and I didn't really wanna, but I gotta post bro, its almost my job. So here is a Sunday post that no-one will read so I can post but avoid the shame.
How do I learn to write better prose?
And don't just tell me to read more and pay attention when I'm reading.
And don't just tell me to read more and pay attention when I'm reading.
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Ok Liberal prophylactics first.
No-one is ever 'good' at the arts. The moment you achieve a meaningful level of skill and understanding of something, whole new vistas of possibility open up in front of you and now instead of being good at what you have been doing you are bad at what you will be doing.
I can only tell you what I know. That may not be what you want to know, or what you need to know, but that is what I have. Accept nothing without thinking about it for yourself and regard it as a toolkit rather than scripture.
People won't care anyway. Being good at prose is not like being the worlds best brain surgeon or plumber where people know and care that you are good. Instead people will be partially alienated from you and vaguely pissed off that you are doing things they can't quite understand.
Most people did it different ways. Anyone who ever got any good was basically putting things together in their head their own way. Writing is like sports, not like A sport, but like all sports. There are a lot of ways to be good. You might be the worlds best weight lifter, or the best horse rider or deep diver, and there would still be lots of things you were rubbish at. Sometimes, especially with the genres, you have to find the thing that you can do well.
ANSWERS
The way I write is mainly down to feel and fiddle.
So I hold the idea in my head, all at once, and then lay it down. When I write it’s more like doing carpentry or fitting smooth pieces of something together than it is like anything else.
It’s like there is a way each sentance wants to be where all the sounds and meanings fit right and do what they need to do. It’s like it wants to become that thing and you are just finding the way that it has to be and the sensation is like the 'ah ha' feel you get when you have been fiddling with a complex piece of technology or a made thing for a while, looking back and forth to the manual pressing it and squeezing it, moving the bits around and then it goes 'click' and you can see that it has fallen into place and everything is where it needs to be.
Then once it’s down, I look at it and fiddle about with it sometimes, usually taking things out or moving them around a little.
So how do you get 'feel' and know what parts should be where?
Poetry
I read poetry, not a huge amount but I have a shelf full and reading that and 'hearing' it and understanding how it works is super-useful.
There is a book by Stephen Fry called 'The Ode Less Travelled' which is probably the best, most direct education in how the structure of poetry works. The best thing about it is that it has exercises in it which force you to make your own poems in various structures.
I accidentally used pen instead of pencil in my copy and am too afraid to look at is because I would have to read my own poems (I am not actually good at poetry) but it’s one of the few books I have kept on me.
The most important thing about this is the work you have to do in your head when you pick up words, sounds, phrases and spaces with your brain and hold them there all together.
Modern academic written-for-the-page poetry is basically trash for this as it does not have a strong euphonic structure and is more 'thought' than spoken, more re-cognated (run through the forebrain more than once) than forming a direct expressive link between the weird mad centre of the brain and the forebrain.
Western Haiku are probably not that useful either, in its home the Haiku uses a syllabic language so each syllable can have a lot of nested meanings and complex phonic relations, in English it’s too easy to write and means less.
Good nonsense poetry can be very useful. The thing about nonsense poetry is that it has to have a strong yet fluid phonic structure and it has to FEEL like it means something, yet not quite mean something. A very good thing about it is that there are no bricks in your head to smash through before you write some. It is very much play and its always reasonable to play or to fuck about so you are enjoying yourself more.
It's much more fun to think 'what is the best or most ridiculous word, sound or arrangement I could put here' rather than 'what is the exact right thing to put here to express what I feeeel'. Either way you are using discrimination and learning 'word feel'. Because its less emotionally consequential, it’s easier to play with form and beauty.
I like Anglo-Saxon poetry and riddles. I have old notebooks where I wrote out the whole of 'The Wayfarer', I think in both translation and original.
Old poetry tends to be better because people spoke then with a stronger emphasis on sound and they had stronger rhythms, repetitions and structures in their words. The more print took over the more words became mere glyphs carrying abstract meanings and not sensual or felt things.
(Old poetry and oral-language epics and ballads generally are probably good for ROG writing for a whole range of other reasons too.)
I found Mallory's original 'Morte' quite good for this as well as I needed to read it phonetically and almost part-translate it in my head to understand it and this meant I had to hold the flow of expression and the 'weight' of the sounds in there all at once.
Then I could try to turn it into 'standard english' and then look back and forth between the standard version and the old version and think about what had been lost or gained.
Same with the Gawain translation.
