This Reads Like a Constipated Volcano

A Literary Laxative Against My Most Heinous Writing Crimes

“No way. Did I really write that? Really? Surely not. I mean, good lord, it barely even makes sense! What, with the cliche imagery, the endless run-on sentences, the agonising  abstractions. None of these characters have plausible motivations for their behaviour. There’s so much exposition happening, I think I’m going to suffocate. Why is this dialogue in all-caps? Why am I describing emotions instead of the actual moment? Do I think my readers are incapable of experiencing their own misery? And how did I convince myself I needed all these semicolons? Is that paragraph still – *gasp!* – it’s still going! Jesus, how long is this story anywa-TWENTY F**KING PAGES! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?”

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Reading my old writing is peak masochism. The melodrama, the cantankerous descriptive passages, the preponderance of qualifiers. (Don’t even get me started on the adverb-adjective-noun combination: “voluminously prolific collection”, “vehemently angry rage”, etc. Alright I just made those up now, but only because the actual quotes are ten times worse.)

I’ll have to explore the many errors of my older writing in some depth, but for now, allow me to plant a short list of dos and don’ts toward guiding both myself in future pieces, and anyone else who’s made the mistakes I have. Making mistakes is all part of what Julia Cameron calls the necessary ‘ugly duckling’ phase we all pass through when we’re new to something. (Just think about how useless you were as a baby. Yet no one looks back and says, “I regret being so small and helpless. I should have been bigger and maturer.”) In fact, I don’t even think improving is about making fewer mistakes: I think it’s about making new ones.

One quick caveat:

I don’t want to be too narrow. I’m not the Boss of Writing Styles; I’m not the Prose Police. In his illuminating text, The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker suggests that, instead of prescribing one exclusive approach to writing, we should explore a wide range of effective writing techniques and simply apply the appropriate ones on a case by case basis. Sometimes, slower and more thorough is better (in an academic paper, perhaps); at other times, simpler and funnier will resonate most with an audience (like on a blog).

This seems sensible enough. Writing is a broad field, and it’d be wasteful to decry certain styles as ‘bad’ and others as ‘good’, when so often the most powerful texts use unprecedented innovations we hadn’t even thought of before. So when I condemn certain styles and praise others, as I will in a moment, I am aware that sometimes the Don’ts on the Naughty List may come in handy, and the Do’s on the Nice List might in some circumstances be very big no-nos.

Costives / Qualities that constipate prose.

Redundancy and verbosity. Repeated ideas, repeated words. Long, complex sentences where shorter, simpler sentences will do. Polysyllabic vocabulary where ordinary words would be fine.

Obscurity and generality. Using abstract nouns instead of physical ones. Focusing on the overarching concepts instead of the actual details of the experience.

Discussing the philosophy is for philosophers; if you want to argue about postcoloniality, for example, just write an essay. It’s far more effective for making a case. But if you want someone to enter the postcolonial world, if you want someone to connect at the level of understanding beyond mere theories, you have to tell them a story.

I don’t want to know that ‘they were angry’; I want to watch their fist tremble, hear their breathing deepen, gasp as their brow sharpens into an arrowhead. I want their eyes to storm. I don’t want to know that ‘the world is a bad place’; I want to know that I live in a world of hit-and-runs outside corner shops, coral reefs fading into mountains of barnacled skeletons, and champagne in the glasses of warmongering billionaires. Okay, I don’t actually want that, but if someone’s gonna say it, I want it more like that, and not like the first thingy.

Over-qualification. Some years back, I thought vivid imagery meant using as many adjectives and adverbs as possible. The truth is, usually, you don’t need any. Rather use stronger verbs, and express what would have been an adjective in a phrase instead. “She was an extremely attractive goddess” doesn’t go quite as far as “Her curls bounced as she walked, and between her freckled cheeks: a cherub grin.” Fewer qualifiers; more strong verbs and pithy descriptive sentences in moderation.

Uniformity of sentence lengths. They say variety is the spice of life. All I wanted to do was gush, one odious giant of a clause after the next. Good gracious, it was basically an obstacle course of words. Utterly exhausting prose. It’s like playing a card game with a deck full of exactly the same card. You just lose interest.

Melodrama and excess. I had no concept of nuance, understatement, or building  big images using little blocks. Instead of “a frown shadowed her face”, I’d write something disgusting like, “a storm of molten fury erupted from a chasm deep within her”. What? Calm down, Nick. It’s frustration, not the apocalypse.

Ponderousness. Meandering scenes, wandering ideas. Most of my earlier pieces just draaaaaaag… Instead of crafting a moment that captures something distinct, or arguing a point towards a forceful, urgent idea, events  and thoughts seem to drift after one another. All dressed up and nowhere to go.

Now don’t get me wrong: descriptive, contemplative styles definitely suit certain modes of writing. Some of my favourite literary moments are in Ian McEwan’s novels, where the sensibility of the character emerges through an elegant consideration of a walk in the forest, or an abandoned alleyway in downtown Paris. But these are rare, fairly short, and purposeful: they serve as breathing room for the reader. In these mellower parts, the events and ideas of previous scenes begin to distill, crystallise and sink in. My crime was not this – I just wrote with no consideration for the reader at all.

