Amph How NOT to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes: The Cheerleader

I felt like I was reading a novel written by a ninth grader. He had talent, sure, but it was embyonic and needed time to develop. Unlike Meyer who is just plain bad.

 

My key standpoint for good writing has always been Harlan Ellison. He does have flaws: his stories are often very low on world-building, and he does tend to have this attitude towards women in his stories that is a bit... condescending. He also has a tendency to use words or phrases which I find would be unlikely to actually come up in conversation.

But the emotional aspects of his writing, his POV narratives, his descriptions -- all very, very good. Top notch stuff.

For POV issues, I often use the example of Frank Herbert. Now here was a man who embodied everything you could POSSIBLY want in world-building such as Dune. And he was able to use the "preach" factor to really good effect by relying on future quotes for his stories that were very, very, memorable ("I am the Quasitz Haderach. That is reason enough." -- very chilling).

But at the same time, I would use him as an example of a TERRIBLE POV writer. Herbert was excellent at writing characters that were smart, cunning and expert at mind games. Problem was, ALL his characters were like that! Almost no character was really dumb and if they were, you never really got a sense of it. All the characters in Dune tended to sound the same.

Other things to be aware of: if you're starting out, feel free to try first-person narrative. First person is in a way easier to write because you're more ingrained to the narrator's thoughts. You wouldn't thing "I did this" would be so much different from "Hank did this", but it is.

A great way to get around this in a third-person narrative, is to include character's thoughts. Many stories I would write determined to get a 3rd person narrative working, without any internal dialogue. It was only later I realized how well internal thought could be used, since they were essentially dialogue that only your given character can hear.

Also: BEWARE changing POV's in mid-scene. Almost never do this. In fact, just plain never do it. Stick with your POV character until the end of the scene. If you want another POV, wait until the next scene and begin there.

Be brutal with editing your writing. Read. Re-read. Put it away and read it again a month later when you've put some distance between you and it. Is it still drawing your interest? No? Then maybe it's time for a general re-write or to re-think the story.

Remember that there are sometimes style problems with a story, but other times there are pure structural problems. Some things as you write them might just not fly emotionally, but you can't see it as the writer. Sometimes what's clear to you is not going to be clear to the reader. That can be tricky.

Keep in mind any rules above can pretty much be broken, but you should have a very good reason for doing so. Experimenting with writing is one of the most awesome things you can do, but do a proper experiment: have a logic to it, write it, then look at what you've written and be honest if it's actually worked.

 

Just want to quickly add praise to On Writing - I've never read a King novel, but I found this book fantastic.

I still love King's quote regarding adverbs ("The road to hell is paved with adverbs").

 

Gonk, this brings to mind another example further along: The Tennis Match. The current vogue seems to be third-person restricted, where the focus is on one character but there is not the extreme limits of first person. JK Rowling is particularly good at this, breaking it only a handful of times in only her novels and all for very good reasons.

 

I still have my copy! I'm going to start re-reading it.

 

I myself have never read JK Rowling, I'm afraid. I HAVE read Stephen King, mostly when I was young to pre-teen. Lets see, I read, besides 'On Writing'... 'The Dead Zone', 'The Shining', 'Needful Things', 'The Eyes of the Dragon'... and I tried reading 'IT', but gave up.

The funny thing was, my favorite? Needful Things. And it's supposedly among his worst. But I dunno as a kid I found it sort of funny and hilarious. As a kid I found "The Dead Zone" sort of boring but also oddly compelling. Contrast that with IT, which probably had more action in it, and yet I just couldn't get through it.

So, King has been a hit and miss with me, and mostly miss, really. I didn't keep seeking out his books to go read them.

One thing King says in 'On Writing' is to always write 'the truth'... since a book of fiction is by definition a book of lies, what this really means is to not BS your readers. Now, there are some writers that DO BS their readers -- I haven't read her, but Stephanie Myers comes to mind -- but it's a bad move to make. You get the readership to match your own maturity level.

But, you might say, "well doesn't that mean I can just BS my readers anyway and it doesn't matter my maturity level"? Eeh, sort of. You don't want to fall into the trap of, another point "Behold my miraculous research!". I've found Niel Gaiman sort of fell into this trap in "American Gods", for instance. So you don't want to condescend to your readers, certainly. But you can't go wrong in presuming they have a certain level of intelligence and encouraging them to think a bit.