NOW
MAYBE YOU ARE NOT INTO OLD-ENGLISH POETRY
Probably though you are into something, something written, something strange, something deep and something that has a strong relation to written expression and which you can learn a lot from.
So do what I did with that thing you are into. Learn from it.
People Talk Too Much -
Americans drive on like a ticker tape, covering and re-covering stuff with long low reams of low-expression words, the British cloak every emotion and bracket every expression with a lot of sub-ironic conversational trash.
This might not always be a bad thing when actually talking. When people are talking to each other face to face, a large part of what they are doing is just convincing each other that they are both safe, and decent people and they don't need to be afraid and that they have a way to exchange power and so on. And this might all be important for the people involved.
But when you are writing your job is to not do that.
(Except if writing for children or doing instructions or using it for effect or blah blah blah)
But generally what you are giving people is the good stuff they would get from speaking to you but with all the extra stuff (which they don't need, because its disembodied text they are choosing to read rather than a fully embodied person they have to listen to) taken out.
You can see this most with fresh bloggers when they really do adopt a literally 'conversational' style where they ehm and aa and re-think and counter-state and ironize and in-joke and witter on and you want to KILL THEM because they cannot get TO THE POINT.
Like any rule in art its never perfectly true and there are a million ways you could do the opposite, but generally the line could be shorter with less fucking about.
Fucking about is the main thing I take out of my own writing, even after years I still see Britishisms and blathering creeping in there sometimes.
Passion and Feeling
That said. Writing doesn’t necessarily have a point. Or the point and the expression are so close and interweave so much that it’s hard to find light between them.
It can be really useful to have a strong feeling about what you are writing.
- energises you and drives you towards expression
- that forward emotional momentum somehow helps you find new means of expression, as if you were surfing the front of the big wave and could reach out to grab new things as they pass
- helps you synergise a wider range of experience
- gets that connection between the deep brain and the front brain working fluidly
- just generally makes the writer light up in a whole range of ways
Most writers have a 'thing', like a feel or a mood and when you see them get into it they fucking fly.
I imagine it as a series of cogs or gears turning in the head. There is the big one right at the base of the spine with all the strange animal stuff in it, then a bunch of smaller ones leading up through the brain, dealing with cognition, the tools of the mind, then the smallest one right at the front above the eyes.
Most writers have a mood, or a situation, or an imagined world where everything about it makes all of those cogs suddenly link up and then, all at once, they are spinning and running in a perfect transmission of energy right from the base to the tip.
And this could include the subject, the kind of social world shown, the patterning and rhythm of the prose, the genre of story, the things they already know about the world.. everything.
So Patrick O'Brien can kick the shit out of 18th Century guys on a military ship, but the further away from that he gets, the more his gears disengage and he has to work.
T.H.White can do his Arthurian legend but everyone has to talk like an early 20thC British public school graduate, and in fact its nearly a Hampstead Novel in disguise as a genre piece.
Annie Proulx can do tense, introverted midwesterners in complex modern social situations, but make them extrovert west-coasters who say every thought in their heads and she might find it harder.
One of the things a genre writer can do, one of the big privileges, but also one of the big challenges, is that we can construct an entire world or reality, to write in or write about, all the way from the kinds of lives people lead, to the social reality they negotiate, the way they express themselves.
So working out how to do that is a thing. Hopefully a fun thing.
People really seem to like those Snail Knight stories I did, but take a look at all the other stories I created, and how different they are, and how people were pretty damn indifferent to all of them.
Euphony & Hearing the line -
This is particular to me and to people like me. Different people process writing in fundamentally different ways.
For instance; Scrap just doesn't get poetry. I think she doesn't sound it in her head at all. It is just marks and meaning to her.
Dave Foster Wallace is someone who can clearly write but who writes nothing like me. He writes at the speed, and with the immediacy of thought, rather than speech. he is very clearly not sounding the line in his head. Also his numerous switchbacks, brackets, asides, re-cognitions and shifts inside a paragraph or a line are part of his writing personality and produce a kind of crystalline array of meaning that is central to how he does things.
I am not like that. I am over with Herman Meiville and Cormac McCarthy and Milton with a very strong dum-te-dum-de-tum strong-vowl-sound line.
I don't literally, directly sound out most of the lines I write in my mind, but I have a kind of sub-sounding or voiceless speech that tells me how it runs.
'Hearing' the line is another thing that's too close to the embodied or felt world for me to easily unpack how you do it. It's like hitting a tennis ball with a racket, or trying to explain doing that purely verbally without actually having seen either a racket or ball and without having them in front of you.
