I've recently been reading a blog by John Scalzi, a writer I'd never previously heard of. He writes Sci-Fi and lots of articles and other non-fiction, and is apparently pretty successful. He's a good blogger too, and while I ended up reading him thanks to his posts about the new Creationism Museum and his offer to visit it if enough readers donated money to a separation of church and state charity, (
they did and he will), I've found his various posts on writing the most interesting.
One on his main page is entitled, "
On Teens, and the Fact Their Writing Sucks" and you know I had to read that one. It's a follow up to a post he made last year, "
10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing," and as you may have guessed from the title of his follow up post, one of the major thrusts of Scalzi's first blog post was that the writing produced by teenagers sucks. Equally predictable is the fact that many readers didn't really get any further than that in his first post, and addressed complaints to him based on their own incomplete reading of his advice.
I'm linking to them both, and recommending that you read them both in whatever order seems more appropriate, but I did want to quote one thing from Scalzi's first "advice" post, since I thought he really summed up an issue I've given though to since... I was a teenaged writer. (Who sucked, in retrospect.)
1. The Bad News: Right Now, Your Writing Sucks.
...There are reasons for this.
a) You're really young. Being young is good for many things, like being flexible, staying up for days with no ill effects, not having saggy bits, and having hair. For writing deathless, original prose, not so much. Most teenagers lack the experiential vocabulary and grammar for writing well; you lack a certain amount of perspective and wisdom, which is gained through time. In short: You haven't yet developed your true writing voice.
Now, if you're really good, you can fake perspective and wisdom, and with it a voice, which is almost as good as having the real thing. But usually, sooner or later, it'll catch up to you and your lack of experience will show in your writing. This will particularly be the case when you have a compelling, emotional story, which would require the sort of control and delivery of your writing that you only get through time. You may simply not have the wherewithal to express your very important story well. Yes, having a great story you're not equipped to tell pretty much bites. Normally, this is when teens look for help from the writers they admire, which brings us to the next reason your writing sucks:
The first paragraph of this is exactly what several adult readers tried to tell me about my writing when I was that age, and of course I didn't comprehend a word they said. What I wrote was the most interesting writing to me, and I assumed it would be what other people wanted to read too. I concentrated on the cool stuff; sex and violence, and didn't waste much time with character development and the other tedious aspects of a story. I remember an agent I worked (briefly) with telling me that I didn't need to try so hard to reinvent the wheel, and that I needed to just experience more of life to gain more depth and content with which to build my characters. Not advice I was partial to at the time, though I did, at least, mature quickly enough to realize that what I'd written a year or two earlier was crap (which caused me to not work with that agent for long, since he wanted to try and publish a novella I'd since disowned.)
Unfortunately, it's not essential that a writer do that to become published and/or successful; plenty of crappy genre fiction writers don't do it and most of them are decades past their last acne outbreak. Lots of writers never get any better, but what Scalzi says is very true for writers who want to. Something else he mentions in the same post is even more important.
Work on your empathy -- try to understand why people are the way they are. This will achieve two things. One, it's a good exercise for you to help you one day create characters in your writing who are not merely slightly warped versions of you. Two, it'll make you realize there's more to life than wry mockery.
Emphasis by me, since that's really a key. I could write a lot of characters when I was 17 or 19 or 20 or 22, but in retrospect... all of the main chars were pretty much slightly warped versions of me. Not biographically; I wrote female chars and old people and monsters and aliens and such, but they were sometimes believable, but they all tended to have something very close to my cynical, observing, non-emotional personality. That's something most writers do forever, and I'm still trying to avoid it; the main female char in my fantasy novel is too much like me in some ways, and one of the things I'm fixing in my current rewrite is her personality. I'm making her mentally younger, and more spontaneous, emotional, etc.
I'm good at writing characters who are scheming or manipulative or superior or Vulcan-like in their emotional detachment and superiority. Whole novels of that don't work real well though, and one of the hard things in crafting believable, varied characters is making some of them people you (the author) disapprove of, are disappointed by, or even dislike. I can easily dislike the actions of chars, bad guys or whatever, but writing them to think and act in ways that are foreign to me, and that I actively strive to not be like in real life, is more difficult. Not only couldn't I do that when I was a teenaged writer, but it didn't really occur to me that there was any reason I'd want to. I hated chars who acted stupid for stupid reasons in novels, and wanted to fix them. Sure, they were necessary to the story, and they had to be like they were to contrast to the other chars, to advance plot events, to give variety, etc, but they just annoyed me so much. I realized at the time that my reaction to them was far from universal, but it took years longer until I understood in an analytical, logical way, why and how they were essential to the story.
One example: Sansa in Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. I hated her so much through books 1-4 that I might have had to stop reading her chapters when I was 18, or 20, or 22, just because she would have annoyed me so badly. How could she be so stupid? Reading those books now though, I still hate her, but I can simultaneously appreciate her purpose and Martin's genius in crafting her. I root for her to die on every page, but I realize that my passion is a sign of how brilliant a character she is, and how well she works in the story, and how subtly Martin uses her to advance events and contrast her personality to other personalities around her. One of his greatest strengths as a writer is his ability to craft a wide variety of believable, complicated characters. As the series progresses and Sansa grows up we're seeing changes in her personality, changes that have an impact because she's been so realistically depicted over the course of the series.
Labels: george r r martin, the fantasy novel, writing
