Victoria, You have changed my whole outlook on what good writing is and is not. Thanks.

I am from the South. Texas to be exact. I am writing a story about the South. The hill country of Tennessee to be exact. I am confused about whether to use or not use contractions, local idioms, expressions, and other regional influences in my writing. I have read conflicting opinions about these matters. We in the South use very colorful and often specific expressions, many of which are cliches. I understand cliches being a problem and that fresh expressions make for fresh writing. So, how should I handle this problem? Thanks and keep it out of the ditch!—Jocko

Ah, you’re talking about the difference between narrative voice and dialog. One is the author speaking, and the other is the characters speaking.

The trick to showcasing dialect is to make it the smallest percentage of your writing possible, casting the rest of your writing in standard English. Because dialect requires effort on the part of the reader, it is most attractive to the reader for whom that effort is the least i.e. readers from the writer’s native area. However, this eliminates a huge percentage of your potential readership. So you appeal to that huge percentage by casting the majority of your work in English we have all agreed to understand the same way, by virtue of dictionaries and school. Keep alternate pronunciation of words to a minimum to give them the greatest impact.

On the other side of the coin, because regional influences are surprising and unique and often intensely vivid, they create a wonderful opportunity for the writer to flesh out their story in a three-dimensional world. So they’re a goldmine—particularly if this is regional influence bred into your bones, so just the right snappy turn of phrase tends to surface at just the right moment from your decades-old subconscious. Put that in your characters’ voices. Showcase it with Standard English in your narrative.

I have a whole chapter on this in The Art & Craft of Fiction. The short version is: lean on your idiomatic language and expressions, your regional cliches that are not cliche elsewhere, and try not to draw attention to yourself with fancy dialectic punctuation and spelling.

In particular, if you’re a Southerner, read Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty to learn how to do it right. Those two were masters.

(My Gampie was from Fort Davis in the Fort Davis Mountains. Although he moved to Southern California as a young man, he never lost his twang.)

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A very well-read friend of mine, who is not a writer, keeps giving me the sage advice of write what I know. I’ve tried that. I don’t like it. I much prefer to let my somewhat askew of center brain go to places of imagination which I have never experienced or seen. Am I crazy or what?
—Jocko

Well, Jocko, yes, you probably are crazy. Welcome to the club.

You know this is actually a really important issue for writers. I talk about it a bit in The Art & Craft of Fiction. It’s true, the advice to ‘write what you know’ truly is sage advice but highly misunderstood.

The rationale for writing what you know lies in authenticity. All fiction hinges on authenticity—the details of your characters’ world, the way they speak, the way they move, the logic of how their mistakes blow up into ever-bigger and -bigger mistakes until their lives come crashing down upon their heads.

Now, if you write realistic stories about characters who live lives quite similar to yours, then you don’t have to waste a lot of time on research. All you have to do is carry a notebook around with you as you go bumbling about your daily business and take notes on it: describe what it looks like where you eat your meals, describe what it looks like where you work, describe your favorite bars and hang-outs, describe your home and friends’ and family’s homes. Study the ways in which you and the people you know speak and express yourselves, your gestures and expressions and mannerisms, your body language, your noises, your subtleties, your silences. Study the cause-&-effect of how events in your lives play out. Study it carefully.

However, if you write fantasy or sci-fi or mystery or horror or some permutation of those umbrella genres, you’ve put yourself in a position in which you can’t do your research the lazy way, just by being you. You have to spend a lot of time—a whole darn lot of time—getting to know your characters’ world. It’s not right there in front of your face. You have to seek it out.

If you’re writing sci-fi you need to study the science upon which your characters’ world is based, and you need to study the logic by which reasonable extrapolations might be made that would result in the events you want to explore. If you’re writing mystery or horror you need to study the craft of mystery or horror so you know how to lay clues and interweave red herrings, build tension through verbal techniques and understanding of human psychology, in order to give your readers the thrill for which they read. And if you’re writing any type of fantasy—just making it all up yourself—you need to do an astronomical amount of world-building, ala J.R.R. Tolkien. All that iceberg, as Hemingway said, holding your story up and giving it its dignity.

