Old Stories and Future Glory

As an AA member (Adverbs Anonymous), I felt we needed to take a break from the broad stuff and get right into the nitty-gritty of good writing.




Look. We all make mistakes. Writers just tend to make a few more than the average person.

As someone who has been writing for most of their life, I can attest to the fact that, yes, people and their words change. A writing style is not something a person is born with. Stephen King did not emerge from the womb with his forefinger punched against the italics key; Ray Bradbury's first complete sentence was not a simile between an insect and a machine. These styles are difficult to conceive and take decades of work and redrafting to evolve into something consistent. That's not to say you should never experiment with your style: if you tend to write direct and uncluttered prose, try flowering it up a little and see if you enjoy it. Writing doesn't always have to be a heel-dragging exercise in tedium. It should be enjoyable, if done right.

That's why we're going to talk about the actual writing today. I'm not going to delve into the mechanics of it, as the Internet offers countless lessons on grammar and syntax (and no, I am not referring to the pretentious English major who feels compelled to leave "it's 'you're'" on every solitary video and post containing a grammatical error). The only advice I have on the subject is to not use an adverb in every sentence. My brush with purple prose was long and agonizing; in fact, I'm still recovering from that dark period in my writing history.

Writers, generally, go through certain phases as they learn the craft. These include the purple prose phase, the poetry phase, the dark phase, and the adventure phase. While these epochs, when reflected on, make teeth clench and curses fly, they are imperative to the process of becoming a decent writer. You have to make mistakes. You have to be embarrassed what you wrote last year, last month, last week. Writers are often highly self-critical and while this is often damaging in regards to appreciating our own work, it can actually be a useful tool in weeding out the good from the bad. So, let's get started with a little humiliation of my own.

I will post five excerpts from five pieces of work I've written over the past five years and evaluate the good and bad. No, this is not going to be fun for me, but it will be a helpful exercise for anyone who wants to learn what they can gain from their past mistakes.

This was a short story called "Departed", originally written in 2010.

"Fredrick was absolutely shocked and horrified over the death of his wife. He spent almost three years in mourning, while Ashley grew up, mostly alone, to be four, while her father spent most of his time locked in his bedroom. She knew how to be alone, she made up stories and games to pass the time in her own room.
  When Ashley turned five, Fredrick brought home a few of his friends. The little girl, with bright blue eyes, yellow pigtails, and a bright pink dress, was sitting at the dining room table, doing her homework. When she saw the unfamiliar men, she quickly went to her room to work. Fredrick forbid her to come downstairs, until the morning, as the other men took out bottle after bottle of alcohol."

This was during my dark phase, where everything was tragic and terrible, and most of my stories involved a cute little girl and an abusive father (the source of this obsession is still unknown, as I have two loving parents who believe in a gentler form of corporal punishment). Let's look at the flaws: abuse of the word "while", comma splices, static characters pulled from Hallmark movies, repetition, monotonous sentence structures. Anyone who can coerce themselves to read the rest of this horrific story will find the rest to be just as shallow and unprofessional.

However, there are a few glimmers of potential. The passage contains some good material that could eventually be developed and reshaped into something better. There are a few adjectives and adverbs (although not quite enough to make the excerpt interesting), and the makings of a decent story. While this is the roughest piece of work I had from this dark period to offer, I posted it to show you that nothing is hopeless. If I had been so disheartened by the quality of it that I stopped writing, my style and abilities would have never developed to the standard they are today. Pick out the flaws in your writing and fix them, be embarrassed: just don't lose hope.

This was a fanfiction entitled "Leave Me Your Light", originally written and published in 2011:

"She's never run this fast before in her entire life. Every time the sole of her sneaker hit's the concrete, it keeps her heart pounding, her blood pumping to the rhythm of the Earth twirling beneath her, her hair gliding in a dark streak against the night sky. Rain floods the ground beneath her, oozes between her red Converse-clad feet, which splash haphazardly through the rain puddles. You'd think someone running away from an orphanage would be quieter, more sneakier on the run, but she doesn't care. Jez runs beside her, silent, almost like a shadow that slips between rain drops, diary in hands. 'Are we safe?' she finally asks, just as she discovers that if she were to spread out her arms, she would fly away.
  'We're safe for now,' is Jez's response, a statement that grounds Amanda back down to the concrete, her arms pumping to her sides now, too afraid to spread them out: she can't take flight, just yet."

