Decent Writing: A Practical Guide

by Carl Milsted

Posted August 18, 2005

Once upon a time, I was an aspiring science fiction writer. Back in high school and early college, I would spend hours behind an old Remington manual typewriter writing and rewriting manuscripts, and sending them to every science fiction magazine I could find. I was hardcore; some of my manuscripts were up to 60 pages long (double-spaced).

Alas, rejection letters piled up, and my only publications were in ‘zines that paid in copies. Eventually, I realized that I needed to pick up some life experiences in order to write realistically. I also figured that I ought to learn some real science, so I went and got a Ph.D. in physics. Along the way I learned that writing computer code was easier and more lucrative than writing fiction; my science fiction writing aspirations got tabled indefinitely.

But all along I have maintained an interest in the writing process itself. I have read widely on the process of writing and tested many of the recommended techniques. Some of the techniques work rather well. I cannot guarantee that they will enable you to produce deathless prose, but they will help you write more clearly and easily.

Do English Classes Teach Writing?

An important data point: during the time that I was busily writing stories, I hated most of my English classes. I hated reading stories oh-so-slowly and dissecting them along the way. I thought that counting the similes and metaphors in Shakespeare plays was B.S. I understood the point of some of the grammar drills, but did not enjoy them. And don’t get me started about the postmodernist, deconstructivist, gobbledygook that college literature departments today “teach.”

The sad reality is that modern English and literature classes do a very incomplete job of teaching the process of writing. True, the better classes do a decent job of teaching editing. But this just results in schools that crank out people with writer’s block who think that writing is difficult and mysterious.

Why Decent Writing is Difficult

Decent writing is difficult because it requires a combination of many skills:

• Gathering information
• Generating interesting and creative ideas
• Organizing those ideas
• Getting the ideas from brain to paper
• Editing results
• Mastering grammar
• Recognizing and applying style.

Your English teachers likely did a good job of teaching some of the skills, leaving you to integrate the remaining skills as you learned them.

Imagine you wanted to join the circus. Imagine that the first skill you were to learn was juggling while riding a unicycle. The odds are very good that you would fail miserably! Only those with incredible talent could learn both skills at the same time. On the other hand, if you were to alternate practice in juggling and unicycle riding so that you mastered each separately, you would then have a decent chance of doing both at the same time.

In general, if you are going to integrate multiple challenging skills, it is easiest to master the skills separately and then put them together.

This is a facet of learning that the public schools keep forgetting, time and again. Phonics, anyone? How about good old-fashioned drill with the multiplication tables? How passé! About the only subject where the importance of drill is heeded is in sports. Competition keeps coaches focused on reality, even when it is boring. Thus, the U.S. schools excel in educating semi-literate athletes.

Yes, breaking skills into small chunks and mastering them can seem uncreative and boring. The results do come faster, but they are uninteresting results at first. Nonetheless, this is the key to real creativity. Get a copy of Guitar School or a similar magazine. Read the interview with the long-haired drug-addled guitarist who trashes hotel rooms and sleeps with a different girl in every city. They talk about scales. Drill. And more repetitious drill. Mind-numbing drill. Understanding is not enough. Scales and chord progressions must become reflexes. Then, you can be incredibly creative, improvising solos while high on drugs, dancing in front of thousands of people.

Getting the Words Out

Reflex. The raw basics of writing should be reflex just like talking. Then, you can use part of your mind to think on the subtler aspects of rhetoric and style.

You can do this: you learned to talk. This was a harder skill than decent writing since you had to learn the meanings to go with the sounds. Yet most people learn how to talk, and usually reasonably well.

How?

Poorly at first. You started with cute noises. Then single words. Then crude sentences. You were not graded at first. Later, your parents began correcting your grammar, but you mostly ignored them and blabbed whatever came to mind. Only gradually did the corrections take hold and baby talk became clear talk, grammar emerged, and the sentences grew more complex.

This is the key to writing well. First write poorly, but write a lot. When you were learning to talk it became a fulltime job, and you drove your parents nuts once you got going. In the process, transforming ideas to sounds became a reflex.

