Not having come to fiction writing through an MFA program, I was never told up front, “This is what makes a novel good.” Exactly what constituted good writing was something my longtime reader’s head had to figure out for itself: if that’s what I like in a book, then that’s the way I want my books to sound. Now — having studied writing, attended conferences, gotten feedback from editors and beta-readers, etc., etc.—having done, in short all the things we all do to improve our craft — I may be more confused than ever. Especially about that subtle aspect called style or texture, and this is a make-it-or-break-it part of any book for me as a reader.
Who Gets to Say What’s Good?
We’re told not to use the passive voice. We’re told that present continuous verbs weaken the sentence. We’re told that “It” or “There” is a terrible way to start a sentence. Yet I’ve read so many wonderful books, especially those of the past, whose authors missed out on the experience of an MFA, and golly! They do those things, and it doesn’t sound weak or inexpert at all! Someone out there has (recently) decided that these things Must Not Be Done…but who is it? There is—oops, there I go—no Academy for the English language, folks. So who makes up the Rules? Good writing has to be more than just avoiding these predesignated pitfalls, which to some extent are arbitrary.
If Everything’s Good, Then Nothing Is… or Something
And yet, clearly it isn’t a case of “anything goes.” Bad writing does exist, and boy, can we recognize it when we see it. I actually read a YA novel to my son once years ago where the only adjective seemed to be “incredible.” Nerve-pain bad. Yet it’s not so easy to point out the exact line where writing veers off into badness. The worst things I read are not usually offenders against the Rules (presumably they have been edited before publication). They’re just clunky, stiff, amateurish. Unoriginal. One has the suspicion that perhaps this author isn’t writing in her native language. How do you legislate against that? How do you teach people to be artists, to have genius? The old-fashioned way to learn a craft was to be an apprentice. So maybe the best way to learn good writing is to read good writing? Just a thought.
Why Bother with Style?
Plenty of writers don’t. They hang their success on tricky plotting, fast-paced action, or emotional satisfaction. But the books this reader loves best are breathtakingingly beautiful, original, powerful wielders of English. Their style is so luminous that I would swoon over that author’s grocery list. That doesn’t mean they’re full of complex turns of phrase or a vocabulary that makes me keep a dictionary handy as I read. They just know how to use their language. Every word conveys meaning, subtext, imagery. The old lateral geniculate nucleus starts firing away when these writers speak (I think that’s the part responsible for mental imagery). We tend to isolate such books as “literary,” but aren’t all books supposed to be literary? They’re just good books! Others, perhaps, not so much. I want to say it’s their use of words that sets the good on a higher shelf, but certainly sentences play a part. Variety, but not to a self-conscious extent. Why shun adverbs? Yet don’t overuse them.
The Golden Mean?
Maybe avoiding excess is part of good writing. Eccentricity can be charming, but—with all respect to James Joyce—it palls pretty fast. Yet neither should good writing be pedestrian. Good writing is transparent; it doesn’t draw attention to itself. It may make us cry, “I wish I had said that!” but what we’re celebrating is the crystalline ideal under those words. It’s not ordinary. It’s not average. But it’s certainly golden. And hard to define. What do you think?
SHEREE A WOOD
I loved this post! I agree wholeheartedly with your premise that merely avoiding certain words is not what good writing is all about. Years ago I got a book on editing that purported to improve your writing by teaching you to use the search and replace feature to seek and destroy all taboo words. For example, you might search the word “was” and replace it with a stronger verb. This was to be done for every occurrence of the offending word. Thankfully I only edited one chapter this way, because what resulted was a series of sentences and paragraphs that seemed to have had the life beaten out of them. They were awkward, stilted, and flat. Yes, some of the sentences were improved by changing out weak words for others, but for the majority of the piece, it lost its luster. I think I finally decided that fanatical replacement of “every” adverb or “to be” verb or “that” was simply too harsh a method for editing one’s work. Then I picked up my copy of Sense and Sensibility and started reading and lo and behold, almost all of these rules were broken in the first two pages. It is as you said, “Yet I’ve read so many wonderful books, especially those of the past, whose authors missed out on the experience of an MFA, and golly! They do those things, and it doesn’t sound weak or inexpert at all!” Well said. Thank you for your article.
Jack Courtney
Great article! Just when I thought “swoon over that author’s grocery list” was more insight than I could digest I was confronted with “the old lateral geniculate nucleus starts firing away.” Nicki knows how to stir-up my hypothalamus!
Niki Kantzios
Sorry for the delay in responding, guys: I’ve been traveling. Glad it struck a nerve! I was a little afraid I had stepped on MFA toes.
richard
I think the best advice I have received is to write what I like to read. I have been caught up in the rule book and dealt with editors that have their own rule book. I have received back edits that were done with a computer program which is to say, they turned the book into vanilla. I think writing is a craft but the question is, what rules will we adhere to. I am struggling with my current book. I started the first chapter writing in first person, present tense. I like the immediacy of that tense but giving back ground requires a shift from present tense to past tense sometimes in the same sentence. “She is a stunning animal and I wanted to know her from the first time I saw her.” That is what I wrote but an editor corrected it: “She was a stunning animal and I wanted to know her from the first time I saw her.” For me, rules get in the way of a writers story, it dilutes the writers edge.
Sidney
1) YOU: “She is a stunning animal and I wanted to know her from the first time I saw her.”
2) EDITOR: “She was a stunning animal and I wanted to know her from the first time I saw her.”
Both sentences need a comma after animal. (Place a comma between two independent clauses that are joined with a coordinating conjunction.)
Is the narrator talking about someone he knew in the past or someone gone from this earth? If so, the second version is correct. If not, the first version is perfectly okay.
richard
I think the other thing some writers do is craft nifty sentences because they have the time to think and massage the sentence. But, doing so can make a story oh so clever but unrealistic. No character spouts perfect, well thought out sentences all the time. If you want a story to flow, it has to be natural and believable. I have not found the “balancing” point yet. My brain delivers a clever line but is it too clever?
Niki Kantzios
I guess that depends on the character: some are clever folks and they can spout clever lines. But mostly it’s the narrator who gets to be pretty!