I confessed a couple of weeks ago, that I have difficulty with historical romances for many reasons, but Alex Beecroft is one historical writer whose books I can understand and relate to. The first of her books that I read was an Age of Sail adventure, Captain’s Surrender. As I followed her heroes, Midshipman Joshua Andrews and Captain Peter Kenyon, I fell in love with them because they seemed so real and so different from many historical heroes that I read about before and since then.
This post by Alex is another example of how she doesn’t follow anyone’s path but her own.
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Christmas and the dead time between the holiday and the first of January is an ideal time for a writer to reflect on their creative life. And the New Year itself is of course the traditional time of year for deciding on changes of attitude or behaviour which are going to make this year better than last.
I’ve certainly been doing a lot of soul searching during the dark days of winter, and since I was at a relative’s house where I had access to the internet for less than an hour a day, I’ve also been doing a lot of reading of some old favourite books. As I was doing so, and pondering what to write for this post, the conviction slowly grew over me (rather like a bad case of mildew) that I was going to talk about the reams of advice that is daily given to writers, and what we should do about it.
For example “Write what you know.”
I’m sure this one has been covered here before. But if I wrote about what I know from my personal experience, I would certainly not be able to write about the experiences of men in the 18th Century British Navy. Despite appearances, I’m really not that old, and I’ve never been nearer to the armed forces than having a daughter in the Air Cadets. My experience of military life is limited to ironing her uniform shirts.
If I re-phrase this “know about what you write,” I’m happier – because of course that gives the author the chance to decide on a story and then research the hell out of the subject until they can make a good stab at imagining what it must be like for their characters, in their world utterly unlike that of the author.
If I twist the saying round a little and look at it askance, I can acknowledge that a lot of what I write has flowed from my personal experience. Just not in any simple, literal way. I may not be a gay man, but I drew on my own experience of damnation and salvation when I was writing Peter’s road to Damascus experience in Captain’s Surrender. I changed what needed to be changed to fit the experience to the situation, but the core of it gains some of its power from the fact that I know intimately what it was like, going through that. But I know that because I am human, and I can give it to him as an experience because he is human too.
In that respect we all do write what we know when we write about what it’s like being a human being. But I suspect that’s not what the people who use the phrase mean. It has some relevance, but it also has lots of ways in which it’s used as a way of trying to control what authors write – trying to control what they think and what they make. In a subtle way it’s a form of coercion, brainwashing, censorship, and now that I’ve sucked what I take to be the real meaning out of it, I’m going to throw away the husk and not let it trouble me again.
This is where I come to the “rebellious thoughts” of the title. In summary it’s only one rebellious thought, and it is this: Authors, don’t pay too much attention to other people’s helpful advice. You’re the artist. You’re the one with the vision and the muse. In the end, you decide what to write about and how to express it. If you don’t write the stories that are in your heart demanding to be told, and write them in the way that you want to write them, what the hell’s the point of any of it?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen writers given the advice to cut down on adjectives. I get the impression these useful little words are soon going to be banned altogether. And I myself have been advised to cut back on my semi-colons. Yet I was reading Patrick O’Brian’s “The Letter of Marque” over the holidays and laughed out loud when I came across this paragraph:
He was a gentle timid little greyish-brown man, round and greasy, easily moved to tears: he was utterly useless as a combatant, since no words, good or bad, could induce him either to attack or defend the ship; but he understood the whole range of naval cookery from Constantinople to Gibraltar; and although his maids of honour brought Rosia Bay to mind rather than Richmond Hill, they went down wonderfully well; while he could also turn out a creditable suet pudding.
I suspect the style gurus would have an apoplexy over this. How many adjectives? The entire paragraph is one sentence, good grief! It breaks all the rules, running on and running over with exuberance and fun like that. Yet Patrick O’Brian is – according to The Times – “The greatest historical novelist of all time,” and I return to his books again and again, to be swept away and ravished by his prose every single time.
My point being of course that I’m going to carry on ignoring the writing advice of anyone who would have tried to prevent the greatest historical novelist of all time from being published on the grounds of his style. Particularly when it’s a style that I adore. There is not – despite what might be inferred from the ever present advice to streamline and make prose transparent – one single, universally agreed upon, good writing style to which we should all aspire. So be yourself, and be yourself splendidly! Let’s have some variety, and let’s have some verve.