The same is true for writing ideas. Downplay quality for a while. Turn off the inner critic. Just crank it out. The first skill to master is taking words from your head and converting them to words on the page. After you master this skill you will have enough spare brain cells to think about quality and style at the same time you are writing, but for now focus on quantity. Getting words from brain to hand needs to become a subconscious reflex, like talking.

What about quality? You can practice this also – as a separate skill. Sleep on your writings. Look at them the next day and let the inner critic have a field day. Mark up and rewrite. You can learn unicycle riding and juggling during the same months, but not by doing them both at the same time – at first.

Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle wrote an excellent essay on this principle: “How to Get My Job” (see link at bottom). Read it. Read his fiction too; it’s good stuff. He advocates more quality from the beginning. He says it takes a million words of finished (i.e., proofread and corrected) work to get one up to speed. I suspect the writers he has dealt with had more problems with the basics of grammar, whereas I have seen more writers who struggle with brain lock and bureaucratic prose. If your English teachers were “good” you probably need more work on the creative flow than on the editing aspects; otherwise Pournelle’s advice may hold. Adjust your practice with what you need the most.

Practice on what? You might ask. Well, not on the Great Novel you have locked in your mind. Probably not even on the clever short story or other important work. Start with lots of throwaway work: email, message board conversations, blog entries, personal journal entries, vignettes based on real events, or even computer code. (Yes, my writing flow for prose became better through practice writing computer code.)

But please, have mercy on others. Don’t have them edit or review your junk writing. Keep the journal entries personal until they sing to you – after you have slept on them. Do proofread your email, message board conversations and blog entries. People will appreciate this, and your ego will suffer fewer unpleasant critiques.

OK, I just gave you wonderful long-term advice for being a better writer, advice that is nearly useless if you want to write something for us next week. Fear not, there are many tricks that are helpful even if you haven’t put in your million words of practice drill. You will, however, have more scratch work to do – scratch work that you can skip after you become more fluent.

Unleash Your Creativity

Good ideas do not come in the order that you need them. Coming up with the ideas themselves and putting them into a linear, coherent order are two very different processes (juggling and unicycle riding again!). Try to do them at the same time and you are likely to fall into one of two traps:

1. Writer’s block. This is a very common disease usually caught in English class. This disease is acquired by trying to edit and write at the same time before both skills are reflexively mastered. If the inner editor is too active, then the creative parts of the mind get blocked out. The result can be hours of unpleasant staring at a blank page.

2. Diarrhea of the mind. This is the opposite disease. Here, the creative mind is allowed to dominate and get its ideas placed on the page as they come up. The result can be stream of consciousness prose which quickly puts the reader to sleep. I have seen such works represented as “art” and have gone to great lengths to avoid classes where such works are studied. However, this disease is not limited to fluffy “creative” types. Frequently, engineers get this disease. The result in this case is incredibly boring bureaucratic prose, which requires ample caffeine and note-taking to translate into understanding. Alas, I have had to wade through such works in the form of military specifications and the like, and it was not pleasant.

Once you have written your million words of corrected prose, you may be able to dance back and forth between your inner editor and your creative mind. Both Mozart and modern metallists could compose pieces and perform them at the same time. Other musicians have to focus on one or the other. And even the likes of a Mozart can benefit from focus when developing complex work.

There are several ways to unleash your creative mind while keeping the inner editor at bay.

Have an idea sink. Fantasy writer Piers Anthony gave some writing advice in the author’s notes to one of his novels. Included was possibly the best cure for writer’s block I have ever seen: always have a second sheet of paper (or word processing window) at hand when writing. If an off-topic idea comes to mind when you are writing, write it down immediately on this second writing surface! If you don’t, you are engaging your inner editor, which can then shut down your creativity. This trick works for me. And it definitely works for Piers Anthony; look at his publication list sometime. The reason I cannot tell you which one of his books has this important tip in it is because he has written so many!

