I’ve been on a bit of a roll lately, posting tips on writing from world class writers. I’m doing this mostly for myself and the few writing friends I’ve managed to collect over the years as a way to keep these tips always easily accessible for them and myself. I have no illusions that these posts are reaching many others, as my website gets very little internet traffic. (I’m too cheap to pay the ridiculous costs to boost my Google rankings.) But if you are lucky enough to be one of the few who happen upon my little website, I hope you will find them helpful.
So here’s the next installment in my “Advice for Writers” series. Today I’m sharing some tips from George Orwell.
George Orwell, of course, needs no introduction. His classics, “1984” and “Animal Farm”, defined an entire literary genre. He gave these writing tips in an essay he wrote in 1946, “Politics and the English Language.”
So here they are, unedited and unadulterated:
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
~
~
From Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” As always, I do my best to give credit where credit is due. I discovered these wonderful tips on The Gotham Writers website.
A while ago, Pixar story artist Emma Coats tweeted a series of “story basics” — guidelines that she learned from her more senior colleagues on how to create appealing stories.
Pixar has made a lot of wonderful full-length animated movies over the years with great, well written stories. Any tips and advice from them on story development is well worth the read.
Pixar Story Guidelines
#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.
#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
#8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.(Branch Rickie!!!!!)
#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
Or, why IMHO the best advice for new writers is no advice.
I was browsing through some old archived folders on my laptop the other day – yes, I was that bored – and came across a collection of writing tips I’d gleaned several years ago.
In my opinion #2 is the best, and #4 is also very good, but then these are tips from John Steinbeck, so who am I to judge.
Personally I still hold to what I wrote a couple of years ago, in which I argue that the best advice – for the new writer – is no advice. Don’t go around looking for advice or attending writers conferences. Don’t do any of that until you’ve finished a complete full length novel. Until then, just write. You need to make all your own mistakes, and experience the struggle first hand, before any advice will make sense. Until then it’s just theory. Once you’ve completed a novel to the best of your ability, then you’ll be better able to appreciate just how brilliant Steinbeck’s advice really is. Because it really is.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
But perhaps most paradoxically yet poetically, twelve years prior — in 1963, immediately after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception” — Steinbeck issued a thoughtful disclaimer to all such advice:
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”
Here is a short list of writing tips from one of the great masters of the craft, CS Lewis.
I’ve always been a bit suspicious of overly long essays on writing advice, and I’ve seen some big name authors do just that. In my opinion, all the really important rules for good writing can be boiled down to a few basic points. If you can’t summarize it on one page, you’re trying to say too much. So I’ve come to really appreciate these six points from Lewis. It succinctly captures the really important rules for good writing, separating it from the amateurish.
Lewis’ Six Tips for Writers
On June 26, 1956, C.S. Lewis replied to letter from an American girl named Joan with advice on writing. Here’s what he said:
Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
In writing, don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.” (My note: In other words, show – don’t tell, which is the cardinal rule of good writing.)
Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
Thanks for visiting and have a great rest of your day.
I’ve often been surprised at the number of wanna-be writers attending writers groups who’ve never completed a book. They’re still “working on it”, but it remains unfinished – sometimes for years.
So in today’s post I’d like to offer some well-needed advice for those aspiring writers who haven’t finished a book yet. Maybe you’ve started a manuscript but can’t seem to finish it, or you haven’t started yet and are still thinking about it.
I think I can help with that, because I’ve finished 10 full-length books since I got serious about writing in 2007 (8 full-length novels and two non-fiction books) – while working full-time and raising a family.
Who am I to offer advice? What cheek!
Why listen to me? Who’s MJ Wahl and why should you take any advice from me? I’m not exactly a household name and I haven’t got rich (yet) from writing. I’m not independently wealthy, and I don’t have a spouse who is supporting me while I chase my dreams. I’m just a regular guy with a full-time job, lots of kids and grandkids – who loves to write.
And that’s precisely why you should listen to what I have to say, because like you I’m not a full-time writer with the luxury of having all day to think and write. Like you, I’m a regular person with a job and a life.
This post will be about how to get your book written. How to write well is an entirely different topic, and will have to wait for a future blog. For now, let’s just focus on getting it done. Then we’ll worry about the polishing. So let’s get going…
Make time each day
This first point is, I think, the most important and the reason why I’m leading with it.
