How To Structure Your Novel

Neera 1 Comment

About five years ago, I joined a writing workshop to convert an idea bubbling in my head into a novel. The workshop was going to last for one year, and we met once a month. In the first session, I made the mistake of asking whether I could discuss the idea with the group to determine whether it was good enough to be developed into a novel. I was volunteered to bring the first chapter to critique the very next month.

I had no idea how to write a chapter, let alone develop the characters and write a scene. We were yet to cover those elements in the subsequent months. I did my best, and to my amazement, everyone liked the opening chapter.

But that was all I had. I lacked the skills to develop it further. My characters were one-dimensional; I didn’t know how to end the story and, most importantly, how to beef up the middle.

As the year passed, we learned a bit about the unique elements of novel writing; each month, one participant presented a chapter for critique.

At the end of the workshop, five of us continued meeting and working on our novels. Six years have passed since the workshop, and none of us have been able to finish. We all have attributed our failure to the lack of a structure.

The mistake we made was that we started writing our novels without working out the structure of them. We hadn’t even worked out the entire story. We were practically writing from the seat of our pants.

For years we were convinced that it was the best way to write a novel. We were exploring; we were having fun, and we were making progress until we were not.

There came the point when we were realizing that the story was not going anywhere. One of my friends realized she had written 100,000 words, but she was not halfway through the story. The other one had all the inciting incidents that happened initially, leaving nothing for the middle. I figured out the end but did not know what to put in the middle. I also realized I had two stories running in parallel, making the book too long and complicated.

Your novel’s structure should be the first thing to be nailed down if you want to finish your novel. Without the structure, you will write and rewrite your novel nth number of times and still won’t finish it.

Why we need a structure?

If you look at anything, it has a structure. A building has a structure; a house has a structure; a tree has a structure; the human body has a structure.

The structure differs from the plot. A novel plot is about elements that go into mixing to make a story even better.

The structure is the backbone. It is about where the plot elements should go to make the story stand.

Without a structure, a story is just a series of anecdotes.

Twenty-three hundred years ago, Aristotle’s figured out how drama worked. His work was based on the thriving Greek theater and the surrounding mythology, rich in story and plot.

He wrote in Poetics that a story has a beginning, middle, and end. But more importantly, he explained how those sections play distinct roles in successful storytelling.

The universality of the Three-Act-Structure structure makes it easy to accept. Our life is a three-act structure — we are born, we live, and we die. Our day is a three-act structure — we get up in the morning, we go to work, and we sleep.

In the simplest form, Aristotle’s “beginning, middle, and end” has been translated into the Three-Act-Structure comprising Act I, Act II, and Act III.

Many authors have described Three-Act-Structure in different ways. They are all fine. You can pick up any and model your novel on that. However, I have amalgamated a few to make a structure that works for me. This article will explain the eight elements I define before embarking on plotting and writing literary novels.

ACT I

Act I occupy 10% to 20% of the novel but incorporates three important elements — Setup, Inciting Incident, and Plot Point 1.

Setup: This is where the readers are introduced to the setting and the characters. Everything is fine here. The main character is happily living her “normal” life.

Inciting Incident: Something happens and disrupts the “normal” life of the main character. It is the first turning point, the point from where the protagonist’s life is about to change. The protagonist resists, the inner conflict begins.

Plot Point 1: Something throws everything off balance. It usually comes as a surprise. The main character is forced to decide. She sets on a new direction in her life.

Many good novels begin at Plot Point 1., thrusting the main character right into the thick of things. It is where the protagonist acquires her goal.

ACT II

Act II has rising action and occupies 60% to 70% of the novel.

The main characters face a series of complications and obstacles, each leading to a mini-crisis. The protagonist keeps deciding to resolve the crisis until she reaches the second turning point — Plot Point 2.

The key to Act II is conflict. Without it, the story can’t move forward. Thus, the stakes are continually raised. The protagonist faces both inner and outer conflicts, alternating up and down internally between hope and disappointment and externally between solving crises and facing bigger crises.

Plot Point 2 is the second major turning point where the protagonist’s actions caused the disaster. Usually, Plot Point 2 leads to mid-point.

MidPoint: As the name explains, it is the middle of Act II and the novel. It is also known as Plot Point 3 or Mirror Moment, where the protagonist looks inwards and faces the moment of truth. A subtle but big change happens here. Instead of reacting to the crises, the protagonist goes through a fundamental change using her newly gained skills and knowledge.

