Mike Johnson's Writing Tips
MIke Johnson's Writing Tips.
From his blog
Writing Tip #1: Show Don’t Tell.
Bringing some common sense to Show Don’t Tell.
Tell me a story tell me a story tell me a story before I go to bed.
So runs the popular children’s song of old, but apparently no longer, and what started out as a perfectly sound piece of advice to writers, show don’t tell, has somehow morphed into a dogma, and, like all dogmas, become fixed and absolute: Thou shalt not tell but only show. And that’s silly.
Let’s begin by admitting that all stories, all fiction, is a judicious mix of both show and tell. Some styles run leaner on the telling side than others, depending on the governing aesthetic of the story. You wouldn’t want Ernest Hemmingway to write up our fairy-tales or folk tales, there might well be nothing left of them.
Show don’t tell may become an imperative for dramatists, whether the drama takes the form of a novel, film script or play, working with a full length, three act story. It doesn’t work so well for a whole range of short stories films etc that naturally lean closer to the ‘slice of life’, less structured approach, or novels that do not follow what we may call Classical Story Design – a topic I’m sure we will return to.
In his famous study of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the literary critic George Steiner suggests there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who write dramas, like Dostoevsky, and those who write epics or chronicles, like Tolstoy. Not that Tolstoy couldn’t write a dramatic scene when he wanted to, but the overall structure of say War and Peace, is more like the episodic wandering contours of real life than the focused dramatic intensity of The Gambler or Demons is. Notice that Tolstoy could not seem to finish his novel, adding postscripts and epilogues, because the story is more like real life, messy and unfinished. Any story that attempts to follow the contours of real life stands in contrast to the clean lines of the three act structure, necessarily an abstraction from life.
So your first question is, what kind of story am I writing? Then you might get a feel for how much telling and how much showing is needed.
Furthermore, we can find showing within a context of telling (Tolstoy/Tolkien) and telling within a context of showing (Dostoevsky/Atwood).
Finally, in our enthusiasm to do the right thing, let’s not forget the simple, spine tingling elegance of telling, in the right context:
There was once a poor man who had two sons, and a rich man who had two daughters…
How silly it would be to try to ‘show’ this, when a simple statement sets it all up.
Proceed with caution
Writing Tip #2: Dealing With Those Pesky Threshold Guardians. The Demon Of Self Doubt
By Mike Johnson
You might have seen them as lions or griffin-like creatures that guard the entranceway to temples and churches.
The idea is that they are there to guard the inner sanctum from those impure of spirit and of evil intentions. Or they might be there to guard some precious secret from discovery. Whatever, they are there to test your mettle. For writers at least, they take the form of insidious doubt, and a constant wearing away at your self-esteem. If you have any doubts that you are shit, and that your writing is shit, then just look at your last sentence! I don’t know too many writers pure of spirit, but one way or another, these threshold guardians have to be dealt with, overcome or avoided by stealth.
These threshold guardians are, of course, a personification or dramatisation of internal forces. Or should I say, internalised forces. Those negative voices, we don’t have the cruelty to invent them, our ears heard them, at some stage: You can’t write to save yourself! Nobody’s going to care about this shit you write anyway. You can’t even write a sentence with out fucking it up. Who do you think you are? You will never write anything worth writing, so why don’t you just give up and go and get drunk!
I hate to say this, but in the end you can make friends with your inner critic, and you don’t even have to get drunk to do it. That inner critic can sometimes be right about a particular sentence or passage, you can learn from fair critique, and many writers say that they are their own most severe critic. But first that carping voice has to be put in its place. How you do this is up to you, but the rest of the journey is at stake. If you can’t put that insidious voice to rest it will continue to dog you, and its relentless prophesies regarding your general crapness will be self fulfilling.
Mike Johnson.
Writing Tip #3: Practice Your Craft Daily
By Mike Johnson
Quit fiddling around on Facebook, or worrying about the bills, and get to work. You’ve heard of Sunday painters, the dabblers, but you don’t hear too much about Sunday writers, because they don’t last.
The one thing that writing requires is continuity. Some writers binge write, and that can work. Philip K Dick could write a novel in two or three weeks – with enough amphetamine. Dashiell Hammett wrote The Thin Man, his last novel, in 30 hours of continuous writing. Jack Keroac would sit at his mother’s kitchen table with a bottle of whisky and keep writing until the book was finished. Other writers, the non-binge types, can keep up a steady nine to five routine day after day, regular as a bank clerk. Reputedly, Peter Carey is one such. Writing is a job and you just get up and do it like any other job. Enid Blyton could turn out up to ten thousand words a day by treating writing as a job. Most of us fall between these two extremes.
