Two Sherlocks Walk Into a Bar

A while back I advised the writer to never put two Sherlocks in the same scene. Or if they do, they must never talk shop. What I said then I stand by, provided you understand why I said it. Understanding why will guide you should you wish to put ignore my earlier advise.

You should remember that whenever you hear a "rule" it is subject to being overcome by another "rule" just as a magnet's field overcomes Earth's gravity field when iron filings lying on a table fly upward to the magnet when it gets sufficiently close.

When you are writing there are multiple forces in play and those forces may occasionally balance or overcome one another.

The delightful Selena McDevitt last night reminded me of this when she tweeted, "Two experts "talking shop" should be explosive and near violent! They should be like two peacocks fighting."

Consider the psychology of two experts in a room talking shop. If they are male, female spectators may later speak of testosterone poisoning. Experts are justifiably proud of their expertise and will want to demonstrate this. Put two together and each should try to demonstrate his superiority over the other. (Unless one is clearly superior and self-confident whereupon he'll kick back and let the other hang himself.) When rivals vie for supremacy that is conflict and conflict is interesting.

So, in this we have an example of two "rules" that are pulling in opposite directions. The "No Two Sherlocks" rule says keep them apart. The "Conflict is Interesting" rule says, push them together.

This is not necessarily a trade-off or gambit situation, because the way you depict the conflict might not offend (or anesthetize) the reader.

Consider the "why" of the "No Two Sherlocks" rule. You don't want to have Expert A say something about something the reader doesn't understand, whereupon Expert B will reply with something else the reader doesn't understand. The reader doesn't want to feel dumb and the smart writer doesn't want to make the reader feel dumb.

Georg Cantor and Leopold Kronecker were rival German mathematicians of the 19th Century and they had different ideas about infinity. They clashed with great heat and passion. The content of that conflict might find its way into a Neal Stephenson novel (because he tends to include math proofs in his novels), but nowhere else. But one description of their many arguments has stuck with me for decades.

When they fought, the large Cantor would be picked on by the much smaller Kronecker. Spectators at the time characterized their conflict as Cantor trying to get walk away from Kronecker who would chase him around like an angry dog yapping at his heels. This image has stayed with me for decades.

That's why you need a Watson in the room. S/he must serve as the eyes and ears of the reader to interpret the experts' conflict and depict their conflict in terms and images that the reader will understand.

If you are going to put two Sherlocks in the same room and if they are bound and determined to talk shop, then by all means stress the angry dog or the fighting peacocks imagery while soft-pedaling the transfinite number theory content.

A Summary of Mantras for the Writer

This post serves as a central point of reference to which all my writing mantras can be linked ad seriatum.

I started this business of writing down my writing mantras and explaining them with a great deal of energy, and I foolishly bundled five of the mantras together in one long post. A few shorter posts would have been better. I calmed down a bit and I wrote a shorter explanations after that.

#1 Work your opening paragraph to death.
#2 Give no excuse to dismiss your work in the opening pages.
#3 Bracketing a story often works.
#4 So does “in media res.”
#5 Make your reader want to “get on the train” with your characters.

These all bear on considerations of the opening for your story. They may seem self-explanatory, but they're elaborated upon here just in case they aren't.

#6 Evoke sympathy for the hero, then evoke identification with his story goals.

Because I was reading like a writer, I realized there was a method to C. S. Forester's madness when he had everyone be so mean to that nice Horatio Hornblower.

#7 A conjunction weakens an utterance.

In the universe of hard-hitting dialog, you will seldom find a laundry list.

#8 Exile “and” from your poems.

#9 Can your poem be rewritten without “I/me/my”? (Universals are not personal).

I clumped together these mantras because they both deal with something I'm less comfortable with and less interested in: poetry.

#10 Adverbs Are Not Your Friends

#11 Put not your hope in adjectives nor prepositional phrases, either.

#12 Modifiers in general should be replaced with stronger nouns and verbs.

#13 Use a thesaurus as often as you drink Tabasco.

The writer needs a vocabulary. With a vocabulary you can know what word has the exactly-right shade of nuance when you want an action, or when you want a being. A lame vocabulary will cause you to decorate your nouns and verbs with crutches like adjectives, adverbs, and propositional phrases. You can't fix a lame vocabulary by going to the Thesaurus.

