My Entirely Questionable Advice for Younger Writers (Which Would be All of You)
If you want me to read more than the first 100 words of your burst, you’re going to have to roll up a newspaper and thwack it down, the way you teach a puppy not to poop in the house.
Maybe something like:
Jessica shucked off every stitch of clothing and stood straight up, bare-naked, on the back seat of the convertible, Neal and Jerry crouching on either side, holding her legs.
“I love this!” she screamed into the night, arms outspread, hair streaming as the Chrysler Sebring sped down the boulevard.
A half-block ahead, a traffic signal flicked from green to amber, then red.
All of them saw it. Jessica was the first to decide.
“Run it!” she screamed, her body quivering with excitement, “Runit runit runit!”
The first 85 words. Easy to write, took ten minutes or so (not counting the idea, I had that when I sat down).
But now the fun part’s over and the work begins. Who are these people, what’s going on, what happens in the middle and how does it end? Who is the driver, is he hunched over the wheel, cackling like a mad man as his horn rim glasses keep sliding down his nose (this would be me)? Are Jerry and Neal naked too? Are they all drunk? Are they stoned?
I have no idea. But I know I could write it if I wanted to, and do it at least so-so because I’ve done it before. I’ve got some confidence going for me because I started thinking of myself as a writer when I was 20, and now I’m 76. Holy Jesus, Mother of God!
Yup. Seventy-six “years young” as we old codgers like to say, just because we know how stupid and annoying that comes across.
But wait: That’s what I would do, write the hell out of it, as in stick-butt-in-chair and sweat 1,200 words into the best 1,200 words I could make, revising it again and again and again and again. That’s what I do and it’s exactly the opposite of the vision Anthony Blackshaw and the gang at Getme had when they started Burrst. Their notion is a burrst gets spewed out in 15 or 30 minutes, stick it up on the website, and there it is.
The problem for someone with my take on things is that’s a formula for writing of uncertain appeal (I’m being exquisitely polite here). Because of my background, I’m a cast-in-basic-rock believer in the old adage that the easier the writing, the harder the reading, and vice versa. (I’m sorry, Anthony. See what a mistake you made letting me write this for you?)
I think this way because I wrote for a living most of my working life. It was all non-fiction—systems and procedures, magazine copy, marketing stuff of all descriptions, advertising, promotional campaigns for television stations (that was educational), press releases, corporate videos, newspaper columns and stories. I’ve probably written four or five million words; I touch-type 90 words a minute. The mechanical skills, the range of experience and the stomach-churning compression of deadlines taught me to be fast, facile and versatile.
Now, in retirement, It’s a lot easier than it was (and of course now there’s no pressure). But I remember exactly how hard it was all those years. It was just damn hard. Sometimes it made my eyeballs sweat.
About twenty years ago I wrote a non-fiction freelance feature story about a small-time swindler and sent it to the daily newspaper. It was colorful, peopled with locals and the places they worked and it had plenty of narrative impulse—it moved. One of the editors called me up the next day and offered to run it in the Sunday paper, but without pay. I declined his offer (sold it to a weekly instead for $75), and then he asked me, “How did you learn to write like that?”
I was stopped. This was the editor of a major market daily newspaper asking me what I thought was one of the most idiotic questions of all time. What I felt like saying was “How does anybody learn to write like that, you dumb s.o.b.? You spend about twenty years reading and writing and doing it over and over, feeling like you’re in purgatory.” But even as my anger flashed, I knew it was pointless. Why bother talking to someone who carried a business card with “editor” printed on it capable of asking a question like that? I mumbled something and hung up.
I’m still learning to write. For the past ten years I’ve been fooling around with fiction, trying to figure out how and why it works. Like so many others, I looked for guidance from books. I read a bunch of them and eventually I found two that spoke to me in a way that made sense. They might not be your cup of tea, but they suited some of the things I realized I needed to learn and they talked in a way that that seemed helpful. One is “Techniques of the Selling Writer” by Dwight V. Swain and the other is “On Film-Making” by Alexander Mackendrick.
Here’s one of the things Dwight Swain says about “the people in your story:”
“The impossible, the unattainable, the forbidden, the disastrous: These constitute the raw materials with which you combine courage, in order to create story people who excite and fascinate.
“Conversely, you cut deep into your chances for any broad success if you choose your major characters from the ranks of the weak and passive. Nothing is drearier than the story that centers on dull, apathetic people borne down by trivial problems…”
That’s what I went for in the opening of the burrst back there, the forbidden and about to be disastrous, characters who excite and fascinate (I hope). And the reader sees them that way not because of who they are, but for what they’re doing (key point). These are the people most fun for me to write about because—I guess I can’t help it—I’m writing for the reader who likes that kind of stuff.
There is, of course, another side to all this. If you’re a sensible person, head screwed on right, not interested in working at writing, if you’re hanging out at Burrst to rattle off something when you feel like it and stick it up there for your friends and the heck of it, that’s entirely fine with me. By all means go for it, have fun. As Dwight Swain says, “…everyone has a God-given right to go to hell in his own way—and don’t let anyone kid you out of yours.”
by Bill Spencer
Bill Spencer has been a clerk-typist, a radio dj, a writer, a creative director, an editor and a publisher but now he’s retired and trying to figure this fiction thing out. He sometimes hangs out at Litopia. He blogs at A Writer’s Notes.