The same goes for subject matter. We’re not lacking for people who will try to tell you what to write. Women, you ought to write about women. Authors, you ought not to write about big hunky alphas with feminized betas. Authors, we love big hunky alphas with feminized betas, you totally ought to write about them. If you write sex scenes without condoms you’re being irresponsible. But sex scenes with condoms are icky and break the mood. You ought not to have an unhappy ending. But you ought not to be predictable. You ought to spice things up. You ought not to include so many sex scenes because they get boring… etc etc.
Now I don’t want to suggest that you shouldn’t think about these things. You should. I think it’s important to know the arguments for and against writing what you write. I think it’s vital to hone your skill, until your characterization, pacing, setting, plotting, dialogue and other scenes are as wonderful as you can make them. (Read lots of great writers – see how they did it, and how very different they all are from each other.)
I believe you have a responsibility as an author to treat your subject matter with all the care and respect of which you’re capable, to do no harm and, if possible, to do good. But I also think it’s possible to get too anxious about pleasing everyone else, to the point where the only person you’re not trying to please is yourself.
My feeling is that a muse is a capricious and temperamental thing. It’s easy to decide that you ought to write a particular subject, you ought not to write something else, but it’s a lot harder getting your
muse to play along. As Dom Cobb says in Inception “It’s my subconscious. I can’t control it.” You can’t force yourself to care about things you don’t care about. Nor can you force yourself to stop loving the things you love. All you can do, by worrying too much about what you ought to do, is to block your inspiration at the source – and what good is that to anyone?
Of course, me being me – the person for whom Babylon 5 alien ambassador Kosh’s proverb, “Understanding is a three edged sword” might have been made – I have to acknowledge that it’s not as simple as that. Saying, “oh, to hell with it” and going your own way has consequences. Your exuberant prose may make the editors at your preferred publishers reject you. Your gleeful experiment to see how many clichés you can pack into a single book may meet with ridicule. Serious people may think that you are irresponsible, and irresponsible people may think that you’re far too serious for their tastes. It may be that you end up self-publishing, with a dedicated following of five readers, one of whom is your mum. But you will have the consolation of a body of work that you are proud of, and a writing experience that is full of integrity and enjoyment.
On the other hand, if you’re writing for a living – if you’re trying to be commercial because you need the money – then you’d be well advised to ignore this advice to ignore other people’s advice, and work out your own compromise between your artistic yearnings and what sells.
My conclusion is that for writers, as for other artists, there isn’t one true way that fits all. We’ve each got to find our own way, while rejecting the advice that shrivels our tender muse like a snail on a pinch of salt. I hope that my rebellion is going to make me trust my own vision, and help me to follow my writing path with a bit more zest this year, and I wish you lots of luck in finding and following your own, whatever it may be.
Oh, lordy, your post comes at a very apt time for me, as I’ve just blogged about some doubts that’ve been nagging me for going on a year now.
While I wholeheartedly agree with you on the advice bit, I’m still very much flailing around in the dark with regard to the direction where I want to take my writing. I used Charlie Cochrane for my example (I love her writing – love it) and am currently at a crossroads with regard to whether or not I should stop writing in a number of genres and just stick to a “safe space” and allow myself to grow creatively there. I write in different genres because that’s where inspiration takes me, not because I want to please the greatest number of people I can, but it does come with a price, ironically enough.
I hate being bogged down by these doubts. I can’t help but second-guess everything I’ve written so far, sometimes to the point where I even wonder if I should continue writing at all.
The hard part is that no one can really settle these doubts but myself. Me, the perpetually self-questioning one.
“It comes at a price.”
“No can really settle these doubts but me.”
Sigh. It doesn’t pay to be emo at midnight, Pacific Standard Time.
Oh, I feel for you – actually I probably feel /with/ you, because I know exactly what you mean. I am going through something similar at the moment too. I think that’s why I felt it was the moment to firmly remind myself to follow my bliss (as the self-help people say.)
I would say “go with whatever excites you most and makes you most glad to be alive.” There is a reason to stick with what’s safe and marketable – for example, if you’re going to lose your house or starve if you don’t keep selling. But it’s unlikely to make you happy.