14    Minimize use of dialog tags.
15    A bit of body language can cue who’s speaking.
16    As well as the intent of the speaker: interrogator vs interrogate-e.
17    “Proper names can cue who’s speaking, Mulder.” “Is that so, Scully?”
18    But if you must use a dialog tag, use “said.”
All these mantras concern dialog tags. Too many of them make your prose wooden. "With some creativity, you can eliminate all dialog tags," he boasted.

#19 Vary your sentence structure.
#20 If all your sentences start with the same first word, see the previous mantra.
See dull sentence. Bore dull sentence. Bore.

#21 There are no new plots, but there are plenty of fresh characters
Here's where I confess the dark secret that lies behind my first Finding Time story.

#22 In every scene, every character should want something.

The unrequited desires of each of your characters are spurs in their sides, the air beneath their wings, and some other metaphors you can supply. These "wants" pull your story forward.

#23 Conflict is always more interesting than harmony.

Just like contented characters are death to stories, harmony is moribund thereto. You should always have some conflict, even if it's just over who goes through the door first.

#24 Action scenes require short declarative sentences.
#25 Short sentences move faster.

Action scenes are fun and confusing. Clarity of expression is always paramount, but action scenes need to convey the tumult more clearly than whether the chessmen are precisely aligned or how they're feeling.

#26 Alternate slow scenes and fast scenes.
Remember how those action scenes are confusing? A slow scene after it is a good place to explain in detail what just happened.

#27 Show, don’t tell. Depict sensa to the reader and let him/her interpret it.
#28 Show, don’t tell. Witness, do not preach.
The reader likes you to interpret the meaning of a scene as much as s/he likes you to chew his/her food.

#29 Read your stuff aloud at least once
The process of speaking the words aloud gives you the chance to hear unfortunate combinations of sounds that can prove a distraction to your readers.

#30 Remove things that “go without saying.”
If a word goes without saying, you shouldn't say it. Many words can be reasonably inferred.

#31 A character acts toward a goal because s/he is motivated, but faces a conflict.
You have to give your characters reasonable motives for their actions. Combine them together and you have the architecture of the story.

#32 All these mantras have exceptions.
The idea is not that the mantras become false, but that there are domains where they are less effectual, and that there are other mantras that may be more effectual at that point. The wise writer then chooses a trade-off that best improves the story.

#33    Everyone’s writing stinks until they write a million words.
Don't take my word for it Ray Bradbury said it. If you disagree, write a million words and compare your output before and after.


#34 If you are right and the group is wrong, nod, smile and slowly back away.
If you turn your writing group into a debating society, you're missing the point.

#35 If two different groups say the same thing, you really are wrong.
You are in a writing group to hear what the voices inside your head are not saying.

#36 Others who ignore these mantras will get published ahead of you. 
You can do everything right and find someone who doesn't may get ahead of you.

#37 Read like a Writer.
To a writer, reading is no longer a passive leisure pastime, but an opportunity to steal learn.

#38 This list is not finished...

Driving Miss Manuscript

#37 Read like a Writer.

I write and I read. I started writing after spending a few decades reading. Now I read differently.

When I was a tender lad, I'd ride in my car with my dad driving. Mom didn't drive. We'd go over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house. I'd look out the window and take in the scenery, the neighbors, the golfers when the weather was warm, the birds, and an occasional deer back away from the road. Or, as often as not, I'd have my nose in a book blissfully unaware of anything save the occasional bump in the road.

I might look at the radio to find out what station was playing, but I seldom looked at the dashboard. I didn't notice whether the speedometer was 35 or 70 mph. I didn't notice whether any of the gauges for oil pressure or temperature. And I didn't pay much attention to the road conditions, traffic, or signage.

Then I took driver's ed and got a driver's license.

The trip to Grandmother's house changed. We were in the same car with the same parents and the same siblings driving the same road.

But I noticed that Dad would cut the corner when he turned left onto our street. That wasn't how I was taught. And I noticed that I was watching more than just how he turn, but how he solved the navigation problem of where to turn. All those things I did not pay attention to heretofore were now getting noticed.

It is a different thing for a non-driver to be a passenger than it is for a driver to be a passenger. Every so often I'll go up in an airplane with my friend Scott. He is a pilot. I am a passenger. If I ever get my ticket, flying will change, too.

I hope you've experienced something like this yourself. You've had some activity where you've transitioned from mere spectator to participant.