The trap, if you like, is to proceed in fits and starts. Coming in hot and strong for a couple of days then doing nothing for a couple of weeks. Pretty much useless, as the trail can go, and grow, cold without regular attention. Works neglected are most likely to be abandoned, or fail to lift off. The longer you leave it the harder it is to get back into it. If you are going to write, you have to give it a fair go. Writing is time consuming. A lot of writing time is spent in dreamtime. If I don’t have time to write on any particular day, I will make sure I read over what I last wrote, change a comma or two, remind myself of where I am and why I’m there. It might only be for ten minutes, but I’ve kept the channel open.
Practice your craft daily and watch your writing grow.
Mike Johnson.
Writing Tip #4: As You Read, So You Shall Write
By Mike Johnson
Note: this was written to be a companion piece to my partner Leila’s reflection on our library makeover. Her blog piece is much superior to mine.
Since we all want to be so amazingly original, we often underestimate and undervalue the role that our reading plays in our writing. Writers come in all shapes and sizes, thank goodness, but one thing they all have in common is that they are readers. What we soak up from other writers is often largely unconscious.
Whenever you write a sentence you evoke some kind of model for how sentences are written, which is how you have been taught to write. The more you read, the more models you have in your unconscious. Yes, you can do this (or that) with language because you have seen another writer do it. Remember, language is not natural, it is constructed. Writing that looks natural and easy is often the most highly wrought of all. Try it and find out for yourself.
Not only that, but your view of the world is shaped by the themes and visions of the writers you love and admire. Your experience shapes who you are, and your reading is an intrinsic part of your experience – that is why it’s so wonderful.
This was brought home to me recently when we gave our library room at home a makeover, pulling the books off the shelves and painting them (the shelves! Sentences can be tricky, eh?). Look at all those SF novels I used to read as an insomniac teenage boy. Not just the Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clark, but those lesser writers we have forgotten. Robert Silverberg, Bob Shaw, and the women who tried to bring a feminist perspective to this essentially boy-lit: Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Junior.
As I dusted off these old books, it struck me how important they were for my development as a writer, and as a person. The sort of person who can recognise the 21st Century as a version of one of those stories that I read as a boy. It’s a bit of a joke among us SF aficionados that we are all trapped in a Philip K Dick story with no signs of escape.
Good fiction extends our sympathies, and by doing so makes us more aware people, which in turn helps shape our world view – and as writers, presents us with challenges. Can we create a symphony of antithetical voices the way Dostoevsky does? Can we create characters with the amazing empathy with nature that Barbara Kingsolver’s character have? Can we plot a story like Agatha Christie or dig into the substance of thought and feeling the way Virginia Wolf does? Can we scare a reader as Edgar Allen Poe does, or have us fall in love with some quirky Mr Pickwick like the impossibly sentimental Dickens?
Yes, we can do all those things and more, if our work requires it. The models are there. Be not afraid to soak up influences wherever you can find them; be not afraid to imitate, for, when it comes to language, it’s by imitation that we learn.
You want to have a distinctive and original voice? And think there is some short cut to get there? That a distinctive and original voice will just miraculously manifest when you put pen to paper or your fingers hover over that keyboard? If that were the case, the less you read the more unique your voice would be! Humbug! All language is intertextual by nature. Embrace that intertextuality and celebrate it in your work.
And read like crazy. If you see a writer doing something wonderful and astonishing, you can do it to. Writer see writer do.
That’s why I keep all these old books around in the library, books I’m unlikely to read again. Books I love to dust off and look fondly at the covers, recalling the reading experience. Each one of them is a small piece of me.
Mike Johnson.
Writing Tip #5: The Problem of ‘Gapism.’ Avoid Block Paragraphing.
By Mike Johnson
The message today is, don’t let your computer format your fiction for you. If you do so it will leave a space or gap each time you hit the enter key. This creates block paragraphing, which evolved out the formatting of business letters, reports etc, to which it is suited.
It is not suited to fiction writing.