This is a ton of work. And it takes a seriously long time.

So mentors and teachers often advise aspiring writers—whom they suspect of being in a bit of a hurry and unaware of the extraordinary amount of time it takes to learn to write well and then do it for each and every novel, much less spend all that time inventing entire worlds—to stick with the easy path and fill their writing with whatever they can easily observe.

However, on the other side of the coin lies the fuel of all great fiction, which is the writer’s own unique, quirky, unreproduceable take on how all those details interact with each other and create layers of meaning above and beyond the dry facts. And that’s what’s happening to you when you long to let your “somewhat askew of center brain go to places of imagination.”

Go there! That’s the fun of writing fiction.

But no matter what stories you choose to tell, if you want them to be any good or to matter in any way to your reader—you still have to write what you know.

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I struggle with critiquers having a mind set of ‘just the facts’ style of writing, paring the story down to the bare bones, but maybe that’s not the writer’s ‘true style’ and the critters can’t see that, so even when the mss. is whittled down to its essence, there still seems to be something missing–it lacks life, character, voice, whatever you want to call it. Especially troubling to new writers who haven’t found their voice yet. My sense is that it takes that proverbial ‘million words’ to even begin to find one’s voice. If that’s true, I’m not even a fifth of the way home …so back to work. —Chris

It sounds like you’ve got two problems going on at once, Chris.

One is that peer critiquers can’t really guide you in learning your craft. They don’t know any more about it than you do. So you really, seriously need to take their advice with a grain of salt. Half of it will be good, and half will be bad, and until you’re more accomplished than they are you can’t tell which is which. They more or less cancel each other out.

The advice to write in scenes rather than exposition is good advice, and there are important reasons for it. If there’s something missing when you whittle your ms down to its scenes, write more vivid scenes. Think up more intense events for those scenes—not violence, but internal struggle. And keep in mind that if you haven’t yet learned to detach from your work, you’ll assume just because your early drafts came out of you in one form that means they can’t live in any other form. They can, and they will.

Exposition is a tool in the writer’s toolbox, but it’s a tricky and, actually, not essential one. You need to get really good at writing scenes before you try to get really good with exposition. The one leads to the other.

The other problem is that it sounds like you’re struggling with voice and prose pretty early in the game. Don’t worry about it in first drafts or even at this stage in your writing life. Just write clean, clear sentences full of detail recording what you see your characters doing. Go out and take notes on the real world to practice seeing the details that are there. Go home and pay attention to your characters—make lists, draw diagrams, doodle their names all over your margins.

But don’t pressure yourself to develop a voice. As Christopher Isherwood said, just be a camera. All else flows from there.

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The quality debate is of course the biggie. If the legacy publishers are already dumbing down expectations, and new writers are self-publishing too soon with inferior quality products, what chance of quality works being found? Or maybe, just maybe, I need to rethink what “quality” writing is. Is “quality” writing something that only appeals to a minority educated enough to appreciate subtle Latin phrases or passing quotations from Shakespeare’s lesser know works? Or is that just elitism? Can a “quality” piece of writing not also engage the masses simply by being a gripping, or at least, entertaining story written in simple, engaging English?
—Mark Williams

Vintage pulp: in its time considered garbage in/garbage out by the literati reading Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, James Joyce, and the Post-Moderns like Paul Bowles, Flannery O’Connor, and Donald Barthelme who followed in their footsteps—it wasn’t genius-level gorgeous and even experimental. It was just good, gripping, well-written, exciting storytelling.

And, by today’s publishing standards, it was of a towering, monumentally-high quality.

The language is clean, clear, taut—there’s no flab, no lazy exposition, no cliches. There’s no pussyfooting around. The writing is meant solely and entirely for telling gripping stories.

The characters are three-dimensional human beings—not necessarily T.S. Eliot’s despairing barfly listening to the women cry, “Ta,” to each other, mooning over his beer wondering what’s up with Lil even as civilization settles slowly, miserably, gorgeously down on his head in perfect rhythm and reverberating, heartbreaking, word-by-word beauty—but Eliot’s fellows bellied up to that same bar, with their own griefs and lost dreams, their own blue-collar jobs (something Eliot didn’t have to worry about, with his career in banking), their own secret passions driving them to keep on living the day-to-day struggle of just living, in spite of the overwhelming darkness of life.