If you write, you should take a fresh look at how you read. When you read, do you notice how the other guy turned a phrase?
Do you notice how characters move through the story?
Do you notice whether they have realistic motivations for their story goals and actions?
Do you see how the various "rules" (or mantras) of writing are obeyed, broken, or played against one another?
Do you recognize the problems the other guy faced in putting his story into words and can you learn from how s/he solved them?
Maybe this is too much work, or it takes the fun out of reading. That's fair and I understand.

You don't have to read like a writer every time, but I'll wager your writing will improve if you read like a writer at least part of the time.

The Spirit is Willing, but the Flesh is Selling

36    Others who ignore these mantras will get published ahead of you.

Years back when I started seriously trying to get a book deal I made the mistake of reading a newspaper. It listed the bestsellers and my gaze lighted upon two of the worthies carrying the torch of American culture by virtue of being bestselling authors: One was a professional wrestler. The other was a pornographic movie actress.

Let that sink in for a bit.

Doubtless these worthies had more going for them than copious amounts of exposed flesh. I'll let others wring their hands about the corrosive effect of such upon the nation's morality.

The point I'm making today is that when these folks sat down to write, the writers mantras I've inflicted upon you were not considered. As you learn to write and try to write better, you'll see where others have flouted what constitutes good writing and have still acquired a book deal.

When some politician gets a zillion-dollar advance, it will not be on the basis of his or her writing chops. The professional wrestler, the politician, and the porn star each have a measure of notoriety that they can parley into a book deal. They have a pre-built writers platform that guarantees book sales.

The lesson to learn from this is not to toss away learning to write and write well, but to keep in mind that publishing is a multidimensional enterprise. What works for one person won't for another. Unless you intend to start taking off your clothes... and getting into the wrestling ring (what? You were thinking something else?) you should put some thought into how you are writing and how to write well.

Despite a certain archness of tone, I'm not really begrudging the successful author who ignores the writers mantras. There's many roads to success and some leverage writing mantras and others do not. You have to decide for yourself how you'll proceed.

The main thing is not to get discouraged when you learn someone else succeeds by taking their clothes off.

You Really Are Wrong, Sometimes

35 If two different groups say the same thing, you really are wrong

The last writers' mantra said not to argue with those in the writers' group who say your prose sucks. The presumption defending the rightness of your prose is a waste of time. You are right and the group is wrong. This makes sense for the reasons enumerated there.

But.

In the town where I live there are multiple writers' groups. I've been known to haunt more than one of them.  For the most part, the folks who go to the group at Barnes & Noble don't go to the group at the Public Library. This is an important distinction.

So, let's suppose you are writing "Lesbian Nazi Cannibals on the Moon." And someone at one group makes a specific complaint that maybe Nazism is not a viable alternative lunar lifestyle. The last mantra provides guidance: thank that person and shut up.

If you really believe your Nazi story works, take it to the other group and read the same passage. If you hear the same specific complaint, from someone who was not at the other group, this is a clue. Ignore it at your peril: You are wrong.

This is a chance for you to learn. People learn by being wrong, owning up to that reality, and figuring out something different to do.

But.

I have a friend at one of the writers' groups I attend who tends to be blown about by every wind of criticism in the group. As a result, he doesn't quite finish anything, but churns. This is the opposite error to make.

When you have people tell you what's wrong with your prose you'll hear signal and you'll hear noise. The wise listener can filter out signal and noise. But that can be hard, even for the wise.

The thing about noise is that it is random. Half the time it'll say you're too hot, and half the time it'll say you're too cold. They cancel out. Consensus-seeking behavior can lead to a groupthink that can make the noise seem very strong. But a different group will have its own different groupthink. So, if you take the same prose to two places, you're likely to have the noise cancel out, and you're likely to have the true signal you need to hear reinforced.

The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Shaft

 #34 If you are right and the group is wrong, nod, smile and slowly back away.

This is a Writers Mantra about writers' group etiquette.

If you are writing in this part of the 21st century, you've probably gotten the news that you should belong to a writers' group and you should run your prose past the other members before trying to publish your deathless prose.

I've been a member of a few writers' groups over the last decade or so and I wish I'd started sooner. You will find  prose that you think is perfectly acceptable can raise objections by one or more members of your writers' group.

