Five Common Writing Mistakes That My Students Make That I Still Make (and You Probably Make Too)
2 Mar
Forgetting the basics
If you’re writing about a person, then can I please have their age? It may not seem important to you, but in my experience there’s a difference between an forty-year old skydiver and a five-year old skydiver.
Too much connective tissue
If the movies made writing more cinematic (visual scene-setting, jumps cuts, flashbacks, etc.) can you imagine what the Internet is doing to our sensibilities? The hyperlink has prepared your reader to make bold jumps in content, logic, etc. so you don’t have to hold their hand through every transition. As the old saying goes, the shortest NASCAR track is 0.526 miles long.
Being afraid of the big knife
I know from experience that it’s hard to make drastic cuts, but every first draft is probably 25% overweight, and you’re not going to get it down to size by tweaking and massaging. Sometimes working on your “craft” means acting like a butcher.
No risks
You are not a writer. You’re a riverboat gambler with ice water running through your veins. You bet big and you bet often, and you don’t care about your hand, or if you win or lose, because you can talk or shoot your way out of anything.
Thinking the point is having an insight or making an observation, as opposed to taking said insight or observation and putting into play so it bumps into and rubs up against other insights and observations.
Know what I mean?
Love the riverboat gambler analogy. Absolutely.
Having just cut 30K words from a manuscript last year, I can identify. We have one editor at my magazine we fondly call “the slasher.” He’s taken as much as 30% from a story and never had a writer complain. Usually, they rave about what a great job he did.
Immaculate timing, Dennis. I’ve got my NaNoWriMo novel all printed out and ready to red-pen starting tomorrow night. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be stopping at a 25% cut (maybe once all the rewrite sections are done!).
You know you’re writer when you can take that editing knife and kill your darlings. The writer who loves every single word and can’t bear to part with one syllable isn’t doing a service to their audience.
Oh dear lord, I do all of these things. Sometimes in the same story.
That said, however, I am looking forward to the middle part of my third draft, where whole chapters are destined for the woodpile. It started around 92K. Goal? Closer to 50K.
Trust me, I might find it occasionally painful, but for the story, it won’t hurt a bit.
Paricularly interesting: “Thinking the point is having an insight or observation as opposed to…putting into play so it bumps….”
I’m pretty new at this so not sure exactly what you mean but I’m thinking we become like archeologists digging for that hidden truth, discovering relationships, tensions, ironies, pathos–those revelations that engage us emotionally and intellectually. I’ve been messing with nonfiction and sense this is possible and has to be aspired to even in reporting, subjects on the surface mundane. Tell me what you’ve discovered that I wouldn’t know unless you tell it to me.
This analogy may be way off base but thinking back to my phot0-student days it’s the difference between the vision captured, say, by the great documentarists–Bresson or T. Eugene Smith–and a snapshot. To capture and then express the ineffable.
@Lindsay: I’m not a big fan of the “kill your darlings” line because if you’re a stylist sometimes it’s all about the darlings. But you’re right about serving the audience instead of yourself. Well played.
@DennisLang: Digging for truth is fine, but I’d rather see people combine multiple truths that are lying about.
Think about William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES. It’s part “children can be so cruel” and part “absolute power corrupts absolutely” with a little Robinson Carusoe thrown in.
Boy–Just in the process of digging for some truth myself. Never read the Golding book but vividly recall the Peter Brook film version. Underlying the behavior–and the kids presumably are at the outset innocent and uncorrupted– there is a fundamental question, and where Golding had to begin, isn’t there? That is, where is the origin of morality? Is there morality in the absence of higher authority? His conclusion, the singular truth revealed, is that without apriori values our innate savagery emerges, no?
Wait, were these all Catholic school kids–therefore not innocent–who left to their own devices threw the morality that had been imposed upon them over the cliff?