Follow the Muse! There are times when ideas just come out well formed in logical readable prose. When this happens, write it down! Do note, usually this flow of ideas starts somewhere other than at the beginning of your story or essay. For example, I started writing this work with this section (“Unleash Your Creativity”). Actually, I started jotting notes for earlier parts of this work in a scribbly fashion as described later and then shifted into paragraph mode when the urge hit me.

A story can be built around a scene in the middle, or even the climax. An essay may bloom from an argument found in the center. Start writing where the ideas first flow. You can always write the introduction later. You can always rearrange paragraphs later, especially in these days of word processing.

Keep an idea journal. No, I am not talking about writing “Dear Diary” about all the events in your life. I am talking about having a place to write down ideas—as they come to you. The key is the word “journal.” A journal is chronological, not categorical. If you think about where an idea should be filed, you will wake your inner editor and shut down the creative flow.

An idea journal need not be a book. It can be loose sheets of paper, which can be filed later. The key is that idea jotting and filing should be separate functions.

Feed your head. If the ideas are not coming to you, stimulate your brain. Do not stare at that blank page, or at the wall. Go take a walk, play sports, or build something. This idea is stated explicitly in Jump Start Your Business Brain, by Doug Hall, but many a creative thinker has noted this principle in some form. I know I have used this principle plenty of times before reading this book; I used to get some of my best ideas mowing acres of grass on the family farm. Then again, I have fallen for the stare-at-the-blank-page trap often enough, so I must give Mr. Hall credit for clearly stating what many creative people often have to keep rediscovering.

As an example of these ideas, when I was a senior in high school I came up with a particularly clever pun based on the asteroid sequence in The Empire Strikes Back and decided to build a story around it. So I kept a sheet of paper in my bedroom on which I wrote puns as they came to me. And boy, did they come! Once my subconscious mind knew that I was going to record the relevant puns, I was coming up with puns at odd moments of the day. I did not have to expend great effort focusing on the story; much of the creative process occurred in the background while I was doing other things. The sheet became two sheets filled with short pun phrases, which became a 60 page, double-spaced manuscript with between one and two puns per page. I wasn’t able to get the work published in a professional magazine but it did get me more personalized rejection letters. Eventually, I published it in a pay-by-copy ‘zine called Antithesis. Looking back at the story two decades later, I see that the writing was choppy and the characters shallow, but I still maintain that the story was a good deal better than what Mel Brooks came up with on the subject.

Sequencing

Order of presentation is very important. In fiction it is one of the primary ways to establish sympathy with the correct character. Present a character early and the reader naturally takes that character’s point of view. (There are other techniques available, however!) Order of presentation can put you in the shoes of a character by giving you the same information as the character has to work with. Conversely, providing information that the character does not yet have can provide suspense, as you ponder what the character will do when the information is revealed later.

Some stories start like a James Bond movie, with an intense opening sequence to grab the reader by the adrenal glands. Other stories take much longer for the action to unfold. They focus on character development and background. The latter approach can produce much greater suspension of disbelief and sympathy with the characters when the action does occur. But what drives the story before the action begins? Curiosity!

Consider J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. The first book begins in the most mundane fashion, with a birthday party and some practical jokes. Only much later does the full gravity of the situation get revealed, after the characters have been established. Before we see magic, monsters and elves, we see a situation comedy played out by a race of short people with no heroic ambitions. By entering Middle Earth through the eyes of the hobbits during mostly ordinary times, the story becomes believable; the characters are “people” with whom we can identify. While the first chapters are mundane, even boring, they are extremely important in setting us up for the wonders and drama that follow.

Contrast this with the movie version. There, the grand mystery of the Ring was revealed in the opening sequence! The race across Middle Earth was a sprint instead of a journey. The elves were just people with nice clothes and pointed ears. It was a much different story. Despite the beauty of the scenery in the first film, I could barely sit through it, and have opted not to see the sequels. Hollywood needs to relearn the arts of suspense and crescendo.