Maxwell Perkins has been dead since 1947. In the intervening years no top-drawer editor has stepped in to take his place guiding literary talent through the shoals of a writing career. You need someone to tell you, "that doesn't work." And sometimes you really, really need someone to tell you that you just don't thank Hitler.

This is where a writing group is a very handy thing. Most mothers, siblings, or friends will read your stuff and pat you on the head saying, "Very nice dear." You might as well tape your manuscript to the refrigerator. Instead, you need someone who has an idea of what works or doesn't-work prose-wise. A person who writes is more likely to be that someone.

But there's a potential problem: Suppose you write stories wherein the protagonist solves crimes with two hard fists, and a hot gat. He likes his liquor straight, and his women pliable.

You'll do well if your writers group has a few manly men or right-thinking women (very, very far right-wing women). But you'll fail if the writers' group is chock full of pacifist, anti-gun, tea-totaling, radical feminists.

Writing is not a monolithic enterprise and what's catnip for some markets is dognip for others. And vice versa. A lot of what is called "bad writing" is just writing for a different market: Don't expect to sell your lesbian coming-out memoir to Zondervan.

In the ideal case, your writers' group will be a perfect reflection of your target market.

Often it is not, and that's the point of this mantra.

Holmesian readers expect Sherlock Holmes to draw some remarkable conclusion from something nobody else perceives. A non-Holmesian probably won't notice if this omission. Likewise, Science Fiction readers do not need to have certain SF tropes spelled out. I once had someone complain in writers group that he didn't know what an AI was.

Push this to the extreme. Suppose you are targeting a very narrow niche where everybody in that niche knows certain things and brings to the reading certain expectations. Further suppose that nobody in your writers' group is a member of that niche. You will get an earful.

Resist the temptation to argue. Resist the urge to vindicate yourself. You've asked the group for their opinion, they've given it, and you have to hear it.

Thank everyone for the feedback. You do not have to say aloud that you intend to ignore it. On another day they might be right.

Writers groups can be subject to groupthink. If you bring some prose to the group that's far enough outside their expectations, you'll catch flack because your prose doesn't match the groupthink. Since it's a groupthink, nobody will hear your reasons defending your prose. Thank everyone for the feedback, etc.

This works on the other side, too. When I feel the need to tear into someone who's written prose so wooden it is an insult to furniture I need to pause to ask myself why I think so:

• Am I outside the target market?
• Am I insisting the other write like I would?

If so, I should qualify my remarks accordingly.

Your Writing Sucks

33    Everyone’s writing stinks until they write a million words.

One thing to remember about Writing Mantras is that I steal them whenever I can. This came from Ray Bradbury who had more writing talent in his left pinky than most writers I know (as well as that fellow I see when I'm shaving in the morning).

It is not unusual to create sucky prose. Everyone does it. Does your prose suck? Don't feel bad if it does. You've got a lot of company. CERTAINLY don't stop writing if your prose sucks.

Suppose you wrote a novel and submitted it to someone in New York. And they said, "Go away, this sucks." I'm told that Nora Roberts or someone of her caliber wrote a novel and then after that didn't sell, kept it circulating while she wrote a second novel, and she kept that circulating with the first while she wrote a third novel. She kept this up until she'd written 10 novels. And after she put 10 novels in the pipeline, one of them sold. If we assume each novel was 100,000 words that's a million words.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about how the Beatles played a LOT of music in Germany before they became famous. He figures that if you work at anything for 10,000 hours, you'll become world-class at it. Supposing you write 100 words an hour. And what fool can't write that much in an hour? You can write a million words.

If your writing sucks, you should work at improving it. And you should commit to improving it over the course of thousands of hours of practice. One of the downsides of the ease of self-publishing is that you can publish your worst prose because you think you're ready when you're not.

I thought my first novel was really hot stuff. Now I shudder to think someone might see it. Was it the best novel I could write? Yes. Can I write a better one today? Certainly.

I remember when I was a younger in college. There was this book on the New York Times bestseller list called Raise the Titanic by Clive Cussler. I loved that novel. So, a few months later I looked and saw another novel by Clive Cussler. And another. And a few more over the course of a year or so. I snapped them up and read them voraciously. But I noticed something about a couple of them. The quality wasn't there. One seemed quite amateurish, and the other less so. Yet all the rest of his novels were great.