The stories are extremely solidly structured. (Much of vintage pulp presages the unexpected crack of the whip that represents the only acceptable Hooks of today.) The catastrophes are vivid and startling, the Climaxes inevitable and inescapable. By the time you reach the Climax of an Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason, you know exactly what those characters’ worst nightmare is, and you know Gardner’s going to deliver it to you on a silver platter.

Did regular blue-collar joe readers read this stuff? Were they attracted to its familiar but exciting content, entertained by its rollercoaster context? Did it sell?

Heck, yes, it did! That’s why publishers invented dimestore paperbacks, and why we have them (well, their more expensive equivalent) to this day. Those babies sold like hotcakes!

And there’s no law that says we can’t still write like that. All we have to do is study those books—they’re out there, you just have to look for them—and use the secrets and techniques they all knew to create our own hot-dog rollercoaster stories.

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Dear Editor, Galley Cat had an interesting twist for your hotel room: “According to the New York Post, Midnight’s Children author Salman Rushdie will be selecting ten American classics to be featured in the guest rooms at New York City’s Standard Hotel.”

I’m wondering: Which classics would you include for the average hotel guest, which books would you stock in a room for your clients/readers, and which books would you wish for your personal reading pleasure? Rather than ten books each, how about two or three for each, and one in common?—John Elicker

Wow, ten? John, you’re talking to someone with probably 1500 books in her office, not counting the ones I share with my family on the bookshelves all across one end of our living room. When I die, it’s going to be from Book Overdose.

Can I give you a list assuming those hotel guests are all aspiring writers? This is not to say these are the only excellent books I have on writing—they’re just the cream of the crop.

On writing, for writers from beginners to adepts:

1. Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

Both funny and kind, Lamott’s book is a classic mainly for its warm, self-deprecating voice. “If I can do it,” Lamott seems to be generously assuring the reader, “you can do it.”

2. Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg

A landmark book when it first came out, in it Goldberg has the audacity to suggest writing is about the magical craft rather than the market and then include dozens of wonderful little exercises for sinking ever-deeper into the experience.

3. Screenplay, by Syd Field

If you want to write stories readers want to read, you have to know how to structure them properly. Field’s the king.

4. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne & Dave King

When I discovered this book shortly after it came out in 1993, I immediately called my new agent up and interrupted her in a meeting with another author to tell her about it. Indie editors decades before publishing became what it is today, Browne & King are still active in the indie editor community.

5. On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner

Who hasn’t read Gardner’s classic work? “It is far more satisfying to write well than simply to write well enough to get published.”

6. Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O’Connor

I refer back to this one more than any other writing book I own. (And I own probably fifty over a hundred.) Charming and profound, O’Connor’s advice on writing just gets wiser and more meaningful the more often you read it.

On being a writer:

7. The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler, edited by Tom Hiney & Frank MacShane

Read it for Chandler’s wonderful spoof on Hemingway, if for nothing else. This is the inside of the mind of a dedicated, brilliant novelist. (Don’t bother with the shallow early draft-ness of the not-really-Gothic Romance he was working on at the end of his life—he’d been wrecked, by that time, by the death of his wife.)

8. Journal of a Novel, by John Steinbeck

Again, the inside of the mind and daily life of a brilliant novelist with such beautiful words on being a writer I posted a whole article for my online magazine once made up entirely of quotes from it. “I don’t care how long it takes. . .You can’t train for something all your life and then have it fall short because you are hurrying to get it finished.”

9. The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

Lovely, truthful talk about what it means to be a writer, especially the chapter describing the morning her typewriter erupted lava. Over and over, throughout the years, I hear Dillard’s six-year-old neighbor’s words in my head, “Did you really write that story? Or did you type it?”

10. The Notebooks of Henry James

I can’t leave this one out. It will teach you exactly how to think like a great writer.