Plot Point 3 shows the protagonist at her lowest, taking a profound misstep among her newfound actions, which drives her directly into the Climax and Resolution.

The story turns towards the climax in Act III, often involving a crucial decision.

ACT III

In the third Act, the climax is reached. All the loose ends are tied, and the resolution is reached. The third Act shows how the character can succeed or has become a better person.

Climax: Theis the last turning point of the novel, and it is the point of highest tension and drama. But it resolved quickly as well. It is the point at which the action starts, during which the solution is also found.

Resolution: Also known as the denouement, the resolution is when all the conflicts are resolved, and the story concludes. Tension rapidly dissipates because it’s nearly impossible to sustain a reader’s interest long after the climax.

The three-act structure is not the only way to structure a novel. Many others (and I will write about them in another post), but it is the simplest and can apply to any genre.

Benefits of a Three-Act-Structure

  1. It is the fastest way to work out where your story is going as you identify the eight elements of the structure. Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, 2, and 3, and MidPoint, you figure out whether your story is proportionate or stretched disproportionately.
  2. It helps identify the major turning points in the story ( Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Plot Point 2, MidPoint, Plot Point 3, Climax). Absence or week turning points make your story bland.
  3. It helps you meet the expectations of the readers. Readers are used to resolutions at the end of the story. They also want the end to be surprising as well as satisfying. In fact, the entire story has a rhythm to it, which can’t be achieved without a structure.

Aristotle codified still plays itself out in story after story and novel after the novel is written in our time.

A structure is only a sketch of how you think the story might go. Your story will inevitably change as you write it. By determining a structure beforehand, you are not tying yourself down to a plan you might not want to follow later.

A structure is just a guideline.

The structure is not a prison rather a map with trails. Finding the road is the most pleasurable part of writing.

Great stories existed long before there were books on story structure. The pattern of an enchanting yarn has been recreated again and again through time and around the world in myths and tales. The rhythm of these stories that so captures our imaginations reflects not marketing trends but our collective struggle through life. Things that deeply resonate do so because they tug at our inner workings.

Does your novel have to adhere to the Three-Act-Structure? No. But you probably find that it does because this is the structure of most stories in Western civilization. We are used to thinking about stories this way, even if we aren’t aware of it.

Some approaches differ slightly from the way I have described them here. Some books include all plot points in Act II, others don’t have Mid Point and Plot Point III, yet others have five or six plot points. The best approach is:

Perhaps the easiest way to decide exactly where your Plot Points fall and their importance is — not as what happens — but what the character decides to do about the thing that happens. It is the decision which drives the story — readers stay involved because they want to understand character motivation and the outcomes of the decisions the characters make. Do be careful to ensure that the scenes which relate to the turning points in your novel have enough resonance — don’t rush these scenes.

Next Step

Now get a pen and paper and start describing your story idea in terms of the eight elements of the Three-Act-Structure.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

How to make your writing memorable, poetic, and persuasive.

Neera

For some time, I have been fascinated with the rhetoric devices. The rhetoric devices are the writing techniques that Greeks invented, Romans perfected, and Shakespeare put to real use.

According to Mark Forsyth, the writer of The Elements of Eloquence at the time Shakespeare was writing, the classical works on rhetoric were being dug out, translated, and adapted for use in English. Shakespeare learned them and learned them well. His prose and his one-liners become more striking because of the mastery he gained in these their use.

Figures of rhetoric (as they were known in Greek and Roman times) were formulas. The formula that you can learn from a book. Ancient Greeks went around, noting down the best and most memorable phrases they heard and worked out what the structures were, in much the same way we ask for a recipe when we eat a delicious meal.

But then they were abandoned. 

Why? 

Because they got a bad reputation. Rhetoric devices were related to persuasive writing, and people didn’t want to be persuaded.

But today, language is considered the most humane way of persuasion. We don’t need weapons to persuade. We rather need well-crafted arguments, essays, and articles.

A little while ago, I wrote an article The things they should have taught us in school on rhetoric devices ever since I wanted to write a series of articles on them, reviving them from the dead so that you can start using them in your everyday writing.

In today’s article, I am going to introduce three easy ones.