I didn't surmise this until later, but I figured that the two below-par novels were written before Cussler got his first book deal. And they languished unsold in his desk drawer for who knows how long. When lightning struck and Cussler was a famous, bestselling author, he could pull out those manuscripts for a quick buck. He'd obviously written, and been rejected, and written some more, and some more. One one fine morning he'd hit the magic 10,000 hour mark, or the 1,000,000 word mark and walla. He was producing bestselling prose.

I'd like to know whether the Beatles or Clive Cussler recognized that moment when they'd performed 10,000 hours or written a million words. I suspect they did not.

I don't know if your writing sucks now. I know for sure that it sucked when you started. And I hope that as you've been writing you've been working to improve your craft. It'd be a shame to waste 10,000 hours and not have any improvement to show for it.

It'd be a worse shame if you gave up before you hit that breakthrough when your writing became good.

In The Name Of The Law

32 All these mantras have exceptions.

There is a novel that was written in 1957 and this novel has sold millions. It has remained in print continuously in the intervening years. Last year the book reached #4 on the Amazon Bestseller list.

It is a thick tome and it's prose is ponderous. There are points in the novel where the storytelling just stops so the author can make an extended sermon come from the hero's mouth. This book was universally deprecated in terms of the writing, the morality and the politics it espoused. The repentant Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers called it a remarkably silly book.

It is Atlas Shrugged and it flouts innumerable the principles of good writing while being condemned by conservatives and liberals.

How does it get away with breaking all the rules? What makes this book exceptional

I don't think it is because it is a dystopian novel. Nor do I think it is because of its libertarian politics or the amateurish objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. I think Vernor Vinge's ungoverned stories are better libertarian work.

I think that in this case the novel says something a particular slice of society wants to hear. Maybe not majority of society, but a slice nevertheless. You'll note that one can sustain a lot of book sales appealing to minority opinions.

How about another story that's too long to fit in one volume, but three. In this novel the author goes to the trouble of inventing two different languages. He contrives a backstory that encompasses thousands of years and a half-dozen human and non-human races. Yet it has remained in print for decades.

The Lord of the Rings is also a work that violates conventions. And it also has its own appeal that has kept it in print for decades. Does everyone like hobbits, orcs, and elves? Some do not. Can you imagine being an editor looking at this manuscript in the early 1950s?

Where Rules Work Best or Least

These are extreme examples. You might be thinking, Ayn Rand or J. R. R. Tolkien got away with breaking the rules. This is not the case. When you don't understand the "why" behind the rules, you are a fool not to follow the rules, because you won't understand why you could or couldn't get away with it.
So, learn the rules and understand the rules. Learn why the rules are there and what benefit they lend to your prose. If you understand the domain where the rules provide benefit and where those benefits peter out, you'll be able to flout them.

Ayn Rand spends a lot of words in preaching by her protagonists. And preaching is a turn off--except to choir members. You can get away with preaching to the choir. Some people really, really believe the same thing you do and they want you to validate their opinions and hear you elaborate upon it.

Sometimes rules overrule rules.

However, the primary reason why you can break rules is that they run counter to other rules. Consider the law of gravity. It pulls iron filings toward the tabletop on which they are placed. Iron filings in the presence of gravity don't go flying upwards. But what if you pass a magnet above those iron filings, then they'll go flying upwards.

Just as the law of magnetism overrules the law of gravity, there are instances where one of the writing mantras will be overruled by another writing mantra. The usefulness of physics derives from the fact that you can exactly calculate for force due to gravity, and the force due to magnetism. From there you can calculate which force is larger and then predict whether the iron filings lie on the table or go flying up toward the magnet.

Writing is analogous to this even if it isn't exact. As you are writing, you'll encounter situations where you'll choose between alternative courses of action. These choices may go against the writing mantras we've seen. Hopefully, that's a minority of the time. And hopefully, you'll be aware of the places where the rules don't work or where the rules get overruled by other rules.

The main thing is that these writing mantras aren't a set of restraints as much as a framework you can build upon and use to gain leverage on writing problems.

On Laying Out the Architecture of a Story

31    A character acts toward a goal because s/he is motivated, but faces a conflict.

This is one of the most strategic of Writer's Mantras. Tom Clancy says that fiction differs from reality in that fiction must make sense.

And the sensible thing for a protagonist in most stories is to walk away, and avoid the heartbreak of being torn between Miss Right and Miss Baxter, and avoid getting shot at by villains, and avoid crying when Ole Yeller dies.