Of course, John, you’re more than welcome to use my books on writing, The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual, , The Art & Craft of Story and The Art & Craft of Prose.

Such an extraordinary craft this is, to which I’ve had the honor of dedicating my life.

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Currently, I serve as first reader for an acquaintance/internet friend. She’s been published a couple of times by POD/electronic firms. I know, from having asked her, that her Very Favorite Writer (Formative Years division) has produced an entire shelf full of well-aged mulch. I wasn’t going to call it that, but my Internal Editor, who was looking over my shoulder when I tried to read the stuff, refuses to apply any other printable label.

So my question is this: as an editor, how can I tell when I’m editing somebody, as opposed to attempting to make their fiction over in my own writing’s image? I don’t actually believe this to be possible in my friend’s case, as our VFWs are so very far apart, but it would be useful information to have when I get enough of my novel complete to go to a critique group. But if I am doing that to her, of course I need to stop.—R.F.

Well, for one thing, R.F., if you want to model yourself on Dorothy L. Sayers, you”ll do great stuff, but your ego will have to be ENORMOUS. She thought more highly of herself than anyone else did, either before or since.

Just had to say that!

You’re a mystery reader, eh? Such a fabulous genre. I’ve reviewed books by all those you named on Goodreads earlier this year and have most of Sayers’, Tey’s, and MacDonald’s books on my vintage mystery shelves. And I just finished reading John Dickson Carr’s The Blind Barber last night. Joy beyond joy! What a fun writer.

Now, my advice to you is going to sound like a cop-out, but it’s really not: I strongly advise you, as a peer critiquer, not to Line Edit at all.

Line Editing is the most intuitive part of the editing craft, one of those things that takes eons to learn how to do properly, distinguishing between decisions as a matter of good writing and those as a matter of the writer’s voice. It took me decades of working professionally to learn to do it well. That’s decades. So I couldn’t tell you in a nutshell, “Do this and not that,” and really be any help. The possible techniques are numerous, and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses, its own aspects to be considered within the greater work as a whole.

Line Editing also has a lot to do with developing your professional ear, and if you don’t have that ear yet you might very likely make things worse.

When I Line Edit clients’ work, I have to be able to explain clearly and logically why I’ve done what I’ve done every single place I’ve done it. There are myriad reasons to alter copy, but only the right reasons actually improve the work. All the rest is playing with someone else’s dynamite. My clients listen to me (usually!) because they’ve paid me for my professional expertise. It’s simply a different kettle of fish. (And sometimes they do kick—which engages my professional expertise as a handler of writers.)

Peer critiquers are really best as companions and supporters rather than editors. You don’t have the authority to tell your acquaintance how to write, so if you try you automatically run the risk of alienating someone you get along with otherwise quite well. I mean, is she going to Line Edit your stuff to read like her own VFWs? Really—it’s such a slippery slope.

Talk your characters over together, ask penetrating questions about what they want and need, what they fear, where their story might be going. Be the one to say, “But if that’s the decision they’d hate to be faced with most in the world, that makes it your Climax, doesn’t it?” It’s so easy, as the writer, to cringe away from the obvious catastrophe, and sometimes you just need someone with less feeling for your beloved protagonist to put their finger on the hot button.

Help each other think of ways to add internal conflict and surprise. Help each other solidify the structure of your novels along classic structure, practice plotting together, get Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and give each other writing assignments. Discuss really good books on writing to inspire yourselves with your work. Hold your heads and moan, side-by-side, when the Self-Loathing Phase of Revision gets you down.

But leave the Line Editing be. Basic Developmental Editing can be learned by anyone, as can be Copy Editing. Line Editing others’ work, though, is simply too complex to tackle unless you’re already a professional.

What is this Line Editing of which I speak? And why do I keep speaking of it?

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I have a question about #5 [on 5 Pickles to Write Yourself Into]. Is a garbled resolution the same as an ambiguous resolution—one where there’s no ‘happily-ever-after’ ending? Meaning an ending where there’s no clear winner or loser, perhaps reflecting the shades of gray found in real life? I feel my ending does make sense, but might not be satisfying for a reader who wants the good guy to be 100% triumphant in the end.
—Chris

Excellent question, Chris.

