writing advice from francine prose's "reading like a writer"
The warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out—don’t tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams “yay” and jumps up and down for joy—when in fact the responsibility for showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.
It’s necessary to hold the concept of clarity as an even higher ideal than grammatical correctness.
It’s a good idea to have a designated section of your bookshelf (perhaps the one nearest your desk) for books by writers who have obviously worked on their sentences, revising and polishing them into gems that continue to dazzle us. […] You can open such books anywhere and read a sentence that will move you to labor longer, try harder, to return to that trouble spot and rework that imprecise or awkward sentence until it is something to be proud of instead of something you hope that the reader won’t notice.
In general, I would suggest, the paragraph could be understood as a sort of literary respiration, with each paragraph as an extended—in some cases, very extended—breath. […] Frequently, each paragraph shift represents a slight change in point of view—[Isaac] Babel’s flash of lightning—or a shift in perspective that we can conceptualize, cinematically, as a change in camera angles.
The advantage of reading widely, as opposed to trying to formulate a series of general rules [about writing], is that we learn there are no general rules, only individual examples to help point you in a direction in which you might want to go.
A one-sentence paragraph feels like a punch, and no one wants to get punched. Overused, it can be an annoying tic, a lazy writer’s attempt to compel us to pay attention or to inject energy and life into a narrative, of falsely inflating the importance of sentences that our eye might skip over entirely if they were placed, more quietly and modestly, inside a longer paragraph.
Like the one-sentence paragraph, the second-person point of view can also make us suspect that style is being used as a substitute for content.
Omniscient merely means all-knowing, but does not suggest that this all-seeing eye is impartial, objective, or free from prejudices and opinions—which, again, are conveyed through word choice, rhythm, sentence length, diction, and so forth—about whatever that eye is observing.
One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.
A good writer understands that characters not only speak differently depending on whom they are speaking to, but also listen differently depending on who is speaking.
This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that (like character itself) transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary, and quite unlike the stiff, mannered, archaic speech we find in bad historical novels and in those medieval fantasies in which young men always seem to be saying things like, “Have I passed the solemn and sacred initiation test, venerable hunt master?”
Ranting is another thing that should be done sparingly in literature, as in life, with an eye to why and how long a reader will stay interested in a character who just keeps on talking.
If God is in the details, we all must on some deep level believe that the truth is in there, too. Or maybe it is that God is truth: Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth—a fact that every liar knows instinctively and too well.
Often, a well-chosen detail can tell us more about a character—his social and economic status, his hopes and dreams, his vision of himself—than a long explanatory passage.
If a gesture is not illuminating, simply leave it out, or try cutting it and see if you later miss it or even remember that it’s gone. Do we really need that cigarette lit, that glass of wine poured? Is it merely a way of passing time, of making space in dialogue, of telegraphing mood and emotion? Does it tell us something specific about the character or the situation we are attempting to recreate on the page?
The wider and deeper your observational range, the better, the more interestingly and truthfully you will write.
Literature is an endless source of courage and confirmation. The reader and beginning writer can count on being heartened by all the brave and original works that have been written without the slightest regard for how strange or risky they were, or for what the writer’s mother might have thought when she read them.
While we have always cared about, and sympathized with, fictional characters, the insistence we do so is a relatively new one.
If art demanded Babel’s life, we can certainly handle whatever inconvenience or effort it seems to require from us.