Unfortunately, as you say, this is all stuff that no one can help us with. It’s all got to be thought through alone. Good luck with it!
Hi, Alex – As an avid reader of a wide variety of prose for 50+ years (beginning long ago with Dick and Jane seeing Spot run), I loved your post. You had me at: “…it also has lots of ways in which it’s used as a way of trying to control what authors write – trying to control what they think and what they make.”
Imagination and courageous expression of one’s inner truth seem to underlie the prose most worth reading — but, as you indicate, not always the most marketable. If everybody just wrote what they actually knew, there’d be a lot more grocery and to do lists published (and there’s Twitter for that). 😉 Nothing is a greater thrill for a reader than to discover a unique and compelling author’s voice. That’s probably the voice of an author following the beat of the drummer inside that author’s head.
Thanks, Cary! I think you’re totally right that one of the delights of reading is the discovery of a new author with a unique and delightful voice that you have never heard before.
It’s understandable that the publishing industry as a whole may want to assert control. It’s their job to control quality while ensuring that a steady supply of books meets the demand of readers. So it’s in their interests to demand a certain amount of uniformity. It’s just not necessarily in the interests of the authors or the readers, who end up in a fast-food situation when they may have hoped for gourmet.
I couldn’t help but laugh at your comments on semicolon as it happens to be my personal nemesis :-). I’m a translator rather than a writer, and while I mostly translate boring user instructions, I still work with words and it really annoys me that there is this one punctuation mark I don’t use because I’m not sure I’m using it properly. So please, carry on using it so that the poor thing doesn’t disappear completely :-).
LOL! I think that’s the reason why I object in principle to the advice to remove semi-colons. In practice many authors may well over-use them. I know I do! My editors are quite right to tell me to cut back on them.
I enormously respect anyone who knows how grammar works, and owe my editors great thanks for teaching me how to use semi-colons more correctly. I’d just much rather use them correctly than not use them at all.
As a general state of things, however, I fear what would happen if authors all took a lot of this writing advice to heart. Might they cut down on semi-colon usage to the point where a useful piece of punctuation would die, and the written language would be impoverished by its loss?
It’s like passive voice. The advice is not to use it at all, but surely there are places where it’s exactly the right thing to use? Or adverbs, or adjectives, or use of the verb “to be.” Writers should be advised to use these things effectively, not to abandon them altogether. I’m very against anything that tries to make the language less complex and interesting than it is.
Sometimes I wish I was Chris Nolan, because his mind must be a brilliant place to run around in 🙂
Great post Alex!
Thanks, Cole 🙂 I agree that it must be fun to be Chris Nolan, but how sad for the world if there were two of him and none of you!
short answer on semi colons: they are used to separate two clauses of equal weight, while commas separate subordinate clauses: e.g we prayed for rain; it rained, so we got what we prayed for. You can also use it for separating items in a list preceded by a colon. Usually used when the items are going to be discussed individually later, e.g There are four branches of arithmetic: addition; subtraction; multiplication and division. Addition…etc. Sorry I confess to being an English teacher in remission and I have terrible relapses!
Authors, don’t pay too much attention to other people’s helpful advice.
Thanks for this great post. I want to save it and keep it to look at every time the editor in my brain has a fight with my muse (which is all the time since I work in editing).
I think a good editor is an excellent and wonderful thing, but that good editing doesn’t require robbing an author of their distinctive voice. It just involves pruning it carefully so that it can flower better. Balancing that fire of creation and the rigour of editing is the tricky bit, of course.
Well you know that I’m in agreement in writing what you WANT to write. I’m making myself a balance, because I’m half writing for a genre market now, deliberately and will write one book a year for Carina. And if you want to slot a book in there, then you have to make certain compromises to oneself, and semi colons and colons are part of the price for that.
But I’m still going to write one book a year for ME – whether it’s tragic, or romantic, or contains THEMES that other people find objectiionable, or questionable or downright wrong. If I get the bunny, I answer the call.
I don’t think I want to be a full-time genre romance writer, but I think I’m capable of working that compromise, at least for now. Who knows what will happen tomorrow.
