Often, in interviews, I'm asked to give my best piece of advice for beginning writers. I always say something vaguely inspiring and possibly smarmy about believing in your dreams, but upon further reflection, I have come to realize that is far from the best piece of advice I have for writers, beginning or otherwise.
About five years ago, I began teaching poetry, fiction, and multi-genre writing workshops at a community college in Phoenix, Arizona. Since then, I've sold a few books and have been lucky enough to teach writers of all experience levels, from beginning writers to professional writers, at various institutions, universities, and writer's conferences. I've read and critiqued hundreds of manuscripts, and in so doing, have learned that there are a few mistakes most beginning writers make over and over. And if you, like me (and all editors and agents), read veritable scads of manuscripts, bells start going off in your head the second you see those mistakes. Those bells, fair or not, ding-dong out the word "amateur."
I don't stop reading when those bells go off because I love beginning writers. It's my job to teach them how to be better. I'm so glad someone took the time to teach me when I was a beginning writer, and I want to pay the favor forward. But agents and editors? When they hear those bells, you can bet they will throw your manuscript into the "no thanks" pile and move the heck on.
The biggest mistake most beginning writers make? Trying to be too fancy. I've said this a million times to various students, and I'll probably say it a million more. "Never sacrifice clarity on the altar of pretty." Beginning writers have heard the statistics. They know, for instance, that 1 out of every 4,000 books written gets agented, and 1 out of every 10,000 books written gets published by a major publisher. They understand they have to be really good to get noticed. They know they need to do something to stand out from the herd. So what they do almost universally is attempt to show off. They use big words when smaller words will do a better job of saying what they need to say. They use weird punctuation instead of adhering to more traditional rules. I'm not putting these people down. God knows I did the same things as a beginning writer. Just ask my teachers. But still. You asked for my advice. (Ok, you didn't, but someone did, and I finally thought of an answer, so I'm giving it to you.)
Let's start with wacky punctuation. If I had a penny for every time a student has tried to create tension using an ill-placed ellipses, I'd be able to retire from teaching for good. I do not allow my student to use ellipses unless someone dies mid-dialogue. This sentence is acceptable: "When I'm gone, take care of my goldfish," Bob said, "and my beloved golden. . ." Poor Bob died. He expired mid-sentence, hence the ellipses. Bob, you are forgiven for the cardinal sin of ellipses use. Rest in peace, knowing we will take care of your golden retriever, or goblet, or whatever other gold-ish things you have schlepping around this place.
However, this sentence is not acceptable: "Sally had no idea why an ax murderer was crouching in her closet. . ." The tension comes from the ax murderer in the freaking closet, not from the ellipses. For god's sake, put a period at the end of that sentence. Trying to create tension by using ellipses is like trying to be sexy by wearing a leopard print speedo. It's desperate. It's overkill. Just don't.
In other news, don't use a semicolon when a period will do. Don't leave out commas to be cool. Your story will tell itself best if you aren't busy drawing attention to your punctuation for no apparent reason. You dig? Punctuation should be invisible. People should be thinking about your story, not wondering why the hell you used 12 semicolons in your last sentence. (And if you don't know what the traditional rules of punctuation use are, learn them. A writer who wants to get famous without learning grammar and punctuation is like a musician who wants to get famous without learning to play an instrument. You now what we call those people? Baristas.)
What beginning writers don't understand, and professional writers do, is that your first job as a writer is to communicate. Writing is a two man sport. It's always you and a reader. You are always working to make them part of your world. You want your reader to know what is going on at all times, no matter what. Making your words sound pretty is secondary to that goal. Readers will forgive you for not sounding pretty. They won't forgive you for being confusing.
In my classes, I often draw little, terrible drawings to illustrate my points. I'm a woefully ineffective visual artist, but I've never let a minor thing like incompetence get in the way of my aspirations.
At least once a term, I will be driven to draw a horrible river on the whiteboard. I tell my students that river is their story. Then, I draw a boat that looks a whole lot like an ice cream cone. Heated arguments often erupt about whether or not my boat is really a boat. I erase and redraw the boat until the majority of the class agrees it is a reasonable facsimile of a boat. Then I tell my students that boat is the words they put on the page, their narration. They are inviting readers to hop into said boat and allow themselves to be ushered through the world of the story. I draw happy little stick figure readers, gleefully riding in the writer's well-crafted boat, digging the ride, enjoying the story.
"Readers expect to be carried safely and seamlessly through the river," I tell my students. "Every time they have to stop to try to figure out what is going on, they fall out of the boat and start to drown." Here, I draw stick figure readers, drowning grotesquely. Poor stick figure readers. They trusted the wrong writer. Sometimes they vomit as they die. People do that, you know. And it's all your fault, confusing writer. You've broken your contract with them. And readers don't like drowning. If you confuse them enough, they will swim out of your story for good. So before you learn to tell a pretty story, learn to tell a clear story.
What exactly does that mean? It means it's way better to say, "Tom's arm hurt, and he screamed," than it is to say, "Tom's right upper appendage throbbed with the vicious, stabbing brutality that had just been enacted upon his person, and he opened his cracked, supine, vivacious eating instrument and released a blood curdling howl which fell angrily upon the ears of all in the vicinity for miles and miles around that fresh, green, yon valley." (You think I'm being ridiculous. If I had a penny for every time I read a sentence like that, I could retire from teaching for good and buy a modest castle in France.) If a sentence is confusing when it's pretty, get rid of the pretty parts and make it simple. And clear. Clarity is your primary objective.