The first sentence contains a grammatical error, which is just the tip of the grimace-inducing iceberg that is this story. It's a mawkish, uneven macrame of romantic platitudes and half-borrowed images from the YA novels I eagerly consumed during this era. While there are fewer comma splices, the comma is still flagrantly abused; this was, however, before I was introduced to the true power of the semicolon (which would later be abused just as frequently as the comma). The sentences aren't fluid, the tone is indistinguishable, the pacing is awkward: it's almost as bad as the first passage.

However, let's look a little closer. The use of adjectives gives the excerpt a little color; "to the rhythm of the Earth twirling beneath her" is a phrase I would still consider decent by my current standards. There's a lot more description, which consequently provide more insight into the characters and their motives (although you should not follow in my footsteps and say "you'd think  someone running away from an orphanage would be quieter"). And though the dialogue and emotions are maudlin, they are so much more realistic than the "she was lonely and that's pretty much it" attitude of the first passage. See-- there's always more to learn.

This was a half-completed novel called "The Hallway", first started in 2013:

"'Jay, can we break into the liquor cabinet? I'm so shaky.'
           'Read my mind,' he said, eagerly hopping off the dinette chair that he had shoved against the buffet. His parents had renovated the basement to accommodate the entertainment center and extensive collection of fine wines, vodkas, and liquors. The bar, an oak countertop polished until it glistened and glass shelves stocked with innumerable bottles, was the hub of their activity. 'Lars, you want a screwdriver?'
             'Yeah. Yeah, and a shot of whatever you gave us last week.' Lauren twisted her turquoise ring around her slender finger, so tense that Will himself could sense the hairs on his neck stirring. 'Hank, please come back. Jay didn't mean anything, he was just playing around.'
            'I'm not drinking. I don't want to, Lauren.' He was balancing his forehead against the glass, refusing to meet eyes with any of his friends. Jay mumbled a myriad of playful obscenities aimed at Hank as vodka cascaded like a vermillion ribbon into the shot glasses."

This may not be the best example for 2013, as this was a project I labored extensively on for the better part of a year before giving up halfway through and falling into a deep creative rut. However, it provides a decent snapshot of the creative metamorphosis I underwent between 2012 and 2013. This was a period marked by my instruction under an English teacher who was quite lax when it came to our workload, but very insightful in regards to literary interpretation. He was very encouraging towards my writing: in fact, I gifted him the first draft of this very project on the last day of school. Another inspiration came from Stephen King (yes, I know, I am incapable of making a blog entry without dropping his name), who was one of the first truly good story-tellers I came across. I read the only King book my father would let me have-- Misery-- religiously and started modeling my style after King's.

This is an early passage of the book, taken from the first six pages. It has several flaws: the prose flirts with the clunky, cluttered verbage of purple prose. The sentence structure is still somewhat awkward and the dialogue, though less colloquial due to this being a more dramatic scene, doesn't flow quite right. In spite of its problems, this piece of writing demonstrates the flowering of my writing ability. These characters go on to endure much development and the writing itself is skinned down into something more readable.

Because let's be honest here: I'm never going to finish this project. I don't have the patience to go back and edit it into something better. I want to move on. I want to write something better, something that reflects where I am now and what I have to say presently. But by going back and reading it, I gain something: inspiration. Whenever I'm in a slump and believe I'll never improve, I return to this abandoned project and remind myself of how much I've improved over the years. And then I'll think to myself: There's no reason why I can't improve just as much in two more years. And two after that. It's all about perspective, ladies, gents, and everyone in between.