Yes, I think it is a case that everybody has to work out their own compromise between doing exactly what they want and being commercial enough to survive. I think it’s a great idea to have already analyzed the difference between what you want to do for artistic expression and what you need to do to live. I’m all for doing both if you can, as starving in a garret, however intellectually pure doesn’t really appeal to me 🙂
I need to figure out my own plan, but I’m not quite there yet.
Or in summary – you can’t please all of the people all of the time – so as you’re writing the bleeding thing, you may as well please yourself. 🙂 x C
LOL! You have it exactly 🙂
Oh this! I should print this out.
Terrific post, Alex.
I give a talk called “Write what you know, because you know more than you think.” It explains how experience translates from the ordinary world to the fictional.
For example, I don’t fly a spaceship. But I do haul freight with a delivery time and I know the stress of realizing I’m not going to make it. So, I can translate the emotion, the cold sweat, the worry about the chopped down paycheck into the story, even if I’m writing “push a button and it goes” spaceflight.
While I’ve never stabbed someone, I have jabbed a knife into an uncooked hunk of meat. I know the sensation, and the unpleasant moment when the blade hits bone and shudders up my arm.
You’re right about people–men mostly, in my experience–using the phrase as a control method. “Why are you writing gay men? Write what you know and do some hot femsub.” (Not only control, but a demand that I cater to his tastes and his entertainment)
My rule is and always has been, “Write as the muses move me.” This may mean financial success or it may mean totally Spielberging an award (they rewrote the rules because of my book). But it means I keep writing and believe in what I write.
And those last two things are the vital ones.
Yes, most people have had experiences that they can extrapolate from in order to know what their characters would be feeling in widely dissimilar situations. If you’ve ever felt anger or fear or shame or love, you know what it feels like. As long as you bear cultural constraints in mind (for example, the way that men are taught to get angry in situations where women are taught to cry,) then there’s no reason why you can’t use your own emotions as a template.
I should probably speak up for the honour of men here and say I’ve had just as much “you’re a woman. If you’re not writing about women you must be a horrible misogynist” pressure from women as I have from men. It seems that everyone in the world wants you to write what they want you to write, rather than what you want to write. Which is natural enough, I suppose.
I’ve gotten the misogynist line as well. Oh, and anti-trans because I dared write a book with a character who was one gender but presented and behaved as another, and I am NOT trans myself.
I’ve learned to stay away from people who are interested in controlling me in any way.
I’m sure it’s good for us to be occasionally prompted into a bit of self-analysis. I know I make an effort to include more female characters in my m/m romance as a result of the arguments around the misogyny question. I just wish there was some way of having the prompt to reflection without the personal insults and assumptions of bad faith. Wave’s blog does a good job of that, I think – making us think without making anyone feel defensive or accused.
When asked why I don’t write women as often as men, I usually say “because there really isn’t a term for female genitalia that I find as neutral and inoffensive as I find ‘cock.’ It’s all too crude or too flowery.”
That tends to put paid to the argument.
LOL! That’s a good one 🙂 Although it wouldn’t work for me, as I rather like the word c*nt (censored as I’m not sure how Wave feels about it). I think it should be used as a direct equivalent to cock, since it’s no more shocking a piece of equipment. But having said that I’m all for anything that shuts the argument down before anyone gets hurt 🙂
This is a super post and very well articulated. IMO, the whole strength and delight and passion of fiction is in its individuality and variety and breadth of topic and style. The minute this gets tramelled into some kind of Expectation Template, the magic starts to fade.
However, just how difficult is it to hold tight to your own “voice” and not be influenced to change for the wrong reasons? How can we decide which reasons are right? I like variety, I like changing my style, I like my passive voice and my semi-colons!!!! (is it a British thing?!).
I think your points are very well-put for balancing the creative with the commercial. We do need to be aware of what is perceived as bad habit or unpopular or obtuse for the reader. And some things DO need keeping to the forefront as we write, to make the whole experience better for both author and reader. Also, there’s such a thing as choosing your battles. I’ll happily(ish) sacrifice my semi-colons for a sympathetic editor who can bring out the best in me in my rewrites!
But *then* we have to follow our heart and the words that flow best from us.
Apologies if I’ve repeated what others have said, I’m snatching time at work and can’t read all the comments until I get home :).
Maybe this’ll kickstart my writing again :).