Sorry. I know it hurts. Kill those darlings, my loves. Whether you know it or not, those things you think of as your darlings right now are likely mutant gremlins looking to eat you in your sleep, working to sabotage your dreams, make sure you never publish anything outside your local church bulletin. You will thank me someday for making you murder the fuckers.
People probably think I'm just talking about prose. I'm not. Poetry needs to make some kind of sense too. It doesn't need to make the linear kind of sense that prose needs to make, but readers do need to walk away from it with some impression of what the hell you were trying to say. You may want your readers to ponder your lines for hours, but you want that to be because your words resonated, because you effectively communicated something that felt authentic to others, not because they had no idea what in the name of all that's holy you were talking about.
Two years ago, three professional writer friends and I went to a poetry reading at AWP. Knowing what we were in for, we sneaked in some whisky in our coffee cups. Thank God. A young writer got up to read. Wearing a beret. She said, "I'm going to read some poems about my feelings and the migration patterns of herons." I'm not making this shit up. We all picked up our pens to scribble the sentence down because it was comedy gold. Then we took swigs of our whiskey and set our jaws, the way you do when you are getting a pap smear, and the only thing to do is stare in stoic silence and wait for the torture to end.
Every beginning writer wants to write poems about her feelings and the migration patterns of herons. Obscurely. The problem is, readers would rather undergo waterboarding than read them. Please believe me when I say this: no matter what your careful readings of "The Wasteland" have led you to believe, obscurity in writing is not a virtue, in and of itself. By and large, people read things for meaning-meaning that is clearly communicated.
The following bit of writing is an example of poems I often get from beginning writers, writers who believe that someday, ardent poetry students will be digging through their works and biography, trying to make sense of the line, "Fish can be good if cookies are bad," when finally, one brilliant grad student will discover that the writer's mother hated cookies, and her dad loved fish. Eureka! We finally understand Gwen! (That's what I've spontaneously decided to name the writer of the upcoming poem.) Sorry, Gwen, my love. Nobody will give a shit about your fucking fish.
I know we've all spent years dissecting James Joyce's obtuse writings, but there was already one James Joyce, and between you and me, one was more than enough. (Here, I apologize to my agent, Andy Ross, who ardently believes that James Joyce was brilliant. Maybe he was. But can we agree that whatever Finnegans Wake's virtues may or may not be, we don't ever need another one?)
Student-of-mine, make your words mean something to your reader, make your lines clear and bigger than self, or you will lose your audience. Again, writing isn't a solitary endeavor. You are always trying to create a connection between you and someone else. Without further ado I give you:
GWEN'S SHITTY POEM
Desk. Moonlight
wanders; my sinking eyes
flit to him as tears course down. Fish
can be good if cookies are
bad. Teapot. . . Brew, brew, brew, little
one, Short and stout. . .My childHOOD. . .Years gone;
yon, yawn, brawn. She looks at me with Heavily
lidded eyes; I dream sex: Sex, sex, sEx. . .
More sex. Phallus palace. My father
was. . .They never knew WHY gravel
turned to stone. Heron calls. Oh,
mommy, the heron calls.
You
Rape
me. . .
Gwen, my little imaginary Gwen, whom I channeled when I wrote that poem and am now beginning to actively hate, that isn't a poem. It's verbal vomit. Within poetry, your words should be connected to one another by a through line of logic. Your nouns/pronouns should refer to someone/something we are consciously aware exists within the world of your poem. Your words must be capitalized for a good reason, and almost always, that reason should be that they fall at the beginning of sentences or are proper nouns. Even in poetry, you cannot sacrifice clarity on the altar of pretty.
Read the best poets you can to get an idea of what I'm talking about. Here are two poems by Grant Clauser, a favorite poet of mine, with whom I was lucky enough to teach at the Rosemont College MFA Retreat over the summer. His work blows me away.
Grant Clauser's Kick Ass PoemsNotice how you always know what Grant is talking about. Notice there is a through line to his logic. Notice that while his poems may cause you stay up all night pondering the meaning of life/eating habits of bats, you never once ask yourself, "What the hell just happened?" You don't have the sick, sinking feeling you've just borne witness to the literary equivalent of a random drive by shooting, one that you will spend the rest of your life trying to make sense of. He does talk about his childhood. He does talk about his feelings. He even talks about winged creatures. But he does it in a way that engages others, that says something both fresh and universal about the experience of being human. We don't need to dig into his biography and know his dad liked fish (or didn't) to get what he's trying to say.
Also, notice most of Grant's words are little. He doesn't use a "flighted mammalian creature" when a simple "bat" will do. Notice how powerful his work is, in spite of, or perhaps partially because of, his refusal to use fancy language, capitalization, and punctuation. Notice how you want to weep when he says, simply, "And yet we live under a sky/with the miracle of bats-"
Sigh. Poetic power always comes from meaning, not literary sleight of hand. Words move us when they clearly communicate truth that resonates with us, when they give voice to and evoke feelings we have experienced-in this case, awe at the natural world. What if Grant said, "And yet, we reside on a double hemisphered turquoise and emerald ball where flighted mammalian creatures oft take wing." Not quite the same punch, right? Sometimes, most times, when it comes to writing, less is more. Simple is best.
So here it is, my best piece of advice for beginning writers (cue "Wind Beneath My Wings" now): My darlings, my pretty ones, my literary luminaries in the making, be like Grant when you grow up. Please. For the love of all that is holy, never sacrifice clarity on the altar of pretty. Ever.
