Writing Tips

If you're pretentious enough for it, start your story with an epigraph. A quote without context becomes an artifact, something to be displayed in a museum. The line might have been  unremarkable in the original work, a pretty line serving a purpose as banal as exposition. But when displayed on its own, all we can see is the strangeness of it. Every word takes on a disproportionate significance. A pot can be used to carry water back and forth to the well each day in quiet thoughtless necessity. Or you could shatter it and put the shards in a museum, and extrapolate an entire culture from the pieces.

Avoid adverbs. Adverbs sum up tone and emotion and purpose in a single word - haltingly, nervously, knowingly, kindly - obliterating the nuances of what actually occurred. Don't say, "He smiled kindly." Who are you to say how he felt at the moment, what was going on inside his head? Even from your third-person omniscient point of view, even if you stripped him naked and vivisected him and probed every nook and hollow of him, where would you find "kindness"? All you have to go on is induction, a fallible, falsifiable conclusion based on the sum of his actions. You might very well be mistaken. You might be deceived. You may be deluded.

Avoid generalizations, avoid abstractions. Thought is an abstraction, as is emotion. A story isn't something you think, or something you feel, but rather something that occurs. Say, "She was happy," and the words are vacuous. They're a Rorschach test. Every reader will imagine something different, and most of them have poor imaginations. What more do you have to offer them? Might as well splinter your pen and blot ink across the pages.

Write such that your writing is non-reducible to a simpler state. Take an Aesop's fable, a genre of story so straightforward that the moral comes attached at the end. WORK TODAY AND REAP THE BENEFITS TOMORROW. And yet, the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper is incomplete without the image of the once-joyous Grasshopper slowly starving to death. Take the themes of your story and then distort them through a character's voice, obscure them in metaphor, until they're buried within the scenario you've created and you realize that the message you started out with has in some fundamental way been proven untrue. If writing were as simple as communicating an idea, we could skip the stories entirely.

You may believe that the purpose of writing is to provide insight - to take a vast, overwhelming world and to put it to narrative. To find the perfect arrangement of words that crystallizes the reality of our lives and makes it meaningful. But there's no great skill in that. People instinctively reduce their life experiences to easily-communicable summary: Kindness. Loneliness. Joy. Pain. Any number of abstractions. Words are Rorschach blots; you can see an entire world in them. Everyone already understands for themselves what these words mean, understands the depths within them. If they didn't, living would be impossible. It doesn't take a writer to see the world for what it is, or to make it comprehensible.

Build a hollow facade of a world and people will populate it with themselves, read their own experiences into anything you write. Just write something as trivial as, "They were in pain," and already you'll have evoked that spark of recognition that passes for authenticity. Write about Death, or Love, or Hope, or Loss, in stumbling and generic terms, and somewhere out there will be someone who's had those experiences for themselves, and who will be satisfied with the simple acknowledgment of them. There's no art in evoking emotion, in writing down the right trigger phrase and letting the world do your work for you. A writer should aspire to something better than that. 
 
Common advice to writers is to work in concrete details, as if to reproduce the world via its gross material constituents. Don't talk of kindness or happiness or pain. Rather, have your characters move through the story atomically, anatomically. Document every twitch, every idle gesture, where their eye falls, what their hand gropes for, all the subtle alterations in their posture. Write with the alien eye of an anthropologist. Know your characters and setting like the back of your hand. Document hairstyles, clothes, brands, all the status symbols that combine to constitute a society; build a city brick-by-brick and uncover the people buried there. Take a world that everyone understands and render it in such intricate detail so as to make it startling again.
 
I myself do not perceive the world in concrete details. I wouldn't be able to tell you my characters' eye color, or race or height or weight or form. I could not tell you what they were doing with their lives in the split-second before the story began. I can't tell you what I'm doing with mine now. I could not describe happiness to you, or its signs, in any degree of detail. I'm not sure I've ever seen it. I'm not sure it exists. The most I could do is gesticulate around its absence. I could not describe to you the world at all. I've only ever inhabited a tiny portion of it at a time.

All I can do is tell you a story.

I'm looking down at the backs of my hands as I type this. They're mottled pink and brown and yellow and green at the veins, slightly translucent at the tips. The skin bulges out and bags at the joints, is raised on the knuckles in a crudely quilted triangular stitch. This is an absurd description that evokes nothing to anyone. You'd think I'd never seen my hands before in my life.