Watch the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents television show. At the beginning of each show Hitchcock taught a lesson in good movie making that also applies to good writing. Another set of excellent sources on this subject are the early works on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Frogs into Princes, and Trance-Formations, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder delve into the subtle relationships between language and mental processes. Among their many ideas are those on “pacing and leading.” A powerful way to change a mental state or belief is to acknowledge and work with the existing state/belief to gain acceptance and gradually mix in the new state/belief. This is what Tolkien did so masterfully.

Sequence is also critical in technical writing. At times during my career as a military contractor I have had to read specifications documents which required information in Section 4 to understand Section2. Such bad ordering of information can hurt readability far more than poor style, run-on sentences, passive voice or outright bad grammar.

Another common dilemma in the world of technical writing is whether to write a reference or a tutorial. In a reference work you want all related information in the same chapter. However, such an ordering of information makes for a bad tutorial, since you have to wade through every aspect of a subject before you get to the next subject. This can be unpleasant if you need several subjects before you start truly applying the knowledge. For example, to use a computer language, you need some knowledge of the basic syntax, the ability to call system functions so you can at least print, and some basic control statements to be able to do anything interesting. Reference-oriented books on computer languages describe all the operators in the operator chapter, all the subtleties of functions in the function chapter, and so on. The poor reader needs to read several dense chapters before writing the first bit of interesting code. Another notorious example I encountered recently is Adobe’s Classroom in a Book for Illustrator. There is a chapter that covers every single shortcut for zooming and navigating around (and there are a bunch) before the user learns how to do such basics as editing a path!

So think of such issues and who your readers are. Sometimes it is important to cover a point completely when first presented; other times you should cover each point in a shallow fashion and then cover the subtleties and exceptions in the appendix.

So, how do you sequence your document? Your English teacher probably told you to make an outline. Outlines are good, but this is a bad way to start! Starting with an outline requires listing your points and getting them listed in the proper sequence at the same time. Remember what I keep saying about juggling and riding a unicycle.

Coming up with the possible points to be covered is a creative, brainstorming process. Choosing which points to actually write about and getting them in proper order is a logical, critical operation. Some believe that the first is dominated by the right side of the brain while the second is dominated by the left side. It really doesn’t matter where in the brain these operations are performed; however, the key is that these are very different modes of thought, and unless you are good at switching back and forth between these modes, you are liable to get brainlock.

Tony Buzan has made a career of pushing “mind maps.” A mind map is a way of organizing ideas in a non-sequential fashion – more “right brain friendly” if you will. Take a central idea and write it down in the center of a page. Ideas that immediately branch off from the center are drawn nearby with connecting lines, and ideas that branch off from those ideas are connected similarly. What you end up with is a root-like set of lines with associated words and phrases. When you are done, you have a holistic view of what you intend to cover (and ideas you may opt to exclude). Once you have this brainstorm on a page, you can edit and order the ideas into an outline. See Using Both Sides of Your Brain, by Tony Buzan (At least, that’s the one I read; there are others on the subject.), or www.mind-map.com.

Gabriele Lusser Rico advocated a cruder-looking structure for brainstorming for creative writing, in her book Writing the Natural Way. I tried her technique for a while, but soon dispensed with the circles.

I usually dispense with lines except when there is an obvious grouping. Otherwise, I just group ideas on the paper. When I am in short phrase brainstorming mode, I usually just jot the ideas in clumps, no line connections to the central idea as Buzan advocates. But these days, I frequently brainstorm in sentences, or even entire paragraphs. To prevent myself from sequencing while brainstorming, I get ledger sized paper (11”x17”) and write on it in landscape mode. Ideas, be they sentences or paragraphs, get boxed to keep them apart so I am not tempted to sequence the final work in the same order that the ideas came. Oftentimes, I mix modes, starting out with short phrase idea jotting, then going into boxes with paragraphs, and then slipping into just plain writing – whatever comes naturally.

Play around and see what works for you. The primary concept to keep in mind is that ideas usually come to mind in a different order than the one you want to present them in. Lay them out and then rearrange. You could even put the ideas on note cards and shuffle them around. (Hmmm, maybe my English teacher did advocate that at some point along the way…)

Focus

Now that you have your ideas lain out and placed in a logical sequence, flush them out. Turn them into sentences and paragraphs in the order you decided upon, taking one idea at a time.