When done and perceived - instant - thwack - 'oh that, you want me to do thaaat.
When described - 'wait so what exactly do you do, and with what?'
Here's a thing to try to do;
- Get two things that are surprisingly different
- Get them together in a line or paragraph so they make sense
- Get it so the Euphony is beautiful
This will make the reader feel. They will sense the beauty of the sound of the line and one part of the brain will perk up and say 'this is beautiful', and another part of the brain will read the meaning without sound or substance and say 'this is extreme or strange'.
And both of these feeling, reactions or thoughts happening at the same time is an interesting or notable thing to happen inside their head and they will be pleased with your for giving it to them.
Rip people right the fuck off
Harlan Ellison used to do this thing where he would take a writer he liked and literally re-write large parts of their book, slowly, word by word, looking and thinking about how he could do each individual part. Presumably this would teach him the secret thoughts and arrangements of the writer.
I wouldn't recommend you do that, but if there is any writer or set of creators that you really like then starting by shamelessly ripping them off, or at least trying to understand how they do things, might be a good idea.
That list of people and things you like is a bit like a map of your developing brain and if you ever make anything really good then it will be, not exactly like, but a bit like, some of those things.
Because you already enjoy them its easier to fool around with them and, again, less consequential if your fail, so its easier to learn word-feel through play.
Be calm in your Head
This is a strange thing I get, mainly when I am trying to write poetry. I've only managed it really a few times. It's so hard to get away from the distractions both in the world and in my head.
I think its like what they call a 'flow state'?
Like I was holding a particular range of problems in my head and instead of dispelling them or veering off into another problem or just settling for an inferior but functional result or thinking my way around them, I just help them there. Without forcing them to a particular solution.
I think the longest I have ever been able to do this is maybe 2 to 3 minutes. Maybe you could be better at it.
Re-write it a bunch of Times
It's the OOOOOOOOOLLLLLD CLASSIC of WRITING ADVICE.
Writing is re-writing!
Is it?
Well, sometimes it is. Sometimes you would be better off leaving it alone or thinking more before you write. You never really know. But certainly writing is OCCASIONALLY re-writing.
Usually (but not always) it can be shorter.
Usually stronger expressed. If a line or a group has a feeling or point inside it that you weren't quite aware of while you were struggling towards it, sometimes you look at it later on and think 'oh that's what I was trying to say, what a fool I was not to see it' then you re-write it so 'that' is the only thing left.
Sometimes you thought it was good and turns out its shit.
Sometimes (rarely) you thought it was shit any maybe its good, or you are being a MYSTERIOUS GENIUS
Sometimes you are trying to be a Mysterious Genius and now even you have no fucking idea what you meant.
Alright thats 2.5 hours, that's all I got off the top of my head.1w
Thank you for taking the time to think about all that, and then type it up. You should post it on False Machine.1w- Shit, if you don't, can I post it on my blog and title it something click-baity like "9 Secrets To Writing Patrick Doesn't Want You To Know About"?1w
- I used to write poetry in college. I had at least one poem in the student publication every year. That was nice. I was reading poetry for a while there: Bukowski, Plath, Omar Khayyam. I should get back into it.1w
- I think you are pretty spot on with your assessment of modern written-for-the-page poetry. Ain't too many new anapests these days, I reckon.1w
- Mindfulness and concentration have always been challenges for me. I have ADD. My brain is like a food court on a Saturday. Sometimes it's nice, like how cooking is nice, when you always have something else boiling beside you other elbow, and there's always something to reach for, should you want it. Other times its easy to get lost, dissipate.1w
- When I was a kid, my head was so loud that I could conjure up people to talk to, and I wouldn't know what they were going to say next. I could hear them in my head and they would have accents that I didn't choose and I could turn them off whenever I wanted. That was cool.
I can't do that anymore.
Closest I can come is sometimes when I'm DMing, and I can imagine a room or a creature, and it just populates itself with details and extrapolations. Like I just say the words "old stone wall" and sometimes I can see the brittle moss and smell the brine of it. It's like building a desk, then opening it to find that its full of skittles. That's cool, too. I feel like I'm getting something for free.1w - Where I think I snag, though, is spinning the ideas into something captivating. My monitor doesn't display enough colors.
Maybe I don't know enough words? But that's silly; I know tons of words, I just don't own very many.
Maybe years of writing laboratory protocols has smoothed out the wrinkles of my brain? I dunno.1w - I think I'm going to get a copy of The Ode Less Travelled. It's only $13 on Amazon, and spending money on things always makes me feel like I've made some progress.1w
- I've got some Harlan Ellison books. I could imitate him as a revenge fuck.