1. Alliteration

2. Anaphora and

3. Epistrophe

1. Want to make a name or a phrase memorable, use alliteration.

Alliteration is when a series of words begin with the same consonant sound such as busy as a bee, good as gold, and dead as a doornail.

Alliteration is meant to be more than a tongue twister. It’s used to emphasize something important and to make it memorable.

Alliterations have been around for a long time. Nobody knows why we love to hear words that begin with the same letter, but we do, and we don’t forget them easily.

An alliterative name can help you stand out in the crowd. Fictional characters or public figures with alliteration in their names stick to our memory more than other names. Remember Donald Duck, Fred Flintstone, Mickey Mouse, Kim Kardashian, Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan, William Wordsworth?

Companies use the alliterative effect all the time to make their brand name memorable. American Airlines, Bed Bath & Beyond, Coca-Cola, Krispy Kreme, Lulu Lemon, Park Place, PayPal are a few examples.

Alliteration in phrases and quotes is also very effective — the last laugh, leave in the lurch, making a mountain out of a molehill, neck to neck, method to the madness, out of order, pleased as punch, pooh-pooh, not on your nelly.

It is not hard to make alliteration, and they are used extensively by good writers and poets. Shakespeare was a master if alliteration. When he wanted to describe the moment Antony saw Cleopatra on the barge and fell in love with her, he needed something to make the words memorable. He chose alliteration.

The barge she sat in like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails and so perfumed that.
 The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver, 
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
 The water which they beat to follow faster,
 As amorous of their strokes.

Milton to Tennyson, Edgar Allan to Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway to Maya Angelou, they have all used it.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, –
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.

Edgar Allan Poe in The Raven

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.

Robert Frost in Birches

For some reason, people love a string of words that start with the same sound. No body knows why. But they do. You can spend all day trying to write a great memorable sentence, bang your head against the wall to put some universal truth on paper, but it is much easier to string together some words that begin with the same letter.

Yes, you can ban the bomb, burn your bra, and push power to the people.

2. Want to emphasize or persuade, use anaphora

Anaphora is used to emphasize a phrase while adding rhythm to a passage. This technique consists of repeating a specific word or phrase at the beginning of a line or passage.

The repetition of a word can intensify the overall meaning of the piece.

Poets use it as an artistic element. Have a look at Shakespeare’s sonnet below.

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac’d,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly — doctor-like — controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill

And Joe Brainard’s “I Remember.”

I remember a piece of old wood with termites running around all over it the termite men found under our front porch.
I remember when one year in Tulsa by some freak of nature we were invaded by millions of grasshoppers for about three or four days.
I remember, downtown, whole sidewalk areas of solid grasshoppers.
I remember a shoe store with a big brown x-ray machine that showed up the bones in your feet bright green.

Politicians and public speakers use anaphora as a form of persuasion, as a method to emphasize a specific idea. Remember Winston Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons in June 1940:

“We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.”

And Martin Luther King Jr’s address at the March on Washington in 1963:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state, sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

However, if anaphora is overused, the repetition ends up being boring rather than inspiring. Be aware of the number of times that a phrase or word is used and how your writing flows, so you get the most out of using anaphora.

3. Want to drive the point home, use epistrophe

Epistrophe is the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences. It is a counterpart of anaphora.

Since the emphasis is on the last words of a series of sentences or phrases, epistrophe can be very dramatic.

Politicians use epistrophe all the time. President Barack Obama’s repetition of “Yes, we can” at the end of the sentence after sentence is an example.

Abraham Lincoln’s words, “And the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” are forever etched in our memory.

So are the words of J F Kenndey’s.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Literature draws some of its dramatic appeal from epistrophes. Poetry, in particular, lends itself well to the rhythmic flow of an epistrophe. Here is an example from the Master.

If you had known the virtue of the ring,
Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,
Or your own honour to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring. 

– The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare

Here are a couple of examples from prose. 

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now, we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

– Corinthians 13:11

Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid, each cycle of the wave is valid, each cycle of a relationship is valid.

–Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Just like catchy speeches, catchy lines delivered in movies, TV shows, or songs have repetition as the key. Here is one from The Lord of the Rings

A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of woes and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight!

Summary

Okay, there is a lot here to remember, so let me summarise.

Rhetoric devices are formulas, just like mathematics. The formula that you can learn from a book (I recommend Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence). They are based on what works rather than what might work.

