Conflicting Advice

It can be very confusing to be a student of writing. You are trying to learn how to create in a completely subjective field and you are going to get conflicting advice because of it. Conflicting advice is a pain in the butt because i goes against everything the beginner's mind can understand.

When we are young and learning from our parents or our elementary school teachers, we essentially know nothing about any given field and need to be told what is wrong and what is right. It's simple and easy, so we assume that all learning is like that when you are a complete beginner. But there is extremely little right and wrong in writing, so it is much harder to learn.

I know that I am guilty of giving a lot of conflicting advice, myself. I've said that you should start by creating your world and I've said you should create blank characters and fill in the blanks when you feel like it. I've said you should write the way you speak and I've said that writing and speech are different things and should be treated as such. I've said you should edit as you write and I've said you should get a first draft done and should edit afterward. How can they both be right?

The reason writing is subjective is people. Different people have different thoughts, tastes, and beliefs. People also have different preferences in how they create writing. Some people speak eloquently, so they only need to write down what they naturally say (like me). Other people sound like stuttering morons when they talk, so they need a fair amount of polishing their spoken words to make them good writing (like me). Also, people change. Sometimes a person needs to understand a character to know what he will do. Sometimes that same person needs to know what the character is doing to understand him.

Conflicting advice serves two purposes. For one thing, you will understand that writing is an art and not a science. There is not a right way and a wrong way to do it. Also, you will learn what the various approaches to a given subject are. And if one of those approaches just isn't working, you will still have a number of other methods to try. Pain in the butt though it may be, for the field of writing, conflicting advice may be the best advice out there.

Visualize the Final Product

In most cases, when we think of writing, the words we make are the final product. There is very little in the way of formatting that a novelist needs to worry about. But writing occurs in so many other forms, each with its own nuances.

When I write fiction for a novel, I see the characters in my head. I see them move and talk and act. What I write down is simply what I see happening. These characters can go anywhere and do anything. My writing will follow them around the earth.

When I write comics, it is a little different. It starts out the same way, with me seeing characters in a setting, saying and doing things. But a comic has panels. These show the world instead of my words. As such, it is crucial to be able to tell a story that fits into panels. Sometimes, the way I would normally write just won't fit. So instead, I think in terms of panels. How much can I say in one panel? What can be shown instead of told? How can camera angles express ideas? When I am doing comic scripts, I don't even write anything down until I can see all of the panels in my head.

This point has been hammered into me even more because I've been writing a play. In theory, a play is just a means of telling a story. But in reality, not every story can be told as a play. A play can't have a ton of scene changes. It has one camera angle. It can only have so many props and actors. In order to write a good play, or even a feasible play, I need to see the play.

When I was first thinking of writing a play, I could see an empty stage in my mind. I then thought, what story can I tell that fits on this stage? I didn't want to deal with scene changes, so I knew I needed a location that could fit a whole story. I came up with an apartment. A husband and wife live there. So what story could be told where a husband and wife are in the same area the whole time. One of the answers I came up with was that one of them could get sick and the other would have to be a caretaker.

Once I had the basic premise of the story, the stage did not go away. In my head, I designed the set. It is bare bones: a bed, a couch, a stove, a door, and a few props. They are laid out on the stage in a particular order. I can see the actors, too. Every line, every stage direction I wrote, they didn't exist in the aether. I saw them happening. If I had an idea, but the actors couldn't do it, I had to scrap the idea.

If I was writing a movie script, the whole story would have been completely different. I would have included scenes outside of the apartment. I would have had cameras making interesting shots and music adding to scenes and a bigger cast of characters. A good movie and a good play are very different things.

No matter what form of writing you do, visualize the final product. See your play being performed, your movie being seen, your comic being read. If you can do this, you will spot out potential problems before they become significant issues. You will also get a feel for how your medium functions and what it is and isn't capable of.

Professional Doodling

I have no artistic ability. I can draw a draw a decent-looking cube, but that's about it. If you saw me try to draw a person, or even a flower, you'd think a twelve-year-old made it (actually, that would be a compliment). When I draw, I call it doodling because I don't think it's good enough to call it a drawing. Professional artists also doodle, but when they do it, they are doing some professional doodling.

I've noticed the same thing in other fields. When a professional martial artist throws a simple kick, it is still a very good kick. There is solid form and technique, even though the person wasn't being serious. When a professional singer hums a few bars of a song, they still belt it out with great tone.

What really surprised me was a conversation I was having with friends once. Without realizing it, I ended up going on a rant so long that it can best be described as a speech. When I finally finished everything I had to say, one of my friends started clapping. I felt embarrassed because I never talk very much and I was just realizing how long I had been speaking. When he started saying how amazing that speech was, I thought he was making fun of me. But then everybody else started nodding their heads and agreeing with him.

I guess I'm no exception to the rule. Whatever you train yourself to do, it becomes a part of your body. It runs through your blood, attaches to your muscle, carves a space in your brain. You can't turn it off ever. When you reach a professional level of skill, even your doodles will be professional doodling.

Why Do They Do That?

The more you watch people, the more you recognize patterns. The women who dress so provocatively are the ones who are the least comfortable with themselves. The guys who try so hard to be tough and dominant end up being weak-willed phonies. Their actions are a manifestation of their characteristics.

Any person who is weak-willed will relent to a strong-willed leader. That is why children are told to stand up to bullies. Since bullies are act tough, it is because they are weak-willed, so if you have the stronger personality, they will follow you instead of attack you. However, anybody who has ever dealt with enough bullies has probably found that this doesn't always work. So, there is a problem somewhere.