The big thing here is don’t wait for some special dispensation of time. You might get lucky and be able to get a book started with some special chunk of time, but you’ll never get a book finished that way. I’ve come across lots of people who say they want to write, but are waiting until they can take a month off to sit alone in a cabin in the woods to write it (yes, I actually had someone tell me that), or some other special magical dispensation of time. It seldom happens and you’ll never be a writer that way.
To be successful at writing, you need to figure out how to write a little bit each day in the midst of your regular life. Stop looking for big chunks of special time, and carve out a little bit EVERY DAY. If you get nothing else out of this blog, this is the one thing you need to remember. This is the single best most important piece of advice you’ll ever get from me or any other writer’s advice book.
Don’t wait for special chunks of time
The most important point is to set aside a bit of time each day, even if it is only 30 minutes. The key is to keep up a regular rhythm and pace. Make time each day that impacts the people in your life the least – that way it will be easier to maintain and you’ll get fewer complaints from your significant other.
Maybe stay up late after the kids have gone to bed, or get up early before the busy-ness of the day starts. I’m a morning person, so for me getting up at 4:30 or 5 AM worked well. I’d get in a couple hours of writing before getting ready for work and my wife’s alarm went off. Often my wife didn’t even know I had a writing project on the go.
Keep up a daily pace, keep a momentum going, and avoid long gaps of time between writing sessions. Don’t wait until you ‘feel like it.’ Approach it like a part-time job – a job you have to do whether you feel like it or not.
Stop talking about it
I’ve run across lots of people who talk about that book they want to write. They can do a lot of talking, but not so much writing. These people fill writer’s conferences and clubs. Usually the people who talk the most aren’t doing it. I think sometimes such people are perfectionists. And perfectionists often won’t get around to do something because they’re afraid it won’t be perfect. So they are endlessly seeking advice and researching.
Don’t be one of those people. Stop telling your relatives about that book you’re going to write, and start writing.
Stop looking for – or needing – encouragement
If you are a real writer, you’re going to write regardless of what anyone says. If your spouse or partner or best friend is constantly having to shore up your confidence and encourage you to write, then maybe you’re not really a writer and should look at doing something else. Writing is a very solitary and often lonely enterprise. You’ll write if you want to – real writers have to write. Success and recognition, while nice, are secondary.
Re-writing and editing separates real writers from wanna-be’s
Your first completed draft will probably suck. Don’t worry about it. The important thing is that you finished it. Finishing a full-length book, even if it’s not perfect, does something for you. It re-wires your DNA and gives you a confidence you didn’t have before, because now you know you can really do it.
Now the fun really starts! Go through your MS again and start re-writing. Then re-write the re-writes until it makes you sick and you can’t take it anymore.
It’s the re-writing that separates the serious writer from the wanna-be. It’s the re-writing that turns you into a real writer. I’ve gone over and edited/re-wrote all of my books at least 10 times (seriously – I’m not exaggerating), some of them more, before publishing. Sometimes I’ve gone over a manuscript so many times I feel like I’m going to throw-up if I have to look at it one more time.
Once you’ve gone over it a number of times and it’s as good as you can make it, then find a professional editor to proof read it. Don’t even think about publishing until you’ve done this.
What I didn’t do…
I’ve talked about what I did that was right, but there were a few things I didn’t do that I think was also right and contributed to my success:
I didn’t read ‘how-to’ books on writing. They can be a waste of time and won’t make much sense until after you’ve finished a book. You need to make the mistakes first before ‘self-help’ books can help you fix them. Finish your book first, then go back and fix it.
I didn’t go to writers groups or conferences. I never attended a conference until after I finished my first book, and I think I got more out of it because I actually had a full-length finished book under my belt. Writer’s conferences are filled with wanna-be’s who haven’t written a book yet. You don’t want to be like that.
I didn’t talk about it. I told almost no one that I was working on a novel. My wife was barely aware and I seldom said anything about it. I was just concerned with doing, not talking.
Wrapping it up – in a nutshell it comes to this…
I wrote every day for years, and finished 8 full-length books, while I had a job, a wife and three kids. I didn’t seek advice and I didn’t waste time running around to writer’s conferences or sitting in the local writer’s club. I just got up really early every morning and kept plugging away. If early mornings aren’t your thing, than stay up late. You might have to turn the TV off at night, but whatever, the thing is to plug at it each day.
The big thing is: find a regular time each day, even if it’s for 15 to 30 minutes, and keep at it until it’s finished. Don’t stop to edit or re-write until you’ve finished it. Then go back and do the edits/re-writes.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line using my contact page.