The whole point of writing a story is the ending: you’re flinging the reader into space to land with a shock on their own epiphany about the meaning of life. Lots of readers are happy for that to be simple reassurance that life makes sense and will work out for them somehow.

But there’s a great deal more to be discovered about life than that, which the writer is not here to explain. The writer is here to fling that reader. The reader will find their own epiphany if you just give them the proper launch.

And that complex epiphany—the epiphany you aim toward through more than one lens, like three-dimensional motion viewed through two disparate eyes—that’s the epiphany that’s truly profound.

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First draft work on character-driven story: 1) how to know when you’ve explained & exposed enough to complete a scene—can some parts be summarized to sort of give a gist of what’s happening? I’m familiar with the purpose of a scene, but fleshing it out is something else again—leaving some insecurity over the length of each ‘chapter’, some being more fleshed out. (Don’t want to short-change myself or readers, and need to go back adding a lot of filler, nor do I want to drag it out with stuff that would be cut out by an editor). I know it’s not all about word count, but it still has to fit norms for the genre. Maybe that is more than one question.
—Laureli

There’s actually only one question in there, hon, and it’s a brief one, but I think I see what you’re getting at.

For your first draft:

Never apologize, never explain. You don’t need exposition. No exposition. Just record the facts: who said what, what they did, where they were and what it was like. In total, overwhelming, passionate detail. This is not filler. This is your imaginary world. Don’t be afraid of fleshing your scenes out too much—write EVERYTHING.

You guys think I’m kidding about this, but I’m not. You can write an entire, gripping, heart-stopping novel without a single spec of exposition. Everything you pause to explain pulls your reader just a little bit out of your fictional dream.

When you go back and revise your manuscript, you’ll do that cold, so you’ll feel when a scene is lagging and you’re having that urge, “Just get on with it already.” You’ll also notice which telling details jump out at you, and you’ll be able to flag those as the ones to keep, which you will use to highlight the hooks, biggest conflicts, and climaxes of each scene. You’ll trim the details, dialog, and actions that aren’t important enough to keep. That’s why you must write with your keyboard on fire the first time around, so you have plenty of room to trim without worrying about trimming too much.

If you find entire scenes you don’t need, that’s fine, just drop them out. Don’t replace them with exposition. Watch how the tension leaps as you move from one scene to another without explaining, and the reader is filled with the thrill of having to run to keep up.

If you find your wordcount has dropped below the acceptable minimum for contemporary genre (and this is a silly, silly hoop to have to jump through, but it’s how the game is played, so if you want to be published and don’t want to do it yourself, you’re just going to have to play it), spend some long, luxurious hours analyzing your structure to discover where you have room to elaborate or develop a subplot. No filler. You may only add substantial material, material that matters, that always, always forwards your plot toward its Climax.

Eventually, at the very, very, very end of revision, when you’ve done everything you possibly can with your manuscript and it’s time to illuminate what you have in the most minimal, succinct, glorious way humanly possible, you may decide you want a little bit of exposition in only those most vital places. Put it in only where you simply can’t live without it. Let your ms go cold. Re-read and ask yourself whether or not the exposition is absolutely necessary. Put in a tiny bit more if you find a few spots that are still awkward. Let your ms go cold again. Squint your eyes, lean backward, and type any final exposition with only the very tips of your fingers. Resist. Resist. Resist.

Exposition is never, ever used to pad wordcount. It is only and entirely good for illumination, and if you’ve written your scenes properly you shouldn’t actually need it at all.

And if all this letting it go cold and then testing and then letting it go cold and then testing again seems like an excruciating process, be assured that it is. The faster, less-painful way to do it is to take your completely fleshed-out, 100%-scene-filled beyond-your-genre-wordcount novel to a professional line editor (not a copy editor! not even a developmental editor! an experienced line editor, of whom we are few and far between) and let them cut loose on it.

That judgment call about what’s exactly enough and not too much is a skill it takes decades to develop. Ask Bob Gottlieb. That’s why, unfortunately, almost nobody knows how to do it really beautifully anymore.