Formality and ‘Trying to Sound Profound’. Don’t get me wrong: I genuinely connected with that mythic style. Heroism, courage against the odds, the sheer gravity of facing the world and daring to try and change it. Certain stories gravitate towards an ‘epicness’ that, especially for fans of high fantasy fiction, actually can be quite satisfying to read. But I think on some level I mistook ‘writing beautifully’ to mean parodying a Romantic register. It reads as pretentious, whether I was pretending or not. (After all, do we ever really know who we are? Are we not largely the sum of our influences?) So the point is not to toss the mythic style necessarily, but to be wary that it can be quite alienating. Contemporary writers typically prefer something more conversational, colloquial or at the very least modern: the writing of Victor Hugo, for example, feels terribly outdated nowadays, since it’s always embellishing descriptions with lofty principles of justice and love and the eternal struggle to be good in a dark world. Moreover, some of fantasy’s loveliest faces at the moment – like Patrick Rothfuss – create that sense of Romance and mythology through an eclectic blending of ancient folk songs with a more ordinary prose. You don’t need to sound like you just walked out of a Homerian poem to be deep.

Passive voice. This creates an awkward indirectness which slows the pace, muddies the imagery and blurs the logic of the ideas. Active is faster, clearer and more coherently connected to the ideas that follow. However, passive voice allows you to drop

Laxatives / Qualities that get the prose going.

Economy and simplicity. If you can say it briefly, do so. If you can say it clearly, do so. But clarity and brevity aren’t everything. We also want spice: vivid sensations, a smattering of word-play, variety. A rule of thumb I repeat like a mantra: “As much as necessary, but as little as possible.” Stop guzzling your reader’s time and energy, and give her the gift of a vibrant experience. It’s better for the story, more enjoyable to write, and more considerate to the reader.

Clarity and specificity. Sensory detail is one of great prose’s hallmarks. It’s what gives writing that magical quality, because the writing feels like it’s building a world for you – inside your own head. Other forms of writing must conform to a kind of neutrality, without that sense of immersion, wonder and depth. Writers of literary journalism, memoir, fiction, poetry – we get to quilt observations into textual rainbows.

Effective description. Too little description feels bare, bland and vague; too much is like how my friends describe bad shroom trips. Say enough to bring the world to life with one or two details at best – three at a push – and feel free to allow the reader to imagine the rest of the details on her own.

Varied sentence lengths. Shorter ones are stronger. They speed up the flow of ideas, and have a sort of jabbing rhythm, like a flurry of punches. Medium sentences beat like a heart, nice and steady. They’re standard fare, so feel free to shrink them when you want to hike up the tempo, or grow them to slow things down, tugging your reader through a body of thought, suspending them, building the tension, right before -finally – you drop.

Measured drama and insight. Instead of pulling a younger Nick and vomiting up incendiary conflict scenes one after the next, or burying your poor reader in impenetrable pseudo-philosophy, try play it cool. Build the drama slowly, with scenes that imply their themes. You shouldn’t be punching your reader in the face, yelling, “THIS STORY IS ABOUT EXISTENTIAL DREAD AND THE CONSTANT HEARTBREAK OF BEING MISUNDERSTOOD BY THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE YOU MOST AND ALSO THAT TIME IS AN ILLUSION AND YET WE SPEND OUR LIVES FOREVER TETHERED TO-” and so on.

Stay on point. Tentatively exploring ideas, or crafting a scene that allows for a certain drifting quality – these are powerful techniques. They build trust with the reader, because they sense you’re not panicking to entertain them. You’re simply honestly unfolding an experience, or forging a point of view. But there’s a difference between ‘slow and steady wins the race’ and ‘dawdling for so long that all the other runners are confused, the race is over, and you and the mascot have wandered so far off the track, that the managers of the Olympics have called in Interpol to GPS-track your location.’ Take your reader somewhere nice, and don’t force them to climb over your prose to get to the other side.

Eclectic voices. A little bit of poetry goes a long way. There’s nothing wrong with offering your reader a rose. But there’s no need to drag them through the flowerbeds. Your formal, mythic register might serve a certain type of character perfectly well, but it may also come across as gimmicky and silly. Let the pursuit of authenticity inform the voice of your narrator, characters or speaker.

Active voice. At least for the most part, spare your readers the mission of navigating your reversed sentence. It’s just polite.

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I suppose the style I have in mind is one which summons evocative sensory experiences through mostly active sentences of varying lengths. Without being too blunt, there’s a sense of direction – a definite momentum to the prose. Avoiding the garish, over-the-top grandiosity of anime and Hollywood, the prose seeks out a cooler sensibility from which to sew its perspective. When contemplative, it doesn’t crawl; when urgent, it’s not frantic. Colourful, humxne. It speaks clearly, profoundly, with spice and humility – and then stops.

This, then, is the goal. A fusion of Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Laurie Penny, Timothy Morton, James Baldwin, K. J. Parker. These are the voices in my chorus of inspiration, and I’m going to keep listening. In fact, I’m feeling a lot lighter already. *flush*