I’m glad you enjoyed the post, Clare 🙂 And yes, you make a very good point. It’s all very well for me to say “hold on to your own voice and don’t listen to advice!” but that can be disastrous if you don’t already know what you’re doing.
I may have given the impression in the post that I’m terribly precious about my prose and unwilling to alter a single comma. In fact, I’m not at all. I hope that I’m a fairly easy author for an editor to work with, because I’m always willing to learn and to see if something can be done better. My editor who cut down the semi-colons was such a good editor that she just taught me the right way to use them, and let me keep a few as long as they were grammatically correct. I admire her for it 🙂
But it’s not really the actual editing process I’m talking about here, so much as the reams of advice that float about the internet and get to you long before you ever work with a real editor.
I think, as in every art form, that you need to have reached a certain level of accomplishment and confidence before you can afford to break the rules. And that when you do it, you should do it in full knowledge of why you’re doing it and the effect you hope to achieve. And, of course, I believe you should be always open to being corrected by someone who knows better.
It’s just that the process is an art – full of shades of grey – rather than a science where there’s one formula and you only have to follow it.
Great article. I see so often posts about “I hate when X is in a book” and then 50 posts saying “I love when X is in a book”. I think authors must go insane trying to determine what to include and what not to, and really, you can’t please everyone. I do think just doing what you do best, writing as it flows from your brain probably makes more sense. Oftentimes I suspect when something doesn’t seem “right”, it may be because it was forced.
Semicolons? Whatever. I am pretty clueless on the punctuation front. As long as an author uses some. Adjectives? I like those, otherwise how can I imagine the book and make it a movie in my head?
Thanks Tam! Yes, I started out in the genre religiously reading all the blogs and trying to avoid the things that people said they hated. The trouble started when I started to realize that there was no way that I could write anything at all that somebody wouldn’t hate. That’s the point where, as Chris says above, you have to decide that if you can’t please everyone you might as well please yourself. Usually that will at least result in you pleasing some readers too, and the ones you don’t please, you probably never would anyway.
I like adjectives too, but the thing I really couldn’t live without is my metaphors. I’m trying to cut them down to one a paragraph, but it’s terribly hard! 🙂
Great post, Alex! I know we must have a lot in common if you’re quoting from Inception and Babylon 5. 😀
I especially like how you’ve pointed out all the contradictions floating around out there in the m/m genre: alpha/betas yes, alpha/betas no, condoms yes, condoms no. Too funny!
I think you’re right about the “write what you know” being a form of thought control, and I love the rephrase, “know about what you write.” No restrictions there, but it does imply taking that basic responsibility to do the research, and that’s important.
Thanks Val! Hee! I’m glad to know the B5 quote found a fellow fan 🙂 Kosh was such a cool character. And I loved Inception, though now that I re-watch it I wish they had spent less time on the tedious bits with Dom and his dead wife, and more time on the team, particularly on Eames and Arthur being snarky and badass together.
I want to know if anyone in the world tells male writers what they should and shouldn’t be writing about? It would feel less annoying if I could be sure it wasn’t a form of sexism at work.
Wonderful post Alex. I was nodding my head off agreeing with you (as opposed to merely nodding off. 😉 ) As a reader, I love a wide variety of genres, writing styles and characters types. I believe it is possible to sense a genuineness and authenticity (or lack of) from the writer as I am reading. Adjectives? Yes, loads please – so long as they are used to bring settings and characters to life rather than take the place of character and plot development.
I can’t imagine being a fiction writer and NOT writing to please myself first. What’s the point if putting heart and soul into a piece of work if you can’t stand back yourself and say, “yes, yes, well done!” The main reason I didn’t pursue commercial art when I was off to college is that I didn’t want to sit and design what somebody else told me to – so I found another career path I enjoy but still paint and draw as a hobby for my own satisfaction. Is it possible to please yourself, your publisher and your readers? Of course, however I would rather wait for inspired work from a talented author than read something that ends up being disappointing because they churned it out “on demand”. (I do realize some of this has to do with making a sole living from writing vs. not, which is a whole separate subject!)
My hat is off to all of you authors, I can barely compose a coherent blog post here without combusting. 🙂 Seems I really must watch Inception…….
