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Stop Telling Students “Said is Dead;” They Shouldn’t Use Anything Else

One of the most fun, yet annoying things I’ve ever done for my oldest daughter is to undo the writing “rules” her teacher taught her in the 7th grade.

“Paragraphs have to be 3 – 4 sentences long. Don’t use contractions. Don’t start sentences with ‘and,’ ‘but,’ or ‘or.’ Don’t end your sentences with a preposition.”

When she was in the 7th grade, I had told her not to follow one of her writing rules “because,” I said, citing my full 20+ years of experience, “it’s stupid.” She did, and when the teacher corrected her, she said, “My dad told me not to do it, and he’s a professional writer.”

Nude woman with the words "write or be written off" written across her front shouldersBelieve it or not, that was the end of that little rule, although the teacher did explain that she wanted my daughter to at least know the basics, so she could understand what rules she was breaking.

“They shouldn’t be rules in the first place,” I started to tell my daughter, but my wife stopped me.

Now that my daughter is home schooled, and writing (especially blogging) has become a central part of my daughter’s education, I’m able to teach her the right way to write, and not the school way to write.

And yes, there’s a difference.

This is What Happens When You Focus Too Much on Math

I was more than a little annoyed and disheartened to read John Warner’s “Said Is NOT Dead” article on InsideHigherEd.com.

Recently, the most disturbing news I’ve heard in a long time came across my Facebook feed. It was supplied by Matt Bell, a writer and creative writing teacher of my acquaintance who had heard this very troubling thing from the students in one of his classes.

They told Professor Bell that when it comes to tagging dialog in their fiction, “said is dead.” He inquired where they learned this, and they answered, “school.”

This is what annoys me about our educational system. We have people who don’t write teaching people how to write. We make science teachers have a background in science, history teachers have a history degree. And yes, I know English teachers have an English degree, but they’re usually readers, not writers. Or they’re not very good writers, otherwise they wouldn’t be telling students to use “enthused,” “squealed,” “chortled,” and “shrieked,” instead of “said” and “asked.”

That’s not good writing. That shows you have a thesaurus, and it’s actually very distracting. The whole point of dialog is to relay a conversation, not show how clever the author is. I want to hear the people speaking, I don’t want to see how many different emotion words the author knows.

To paraphrase Warner’s friend, Jim Ruland, “A tag on a line of dialog is like a tag on a garment: you’re not supposed to notice it and it’s slightly embarrassing when you do.”

By teaching “said is dead,” these teachers are violating two other important rules of writing:

  1. Don’t use adverbs. Don’t describe a verb, use a better verb.
  2. Show, don’t tell. Don’t tell me she’s enthusiastic, describe it through her actions.

Good dialog should flow like a good TV show. When you have good actors doing good dialog, you don’t need a lot of visual fluff to go with it. When you’re writing dialog, you don’t need all that pap and fluff to tell the reader what to think. You show it with the rest of the narrative or the other character’s reaction.

Teachers Need to Learn to Write

Writing is easy. Writing well is hard. And the better you get, the harder it gets. But people who teach grossly incorrect ideas like “said is dead” are making it harder for people who actually want to write for a living.

Anyone who has to unlearn a bad habit is at a disadvantage compared to the people who learned good habits early on. Teachers who tell their students “said is dead” — or any of these other grammar and language myths — are doing their students a horrible disservice. And employers like me end up with an entire generation of students who couldn’t write their way out of a wet paper bag without a quiver full of adjectives.

Teachers, if you want to help your students be good writers, start writing yourself. Write essays and short stories. Don’t just read them, produce them. Invite professional writers and college writing professors to your class to talk about what the writing life is like. Start reading blogs from professional writers and creating writing teachers to see what kinds of advice they’re giving and what ideas they’re teaching.

Give them sound writing advice that every professional writer is following in the real world, and not something from the Pollyanna School of Saccharine Pap.

(Update: As my friend and published novelist, Cathy Day, said in the comments below: If any K-12 teachers find their way to this post and feel inspired to focus on their own identities as writers, this is just what they need: The Indiana Writing Project (or if they don’t live in Indiana, many states off similar summer institutes).)

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Three Unrelated Skills to Make You a Better Writer

Every writer gets the same advice when they’re starting out — write every day, read a lot, practice writing exercises — but that can only get you so far. There are other skills to develop.

It’s like a baseball player who only practices hitting and catching. Yes, those are important skills that he needs to practice over and over. But there are other skills he can practice that will also improve his playing ability: lifting weights, sprint workouts, and even off-season work like chopping wood and playing basketball, will improve his ability to swing a bat.

Doing this taught me to be a better writer.
For writers, there are related skills they can develop, through other activities that exercise their writing muscles, but don’t actually have them writing the same same stuff over and over. These other activities can improve your communication skills, which will ultimately improve your writing.

Twitter

I always thought I was good at concise writing, until I fell in love with Twitter. After using it for a year, and learning how to fit a single thought into 140 characters, I realized I was doing that in my regular writing. When I went back and compared my work to the previous year, I could see how everything was tighter, and how I expressed ideas more fully with fewer, better words.

