The Best Writing Advice EVER

Over the course of my writing life, I've spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on writing advice. Books, magazines, seminars, conferences - I've listened to it all, and the one thing I've found to be consistently true is that the formula for teaching is this: First they tell you what to do, then they tell you what it looks like when you do it. Sometimes you get a sentence or two of "before" writing, followed by a gleaming, polished bit of "after."

Taken individually, everything makes sense and you can certainly understand things like why passive voice makes a sentence drag, why lack of pronoun reference causes confusion, etc. What's harder to grasp, though, is the effect that ignoring all this sage advice has on a larger body of work. I have yet to see, say, The Eye of Argon dissected and put back together as a readable work, although I have been present at an Eye of Argon reading and have come to appreciate the fact that it is, at least, campy and mockworthy. That's a start.

Not so with Andrew Martin's The Necropolis Railway, although I did give it the old college try. I looked at a few other reviews of this book, and find that if you know absolutely everything about steam railroads, you might actually enjoy this book. However, if you're NOT one of those sixteen people, you won't have clue one what the hell Martin is talking about. I do want to mention that, while the Amazon price for this book is about twelve bucks, I got it out of the remnants bin at a Borders for something like three dollars. At least I'm happy on that score.

Rule #1: Explain your jargon. This book was set in Edwardian London, mostly in and around rail yards. Great. I think I've seen enough BBC productions that I can handle that, right? Wrong. Apparently, men who work in the rail yards spoke an entirely different brand of English than anyone else. For instance, the term "half-link" came up in nearly every conversation, but even after finishing the book I can't tell you whether it refers to a part of a train, the men who work on a part of a train, men of a certain rank in the train company, or the breakfast everyone ate that day. At one point one of the characters says that she doesn't understand what the narrator is talking about, and the writer says that "he explained it" to her. Explained it to her, but sadly, not to us. There was tons of train jargon that seemed put there just because Martin wanted you to know that he knows this stuff and you don't.

Rule #2: Nobody likes Scooby-Doo. The "mystery" part of this (besides "what kind of idiot would publish this") was solved in two parts. The first part was the old "Mr. Jones, the carnival operator!" "Yeah, and I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!" I got to that point in the book and was baffled and a little annoyed that it seemed that I still had about fifty pages to go. But then, Martin pulled a tricky one - he compounded the Scooby-Doo ending with the victim-as-murderer ending.

I have to make one confession: I am not one of those people who reads mysteries carefully, looking for the clues that will allow me to solve the crime along with the fictional detective. I'm much more the kind of person who just allows the story to unfold, appreciating the surprises and disappointments in store for both characters and reader alike. Except that by the time anything happened in this book, I had long since lost interest, so I wasn't taken by surprise when the guy we thought was the bad guy wasn't really the bad guy (although he did kill people) and the guy that we thought was the good guy (although I never thought that because every other character in the story hated and mistrusted him except our "detective") wasn't actually a good guy. Whatever.

Rule #3: Remember your characters' names. The book is billed as "A Jim Stringer Mystery," but we're into chapter 2 before we realize that the narrator himself is Jim Stringer, and I think that the name comes up perhaps four times in the entire book. The only major character whose name is mentioned less often is the boy's landlady. In fact, I just looked through the book to find some reference to her name, but couldn't. It seems that although she is the only major female character and in fact is critical to the narrator's coming through the tale alive, she doesn't merit a name. Even after he makes her "his girl" and shares his dreams with her, he can't bring himself to call her anything more than "my landlady." There is one other female character in the book - a nurse who tends him in the hospital and who never speaks, and she is given a name (Elizabeth Purvis), but no name for the love interest.

Rule #4: Action + Mystery = Tension. Normally in a mystery, there come a few times where, as a reader, I'm tantalized by the fact that I know something the hero/heroine doesn't, and I see them heading into danger. In a well-written thriller, I want to shout out "No, don't go in there!" or "He's got a gun!" Except that in this particular instance, I was having such a hard time envisioning what was happening (thanks to the non-observance of Rule #1) that not only did I not understand that our hero was in danger until it was far too late, but even after he'd gotten out of it I didn't get what had happened.