So, what keeps your protagonist in the game? Don't tell me, tell yourself and remind yourself as you're writing your story.

For example, let's suppose you're protagonist is Dagney Taggart and she wants to make her family's railroad business a success. That's easy enough. Just make the trains run on time. And if you write a story of trains running on time delivering goods safely and efficiently where they're needed and keeping customers satisfied, nobody will be interested.

To make things interesting, you add conflict. In the case of Taggart Transportation, two problems arise. On the one hand, Dagney can't get high quality metal for rails and bridges. On the other hand, gubmint regs are making it impossible for her to do business (but if you grease the right palms, you can make these problems go away). To add insult to injury all your best people are disappearing.

The motivation to keep her family business intact and profitable pulls Dagney along through the twists and turns of the plot. Along the way she discovers a mystery and starts putting together clues of a general strike being waged by the makers against the takers. Happily, she doesn't have to sit through any long sermons by John Galt, so she remains engaged in pursuing her goal.

(If you don't know what I'm alluding to, find out who's John Galt.)


Most people aren't interested in reading long political diatribes. If you don't believe me, have you read the Unabomber's Manifesto? Or Earth in the Balance?

Many more people will read a story. We all face trouble in our lives. Some have more trouble. Others have less trouble. But everyone has some trouble. We can identify with someone else having trouble and trying to work through it. So, we keep reading. Will Dagney Taggart find out why all the greatest minds of America have gone missing? Will she escape the parasites who infest her life? Will she make the trains run on time? We want to know, and to find out we'll keep on reading despite the polemics along the way.

The novel I'm alluding to is fairly heavy-handed propaganda. It is more pornography than truth. But this mantra is not about telling the truth, but of laying out the architecture of a story. So, look at your current writing project and answer:

• Who is my protagonist?
• What is her story-goal?
• What stands in her way?

With these answers in mind, you need to weigh them:

Does it make sense for someone, and in particular a person like your protagonist, to pursue such a goal?

How about the obstacle? Does it seem daunting? It should be.

In motivation theory a person will be unmotivated by a trivial task. As the task becomes more difficult the motivation rises. For me more difficult problems are more interesting. But if the task becomes ridiculously impossible, people naturally give up and become unmotivated again. In your life, you'll be most engaged in the problems that are near the upper-limits of your capabilities. Try to live there if you can.

When you're writing, you want to show your protagonist going against an obstacle that is seemingly impossible. The more impossible the better. You want the reader thinking, "Gosh, if that ever happened to me, I'd just curl up and die." And then you've got to use your cleverness as a writer to devise a way for your protagonist to NOT curl up and die, but overcome!

Avoid the dreaded deus ex machina when you do.

A Word Is A Terrible Thing To Waste

#30    Remove things that “go without saying.”

Consider these sentences:

John removed his hat from his head.

Joan had never done something like this before in her life.

The reader can reasonably be expected to know that hats are worn on the head, as opposed to the knee, wrist, ankle, or elsewhere. Moreover, unless your story is about reincarnation, a person has no other lives in which to do something like that.

John removed his hat from his head.

Joan had never done something like this before in her life.

These sorts of accretions on your prose generally come about when you're dashing off prose. When you turn the words in your head into the words on paper, you can easily hold a couple things in mind where only one should be written down.

This is an easy thing to find and fix. The easiest and best editing is often done with just the delete key.

I think that well written prose is something like a Japanese painting where each stroke of the brush contributes to the picture with nothing extraneous added. Remove everything that is not needed and no more. You know what should be conveyed to the your target reading audience. That knowledge should reflect what you put on to the page.

Some readers need a few more clues than others. When I was in high school, I didn't appreciate the one Hemingway story I had been assigned because I hadn't lived enough to put it in its proper context. Sure I grasped the atmospherics of a gray Michigan weekend in late autumn, but not the alienation of breaking up with a fiance. (This is why you don't want to assign Hemingway to high schoolers.)

What went without saying to a serious adult was lost on a callow youth such as myself. Some cultural referents may be missing from your audience. What is obvious to an American reader may fly over the head of a British reader. or vice versa.

You may cut too much, but this is the exception, not the rule. If there are two things in your prose that support the same point, look for the one which best makes your point and cut the rest. If there's something your reader can reasonably infer from the rest, delete it. Every word must contribute enough to the story to justify the reader's time spent reading it.

