How To Write

Writing is one of humanity’s most revered pastimes. Practically every human civilization has had a written culture, even the stupid ones that lived in caves, and hit themselves with rocks all day. And there has never been a better time to get into the field, considering the availability of paper today. However, one doesn’t become a great writer overnight. It can take many years of practice to refine the art; over the course of my study, I have found several rules of thumb, which I will now refine, so as to bring writing into a wider circle of use. If these tips don’t make your writing interesting, then you ought to try harder. Either that, or become a banker like your mother said you should have done all along.

1.Use metaphors often. A metaphor is the best thing to add to any lackluster piece; you can take any dry, declarative sentence, and make it shine using a metaphor. Consider the phrase:

“Our marriage has fallen apart.”

This sentence gets the point across, but it’s depressing. There’s a lack of excitement and depth to it. Now, try adding a metaphor:

“Our marriage has fallen apart, like a poorly built bicycle that your inept, drunkard father made you for your tenth birthday.”

2.Remove all ineffectual, filler words. There are plenty of words in the English language—at least a hundred or so. Not all of them are going to excite your reader. Unfortunately, they can still come up in our prose, and weaken its critical impact. Keep a sharp lookout for these words, and delete them whenever you can. For example:

“The car veered off the road, and caught on the guardrail, catapulting his wife into the Connecticut woods. The authorities later found her, face-up, beneath a cedar. She was kind of dead.”

This passage starts to pick up steam, only to lose it all in the final sentence. But, through strategic replacement, we can exchange passive adjectives for dynamic, action words. Try this on for size:

“The car veered off the road, and caught on the guardrail, catapulting his wife into the Connecticut woods. The authorities later found her, face-up, beneath a cedar. She was very dead.”

Wow! You can almost feel how dead she is! That’s the hallmark of great writing.

But before you can come up with sentence structure, you have to have a subject. This is one of the cardinal rules of literature, along with “Publish your book in English.” Many famous authors, when asked how to write, will respond “Write what you know.” They are lying. They want your work to fail, so they’ll stay famous, and keep all of their money. Writers are naturally greedy people. Think about what you know: you had grape nuts for breakfast, then cut off someone on the way to work. No one wants to read about this. Ordinary life is boring, which is why people read: to escape that boredom. Many will cite Ernest Hemingway as a counterexample to this. However, what these critics don’t consider is that he is dead. A better writer would still be alive, eating grape nuts, and passing cars in the break-down lane. So, if you’d like to keep your work interesting, go with what you don’t know. When in doubt, always keep your writing full of action. Consider this scene:

“I was walking to class today, when I found a quarter on the sidewalk.”

This is a start, but it doesn’t actually go anywhere. Add some dynamic language:

“I was walking to class today, when the volcano erupted and I had to save the orphanage.”

Pow! Bam! This is what your writing is saying, in not so many words. Also, the orphanage adds a personal, emotive element to the story. Emotions influence people, thus making them like your story more. Many feel that a lack of emotion was what kept such historical books as Moby Dick from reaching a wider audience. From the very opening, it’s cold and impersonal. Melville begins:

“Call me Ishmael.”

Well, that’s a fine way of making the reader interested, ordering him around like that. Also, it confuses the audience, because as we know, his name was Herman Melville. This detracts from his credibility, which is very important to an author. But, with even a simple change in punctuation, we can add emotion to this lifeless sentence:

“Call me, Ishmael.”

Suddenly, the phrase is interesting. We want to know who Ishmael is, and why he’s been giving Melville the cold shoulder. From there, all Melville had to do was mention a whale, and his book would have been a best seller. Still, it’s good that authors like him have made their own mistakes, so that we can look back on their work, and know what not to write.

I’ve already cautioned you against writing realism. Simply put, realistic writing doesn’t appeal to today’s markets. However, if you’re absolutely bent on describing the world as you see it, there are a few rules to keep in mind.

1.Swear as often as possible. Every realistic novel has to have a gritty, foul-mouthed tone, that convinces the reader of its reliability. If you’re against having particular characters curse, write a character into every scene that will do the swearing for them. Think Al Pacino in Raging Bull. Shakespeare, though widely read in his time, is considered boring by today’s standards. Over the course of his dozen and more plays, he swears less than half the equivalent of five minutes in any Quentin Tarantino movie. One of Shakespeare’s most quoted lines is Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be.” This underscores the dichotomy of the prince’s world: he’s caught between opposing wills to live, and to perish. Shakespeare’s writing doesn’t convey any of that sense of struggle. Coming from the pen of a better writer:

“To be, or not to be. Fuck that.”

That’s expressive. To be fair, Shakespeare didn’t have a wide range of curses back in sixteenth century England. The worst swears were like “prithee,” or something. So, we can’t blame him too much. Still, it’s impossible to overestimate the importance a few, well-placed f-bombs would have had in the Bard’s writing.

2.Pick very depressing topics. When we say writing is “realistic,” we don’t actually mean that it conveys life as it is. We mean it’s sad. A work like Tolstoy’s War and Peace is realistic, because it concerns war, and main characters being killed. In order to make your works more realistic, terrible things should happen to the protagonist, ideally in the first few sentences. Say you’re writing a novel about a girl who dreams of being a figure skater. You have a premise, but you’re stymied in terms of plot: what is she going to do, besides skate, and occasionally dream? Add some realistic touches to deepen the novel: she dreams of being a figure skater, but then gets cholera. This is both realistic and emotional. Already, I want to know: what’s going to happen to her? Will she live long enough to make her Olympic dreams come true? But that’s your story, not mine.

Writers will always tell you to pick your own unique stories, and add personal touches to the writing. Again, writers are heartless, lying bastards. If you really want to succeed, there’s no better way than emulating everyone else. Say you’re writing this figure skating novel in the summer of 2003—no one is going to want to read about that. They’ll be too busy talking about The Da Vinci Code, which has just captured the nation’s imagination. If you can work its themes into your own text, you’ll sell books. And changing the plot details is the easiest thing in the world: she could be on her way to the ice rink, when all of a sudden, she finds a dead body next to a copy of the Mona Lisa. And then you have a best-seller.

When writing your book, you’ll probably face the biggest problem for all professional authors: how to end. The one pitfall to avoid is ending your book too early— often, writers can run out of ideas quickly, and end their work on short notice. This can only hamper the book’s potential. Charles Dickens often ran into writer’s block—imagine if he had brought his classic Tale of Two Cities to a hasty conclusion:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. THE END.”

There’s no way, short of monstrous font size, that Dickens could have filled a book with that. However, he went on to write thousands more words before the novel’s close—more words, in fact, than might have been necessary. He used a very simple strategy, which I will pass along to you: when in doubt, look at your title. Dickens, unable to write further, turned back the page of his manuscript to reveal the title. “Ah!” he might have said, slapping his face, “A Tale of Two Cities! I’ll write about cities.” And so he did.

Another way to add text to your novel, while feeding your potential family, is to loan your text out to advertisers. Some critics would call this tactic “selling out”. These people are probably Communists, and, at the very least, drive Volkswagens. Thus, their opinions don’t matter. Still, there are rules to be followed when advertising in novels, and one can risk coming across as too commercial. Consider this example of an advertising faux pas, written into