This was a novella entitled "The End of the Whole Mess", originally written in 2014:

"'Did you have fun with Misty last night?'
Dad had finally reached a state of coherency. The color in his stubbly cheeks was receding back down into his neck, which bore a resemblance to an enormous plug of licorice. I guess it was because he was a stockier, broader man, but that didn't cease the inevitable marveling at the nature of his blood-red neck. 'Yeah. I mean, I think she's more Julie's friend than mine, but, ya know… she's really nice. And honest. And funny.'
'Really?' He swerved to avoid the never-ending light, strung across the road that would lead to Main Street and the shopping center and the hospital where Julie was born. Our pitiful subdivision was only a stone's throw from this three-way intersection. If you cut through the thick, scrubby patch of woods corralling us from the remainder of civilization, you could be at the Walgreens within five minutes to grab a can of soda or magazine or bandage because you've just accidentally sliced your palm open with a pencil and your sister won't stop alternating between screaming and cackling. 'She seemed very polite. I like her a lot more than some of Julie's other friends. Like- - who's that girl? Emma?'

There's a lot to be said about this passage. While the narrator is intended to be a teenage boy with a knack for writing, it still reads too much like a "book": a little too wordy, a little too precise. Certain words are misused: "remainder of civilization" should be "the rest of civilization" and "at nature of his blood-red neck" should just be "his blood-red neck". As you can see, I was still susceptible to dressing up my writing for the sake of it looking good, rather than sounding good.

Otherwise, this is not a bad piece of work. There's detail to paint a clearer picture of the setting (something I struggle with tremendously); the dialogue flows a little better, especially for the narrator, who is anxious and has difficulty expressing himself verbally. Though I don't particularly like the way it reads, I still enjoy the comparison of his father's neck to an enormous plug of licorice. That's the sort of unique metaphor I search for in other people's writing and my own.

By picking out the flaws, I can now scan my current projects for similar issues and remove them. By picking out the highlights, however, I can celebrate a tiny victory. Writers are so hard on themselves and are motivated by a deep-seated hatred of everything they've written before this very moment in time, but that doesn't have to be the case. Look back on your old work. If you see a diamond in the rough, be proud of it. You wrote that, after all. Enjoy it.

This is the opening to my first published short story, We Burn the Bridges, originally completed in late 2014:

They woke the world.

In the febrile starbursts of daylight, their Ford was a shadow, a form profuse in size but lacking in definition. They wove through the volcanic slants of radiance like a needle lacing through a tapestry of violent orange and visceral crimson. The sun loomed, a tarnished coin framed and plated against a sky of deep, citric red. Below it, the city rose.

First in low stone walls and graffiti-daubed storefronts, then in majestic peaks and glass-eyed apartment complexes. Their exteriors were frosted with gossamer shrouds of mist that clung to the cement with the delicacy of wedding lace. It would have been a romantic sight had these buildings not been gutted and in the throes of such a decadence that not even the crows would rest upon their weary ledges and parapets. At ground level, where the fields of concrete grew wide and grey, there was almost nothing left to wake. 

While this passage does lean towards a certain purple tint that later evaporates with the introduction of the characters and plot, this a piece of work I'm quite proud of. By starting off with a hook (which we will discuss in a later post), I lure you into this world of reds and greys, where I paint you a vivid picture of the surroundings. The connotation of certain words like "tarnished", "visceral", "gutted" foreshadow the story's violent, fiery climax. Though the Apocalyptic Wasteland is a trope that has been exploited far too frequently, it leaves you wondering what happened and why a Ford is waking the world.

Comparing this passage with the first I published is a little overwhelming for me. The passage of time is so abstract that we don't perceive its gravity until we compare two things separated by a short course of years. It's like looking at a photograph of yourself from middle school and feeling a little burst of self-confidence. You think you're beautiful now. You think you're at the best you'll ever be. And while it's good to have these feelings, remember that the photos you take and the stories you write and the sketches you draw now will never live up to the standards of yourself one year in the future. So don't try to please that person. Please your present self, because you'll never, ever be that same person again. Until next time, comb through your old work. Pull up ancient Word documents. Tear through middle essays and poems. And, above all, write for yourself. 

For a tool to help you weed out excess adverbs or complicated sentences, I recommend http://www.hemingwayapp.com/