In Today’s Journal
* Chapter 10: Final Notes
Chapter 10: Final Notes
As you read this book, you probably noticed I didn’t mention typos or wrong words (e.g., waist for waste) except in passing. But those are author intrusions too, aren’t they?
Well, yes and no. If your story is intriguing enough, engaging enough, most readers will gladly skip over the occasional typo or wrong word without a second thought. Some readers won’t even notice them.
Besides, both typos and wrong words are content problems. Your spell check and/or your first reader—preferably an avid reader who will not try to tell you how he or she would have written it—will catch typos and wrong words.
The problems I’ve addressed in this book have to do with technique instead of content. They are the problems that will easily sidetrack the reader and keep him or her from becoming intrigued or engaged with the story.
But even if you only focused on the bigger problems I addressed in this book, you probably thought at least once, So what, right? Nothing’s perfect.
Of course, that’s true. And chances are good that nothing you ever write will be perfect. Yet every story of any length you write should be written to the best of your current ability—so in the pursuit of perfection.
Perfection is not a realistic goal, yet it’s a quality you should always strive toward. Not with which specific words appear in the content of the story, but with technique: hooks and cliffhangers, openings and resolutions, dialogue, settings and scenes, and character descriptions.
As I’ve often said, in fiction writing, if you master the technique, the content will take care of itself.
So second only to telling a good story in the first place, your job as a writer is to not interrupt the reading of your own work with silly mistakes.
If you overcome the problems listed in this book, and if you’ve written a good story in the first place, your efforts will more readily pull the reader into your story.
Yes, even if the reader is a traditional publisher (ugh) or a literary agent (ugh squared) because more than likely these problems will still plague all the other manuscripts in their inbox that day.
A Final Word
As I write this, I’m almost finished reading a novel—Duma Key—by Stephen King, whom I’ve previously called the only Stage 5 writer working in the United States today.
In fact, I’ve personally learned more about fiction writing from reading and re-reading his work than I’ve learned by reading the works of anyone else, with the exception of Ernest Hemingway.
But in this particular novel, the writer seemed to have stopped caring. I don’t know what “stage” that leaves him in, but it certainly isn’t Stage 5.
Don’t get me wrong. Duma Key is still a good story, by which I mean there were places where I couldn’t have put it down if my house was on fire.
And again, I wasn’t reading consciously, “looking for” things to criticize. As I always do with King’s work, I went into the reading with my sense of disbelief fully suspended. As I read, I was completely lost in the story, fully engaged with the situations and characters. King has a way of doing that.
But there were plenty of places where I lost interest, closed the novel, and found something else to do. Over and over again, the author popped into the story and pulled me back to the present.
And each time I closed the novel, I was a little exhausted from the mental effort I’d expended repairing, reading-around, or skipping-over all the places where the author had popped into the story to tell me the character “could see” or “could smell” or “could hear” etc.
Or all the places where a character, obviously forced by the writer, said unnecessary curse words. Or where a character, again forced by the writer, repeated various “catch phrases,” again unnecessarily. One character even referred repeatedly to the “clip” for his semiautomatic pistol.
C’mon, man! I read somewhere that Stephen King even has research assistants, so how did he get so many things so wrong?
Still, I did my best to absolve my favorite current novelist. Each time he jerked me out of the story, I reverted to my writer-and-copyeditor self and took the time to consciously analyze the passages that contained the mistakes.
After all, sometimes masters of the craft make mistakes intentionally to achieve a particular effect in the reader. And this was Stephen King, so I expected to find that he’d done exactly that.
But no. None of those errors—not one—was necessary or intentional. All of them were only the inadvertent mistakes that any writer might make. And the only effect he achieved in me was to push me out of the story.
Suddenly I wasn’t on Duma Key with the characters after all. I was sitting in my recliner in the living room of my house in southeast Arizona, reading a novel.
I admit, I was sad and a little disappointed that one of my few literary heroes had fallen in my estimation. But more than that, as a writer and writing instructor, I was just annoyed.
Because writers who are learning the craft love to make excuses.
Writers love to justify their own lapses of judgment and errors by pointing out that even the “big” writers do some of the same things:
- Like the woman who said during one of my seminars on Punctuation that she wouldn’t enclose her characters’ dialogue with quotation marks because “Cormac McCarthy doesn’t.”
- But quotation marks signal subliminally to the reader that what he’s about to read was spoken aloud. The fact that Cormac McCarthy doesn’t always use them is no reason for you not to use them.
- Or the man who, during a writers’ conference session on Misplaced Modifiers, wagged his hand, grinned, and said, “Aw, misplaced modifiers aren’t so bad. They’re all over the place in [James] Michener’s books.”
- Again, fine. It’s your work. But the fact that Michener or his copyeditor screwed up is no reason for you to screw up too.
Likewise, saying you should be able to use the sense verbs (saw, could see, etc.) to describe characters’ actions or misrepresent the magazine of a semi-automatic weapon as a “clip” because “Stephen King does it” isn’t a reason.
I would never dream of doing any of that. My readers deserve better.
Besides, when readers discuss my short stories and novels with their peers, I’d like to think they’re discussing the story, not the fact that I didn’t use quotation marks to set off dialogue or the number of times the characters cursed unnecessarily or how the work was replete with misplaced modifiers.
So the fact that “big” writers sometimes make stupid mistakes is no justification for sabotaging your own work.
I hope you’ve taken note of—and will take to heart—what I’ve written in this book. If you do, your craft as a fiction writer still won’t be perfect, but your writing skillset will improve and your craft will leapfrog ahead of your contemporaries.
If there are parts of this book you disagree with or that don’t currently make sense to you, I urge you to reread those parts once or twice a year. What might not have made the little light bulb in your mind pop on the first time you read it might illuminate a point later on, when your skills are sufficiently advanced that you’re ready.
Any questions about anything in these posts, feel free to email me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com.
Either way, I wish you happy writing and a great career.