The reason for this is that very few people are going to walk away from something that doesn't pretend to be any smarter than they are. And if it hints something to them that makes them think that they are smart to figure it out, they're going to love it. They're going to think that they are smart and that your work is connecting with them. Which is sort of true, anyway. They're going to think that it's sort of true to life. Just because someone likes "Twilight" doesn't mean they won't cry if they read "Flowers for Algernon". And after reading such a story, maybe they wouldn't be so entertained by "Twilight" any longer. If you BS your readers with fake sentiment, you imprison yourself to a certain audience that is forever at a given maturity level. And you are doomed, in a sense, to watch your readers outgrow you and your work.

But if you write great, emotional stuff that is still accessible, everyone will seek out your work eventually. Even young readers, because all young people want to be treated like adults.

This is probably how GRR Martin gets by. His style, I admit, is fairly wanting. It's overdone a bit. But I do get the sense he is not BSing his readers. He creates a harsh world that isn't very pretty, a world where main characters die before anyone would expect. I can fault his style, certainly, but his structure is fairly ok -- at least by the skeleton of the work. Still I notice small points of difference where the show was superior: maybe that's just because I encountered the show first but still, that's my impression.

 

"Carrie" was quite ambitious, as I recall, and so was "The Shining". But my fave was "Salem's Lot" for some reason, though it's been years. "The Stand" suffered from GRRMitis, and that's the book in which King doesn't take his own advice.

GRRM's fans keep saying he's 'gritty' and 'realistic' but what they mean re realism is that he ramps up the sex and violence and kills off people fairly randomly. The laws of both physics and science are violated pretty freely, though. Jacques Barzun used to say that realism in genre fiction was a mistake (detective fiction is what he was talking about), which I used to think was a perverse view, but perhaps not as much as I thought.

 

Curious that nobody's brought up Tom Clancy yet.

I loved his concepts. I really wanted to be a huge fan of his books (I studied history & political science in college, right when his popularity was peaking in the early '90s). But when I sat down and actually read his stuff, I was astonished at how boring I found his style to be. His excruciating detail was incredibly numbing. I remember trying Debt of Honor, and Clancy took about three pages to describe something that was to have taken place in only 20 seconds of real time. Clancy's wife obviously was no Tabitha King.

His publishers always seemed to enjoy promoting the fact that his only published material prior to Hunt for Red October were an op-ed letter to a newspaper and a magazine article. He apparently had no experience with editors, because each successive book of his just seemed to get longer and longer and longer... and yet the audio books (author-approved, of course) of his stuff were often the 6-hour variety and much more tolerable.

I mean, seriously, are authors still paid by the word??? Clancy seemed to think so.

 

If it hasn't already been mentioned, The Art of Fiction by Ayn Rand is also a good one to have in your writing book collection. My Fiction Writing teacher during my undergrad years swore by it and Elements of Style, so even though I was broke, as soon as I got the chance, I ran out and got both. Best 'textbook' buys I ever made.

 

GRRM's fans keep saying he's 'gritty' and 'realistic' but what they mean re realism is that he ramps up the sex and violence and kills off people fairly randomly. The laws of both physics and science are violated pretty freely, though. Jacques Barzun used to say that realism in genre fiction was a mistake (detective fiction is what he was talking about), which I used to think was a perverse view, but perhaps not as much as I thought.

I disagree with this, personally. Yes, GRRM does "ramp-up" the sex and violence, so to a certain degree I do not protest. However is it that each occurs more often, or that when it does occur, that it is graphic? The former would be getting away from reality a bit. The latter, no so much.

That the laws of physics may be violated however, is not something I think is quite fair. When fans site the "realism" I doubt they intend to mean that the work is 100% like reality. No work is: if any work of fiction was like reality, the first thing the reader or viewer would think would be: BORING!

All works of fiction play with realism merely by the fact that reality does not jump from one scene to the next. Time passes in between for which to describe would make any story several hundred times larger than it would otherwise be. But because it is not important, it is left out. Furthermore, all fiction dialogue is generally unrealistic for the mere fact that in real life, it is rare for people to talk concisely and clearly at all times: we stutter, we mishear, we ask for people to repeat themselves... all tedious stuff. The closest someone has come to capturing this might have been James Joyce; and that is the example of a type of book that goes over so many people's heads you wonder if it was really worth writing. I mean, great as a thought exercise, but otherwise...