For fiction we use indent paragraphing, traditionally the only form of paragraphing for either fiction or non fiction. With the indent form, there are no gaps between paragraphs, the ruler at the top of the page is used to set a first line indent, which means that when ever the enter key is pushed, you move to the next line with the indent you have set.
Look at these two examples of the same passage from my latest book Hold My Teeth While I Teach You to Dance. I’ve used PDFs, as WordPress and Facebook do not permit indent form, at least not easily. I am using block paragraphing now as it has become the standard for blog and website software.
Example 1: Block Paragraphing.
Block Paragraph Example
Note how it fragments the text with gaps, particularly dialogue. Even over this short section, we have gained space and lost content, all gobbled up by needless gaps! Block paragraphing wreaks dialogue, the look of it and the continuity of it. Destroys the flow of readers attention, and possibly yours as you write. Remember, in much modern poetry gaps are there for a purpose – gaps can be phonetically charged, or indicate lacunae of some kind.
In fiction a gap can represent a mini-chapter or narrative break, a shift of time and place. To do that with block paragraphing you need a double gap, and the page looks even worse.
Example 2: Standard Indent Paragraphing.
Indent Example
My point is that this might affect the way you write. I notice that writers who use block form can’t happily vary paragraph length, or use in very short paragraphs. The form itself tends to make for longer paragraphs and less flexibility.
Write fiction in indent form, it may change the way language flows for you.
I can’t instruct you on how to change your software settings, as different versions of Word do it in different ways. It can usually be found under formatting, paragraph. Seek help if you need it.
Mike Johnson.
Writing Tip #6: Finding Stories. The Bowles Effect
By Mike Johnson
Writers find their stories in all sorts of places, from the daily newspapers to under their rugs. People comb their own past, our national history, and all kinds of bars and unholy places looking for their story. Sometimes, frustratingly, we become aware that there are stories all around us, every moment, we just can’t always catch them. ‘Find your emotion and you’ll find your story,’ says Hemmingway. That’s one way. Even newspaper personals: For recycle: baby’s booties (pink), unused. Wanted: Woman for farm work, must have own tractor.
There’s a story in everything.
But what we often forget is what I would call the Paul Bowles effect: it is the act of writing itself that is the major generator of ideas.
Paul Bowles.
When asked where he got his ideas from, Bowles replied that writing was the sole source of his ideas. ‘Now that I’m not writing, I have no ideas,’ he said. He described his method. He would begin with an image. Lets say, a man standing at the edge of an empty swimming pool, looking down. Okay, so who is the man? Where is he? Why is the light so bright? Why is the pool empty? And, oh, who is that standing the shadows of the open doorway behind him? A woman. His wife perhaps… And so it builds, bootstraps itself into existence from a single image.
Even if you begin a story derived from elsewhere, the Bowles Effect can still kick in, sometimes to the point of steering your story in a direction you didn’t intend, exactly.
Another writer to use the Bowles Effect is Nobel Prize winning dramatist Harold Pinter, master of pauses and implications. In his Nobel acceptance speech he spoke briefly of this method, which is an extreme application of the principle. He will begin with no more than a single word, or phrase, and builds from there. A word is spoken. Somebody is speaking it. Somebody is listening. Somebody replies. And by the way, who is the woman standing by the window…
You may have a firm idea of the story you want to tell, and that’s all well and good, but allow yourself time to just generate a word or two, an image, a piece of dialogue out of nowhere – and elaborate.
Let it go where it will, define its own direction. Modern commentators speak about the intentions of the text. Well, what are they? They are yours, as a writer, to discover. This kind of story discovers itself from the inside out, not the other way around.
This is a very handy exercise, and can be fun, even for the most diehard planners and forward plotters. You just have to hand over the reins to the story itself. Easy-peasy.
Ah… and the woman in the doorway by the window is wearing a red scarf!
Mike Johnson.
Writing Tip #7: Loosening up the linear. Having fun with parataxis.
By Mike Johnson
Edgar Allen Poe
‘Distance and duration are one.’ Edgar Allen Poe.
Poe had the insight in the 1840s, but it would be seventy years before Einstein formalized the maths, and identified space-time as a unity for the first time. For a long time writers have played with the variables of distance and duration, duration relating to time and narrative, while distance relates to space and geography.
Descriptions of place will slow the pace of narrative; a faster narrative will tend to displace other, non-narrative elements. Space and time come together in consciousness, in point of view.