Or I could do Borges.
Nah, I can't do Borges.
I'll meditate on it.1w - 1. Buy Ode.
2. Ape a mammal.
3. Study my own writing, I guess. Figure out what mood I'm good at. Grope the walls of my house.1w - 4. Try to crystallize the feelings I get when I write. Figure out what I'm trying to evoke. Be mindful of that, I guess.1w
- Okay, that's enough homework for me.
Thank you again.
Reading your response for the 3rd time, and a lot of your advice isn't advice on how to write better, it's advice on how to manage my expectations. Which is good fucking advice.
I have a friend who is a luthier. When I was trying to learn violin, I asked him for advice. He said a lot of stuff, but the one I liked best was "Accept that you'll never really be good at it. You might impress some people, but you'll never be good."
I found that tremendously heartening.1w - Actually, it sounds like lifting weights. It never gets easier, but the numbers eventually go up.1w
- Expression is a concept I'll have to think about a little bit more.1w
- Question: if blog posts are meant to be eaten through the eyeballs, then why is euphony more desirable than writing for the page? A more direct connection for expression to worm through? (For at least one type of expression?)1w
- Your Wir-Heal post is very good. I can see Gawain's footprints on it.
I'm writing a post that pulls from Wir-Heal's titans (at least a little bit). Giants in the Earth. I'm going to steal them back again.
But first I'm going to go lift weights.1w - > Hmm, I'm not sure I have enough faith in my own writing advice to put it out publicly in any format.
> "Like I just say the words "old stone wall" and sometimes I can see the brittle moss and smell the brine of it."
Ok firstly, having full-spectrum visions is probably a good thing for writing, it gives you the sensuality and physical specificity that you need to say good stuff.
Second, that thing you did there where you said "old stone wall" and then saw the brittle moss and smelt the brine of it, but inside your head; do that but the other way round. The cool thing should be the thing that goes on the page.
> "Maybe years of writing laboratory protocols has smoothed out the wrinkles of my brain?"
Mmmaybe. Perfectly intelligible reason is on a tangent to art. Not necessarily opposed, but at an angle so they rarely share exactly the same space.
But I am sure lab reports and scientific speech have their own secret aesthetic (that they don't think they have). Maybe you could write lab reports about impossible or irrational things?
> "Question: if blog posts are meant to be eaten through the eyeballs, then why is euphony more desirable than writing for the page?"
I don't really know. I know euphony plays a big role in how I perceive and think about writing. I think it might be my primary mode or strongest tool, but there are many people who don't think like that. Scrap, for instance, writes in this utterly strange and particular way that isn't like anything else. I don't know what she's doing in her head but it often works.1w - And thank you for the compliments.1w
- Rereading this: I still think you should post it.2d
- I will think about it.2d
- Let me know if there's anything I can do to heckle.
I'm glad you posted this; some very good advice.
ReplyDeleteThis is some great stuff here.
ReplyDeleteOh shit you posted all of it. But yeah, no one reads Sunday posts, so we're safe.
ReplyDeleteBe a shame if someone shared it on a Monday, though. . .
Also gonna plug this thing I wrote about how to be creative.
ReplyDeletehttp://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/07/how-to-be-creative-also-blobbins.html
Scrap once wrote, as a random table result "A busting fat piggy!" which is the most poetic and euphonious thing I've ever heard, partially on account of what your mouth has to do to say those sounds.
ReplyDeleteSo, there's spoken poetry there, I think Scrap's aversion to poetry isn't aversion to sound it's aversion to impatience around the forming of the idea.
Turns out I got that line from Martha Wentworth at 26:13 here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E-AqC75jddE though she says "pig" rather than piggy
DeleteThanks for posting this. I used to write a lot of poetry, but haven't picked up my pen to do so in years. Now that I'm DMing more and having to flesh out a lot of what I want to do in writing, I think some of the exercises you've mentioned would be incredibly useful. Thanks again for sharing all of this.
ReplyDeleteIf I think about I do kinda hear words when I read them but it's hard to tell if I'm creating that voice by listening for it. Regardless it always seems slower than how I'm reading the text, and have a lot of vocab that I have no idea how to actually say but think and write with anyway
ReplyDeleteSongs lyrics and song fragments are still part of my psyches soundscape and there's words and languages that i love hearing, but poetry is just silent to me.
ReplyDeleteUseful. Thanks man! I don't read enough Poetry. I don't read enough anything anymore because I am failing.
ReplyDelete