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Hi Victoria, I’ve been following your website for a while and now have a question that I hope you can assist with. I am a writer who lives in Australia. I’ve been told countless times that setting a novel in Australia (or most places outside the US) can mean the death of your novel. Do you think this is true?

That said, the novel I’m working on at the moment has no reason to be set here—the setting can be anywhere. I spent a year in Eugene, Oregon, and have quite an affinity for the place, plus my husband spent most of his life there, so I feel I could definitely set the story there. I would appreciate any thoughts you have about this.
—Cheers, Jo Vraca

I’ve got three words for you, Jo: My Brilliant Career.

What you’re talking about is the regular old horseshit that circulates the industry on a regular basis: “Don’t rock the boat.” Those so-called ‘experts’ aren’t talking about literature. They’re just talking about what they expect will make them a few bucks without taking any giddy, thrilling, heartstopping risks of writing something great.

You know what makes a novel a great novel? A writer with a fresh vision, the commitment to polishing their fiction skills, and a whole lot of stamina. Writing a novel is a mountain of work. If you want to be a writer, you’d better love the work.

You know what makes a novel that drops out of sight before it’s even published? An industry that instructs writers to write formulaic garbage they hope will bandwagon on the success of some successful novel that was written with a fresh vision.

So you’ve got a great story, and you’ve got a fresh and exciting place to set it, someplace that hasn’t necessarily been beaten to an unoriginal cliche but also—fortuitously—isn’t so obscure it would only appeal to readers interested in obscure cultures. You’ve got a zillion wonderful, vivid, telling details to place your reader in your scenes and give them unique and interesting characters to follow around. You’re surrounded by great material. Wow, are you in the catbird seat!

When I lived in Brisbane years ago, my Aussie boyfriend had a real chip on his shoulder about his idea of Americans’ idea of Australia.

“You think we’re all Crocodile Dundee!” he used to complain in high dudgeon.

“You ought to be grateful that guy put you on the map,” I used to say back. (Yeah, we did eventually break up.)

Did Paul Hogan listen to industry pundits: “Do you think my movie will fail if I set it in Australia? Can it only succeed if I put my hero in Florida?”

No, he did not. He said, “I’ve got a great story and a fresh and exciting place to set it, mate. Now all I need’s the commitment and stamina. How bloody lucky am I?”

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I’m 18. . .I will get an idea in my head, and i could write for hours from that one idea. After that idea is gone, for several days not one word will be written on the paper. Is that normal for writers?—Josh Miller

Oh, yes, Josh. That is totally normal for writers.

You’ll hear a lot of push-push-push out here in the online writing community—”Write every day! Finish NaNoWriMo! Set yourself a deadline for querying!” It’s all bull. And it will turn the grand adventure of hiking up your backpack and heading out into the world of fiction into just more burdensome homework.

Don’t fall for it. There are rules for great writing, but there are no rules for how to get it done. This pressure is all really quite recent stuff, generated by the rise of marketing in or culture, and it’s completely meaningless in the context of the great literature. It will pass. All bad ideas eventually do.

I also started writing a novel when I was 16 or 17, and I also tried to finish it in a timely way. As it happens, I didn’t, because it turned out I didn’t know how to write a novel. So I started another, and another, and a few years after that another. In the meantime I was writing lots of periphery stuff—short stories, poetry, sketches, Natalie Goldberg-inspired exercises, a journal of my daily life complete with conversations and a record of where I went and who I saw, what we did together. I eventually finished a novel when I was 25. And another a few years later. And another later. In the meantime, I kept writing all that periphery stuff.

When I met my first agent, she asked me how many novels I’d written, and I said, “Three.” She said, “Good. If you’d only written the one, I wouldn’t take you.”

Start writing when you feel like it, stop when you’re depleted, write all kinds of stuff whenever it strikes you—particularly real stuff that really happens to you, in great detail. Get your hands on Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and have a blast with the exercises. Expect it to take the rest of your life to learn how to do right. Most of all: live your life.

You can always start another story, you know. That’s the beauty of creation. But this is the only life you’re ever going to get.

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