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.