GRRM killing off people seeming "at random" though, I think adds to the work and makes it more realistic: isn't that how people die in real life? From our own point of view, it's essentially random when people die versus when they don't. The only time it DOESN'T seem random is if someone is facing execution or is on their deathbed. And even then, those are only telegraphed moments from a point in time where the now-imminent death DID seem random (i.e: "Caroline is sick? I didn't expect that today!").

This is not a condition I applaud (I leave that to the contemptible attitudes of Woody Allen), but it is something I acknowledge to be true. If GRRM captures this in his work, I say so much the better: there are other aspects of his writing that I understand require greater attention.

After all, for it to be claimed that someone is the American J.R.R Tolkien is not necessarily a good thing: Frank Herbert was one of the great world-builders: Tolkien was an even BETTER world-builder, starting from exactly the point that everything truly flows from -- language. Want to develop your own world? Create a language and watch everything flow. J.R.R Tolkien is still the greatest world-builder the fiction world has seen.

But does that mean you want to write in a style like J.R.R Tolkien? That I would NOT advise in the least. What Tolkien had in world building he lost in style, characterization and plot mechanics. The idea of the One Ring was fantastic, but so much else was lacking. GRRM, as well, could do with improvement.

EDIT: Take advice from Ayn Rand? Like, for fiction writing? Forget the above -- for the love of all that is holy, go ahead and emulate Tolkien. If you thought Tolkien's themes were as subtle as a sledgehammer, Ayn Rand's are about as subtle as a supernova.

 

Oh, a champion example of the After-Dinner Speech. However, as we have seen with King, he gives great advice that he doesn't always follow. So it is entirely possible it's a good book. I'll try to get a copy of it.

I'm afraid I agree on Tom Clancy. I could not get through the only example I tried.

Another one: Michael Crichton. Terrific ideas, terrible execution.

I think TV Tropes description of Tolkein is "Trope Codifier", which is pretty funny. Martin is nothing like Tolkein, but I notice one disquieting similarity (Lost in Your Own Fantasy). Tolkein never did finish "The Sillmarillion"

 

I'm looking over this thread and I'm seeing more examples of bad writers than examples of good ones. For the record, here are some that I would choose to try and emulate. Or at least, emulate some of their seminal works:

-Harlan Ellison ("I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream")
-William Gibson ("Neuromancer")
-Neal Stephenson ("Snow Crash")
-JD Salinger ("Catcher in the Rye")
-Anthony Burgess ("A Clockwork Orange")
-JG Ballard ("The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race")
-F Scott FitzGerald ("The Great Gatsby")
-George Orwell ("1984")
-Kurt Vonnegut ("Harrison Bergeron")
-Hilary Mantel ("A Place of Greater Safety")

I'd list Shakespeare, but he wrote plays, so I'm not going there. But I think he was a better playwright than, say, Dickens was a novelist (and it's not like I think Dickens was atrocious). So that's something.

Although you can't judge a book by it's cover, I do often find that the more unusual the title, the better the story is. Because it tells you that the author is at least thinking about catching the reader's attention, which is another rule: go for broke right out of the gate. The most important parts of the story you write are the beginning and the ending. And in the beginning you have to grab your reader's attention by at least the first paragraph. Don't wait for the second. If the second paragraph is more interesting, find a way to make it the first.

I'm looking over this list and notice I'm lacking for female writers, since Hilary's the only one up there. Keep in mind I cannot STAND Jane Austen. The BBC productions are nice, but I can't stand reading the stuff: so draining.

 

Gonk: try having to take a whole class of nothing but Jane Austen. Your patience will be sorely tested. People say her work is hilariously funny, but save for a moment or two here and there, I don't see where they're coming from.

One piece of advice I was given was if you've already got an idea of what the ending for your story will be, make it the beginning. Completely turn things on its head.

As for the beginning and the ending, I always love thinking up ways to get the reader's attention. The better the first sentence, the more fun I have writing said story and the more fun the audience has in trying to figure out what's up.

Gotta agree with the opinion of Michael Crichton. I gave Sphere a try and while the idea was certainly intriguing, it took forever for anything to really happen. I know that's how thrillers work, a drawn-out pace to build suspense, but with Sphere it was more tedious than curiosity drawing.

 

Jane Austen's humour is in her satire and her subtlety, but the only novel of hers that I really like is Pride & Prejudice. This looks to be an interesting thread, less commentary and more writing club.

 

Next is: The Gum on the Mantelpiece. "Wherein the reader is unintentionally misled."