I think there’s an appetite among readers for more variety than publishers are willing to try giving them. You’ve only got to look at the enormous popularity of things like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, or the Lemony Snicket series to see that – as long as the writer can handle their style well – readers love books that bring the language right up in your face and then play with it. I suppose – on the downside – it’s just a lot harder to do well than the stripped, transparent prose.
The main reason I didn’t pursue commercial art when I was off to college is that I didn’t want to sit and design what somebody else told me to
That was very wise of you, I think. That dilemma of how to balance the needs of your heart and soul with the production of something that will be commercial enough to sell is a tricky one to negotiate. Everyone who produces artistic work professionally has to struggle with it, and I feel it’s very easy to gain the world and lose yourself. It’s a constantly shifting balance, and you’ve got to get good at dancing along it 🙂
Inception is worth watching just for the eye candy and the action scenes – Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a sharp suit, beating people up in zero gravity, and Tom Hardy taking out a small army on his own, while being ever so slightly camp 🙂
Thank you for your great post, Alex. I am wrestling with all those things you mentioned, and those in the comments that followed. I never thought writing the second book for publication would be harder than the first. I always hated to conform. That said, I still think you can conform and set your muse free at the same time – I just have to learn how!
And write what you know? Always took that on a broader scale. You just have to know the human condition. I may not be a gay man, but I’m pretty sure they want someone to love them, too. Just like me.
Thank you, Finn! I know what you mean about the second book being harder. There aren’t any expectations on you with the first, either for you to try to conform to or to have to rebel against. I think that part of it actually gets worse each time, though you get used to the pressure in time.
I do agree, there must be a way to do both – to be commercial at doing what you love. But finding the way is a tricky one 🙂
Great post, Alex. I’ve been pondering all sorts of reader comments on blogs this last year about the kind of things they like and don’t like. In the end, I decided it was all so contradictory that I may as well write things that I want to read, and just hope someone else does too.
My muse won’t let me write anything other than gay romance right now, and I can’t see the point in fighting him. Like others have said, though, I write what I know from observing human beings, and the rest just takes a bit of diligent research.
Thanks Josephine 🙂 Yes, I started off reading all the blogs and trying to avoid doing anything that people said they hated. Then I found that there wasn’t anything left!
I absolutely don’t see the point of your doing anything else than writing gay romance. I think your stuff is fantastic, and we could do with as much of it as you care to provide 🙂
You’re too sweet! Thanks for the encouragement and inspiration 😀
Hi Alex,
As a new author, I have bewildered by all the advice, but I have followed one simple thing – I’m buggered if I’m going to stop writing what I love.
Sue xx
LOL! I love that attitude. It is a bit bewildering and sometimes even fraught trying to come to terms with all the advice out there, but it certainly sounds as if you’re going to be fine 🙂
Fabulous post, my feeling is that you have to write what moves you, you can write to a formula, provided you serve your muse at the same time. Stifle your muse and it will produce a story that is ‘flat, unprofitable and stale.’
As for the condoms…well in the C18th they were made of sausage skin – lamb’s intestine and that is just EWWWWWW don’t go there! You have to have a balance between responsibility, and what is historically fitting. As an old bat, who remembers the dawn of the post pill paradise, the attitude back then tended to be that sex with a condom was like taking a bath wearing your socks! Condoms in an MM story set before the early eighties strike me as anachronistic…and we didn’t know about aids until then. In space opera I tend to have some sort of totally bug zapping lube! But what matters in a sex scene is what it tells you about the people involved in it, not the mechanics at all. Josh Lanyon is the past master of this – everyone should read his master class on this from his manual on writing MM romance!
Thank you! I absolutely agree, writing to a formula is quite compatible with writing what you love to write, as long as you love that formula yourself. I’m a total fan of genre fiction, and I think that the ‘formula’ (in the sense of boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy regains boy & they live happily ever after) can actually form a creative challenge that is helpful to an author. It’s only forcing yourself to write to that formula if you hate some aspect of it that can cause problems.
I honestly don’t see what the fuss is about condoms either way. I think there are much more important things for the writers to focus on. Though, of course, whether they’re used or not can be a point of characterization. And it might be fun to have an 18th Century condom in an appropriate novel. I quite enjoy grossing people out with Georgian facts, and the scene where he took it off and washed it and then folded it up again for later would be an amusing one. They did have syphilis to contend with in those days, after all, and that was a killer too.
