, though. A real adventure. Who knows what ’sunspots’ will pop up in your prose? What weird directions your blook will float into?

And that is, to me, the beauty of this medium.

I’ve been coming across a lot of stylistic guides over the past few days … perhaps due to hththt’s posts on 9Rules about great writing tutorials online. A lot of them are good, and a lot of them talk about the horror of adverbs.

What are adverbs?

Adverbs are words that are used in writing to answer questions such as how?, when?, where? … and so on. (Wikipedia link)

A few examples: “I love you,” she said tenderly.

He threw the ball expertly; the crowd cheered as it arced through the air.

“Kill her.” He said coldly, “And then leave the body here to rot.”

So? What seems to be the problem? These sentences seem perfectly alright on their own. But allow me rewrite them, and let’s see what happens:

“I love you,” she said, her hands tracing the outline of his face.

He threw the ball in a single fluid motion; the crowd cheered as it arced through the air.

“Kill her.” He said, eyes cold and distant, “And then leave the body here to rot.”

Replacing the adverb in all three cases strengthens the impact of the sentence and adds a degree of depth: in the first example, you knew she said it tenderly – but the rewritten version tells you how exactly the tenderness was expressed.

In a sentence: If used incorrectly, adverbs can blunt the impact and power of a verb.

This brings us to our next problem: How can you tell if an adverb is used correctly?

The solution is actually pretty simple. Reread your writing and take note of the adverbs used (typically ending with -ly). Ask yourself this question: “Is this adverb absolutely necessary?”

An example of a necessary adverb:

Ceri got to his feet slowly, a mild headache throbbing between his temples.

The use of slowly cannot be replaced or expanded upon, and is in fact necessary to convey the pain Ceri is experiencing and the effect it has on his movements. Another example:

Yuki calmly blocked a forward blow; Bishop’s palm streaked upwards and a corresponding streak of falling bricks and disintegrating mortar appeared in the side of the hall.

The calmly here can actually be expanded upon, but there is no way of doing so without muddling up the sentence. This is due to the fact that in long sentences it is absolutely vital to keep both subject (Yuki) and verb (blocked) at the very front … anything between will just confuse the reader.

Let’s end with the bad use of an adverb:

Suddenly, there was an eruption of searing white light.

And how can we improve that without changing the meaning of the sentence? Simple:

There was a sudden eruption of searing white light.

It’s pretty amazing what proper adverb usage can do for your writing. The next time you’re flipping through a magazine or a newspaper grab a pencil and watch out for them. Good writers use them sparingly. Do the same.

The following are first lines – from some of my most loved novels:

Call me Ishmael.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

All day, the colours had been that of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.

“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.”

Can you recognize any of the above? (Don’t you go and Google them … I’ll put up the answers at the end of the post).

Are first lines that important? I usually read at least half a novel before developing an opinion about it (a possible exception is online fiction, or something that I know is from the slush pile) – and even then I don’t judge something by its first line alone. I read at least two pages of rubbish before I decide to call it rubbish.

But I’m not spokesperson for the world at large. Nor are novels what we usually read online.

So should you give thought to the first line in your writing?

The answer? It depends on the medium. Novels can get by with absolutely pathetic first lines, though writing overall still has to be good, vigorous and well structured. You wouldn’t have thought that To Kill A Mockingbird – one of the greatest novels ever written – started with an extremely unimpressive first line now, would you?

Once we take it online, however, the first lines of posts, episodes and chapters become absolutely vital. Which of the following would you rather continue reading?

I’m so tired to blog today because a lot of bad things happened to me while I was coming back from school and it was so horrible to be stuck between this woman that stunk like a fish market and a man who looked like he came straight out of The Departed – it nearly made me puke after the heavy meal Kristin made me eat during lunch break as well as the breakfast Mum forced down my throat.

Or:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Alright, so the second example was borrowed off Dickens. He wrote sharp and beautifully, and that first line from A Tale Of Two Cities still sticks with me today. Unfortunately for me, he peppered the rest of the first paragraph with variations of the first line, making me rush through to get to the meat of the story as soon as possible.

The first line in online writing should be concise, to the point, and attractive enough to draw the reader in. You’re not going to get anywhere with:

Hello, my name’s Kevin – but that’s not important.

So what should you aim for in your first line?

1. Sentence level elegance. Your first line doesn’t necessarily have to be short. Properly structured long sentences still work the same wonder if done correctly. For this I refer you to a very enlightening article over at Poynter Online. Read it here.

2. A hint of what lies beyond. Can this be accomplished in a sentence? Not impossible, but you’d need the skills of a good wordsmith to make every letter count. Rather, aim to set the tone for your introduction – and the chapter beyond it – with your first sentence. The second and third are equally important to draw the reader in, though it probably won’t end up in the sacred halls of first (one?) liners that sticks to the mind.

