The Writing Life Too

Clouds everywhere and more rain in the forecast. Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all. And did you know that blue, not green is the official color of St. Patrick?
On Sunday night my book club was here and we were talking about some of the good dramatic series on television. I started the conversation because I’m crazy about Breaking Bad on AMC. Its amazing writing and acting. Now, I don’t watch a lot of series now that I don’t have HBO any more, but compared BB to Deadwood—also an amazing drama. And one of the club members said she’s never wasted time watching television, implying that it was beneath her. I have missed entire decades of television, and don’t watch sit coms or anything with a laugh track. I’ve never seen Will and Grace, or Desperate Housewives, or St. Elsewhere, or for that matter Seinfeld or Friends. But good storytelling can come in many forms, including television, and Breaking Bad is fabulous storytelling.

A confession: I don’t text, I don’t tweet or twitter, or have a profile on Facebook. Don’t have the time or interest. And although I’m not a Facebook gal, here are 25 short things I know about writing.
1. Writing while artful, it is a craft and can be learned.
2. Keep a writer’s notebook where you capture the world around you.
3. Gather metaphors from great writers to inspire your own.
4. When you’re writing your final draft and the writing seems flat keep asking yourself, what does that remind me of.
5. As Strunk & White proclaimed “Omit needless words.”
6. Make sure your beginnings grab a reader. Use an anecdote, dialogue, action, raise a question, slip in a potent description.
7. Use a variety of sentence lengths and structures.
8. Verbs are the most important parts of the sentence—collect vivid verbs.
9. Use onomatopoeia—it brings language to life.
10. Prepositions are the carbohydrates of language—comb your writing and trim prepositional phrases that clutter your sentences, burying nouns and verbs.
11. Justify every modifier—they should only modify what the noun cannot and should always surprise or jolt the reader. Arthur Plotnik’s example is don’t use yellow daffodils because daffodils are yellow, instead describe them as gaudy. As Mark Twain said about adjectives, when it doubt, strike it out.
12. Adverbs are usually clutter, especially those with an -ly ending as when you write walk slowly instead of plod.
13. Write in the active voice.
14. Use short sentences for emphasis but don’t overdo because a series of short sentences actually slow the pacing—sort of like driving over speed bumps.
15. Use words of mostly Anglo Saxon origin.
16. Learn all you can about narrative structure, including the structure of individual scenes.
17. Read critically analyzing authors’ techniques.
18. Avoid using qualifiers (sort of, kind of, pretty much, a bit, etc.) and intensifiers (very, quite, really, awfully, deeply, truly, etc.)
19. Write your first draft as fast you can while the idea burns bright within you.
20. Learn the rules of punctuation as a courtesy to readers and avoid using exclamation marks because they make you look like you’re 8 years old!!
21. Don’t wait for the muse or mood to arrive—you’ll be waiting most of your life. Write despite your tiredness, bad back, low self esteem, worry about your mother’s health, or despair over your kid’s addiction. Just write. Every day.
22. Editing can feel like you’re wandering through the seven circles of hell. Do it anyway.
23. Don’t talk too much about your writing—it dissipates its power. Spend your energy on the actual writing.
24. In the beginning, before you have developed the discernment to understand if your writing has power, find readers to give you honest feedback. This is likely not your spouse, best friend, or mother.
25. Accept that rejection is part of your job description.

And if you’re having a bad writing day: Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. (George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947.)