The authors say: because you create the world, the reader assumes everything has its purpose, including that big glob of gum you had a character plant on the mantelpiece. If it's not dealt with by the end of the book, the audience feels 'unfairly dealt with'

Also known as: Chekhov's Gun

Then they go on to give two common versions of it.

The first is called "Oh, Don't Mind Him." If you mention that your brother is just back from the War and has an alcohol problem and is depressed, you don't say: "I wanted to quiz him about this black hound [the depression], but forgot to ask and never had reason to think of it again, for the next day, uncomfortably dressed in my grandfather's suit, I was seated in a Pullman car of the Union Pacific, off to begin my great adventure at Yale."

The other is "The Deafening Hug" and has a paragraph which describes the hero hugging his sister in an unmistakably sexual way. The authors comment: "Sometimes the author is the last to know."

This is given in some common variations, too:

"The Mayfly Fatale" If someone is introduced, and they are very good-looking, the audience thinks they are love interest, whether they are or not.

"Alice in Lapland" Any undue interest in or physical contact with children will set off alarms. They warn against dandling of children by fathers and uncles, and state that if a character is a member of an organized religion, 'he should not even pull a child from a burning building.'

"We're Going to Need a Larger Closet" "Male friends hug, toast their friendship, and later stumble drunkenly to sleep in the cabin's one bed. The reader is way ahead of you--they are secretly gay, and nothing you say later is going to change his mind. If you do not intend they to be secretly gay, let Alan sleep on the couch."

 

Actually, isn't this the OPPOSITE of a Checkov's gun?

By my understanding, a Checkov's gun is something that is placed out in the open that the audience is not really intended to notice, or perhaps notices for reasons they had thought at the time to be the sole one.

Here is, in my understanding, a Checkov's gun at work. This is from "Order of the Stick" with two strips, 224 places apart --

Strip 9: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0009.html

Strip 233: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0233.html

The belt in question had not really even been mentioned in all that time. The reader thinks the purpose was for a brief laugh way back in strip 9, but it's used to great effect in strip 233. Audience interest is engaged.

Mind you, it is almost guaranteed that the author did not foresee ever using that belt again. Often that's how Checkov's guns work, and what can make them so great. Even the AUTHOR didn't know he was going to pull that on on us until one day he was looking at what he'd already written and thought "hey, wait a second..."

But "Gum on the Mantlepiece", to me, suggests the opposite. It's when an author draws attention to something they either don't plan to use or, more likely, don't end up using the way they intended. Like an abandoned plot thread, which can be frustrating. This is more of just a general storytelling problem then a writing problem, although you definitely do see it in writing. The most notorious examples of this, although I loved the show at the time, were in LOST. Although LOST got many things right, by season 5 you could start to see that they weren't planning quite so far ahead as they let on. The entire Walt storyline, for instance, was largely dropped and had to be resolved all with bonus material. There were many times characters would offer vague hints and suggestions which either didn't go anywhere, or didn't really make sense when you went back and looked at everything. There were even instances of characters saying they didn't recognize someone when they were clearly shown video footage of said character just the year before, and the person in question explicitly pointed out (John Locke: "Sorry, I've never seen you before... oh, Charles Widmore? Huh, you look nothing like that video footage Ben Linus played for me in Season 4, then paused on an image of your face. Nothing at all.").

It's a general problem of either miscommunication or making it up as you go along. The former can be really hard to overcome, in my experience. The latter just takes planning, though.

 

I think what they are talking about here is something the author puts in the story either intending to use (but doesn't, and doesn't later remove for some reason), uses only slightly or in a way to illuminate character, or completely ignores ever after, leaving the audience saying huh?.

In Rowling, I rather expected S.P.E.W. and the giants to have more of a pay-off in the story. SPEW was probably to illustrate character more than anything (Hermoine's, in this case). I suppose Hagrid's giant half-brother did play a role, but with that build-up, I expected more.

Re: "Alice in Lapland" Certain minor works of J. M. Barrie have to be read to be believed. cf. "The Little White Bird", though "Peter Pan" is bad enough.

 

A variation of this is "The Red Herring on the Mantelpiece"

Which is also known as misdirection. It is "a well-planted false clue, sleight of hand that makes the reader watch one thing while you are busy doing another thing, a thing that will surprise and delight the reader when it is revealed at a time of your choosing."