But yes, ultimately your sex scenes ought to be doing much more story-relevant things than just educating people about safe sex or not.
Like I said, you rock girl. If you want any help with gross out historical facts I am your woman – they were THE way of keeping the horrors I taught under control, cries of ‘that’s disgusting! What happened next?’ were a sign of success. But don’t get me started on the appallingness of the London Dungeon and its trivialisation of the horrors inflicted by the state in the name of justice, I’d need a soap box and a season ticket to Hyde Park Corner!
*g* Thank you! Heh, and I don’t think I ever grew out of that childish horror/glee reaction at some of the funny disgusting things people did in the past. But yes, torture and ingenious, abhorrent cruelty does not fall into the same category for me either.
All hail your exhortation, “So be yourself, and be yourself splendidly! Let’s have some variety, and let’s have some verve.”
I’m stomping and cheering and giddy with “Oh, Very Well Put, Alex!”
*g* Thanks, Lee! You’re definitely one of the people I think of when I think of beautiful prose and a unique style, so I can tell you’re following that one already 🙂
You make me all squirmy! You’re one of the most consistently readable and deeply interesting writers out there — every new book an event in my reading life. Hearing such kind words from someone I respect so much reinvigorates the effort to stay true to myself in my new projects! Thank you.
Thank you! That was really what this post was about, so, hurray!
Great post , Alex!
I particularly love the reversion “know what you write” It’s my pet peeve as a reviewer, actually, when I read a book and get the impression that the author hasn’t done his/ her homework. I don’t know how a sailboat works, for example, and I don’t necessarily want to know, either. But I want to feel at home in what I read, and if something strikes me as not quite right, I’m not above looking it up. When a simple Google search brings about three author’s mistakes in the first paragraph, I tend to get really impatient.
Then again, I’m a new author too, and still awaiting my first edits. I’m curious to see what might be seen as inadequate – I like my semicolons, I tend to form long sentences, and give me adverbs and adjectives any time.
Someone told me once I should trust my instincts with my writing. Your post comes down to the same, and as for me, it’s the best advice ever.
Thanks, Feliz! I completely agree with you – it’s an author’s job to make the reader feel as if they’re in a safe pair of hands. The author does that by knowing enough about what they’re writing about not to make the sort of egregious mistakes that throws the reader out of their suspension of disbelief. If the author doesn’t do the research, then the reader can’t let go enough to be thoroughly immersed in the experience of the book.
I wasn’t really talking about the advice that you will get from your editor. I think it’s safe to assume that a professional editor will know what they’re talking about unless they give you cause to doubt it. I was really talking about the sort of advice you get on “how to write” blogs.
I’ve never had the kind of advice from professional editors that I’ve seen on writing blogs and am reacting against here. Generally by the time you get to a professional editor your book has already been accepted – with the long sentences and stylistic quirks – by your publisher. So you can trust that your editor already likes your book and your style, and will only be pointing out stuff that you would be well advised to think about again.
I hope I haven’t given the impression that I don’t trust editors. I do – at least, I have enormous respect for all the editors I’ve ever worked with. It’s the internet style gurus I don’t trust, and I don’t think they’re the same people at all.
Yes, that’s the core of it, I think. You have to trust yourself. If you’re being published, then you must have good reason to! Congratulations 🙂
Word.
That was lovely, Alex. Thank you for articulating so many complicated, recsonant thoughts so carefully. In fact I JUST wrote a piece about “Knowing what you write” so this meme must be ripe in the zeitgeist! “Writing what you know” has become a sign that’s outlasted its utility and territory. It’s lazy, pernicious advice because it is often misleading and generally offered to people who won’t spot the trap till they’ve been nabbed. Could not agree with you more, even about not agreeing. 🙂
Marvelous.
Hee! Thank you, Damon 🙂 Yes, when I was young and growing up with the dream of being a writer, part of the allure of the thing was the absolute freedom. You could make your own universes and populate them as you liked, creating anything at all that you wanted. I don’t like the idea of people taking that freedom away.
Which doesn’t mean that you should never take advice, of course – just that you should be in ultimate charge of what you take or leave, rather than trying to please all the writing pundits on the planet.
Thank you!