1. Using a string of words with the same consonant sound is an easy and foolproof way to create memorable titles and lines.

Nobody knows the reason why but people are suckers for alliteration. If you want to make the title of your book, name of your character, or a phrase memorable, use alliteration. 

Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility will always make good titles than Dignity and Prejudice and Prudence and Sensibility.

Curiosity didn’t kill any cat, nobody has thrown a baby out with the bathwater, it takes two to tango but it also takes two to waltz.

2. Repetition of a specific word or phrase at the beginning of each line or passage is a simple technique to emphasize or persuade. 

Politicians and public speakers use it all the time. 

It’s preposterously easy to do. It’s so preposterously easy to pick some words. and it’s so preposterously easy to repeat them.

3. Want to make a dramatic impact like leaders, use the same word or a string of words repeatedly.

Remember the oath we take in the court:

I solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Your Task

See if you can introduce some of these in your writing.

Photo by Nils on Unsplash

Can Lockdown Enhanced Creativity

Neera

The world has been in various phases of lockdown from the past seven months. No one has any idea of how long we will be living in this manner. It is not just weeks or months; we are talking years. Working from home is going to become a norm pretty soon if it hasn’t already.

While there are plenty of reports saying that productivity has gone up with lockdown, but what about creativity. Are we feeling more creative working from the confinement of our homes? Are we coming up with more ideas in isolation?

Isolation is beginning to get on people’s nerves. Office workers are missing their workplace (which not so long ago was they hated the most). Lack of socializing is driving people crazy. The common complaint is boredom.

But there is one thing that blossom in boredom- creativity.

How can one be creative when one is bored?

Agatha Christie made an explicit link between her writing and childhood boredom:

People often ask me what made me take up writing. Many of them, I fancy, wonder whether to take my answer seriously, although it’s a strictly truthful one. You see, I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education. Perhaps I’d better qualify that — by admitting that I did eventually go to school in Paris when I was 16 or thereabouts. But until then, apart from being taught a little arithmetic, I’d had no lessons to speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle, in those days children had to do a good many things for themselves. They made their own doll’s furniture, and they made Christmas presents to give to their friends. (Nowadays, they’re just given money and told to buy their presents in a big store.) I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write. So by the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I’d written quite a number of short stories and one long dreary novel.

Austin Kleon has been saying for a while that to be creative you need to be boring. You are more creative working in a mundane routine than from exciting, socially-active days.

Neil Gaiman’s advice for writers is, “Get bored.”

[Ideas] come from daydreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there… The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored. I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say ‘I want to be a writer,” I say ‘great, get bored.’

Even Einstein was in favor of idleness: “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

So if isolation is getting to your nerves, find something creative to do. You can – start a veggie patch, learn to draw, write a book, make a collage, do some embroidery.

I do not know about others, but I am taking more ideas to completion. I am sticking with them longer, exploring them more, and finishing more articles and sketches than before. Not being able to go out means I can plan my days better and get more work done.

This week I wrote two articles, Seven Tips To Write With Style and Kindness Starts At Home.

I was really heartened by the fact that Seven Tips To Write With Style was picked up by the Medium curators (team of people at Medium who look for good articles and recommend them to subscribers). This is my second article in three months that got curated, which means the article will go to a wider audience.

In my cartoon drawing course, I have commenced drawing cartoons for Ms. Jolly’s Rule Book For Writers that will be published at the end of the course. Those of you who don’t know, Ms. Jolly is the cartoon character I have created who is more or less my alter ego.

That’s it from me this week.

Take care.

Kindness Starts At Home

Neera 1 Comment

I was walking back from the shopping center when I saw two girls sitting against a shop window playing a song through their mobile phone. A piece of cloth was spread before them for money.

They seemed to be from a good home. Well-dressed and well-fed.

I went past them, disgusted, thinking they must have found busking an easy way to raise money to afford something they wanted to buy.

I had only gone a few steps when something made me stop. The music they were playing was beautiful and sad. It was not the usual boisterous kind of music teenagers would listen to on their mobile phones.

I turned and had a closer look at their faces. They looked solemn. What if something is going wrong in their lives? What if someone is sick in their home and they need the money? I opened my wallet and placed a few dollars on the cloth in front of them. Their faces lit up, and they mouthed thank you. I smiled back and went my way of feeling better. I had done my act of kindness for the day.

Then a thought stopped me in tracks.