For instance: he climbed into a furnace and fell asleep? And then was surprised that someone had shut the door on him and lit the fire and run away? What? How the hell did he get into a furnace in the first place? And why? What sort of idiot crawls into the fireplace to sleep? And since that particular "prank" never comes up again, we have no idea whether it's his hostile co-workers trying to school him or whether it's a bad guy trying to off him. Either way, if he'd died there, it would have been Darwinian justice.

I finished the book early this morning and spent the rest of the day doing some editing to the book I'm currently working on, and found that as I read my own work, I was looking at it with a much more critical eye. As I read, I was asking myself whether I could picture what was happening - where the characters were in relation to each other, how the action flowed from one scene to the next, etc. The relationships between them were clear, and I took out any ambiguity that would leave a reader thinking "what just happened?"

I want to thank Andrew Martin for having written his book, a valuable object lesson for someone like me who needs to know exactly what happens when you don't listen to all that good advice given you in all those other books on writing.

At The Movies

The Pirate and I sat down to watch a movie last night, and here's what happened in the first ten minutes:

1. The very pregnant wife of the school music teacher tells him that the baby she's carrying isn't his.


2. The wife and child disappear and the music teacher is now a carpenter making furniture and lacking in personality.


3. The politician is asked whether, if the syndicate financially backs him for office, he can guarantee that he's “clean.” He lies and says yes.


4. The music teacher goes to the down antique store to buy a gold coin.


5. The politician gives his younger drunkard brother money to give to the heroin addict who's the mother of his baby. The one nobody knows about.


6. The music teacher goes home, drinks and entire bottle of tequila, then looks at his secret stash of gold coins amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gold.


7. The politician's brother takes the politician's car, goes to a roadhouse and gets drunk and stoned, then crashes the car into a tree, killing the girl he's with. He runs away from the scene.

At this point, the Pirate and I turn it off. We decide that not only is it one stereotype after another, but we're too damned old to want to watch anything that depressing – especially if we haven't been given a reason to care about anyone in the movie. And the fact that each of these scenes took about two minutes meant that we had no time to know any of these people well enough to care about them. I felt pretty curmudgeonly for having given it so little time to prove itself, but I'm getting used to it.

We started talking about our taste in movies. We both hated the first episode of Battlestar Galactica and have never watched the series for one reason: nobody has a sense of humor. If they have one later in the show, it's a late development because they're all positively grim in the first episode. I told the Pirate that I don't like shows where the villain is sexy and cool and the good guy is brooding and dark. I don't like them because shows like that can't have humor in them – humor would just show how ridiculous that entire setup is.

When I was in college, I dated an artist. This guy and I used to watch horrible, depressing art films and then drank too much and talked about how meaningful they were and what they said about the human condition (a term that makes me throw up a little just typing it). For a long time, ours was a long-distance relationship. We'd see each other every second or third weekend and the time we spent together was intense. By the time he'd gotten a scholarship to Otis Parsons School of Design and moved out to southern California where I was going to school, things were pretty much over. I hadn't exactly been faithful, and although he never said anything outright, I'm pretty sure he hadn't either.

More importantly, though, I realized that in the few years that we'd been together, I'd changed. All that pretension about art had morphed into a pragmatism about making a living and how I was going to get through school and support myself. I realized that art films were only interesting when you were young enough not to have had any life experiences of your own. Once you've had a few ugly relationships, spent a few sleepless nights, lost a few friends, it lost some of its luster. At the time we broke up, he was on the verge of being evicted for not paying his rent, all the while railing about how his landlord should understand that he was an artist. It was just too much for me to stomach (I was going to UCLA and working two jobs), and I spent years feeling embarrassed about it.

I stopped thinking that art was the be-all and end-all of existence. That romance was the same thing as love and affection. That just because someone in a movie was unhappy, the movie was dramatic. That all laughter was equivalent, even the kind that came at the expense of someone's dignity. That people I loved should be able to read my mind. I realized that I don't have time to participate in things that aren't affirming in some way. Laughter is affirming, as is recognizing the value in others and celebrating things that are beautiful. If that makes me a curmudgeon, like I said, I'm getting used to it.