Four things you should never say to a writer…

There are some awful things you might have said to a friend who loves writing. You probably said them in all innocence. Allow me to explain why you should never, ever repeat them, since your friend is unlikely to tell you him or herself.

I am a writer. I work with writers. I help people become writers. I know that when a group of writers congregate in a room and one of them tells the others something a well-meaning friend has said, everyone else will wince in shared sympathy and empathy.

That’s because the individuals in that room ‘get’ it. Whatever their ages, genders, races, nationalities, they get it. Even regardless of the genre each of them prefers to write in – which is a far, far greater divide than racial groupings or generations could ever be – they get it.

What should you never, EVER say to a writer? Read on:

2. “What did I think of your story? It was really nice.”

Did you give the story anything more than a quick scan? Did you look at it at all? If not, just say so. If your friend is serious about writing, she wants REAL feedback NOT a platitude. She wants to know what you liked about it, and she wants to know what you didn’t like – what was confusing, what was boring, that kind of thing.
You could actually cause damage to your writer-type friend’s confidence by saying it was ‘nice’. ‘Nice’ is a word we use to describe a gift we think is a bit dull but we don’t want to hurt the person’s feelings. Please, offer a real emotional reaction to that story. Perhaps you were angered or disgusted by something in it: that is better than saying it is ‘nice’.
What if your friend gets offended by you saying this? If she is serious about being a writer, she won’t be. If she is offended… well, she asked… and you won’t have her bothering you for an opinion in the future.

4. “I really liked that one. It reminded me of… you know, that book…”

Please… go and check your facts first. Is your friend’s work really reminiscent of ‘that book’ or is it just that a particular word or character’s name set you thinking of something else you’ve read? Unless there really are glaring similarities, do NOT say this to your friend. It will not be taken as a compliment, even if you’ve compared the text to Pride and Prejudice or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It will be taken by your friend as a sign that he has been wasting his time. What is the point of writing something that has already been written? What publisher will take his book on if it is a rip-off of something else?
What if your friend really has lifted a plot wholesale (even unconsciously) from somewhere else? If you’re sure about it and you’ve double-checked your facts, it would be kindest in the long run to tell him. Do it gently and privately – it will be very bad news, but if he is a good friend he won’t shoot the messenger. (Unless he turns you into a character in a new story and has you murdered in a brutally imaginative fashion. If this happens, you’ve done him a favour by providing him the inspiration for something original.)

So now you know the truth, dear friend-to-a-writer.

Be kind to your writer-type friend, even if to do so you must be cruel. Above all, be honest. Otherwise, you may well recognise yourself in a future story meeting a very sticky end.

Three myths about good writing

There are many myths about what makes good writing. Here I debunk three of them…

1. Good writing needs to be grammatically correct.

Not always. Controversial? Not particularly – just common sense. Take another look at those three sentences you’ve just read. Every textbook of English grammar states that a sentence needs to contain a main verb, yet those sentences do not have a single verb amongst them (main or otherwise). Did that stop you understanding them? I doubt it. I am not saying that we should throw the rules of our language out of the window and burn them all on the bonfire while we dance around it wearing bear skins. As a general rule, standard English is the way to go.

But (and how dare I start a sentence or a paragraph with a conjunction!) there are times when we can bend or ignore the rules. There is indeed wonderful beauty in the standard English rhythm of Dickens’ “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” (A Tale of Two Cities) but there is also beauty in the truth of the words, “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.” (The Color Purple, Alice Walker). Celie’s voice couldn’t talk to us in standard English – it wouldn’t be true. So that is writing myth #1.

3. I need to use lots of unusual words and long sentences so that it doesn’t sound simplistic.

There’s a world of difference between simplistic and simple. Simplistic is bad. Simple is good. Avoiding swallowing a combined edition dictionary and thesaurus does not make your writing simplistic. Treating your reader as if s/he is stupid makes it simplistic (see the above note about too much detail). Simple is beautiful. Simple doesn’t tangle your reader in sentences which use three different types of subordinate clauses plus an embedded clause (and no, it’s not desperately important whether you know what they are or not). Simple doesn’t leave your reader baffled because you’ve used three words in a row s/he doesn’t know. Simple writing lets your reader read it without drawing attention to itself. Your reader is free to enjoy the story. Simple! Writing myth #3.

So what am I really telling you?

Good writing serves the reader, not the writer. How can you engage your reader in the story? How can you make your characters come alive and dance for their audience? Anticipate what the reader will want, then give it to them (though tease them now and again by making them wait a while for answers). The reader isn’t thinking ‘How can I admire this writer?’ but ‘Am I enjoying this story?’ That, dear reader, is the crux of it – write so that your reader enjoys the story.

Why you should never write a book

So what if you’ve always had that idea to write a novel? Big deal if the fabulous life events of a family member ought to be recorded for posterity in a book?

Nobody actually wants to read any book you could write, right? You haven’t written anything of that nature for years – not since you were in school. You don’t have the wit of Stephen Fry, or his vocabulary, come to that. Do you really think you could write enough? Books need to have thousands and thousands of words in them! Not to mention the effect it would have on your family and social life: everybody knows writers are loners; in fact, they mostly live tragic, isolated lives in a cold cottage somewhere on a blasted heath.

Actually, no.

How do you know nobody would want to read it? If the story grips your imagination, chances are it would grab other people’s imagination too.

School may be a long time ago (longer for some of us than for others!), but who says that learning stops when you leave formal education? School isn’t a place where all the knowledge and skills we could ever use are downloaded to our hard drives – it’s a place where we learn how to learn for the rest of our lives.

Why are you comparing your words with the words of other people? Of course you’re not Stephen Fry! Or Philippa Gregory. Or J.K. Rowling. Or… anyone else who isn’t you. Your voice is uniquely yours.