Usually used in detective novels (Christie was a past master at it), and a classic example is "A Fatal Inversion", yes I was fooled, and I was delighted that the author fooled me so completely. Austen practiced it in "Emma" and according to Rowling, that where she learned it. She does it in nearly every book--Harry Potter is certain someone is a villain, and it's usually someone else. I say 'usually' because in Book Six, Harry Potter's suspicions are borne out, and the audience tends to ignore him because they know he's never right. That's downright sneaky.

The book warns that the placement of the red herring must be very carefully done, and not to call too much attention to it.

 

I think a great example of this one is O. Henry's The Last Leaf in which the two main characters are female best friends, one of whom is an aspiring artist, living together in an apartment. When I read this story with my high school freshmen students, one of them remarked, "Are they gay?" Another student wrinkled her nose and said, "No! It says they're best friends!" I thought about it and decided to take a diplomatic approach, saying that there really was no evidence one way or the other, so it's up to the reader to decide.

What I do find interesting, though, is that in the 1952 version of the story in O. Henry's Full House, they change the story to make the girls sisters and add a scene where the sick sister breaks up with her boyfriend. Methinks they doth protest too much...

Even if "The Red Herring on the Mantelpiece" is considered a flaw in writing, I think that in some cases it can make reading more fun for an astute audience. In The Jane Austen Book Club, one of the characters decides that Charlotte Lucas is gay because she says that she is just not romantic like Elizabeth. I don't know how Austen would have felt about this (ironic denials, perhaps?), but I do think that the infinite number of interpretations keep her writing and others' writing fresh and interesting. I'm not saying writers should be intentionally ambiguous about characters or plot points, but sometimes leaving the window open a crack to allow things to be seen in a different light can be a good thing.

 

Actually the book does not consider it a flaw; just the opposite. Their point is that it must be done carefully and well, and when it isn't, it *is* a flaw. (See: "The Gum on the Mantelpiece" in which a loose end is left unexplained, thereby irritating the audience. )

 

It's not really an example, more in a box that explains things a bit better, like Alice in Lapland.

 

A great example is Christie's "The ABC Murders" in which red herrings abound. She's a very skilled at cluing, too.

 

Other point of interest:

- Always favor active voice over passive voice. That is, verbs up front.

To show the difference,

ACTIVE: "Jerimiah leapt across the chasm".

PASSIVE: "The chasm was leapt by Jerimiah"

The first is by far preferable -- and note that this is despite using the word 'across' which would make the lower text seem clunky. In the former, someone is DOING something, and that is the focus. In the latter, the subject is being acted upon.

It seems a slight distinction, but it will surprise you how such a small change in language propels your narrative and can keep a reader's interest where you want it. Sure, you may have an interesting character doing interesting things, but with enough "passive" sentence uses, the reader will be apt to forget that the scenario was so interesting.


- Don't play with tenses/persons until you have reason

It's not like present, future tense and 2nd person don't have their place. In fact, present tense can be used to incredible effect in particular, often when depicting brief scenes of memory or distorted view, like vignettes. But generally, my advice would be to stay away from the core usages of 1st person and 3rd person narrative.

Even omniscient narration is something you should stay away from until you can find a 'voice' for said narration. There was one female writer in my online workshop who was able to pull it off in spades by adopting a very sublime 'fairy-tale' like tone to some of the stories she wrote, but my own attempts at emulation could be wanting when I strived in that direction. Perhaps I could pull it off now, but it was one of the ones I struggled with. You may do much better. But the point is, don't veer off the beaten path until the moment calls for it.

For instance, as a reader 2nd person stories annoy me to no end. When a story writes something like "You saw the rider from a distance", in my head I immediately think, "er, no I didn't, I'm sitting right here". Some people can pull those off. I've never been big on them. Remember that all the tenses and person variations have been tried before. It's a well-worn fact workshops point out, but it bears repeating that present-tense usage, thought by some writers as a way to feel 'avant-garde', was used for the same reason by Dickens in "Bleak House" back in the 19th century. So really, not so cutting edge. Doesn't seem to both Michael Ondaatje, but what can you do?

 

I always use past perfect and third person. And aside from post modernism, second person works only in one other form: the gamebook where the reader is the hero. I'm a Dungeon Master and I always narrate in second person, as I am talking directly to the players and telling them what they see.

 

I have seen paragraphs in which both the POV and the tense change more than once. It's depressing.

One thing about Latin, it does help you with the notion of declensions. English declensions are a bit decayed, but still there.