Beware! Every idea has exceptions, subtleties, examples and counterexamples. Hold them in abeyance! Jot them in the margin or on another sheet of paper Piers Anthony style. Focus on the core idea. Get it defined. Bring it to life. Later, in subsequent paragraphs, you can tell of exceptions, subtleties. Later, you can defend your idea from objections that you know will arise.

Now is the time to remember what your English teach did teach you: paragraphs. A paragraph has a topic sentence and sentences that support and flush out that topic sentence. A paragraph is an idea brought to life. If there is another idea, it is time for another paragraph.

For example, even what I just told you has exceptions. A good essay will often have introductory and conclusion paragraphs. Such paragraphs will list multiple ideas without fully flushing them out. Then again, I could say that the list is the idea, and thus defend my previous statements. Regardless, note how I finished the ideas above and then noted this exception/subtlety in a later (but not much later) paragraph.

You could say that I did briefly put a wrong idea in your mind, that the fully corrected idea should have been crammed into the first paragraph so as to get the idea right the first time. This is the path towards selfus interruptus! If you want to write like Husserl or Hegel, and make your writings so obtuse that they become objects of study for future generations, then ignore my advice and go for it. Bring in every exception, objection, and counter-example as you state each idea. Your writing will be so difficult that only very intelligent people will be able to understand it. People who are almost very intelligent will pretend to understand you and treat you like a guru.

At least this worked for Hegel and Marx, as well as many other “great philosophers.” Through the techniques of very bad writing, they were able to hide the fact that many of their arguments were circular, specious, or downright silly. Thinkers like Ayn Rand, who wrote clearly, are much easier to understand, and to refute.

There is a way to maintain credibility while still writing out ideas one at a time, where these ideas are understood before they are completed: use fuzzy language as need be; avoid overgeneralizations and categorical statements. Words and phrases like “usually,” “seems,” “tends to,” “is a factor,” and “is rather” are your friends. If you say “Government doesn’t work,” people will discount your credibility long before you build your thesis or state the exceptions. After all, the Post Office does successfully deliver mail, and on a regular basis at that. The statement, “The market works better than government,” is better but even it is overly categorical. If there is even one exception (military defense is a likely example), then the statement is wrong. The statement, “The market usually works better than government,” is far easier to defend, and leaves the reader open to hearing you defend your thesis instead of busily coming up with obvious counter-examples.

Reviewing Your Work

If you apply the above techniques, you hopefully will experience getting into the full creative flow. When this happens, your writing will sometimes sing. There will be graceful flow; ideas will lead one to another; and the introduction and conclusion will tie things together into a full circle.

While still in this state of flow, it is a good time to do a first review of what you wrote. Often, the flow hits after the first several paragraphs of a writing session. Your early paragraphs may need tweaking or rewriting to match the theme and style that you attained once the flow got going. Do it now, while you have the rhythm.

However, this review should not be the only review! During times of flow, the inner critic is weak. Words that seemed beautiful when written may turn out to be beautiful only to the properly prepared mind. You may have left out context for an outside-your-brain reader to follow. You may have stated things bluntly that were already deftly implied. You may have lapsed into stream-of-consciousness writing. You may have switched verb tenses unduly or made other grammatical mistakes.

Save yourself embarrassment. Do not send your work to an editor at this point. Do not let a friend read it. Sleep on your work and then reread, with red pen in hand. Turn on your inner editor. Bring forth the lessons that your grammar teacher did try to tell you. Make sure objects and modifiers are close enough to one another. Check the ordering of paragraphs. Watch out for words and phrases overly repeated. (I usually have to delete a bunch of “indeeds” at this point.) Read your work out loud. Does it have rhythm? Does it flow well? Did you balance long and short sentences?

