Content warning: suicide / self harm
Howard Hawks said a great picture is three good scenes and no bad ones. If you were to take issue with his opinion, which part would be the problem?
Three good scenes or no bad ones?
Hawks had a fairly simple understanding of movies. He didn’t think they needed to be overly complicated nor packed with action, and you might be expecting more from greatness than three good scenes.
You probably aren’t allowing for more bad ones.
Let’s discuss: no bad writing.
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Now, let’s discuss: no bad writing.
“No famous writer ever said anything I find useful enough to place here.”
—Thaddeus Thomas
There’s a difference between the techniques we focus on and the idea of no bad writing. Each of those is about doing something special, but right now, I’m focusing on writing where nothing special happens. It’s just there, doing its job, but it’s not bad.
And that’s all that’s required of it.
I want you to think of a relationship, and your “special other” makes grand gestures that make all your friends jealous. It’s over-the-top romantic, but when it’s not big, it’s bad. Every little thing that goes wrong is made to be your fault, and you are made to suffer for it.
It’s a bad relationship. No matter how high the highs, we have to raise the level of our lows or the whole thing is bad. It’s true for relationships. It’s true for writing.
The best relationships are found where the lows are comfortable and cozy. Negative events are handled in a healthy way, and those days your friends would call boring, you just enjoy being in each other’s presence.
Your readers are investing time in your story, for that time, they’re in a relationship with your words. Let’s learn to treat them right.
What You Don’t Write Matters
The problem with most writing is too many words.
I think you understand that I’m not talking about switching to short books and short sentences, but that doesn’t mean you know what I mean. Know what I mean?
It was on a chilly morning, in the early part of spring, that Lucy decided that it was finally time to go to the house that had been abandoned for years and that was situated at the edge of the forest, with its creaky doors and broken windows, which always seemed to rattle when the wind would blow, carrying with it the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves, which, to Lucy, felt like a kind of eerie invitation that she couldn’t quite resist.
This is an example of too many words. In particular, we’re talking about “glue” words which don’t add value but hold the other parts together. We want to limit our glue words as much as possible.
On a chilly, spring morning, Lucy went to the abandoned house at the forest’s edge…
This reduction is fine.
I’ve talked before about the secret of literary style, but this is another example of where the “balanced” approach and the literary approach diverge, for the balanced approach removes the glue while preserving the rules. The literary approach takes those rules and does awful, unspeakable things.
But we’ll keep this grammatically family friendly:
A chilly morning in early spring wrote an invitation on creaky doors and broken windows—windows that rattled in the damp-earth-scented wind, the decayed-leaf-scented wind, the wind that wound through forest wounds, bleeding upon the old, abandoned house like a love letter written from a slit wrist, writing sticky, sweet, haunting sights to stain poor Lucy’s eyes.
I said grammatically.
I could have removed more glue words but chose to do otherwise. Getting away from too many words isn’t about saying something in the fewest words possible; it’s using words—the right words and the right number of words—to create rhythm and meaning.
Even in literary works, not every sentence is going to look like that. In balanced works, none of them will. Very often, we need something simple and straightforward that carries the story and little else.
The lines we need don’t offer anything fancy, but what they give a reader is good.
On a chilly morning in early spring, Lucy sought the abandoned house at the forest’s edge, where creaky doors and broken windows rattled in a wind that carried the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves, an eerie invitation Lucy couldn’t quite resist.
The more interesting choices:
sought— “decided to visit” was my first choice, but I found it too clunky.
that carried— I tried to make “carrying” work, but it felt wrong.
You would make different choices. You might choose to cut quite, while I liked the beat it gave the sentence’s rhythm. As long as you improve your meat to glue ratio, you’ll do fine.
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Make Your Least a Beast
Focus on clarity. Avoid clichés and don’t over-explain. In other words, don’t do this:
On a chilly spring morning, Lucy set out for the old, run-down house that everyone and their grandmother whispered about in the small town, located at the edge of the forest and long rumored to be haunted. The creaking doors and shattered windows rattled in the gusting wind that howled like a wolf and carried the damp, earthy scent of decaying leaves and mud. Lucy, drawn by the house’s eerie atmosphere, couldn’t help but feel it was beckoning her, even as her better judgment hesitated.
When we’re first learning a technique, we treat it like fireworks and watch it fill the sky with an inescapable glory. As the technique becomes familiar, it’s less often explosions in the sky and more often flowers in the field, having become a natural part of the landscape, quiet but beautiful.
Morning light fell thin and gray upon jagged windows, and darkness loomed behind a door hung slack on one rusted hinge. The creeping forest blurred the house at its edges, like the world had been colored by a child. Wind carried the rot of the forest floor, and feeling the pull of ruined places and ruined lives, Lucy stepped forward, the earth beneath her boots soft and formless behind the cover of winter-brown leaves.
— Thaddeus Thomas
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Great advice. Sparse writing can be a foil to indulgent writing where one constants the other to great effect. I find this helps with dialogue as well.
I love these essays. They show me the mechanisms behind my writing. They challenge me to improve. And they leave me dying to try new things.