As it turns out, any given character trait can exist for any number of reasons. Some bullies just love the feeling of power that comes from tormenting others. Some of them like the added source of income that stealing lunch money begets. Similarly, some women who show a lot of skin simply are comfortable with themselves and don't care about the reaction. Some of them just think it's fun to play dress-up and do something they wouldn't normally do.

You may have a character that acts in a particular way, but you aren't sure why yet. If there comes a point where you want to figure it out, remember that there may be one very common answer for it, but there may also be an uncommon one that is just as valid (and potentially more interesting).

Start Vague

I have always recommended to writers that they start out by creating and thoroughly understanding a world. I still think this is a good idea, but there is also a merit in doing the exact opposite.

Start by creating two generic characters. These are blank slates that you fill in as you feel like it. Have them start talking back and forth. It can be about anything. These characters are not fully-developed people yet, so nothing they say can be wrong or disagree with their characteristics.

As the conversation goes on, you glean information on who they are, or at least who they might be. If one person keeps having snappy comments and telling jokes all the time, you may decide that the person is a professional comedian. If you want it to be permanent, then you have it come up at some point, which canonizes it.

This method of starting vague has a lot of positive aspects to it. For one thing, you can start writing right away. And since most people get most of their ideas in the midst of writing, this allows the most freedom and creativity without needing revision. There are also some things that we just can't imagine will be important. A favorite color will rarely be of any significance, so it isn't useful to put in a character bio. But that doesn't mean it will never come up. If you start vague, then you can decide what your character's favorite color is if there ever comes a time.

Now, as your character amasses traits, there become fewer possibilities for them. For example, if a character is an adventurer, or some kind of wandering warrior, they are not likely to have any family ties and probably don't care very much about families. Since it is not a part of their world, it is something they will have no feelings about (unless their family was slaughtered or something, in which case they would have extremely powerful feelings). As such, once you have a decent idea of who your character is, you have to figure out which of the possibilities make sense to fill in the remaining gaps. It's like creating your universe in reverse.

Like I said earlier, both methods are credible and effective. The only factor is you. Some people write as actors. They become their characters and say what their characters would say. In that case, it is very important to have a firm grasp on who your characters are. Other people simply want to write a situation or a story. In that case, most aspects of a character are completely unnecessary, so the best thing to do is paint in broad strokes and fill in the blanks as need be.

Redundancies

There are a lot of redundancies in writing. It exists on several levels and occurs for a number of reasons, but few, if any, of them are worth keeping.

On the smallest level, redundancies start occurring in phrases. Some of our common phrases, like 'null and void', 'cease and desist', and 'unexpected surprise' are all guilty of redundancy. Sentences are also very common. There are not common sentences the way we have common phrases, but whenever you see sentences that keep repeating the information with different words, that's redundancy to the letter. Redundancies may also exist in paragraphs, but one would hope that those would be caught easily. If they existed in any level larger than that, the writer either needs to be smacked very hard or taken out behind the shed and put out of his or her misery.

Regardless of the level, I've found redundancies exist for one of three reasons. The first is for emphasis. When you focus on a single point by using several words that all have the same meaning (like saying 'single point'), it shows that you really care about that point, that the point itself is important (as opposed to things that are affecting that point). The next reason is that the author just doesn't know what to say next. A paragraph with only two sentences is too short, but if thre is nothing else to say, the easiest thing to do is just repeat yourself until it is big enough. The third reason is that the author has multiple ideas of how to say something and can't decide which one they like more. If you have non space limits and you can't pick an option, then they just pick both.

Redundancy is one of the problems I still have. I think it comes from my oral writing style. Certain redundancies are very effective, if not downright crucial, to giving a speech. But when a person has those words in front of them and has the luxury of taking their time and rereading whenever they want, it is more effective to be concise than it is to be redundant. Whatever the reason, you are usually better off using fewer words than more. When writers give the advice to cut out unnecessary words, redundancies are the best place to start chopping.

Write to Fit the Form

There are so many different forms of writing, each one with its own set of nuances. I think there is a beauty there, that however you want your writing to be experienced, there is a form of writing just for it (and if there isn't, you can make it up). With all of these possibilities out there, it boggles my mind that writers would write in a form other than the one they intended.

My favorite example is with poetry. There are two kinds of poetry: poetry meant to be seen and poetry meant to be heard. Some poets spend more time arranging the words in their poetry than they did coming up with those words. Sometimes they create a poem whose arrangement is such that it can be read in a number of ways. And yet, with all of that painstaking effort put in, they then go on stage and read their poem aloud, making all of that arrangement worthless.

If you want your work to be heard, then make sure it is the best-sounding writing you can make. If you want it to be read, then make sure it is the best-looking writing you can make. The same principal applies for all the other nunances that go with a form of writing.

In a novel, you need to be able to characterize, convey time, create places, animate scenes, and move things along at a steady pace. In a short story, you do need these things, but on a smaller scale. In a novel, you get to know characters inside and out, but a short story's characters, we only go a little deeper than skin. The pacing between the two is also going o be different. The sheer length of the novel means that wew have to take it all in piece by piece, like taking sips from a cup. A short story, though, is like one good gulp. And by the same analogy, flash fiction is like pounding a shot.

Short stories have to glaze over finer details like every furnishing in a room. They don't have the time or space for frivolous information. As such, when you see a short story that rambles on, it becomes very painful to read because it doesn't fit the format.

Another example is with webcomics (i.e. comics who are primarily published online in regular installments). Webcomics update one strip or one page at a time. But since every update needs to be a complete work that satisfies the reader, every update needs to have a joke or a twist or something that makes the reader glad they saw the update and excited to see what happens next.

Whatever you want to write, there is a form for that. There are a great number of writing forms out there. And within each of those are a great number of writing forms. If there is something you want to write, pick the form that fits it. If there is a form that you want to write, then write something that fits the form.