3. Relevancy. Since the first line sets the tone for the introduction as well as the chapter – make sure to revise, revise and revise again. Sometimes the first line is forgotten as the main meat of the article/post/chapter is rewritten – and thus the introduction feels off tangent with what you’re trying to say. The internet is the domain of unforgiving eyes – if your direction, tone or story is not apparent within the first few lines interest would be extremely hard to generate. And thus your reader goes off to check his email, his friend’s blog, or some distraction the internet is all too happy to provide.

4. The Set Up. I don’t like novels to throw me into the chaos of a world I haven’t even begun to understand. I didn’t particularly like the way To Kill A Mockingbird started, but Harper Lee cushioned the abruptness of the first line with a few pages of backstory. Here’s a good example of The Set Up in a first line:

The dark man fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

From Gunslinger, Stephen King.

Ample opportunity for the author to explain – who is the dark man? Who is the gunslinger? Why the desert? Why is one following the other?

5. The Hook. This one doesn’t set up the story, nor does it offer a glimpse of what lies beyond. It just hooks you, pulls you in. Makes you want to know more. One example:

Today my Grandmother exploded …

From Ian Bank’s Crow Road

Does it set up the story? Possibly. Is it elegant? Quite. Does it give a hint of what lies beyond? Absolutely not.

What it does remarkably well is to make you want to read more. I do, and am currently reading up on the book at Amazon. Powerful stuff, this first sentence.

*Note: As promised, here are the books from which the first lines at the introduction of this post were taken:

‘Call Me Ishmael’ – Moby-Dick, and is one of the most famous in American Literature.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ – Cheeky set up, this one: Pride and Prejudice.

‘When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.’ – An abrupt start to an amazing novel: To Kill A Mockingbird.

‘All day, the colours had been that of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.’ – Man Booker Prize Winner of 2006 – Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance Of Loss.

‘”Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.”‘ – The beginning of a masterpiece: Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

It must be noted that this post was inspired by a 9rules note. A big thanks to them for making me read up the first lines of my favourite novels.

An anticlimax is personally one of my most feared nightmares – it means you have to revise a major part of the novel, or at least put the climax on hold until you can figure out a way to make it bigger, better, more twisted and more shocking than anything you’ve thrown at the reader so far. Here’s my top 10 list of successfully writing an Anticlimax – found mostly through trial and error.

1. Never plan ahead. While writing your novel take care to never plan more than 2 chapters ahead – that way you get to make sure incongruous details pop up at the last minute, and ensure that your pacing is like that of jerky Chevy.

2. Introduce a new plotline at the last minute. There’s nothing more satisfying than knowing you’ve thrown your reader off the buildup to your climax. One of the best ways to do so is to have your protagonist killed, brought back to life, get a new love interest, before finishing off the antagonist/challenge poised. This works well especially if it’s way off course.

3. Have plenty of explosions. Place them strategically all over the novel, at various scenes in the build-up to the climax. Then have the smallest explosion ever at your climax, simply because you’ve run out of fuel. In other words: make sure your build-up is more exciting than your climax.

4. Make sure the final confrontation/culmination is very short. Half a chapter is good. No, wait – 50 words is better. In case of a mystery, use the following paragraph (exactly 50 words):

Detective walks up to killer. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Victim A, B and C. Put your hands in the air.”

Killer: “Gee. You’re one smart guy. Must’ve been all the forensic evidence I left lying around. When do I get out so you can catch me again?”

5. Drag your final confrontation to half the book. The idea here is to make bring the reader to the edge of his seat – and keep him there for as long as it takes to get him bored.

6. Kill off your antagonist before the climax. Alternatively, have the problem solve itself before your protagonist finds out (that there actually is a problem he’ll have to solve).

7. Kill off your protagonist before the climax. And then have a supporting character with no emotional connection with the reader solve the entire problem. What an amazing plot twist! you tell yourself.

8. Have everything miraculously fall into place during the climax. This works like a charm in romance novels – especially after you throw a thousand and one very interesting challenges in between the said couple. An anticlimatic scenario: Male Lead’s ex girlfriend (who is a wildly successful popstar) dies in carcrash at the same time Female Lead’s father falls down stairs while serving tea and has a new take on life (and no longer resents the relationship). They get together, Female Lead’s credit card debt suddenly disappears due to a glitch in the credit card company’s computer and Male Lead gets his job back because his boss suddenly realizes he can’t live without him, nevermind that Male Lead has punched aforementioned boss over Female Lead.

Cue for happy ending. (This is also a good place to announce a pregnancy – very exciting stuff, isn’t it?).

9. Change the tone of your novel during the climax. It works. Trust me. Note to Dan Brown: write like Jane Austen at the climax of your next book. Jane Austen: rewrite Pride and Prejudice to include an albino murderer who wants to kill Mr Darcy, just at the moment when Elizabeth and him finally get together. Ahh. What thrill!

10. Leave your novel/novella/post hanging …

One last note on writing an anticlimax: it has all got to do with pacing. But pacing your novel is something that has to be learnt, which brings me to Faulkner:

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

Write long, write badly, make mistakes. Then learn from them. The list above are some of mine. How about yours?