Though you might cut too much, but you should cut nevertheless.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

#29    Read your stuff aloud at least once

Sometimes a surplus of sibilants sneaks into sentences. Or an annoying alliteration afflicts your prose. The words you type have sounds to them that may not be apparent to you when you compose them. The process of speaking the words aloud gives you the chance to hear unfortunate combinations of sounds that can prove a distraction to your readers.
You are more familiar with your words than your readers are. You know both what you put onto paper, and also what you did not--the stuff you considered putting onto paper, but decided against. This can get into your way in a few ways.

For one thing, you can devise a sentence that is perfectly clear, albeit complicated. And thus the sentence goes on and on treading down one rabbit trail and up another. In your head, all the pauses are perfect and the delineation between clauses are clear. Trouble is that the sentence is too long and complicated to be grasped as a whole by someone who does not already know what the sentence intends to mean.

When you read such a sentence aloud, you'll find yourself stumbling over words. This is a clue. Or you'll find yourself out of breath before you're halfway through it. Or you'll botch the phrasing and pause someplace mid-clause. These are also clues. Simplify that sentence.

When you're writing your attention may wander or distractions may cause a word or punctuation to go missing. Likewise, your sense of grammatical correctness may nod off momentarily. Reading your prose aloud will bring these omissions to light.

Likewise, when you're editing your work, your eye may skip past typos. You are more familiar with your work than anyone in the world, and your eye can slide over niggling details. When reading aloud your tongue, which moves much more slowly, will trip over them.

There are text-to-speech programs out there. I've never tried using them to vet my prose, but I think it would be an interesting experiment. If anyone reading this has ever performed an experiment like this, please let me know whether it worked as well as reading it aloud yourself.

Show and Tell Is The Game I Play

 #27 Show, don’t tell. Depict sensa to the reader and let him/her interpret it.

The advice "Show, don't tell" is one of the first things you'll hear when you start talking to folks about writing. OK, let's unpack what that means.

Reality presents itself to human observers through the five senses. Each of those senses work a little differently with each individual. My eyesight is better than my wife's and it's not as good as it was when I was a kid. And I can hear better from one ear than another. Sensa are the sum total of everything that comes to the observer through the five senses.

After sensa are presented to the observer the mind interprets it. Interpretation is where we decide what sensa means, and where we contextualize and link sensa to every other concept in the mind. Interpretation does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in the sum total of the observer's experiences. The woodsman who's spent decades in the forest stalking game will interpret bent blades of grass and disturbed soil. He'll interpret these things differently than a city-dweller who might be completely oblivious to the significance of the same sensa.

We continuously encounter more sensa than will ever fit on the printed page. The job of the writer includes figuring out all the sensa in a scene and deciding which of them s/he can record in prose. When I write anything, I have in mind a point of view character. If that POV character is a city slicker, s/he will be oblivious to bent blades of grass or disturbed soil. Conversely, a woodsman will notice such things.

I think that the POV character can provide a little interpretation for the reader, but not much. The woodsman can read the signs and tell the reader they are fresh bear tracks. Of course, if the reader is an expert woodsman, he may not appreciate being told the obvious. Your reader's expertise will determine what's obvious and what's not. If you interpret the obvious parts of a scene for the reader it can be like pre-chewing someone else's food. Unappetizing.

You have to trust your readers to take the prose you put before them and come to understand what's going on.

#28 Show, don’t tell. Witness, do not preach.

I am a Christian, and an Evangelical to boot. Part of my religious background includes an emphasis on communicating the content of my faith. Evangelicals are encouraged to witness to non-believers. Sadly, this does not happen very often. Instead, a lot of my zealous coreligionists preach too much. And this is a mistake.

When you witness in a court of law, you describe what you've actually experienced. If that experience is of a religious nature, your interlocutor may deny your sermon more easily than your experience.

The same goes for your writing.

When you write about some element of your story--a girl for instance--you can say she's beautiful, or intelligent. But these are summary statements. It's better to describe the shape of her face, her eyes, lips, complexion...all of the things your POV character would sense that contribute to an impression of beauty. Likewise, an intelligent girl will use bigger words, solve mathematical problems, or do other things smart folk do.


You may have some deep insight into the way the world works. There are certain facts that brought you to this insight. Trot them out in the sequence that will lead your reader to the same conclusion.

But you can't be heavy-handed about it or you'll come off as propaganda.

Only Commies like propaganda.