If all went well, such polishing will produce a manuscript ready for friends and/or editors to have a look at. But you may find that your flow was not as good as it felt at the time. The writing may be choppy, bureaucratic, or stream-of-consciousness. If so, admit it to yourself and rewrite. Rewriting is usually much easier than writing the first draft. The ideas are arranged in your head, and you are in a better position to let the inner critic in partway as you write. I rarely compose at the keyboard; I usually write on paper first. This forces me to rewrite. (It also allows me to write while sitting outdoors.) If the first draft comes out well, the process of going from paper to computer is simply that of typing. If I am not happy with the first draft, then I may end up barely looking at the first draft while typing in the first computerized draft (as happened with this section).

It may take several rewrites to satisfy your inner editor. After your inner editor is satisfied, get opinion from others. The power of your work lies in the effect that it has on other people. Ideas that seem obvious to the writer could well lack context to the reader. In fiction, scenes and characters which seem vivid to the writer may be partially sketched on paper. Only an outside reader can tell you these things.

But if you get overly eager and hand your first draft to an outside reader, you will not get the important feedback! You will get grammar corrections. You can ask people to critique the overall ideas of your work and tell them that you know that the work is a first draft. You can ask them to overlook grammatical nitnoids. It won’t work. When people are in critic mode, the obvious errors jump out first. I have learned this from hard experience, having committed this error many times. I have suffered many irrelevant grammar critiques when what I wanted was critique of the underlying story.

But I, at least, had an excuse; I was typing drafts on a manual typewriter. In these days of word processors, you don’t. You can easily wait until the second or third draft before revealing your work to outsiders.

On Style

If you follow the advice above, you should be able to produce coherent, readable prose. It might even be good. But I did not promise that. The title of this essay is “Decent Writing,” for a reason. For writing to be good, you need at least two more elements. First, you must have something good to write about. For example, my early attempts at science fiction were heavily marred by lack of life experience. Were I to take another crack at fiction writing, I might do better simply for having lived longer. For you who are writing for this publication/web site, I assume you already have an important idea in mind, so I won’t dwell much on research and the like. But in some cases, this assumption may be wrong…

Second, there is the issue of literary style. Which verb tenses should you use? Passive voice or active voice? Should you always write in complete sentences or are phrases like I just used appropriate? How about metaphors and similes? Rhyme and alliteration? Why does Jack Vance’s writing seem so wry and elegant? How did Robert Heinlein achieve such smooth transitions between story and background? What are the elements that Norman Spinrad uses to achieve his different poetic tone for each of his novels? How did C. S. Lewis achieve such powerful imagery with words easy enough for a child to read?

These are things that your English teacher tried to teach you. If you paid attention in class, you might have learned something from the literary analysis assignments and drills you were given. If you were like me and failed to see the purpose, you might want to go back and try again after you have done a significant amount of writing. The more you write, the more interesting these issues become. As you become more fluent with the basic process of decent writing, you will have room in your brain to think about the subtleties of style while you write.

By the way, this is something I still need to do. If you find my writing bland or pedantic, you now know why. But if you got this far, then you are at least able to get through it, and that is all I claim to teach in this lesson: writing that is decent enough to get read.

Good style takes a while to develop, but it is not as critical to getting your work published here as other factors covered in this guide. Poor organization, soporific stream-of-consciousness rambling, boring bureaucratic prose and selfus interruptus are very hard for an editor to fix. On the other hand, grammar nitnoids, verb tense shifts, modifier misplacement and the like—those problems your high school English teacher graded you on—are relatively easy for an editor to correct with a red pen.

Further Reading:

• How to Get My Job by Jerry Pournelle.
• The Romantic Manifesto, by Ayn Rand. I am not an Objectivist, nor do I endorse everything in this work. But Rand was a powerful writer and she wrote very clearly on the subject of art in general.
• Frogs Into Princes, and Trance-Formations by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. These are early works on Neuro-Linguistic Programming, not writing, per se, but they provide much valuable insight into the psychology of language and writing style.
• I would add the author’s notes to one of Piers Anthony’s books if I could remember which one…

Printer Friendly Version
Top of Page