It is easier to be kind to strangers than to our loved ones.

I once read an article where the writer lamented that she was disgusted by the way she was treating her children.

If someone bumps into me in shops, we both say sorry, smile, and go our way. But at home, when my kid bumps into me in the morning rush, I get angry and lash out. Can’t you see where you are going? Look what you have done; you have made me spill tea all over my blouse.

We are much harsher, unforgiving, and cruel with our own than with people we meet on the street.

Relationships are frail. The reason they break because we start taking them for granted. We stop giving each other the common courtesy we so easily extend to strangers.

We need to be extra kind to our loved ones.

Do you know who else we are harsher with?

Ourselves.

We reserve the harshest judgment for ourselves. We remember all our faults. We blame and shame ourselves all the time.

We abandon ourselves and admire everyone else. We readily accept other’s mistakes, but we can’t seem to forgive our own. We play them in our minds over and over again.

We don’t mind others being lesser beings but can’t accept anything less than perfection from ourselves. No wonder we suffer from depression, anxiety, and fear of failure.

Like charity, kindness should start at home.

It is easy to buy food for a homeless person, and many people do that, but it is hard to ring your estranged sister and tell her that you miss her, and you love her.

We all like to think that we are kind at heart, that we don’t do any harm to anyone, but by default, our mind is finding faults in others. We only see flaws, bad traits, and annoying habits in others. Yet people never forget if you have been kind to them.

Kindness is the only thing you remember about people.

Let’s do a little test to prove that.

  1. Tell the names of the five wealthiest people in the world.
  2. Who were the five best football players last year?
  3. Tell the names of the people who circumnavigated the globe.
  4. Who conquered the Everest last year?

Most people can’t answer these questions. Now let me ask you another set of questions.

  1. Tell the names of the five best teachers in your life.
  2. Who believed in you when you didn’t believe in yourself.
  3. Who forgave you when you did something wrong.
  4. Who guided you when you didn’t know what to do?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

How To Be Kind To Those You Love

Kindness is such a big thing that sometimes it is hard to know what it exactly is. And yet kindness can be portrayed in small gestures.

Kindness is to listen to someone. Really listen to them.

Kindness is to smile at someone and say hello and wait for their response.

Kindness is to tell your loved one that you love them.

Kindness is to give an honest compliment.

Kindness is to tap on someone’s shoulder and saying, “Nevermind.”

Kindness is to offer a helping hand to those who can’t pay you back.

Kindness is to connect with someone’s soul and to make them feel that they matter.

Kindness is to be accepting; not only of others but of ourselves too.

No one knows kindness better than Orly Wahba, who took it upon herself to make kindness viral.

In 2011, a young middle school teacher started a movement, The Kindness Boomerang, to inspire and motivate people to make the world a kinder place.

Orly Wahba began her career as a middle school teacher, empowering children to embrace unity, build self-value, and use the power and magic of kindness to influence the world for good.

Her award-winning Kindness Boomerang film went viral receiving 100 million views.

We are all striving to become our better selves. We are trying to become better employees, leaders, teachers, doctors, nurses. But being a kinder-self surpasses them all.

A goal worthy of striving for is making sure anyone who comes into our contact remember us for our kindness.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

Seven Tips To Write With Style

Neera 1 Comment

Kurt Vonnegut was a great American storyteller and teacher. Known for his satirical style of writing, he was one of the most famous writers of the 1960s.

His career spanned over 50 years, in which he published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most known of his novels Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions.

In 1980, he wrote the article “How to Write with Style,” which was published in the Times. In that article, he made seven suggestions on the literary style which every new writer should frame and put on her desk.

Here they are in a nutshell:

1. Find a subject to care about

Kurt said, “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about too. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

He couldn’t be more right. Your writing shines when you write about something you care about; whether it is a novel or a love letter to the girl next door or a petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house.

One of Vonnegut’s favorite pieces of writing was an open letter his daughter Nanette wrote to a stranger who was so mad at the service he received from a waitress that he complained to the management, in writing. In her letter, Nanette made a plea to be kind and humane to young wait staff and don’t break their spirit if they happen to found it difficult to juggle correct balance and timing.

2. Do Not Rumble.

And he said he would not ramble about it.

3. Keep it simple.

There is a belief that the writing that is convoluted and sprinkled with big words is somehow elevated and more intelligent. Kurt Vonnegut wrote in simple words.

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Vonnegut continues,

The simplicity of the language is not only reputable but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

4. Have the guts to cut

It takes guts to cut the words you have spent hours writing and polishing. Yet you have to develop the courage to be able to do just that.

But the problem is more significant than having the courage to cut.

It is “not knowing” what to cut, and Vonnegut knew that. He wrote, “The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.”

He goes on to say:

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant to the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, doesn’t illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

He never talked about separating the process of writing and editing because perhaps he never wrote like that. In an interview, when asked about his method of composition, he responded:

There are swoopers and there are the bashers, and I happen to be one of the bashers. That is, you beat your head against a wall until you break through to page two and you break through to page three and so forth…But the swooper’s way, you know — and I envy them too because it must be exhilarating — is to write the book any which way and in a month maybe, whack it out, and then go through it again and again and again and again. I’ve never been able to do that.

5. Sound like yourself

When writing, most of us make an extra effort not to write the way we speak. Yet this is exactly like we need to do.

Many writers waste too much time finding their voice, without knowing they already have it. It is the voice in which they speak every single day. Even if English is your second language, you should write what is your natural way.

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

All varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varies for butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

6. Say what you mean to say.

Have you ever started writing something and found that it went in a completely different direction. Many modern writers writing to SEO guidelines find themselves in this conundrum.

The primary goal of good writing is to say precisely what the author meant to say.

My teacher wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like the parts fo the machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood…If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-pigggledy, I would simply not be understood.

If you have something worth saying, you too should avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing and write to be understood.

7. Pity the readers.

Vonnegut was acutely aware of the skill required if the readers to decipher and understand the written word.

Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high-school — twelve long years.

He wanted writers to sympathize with their readers. To be patient with them. To be ever willing to simplify and clarify.

It was this advice of his that impacted me the most.

We writers are so focused on ourselves that we forget the readers.

Yet surprisingly, most writers are the readers too.

As readers, we consume a lot of information in a day. We spend a lot of mental energy to select what we want to pursue and what we want to discard.

If your writing is convoluted, difficult to read, has lots of rambling, the reader will discard it.

I started this column to help writers write from the reader’s point of view.

You will find a new article here every fortnight.

Leave me a note if you want me to write on anything particular.

Photo by Houcine Ncib on Unsplash

Pity The Reader

Neera

I am reading a book on Kurt Vonnegut, a great American storyteller, and teacher. Known for his satirical style of writing, he was one of the most popular writers of the 1960s. 

His career spanned over 50 years, in which he published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death.

In spite of his scathing satire and willingness to scoff at received wisdom, he was an exceptional and generous teacher. His students at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop gained a great deal of wisdom from him as a writer, teacher, and human being.

In 1980, he wrote an article “How to Write with Style” which was published in the Times. In that article, he made seven suggestions on the literary style.

  1. Find a subject to care about
  2. Do not rumble
  3. Keep it simple
  4. Have the guts to cut
  5. Sound like yourself
  6. Say what you mean to say
  7. Pity the readers

Although all the suggestions are gold, the last one caught my attention. We writers are so focused on ourselves that we forget the readers. 

He wrote:

Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high-school — twelve long years.

Kurt called reading an “art.” You are not born with it. You must learn how to do it, and as with any art, you can keep gaining skills and pleasure in it for the rest of your life.

Those “marks on paper” i.e. words are symbols. They require deciphering. If they are not easy and clear, the readers give up. Rahter than encouraging them to read, we turn them off. They give up. We lose the opportunity to get our message across.

Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify.

From next week I am starting a new column in the online magazine The Innovation from. A column for writer on how to write from readers’ point of view. And it is titled… you guessed it Pity The Reader.

I have been writing on Medium, an online publishing platform. Launched in August 2012, it is the place to be for writers and bloggers because it has an audience of 100 million. I have published about 47 articles there and steadily building a readership. It is very satisfying to know that your work is going to such a vast amount of people and is not going waste.

This week I wrote one article on the blog The Four Cs of Writing, and two on Medium – Why is it easy to tell personal stories but so hard to write them and Failing To Build A Habit To Write Every Day? Try A System Instead. Have a read.

It is wet and windy today in Canberra and I am going to take a leave and from you. I will write again next Friday.

Until then take care.

Photo by Marcos Gabarda on Unsplash