Twitter has especially helped my humor writing, because I’ve learned how to set up a joke and deliver the punchline in a single tweet. This has had a huge impact on my humor column writing, because I’ve been able to squeeze more jokes into the same number of column inches.

To learn how to tweet effectively:

  • Distill your thoughts into the most expressive nouns and verbs.
  • Cut the adverbs.
  • Use adjectives sparingly.
  • Avoid first person references. Instead of saying “I had lunch at @BoogieBurger,” say “Had lunch at @BoogieBurger” or even “Ate at @BoogieBurger.”

(This last one is more of a space saver, but it also teaches you how to write with greater punch.)

Want to make it a real challenge? Avoid abbreviations if possible, and never, ever use text speak. Then, make your thoughts fit into the required space. That’s the best training you can ever do for yourself.

Public Speaking

If you speak in public, you already know how to deliver information clearly and directly, making it easy for your audience to understand and be interested in it. If you’ve been doing it for a while, you’ve already got a speaking style. (And if you don’t, find your local Toastmasters club, and learn to speak in public.)

As you develop that speaking style, try to tailor your writing style to match it. As you’re reading, imagine yourself delivering the material to your audience. If you speak with strong declarative statements, write them. If you’re funny in person, be funny on paper. If you’re calming to your audience, be calming to your reader. Basically, your spoken word choice and delivery should affect your written word choice and style. And as more people hear you speak, the more they’ll hear your voice when they read your work. Match the one to the other in tone, word choice, and even rhythm.

Storytelling

I don’t mean become the kind of storytellers you see at festivals or hear on The Moth, although that helps. Rather, focus on telling stories to friends over dinner. The story should have a beginning, middle, and end. It should create suspense, and have an interesting payoff at the end.

If you can easily tell those kinds of stories out loud, you’ll learn how to tell those stories on paper. Any story or blog post you write should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It needs to have an interesting payoff. (Of course, with blogging and journalism, the payoff comes at the beginning, so you’ll need to learn how to deliver the punchline first, and turn the setup into its own a-ha! moment.)

As you’re writing your articles, write it as if you were going to deliver it in public, but as a five-minute story. If you can shift the storytelling architecture to your writing, that makes your work easier to follow. You learn how to keep people involved from a post or article from beginning to end.

These are the three skills I have worked on over the last several years, and they have made a big difference in what, how, and how well I write. And I’m always looking for the next new challenge or skill to master to make it even better.

How about you? What challenges are you taking on yourself to become a better writer?

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How to Make a Living as a Writer

A lot of people dream of making a living as a writer, or at least making money from it, but it’s getting harder, thanks to the Internet.

Stupid Internet.

The irony is that the thing that’s made it easier for people to get published has also made it harder for people to get paid for doing it. And yet, it has also created new ways for people to get paid for writing.

But here’s the sad, scary irony — you will almost never make a decent, full-time, support-a-family living as a professional writer.

Okay, we’re NOT really ghosts. I mean, you can actually see us.

Every other novelist I know, and I know a few good ones, makes their living doing something other than writing novels. Most of them make their living as teachers, and they write novels as their nights/weekends job. (Even William Faulkner was a postmaster. One of our country’s greatest novelists, and he sold stamps!) The few magazine writers I know only write articles as a sideline. And I have yet to meet a blogger who writes for himself or herself as their only source of income. (There may be a few in existence, but I haven’t met them yet.)

Here’s why:

  • Novelists get paid advances, and then receive royalties on book sales. Advances and royalty checks are getting smaller as publishers’ margins get smaller. So unless your last name is Grisham or Patterson, you’re not going to make a living this way, unless you work it at constantly. There are a few novelists who write 10 – 12 hours per day and produce a novel a month which they sell as ebooks, but they’re few and far between.
  • Magazine writers get paid a few hundred dollars. Let’s pick $500 as a nice round, almost-attainable number. If you wanted to make $60,000 per year, you would have to write 10 magazine articles per month. That’s doable, but you’re working constantly, more than you would at a corporate job. Also, you’ll take quite a while to reach that level, so be prepared for a few years of that constant work at little to no pay.
  • Nonfiction book writers (me included) make squat from our book sales. I own my own business. My friend, Kate, is a freelance book editor. Other authors support their book sales with public speaking gigs, or use it to promote their actual business.

The sad truth is that it’s very difficult to make a full-time salary solely from writing, unless you’re a journalist, and even those people are facing uncertain futures.

The Secret to Making Money as a Writer

There’s really only one way you’re going to make money by sitting down at a computer and churning out words by the bushel: write for someone else.

Seriously, that’s it. That’s all there is to it.

The people who make money writing are the people who don’t get to put their name on their work. They give up the credit and recognition in exchange for a paycheck.

Political speechwriters get paid to write speeches for people who will never give them public credit. They don’t get to put their name above, and the speaker will never say, “I’d like to publicly thank my speechwriter who crafted these words.”

Marketing copywriters write copy that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars for their employer, but they never get to put their byline on a brochure. (They also rarely get any bonuses for their work, even if their work directly led to a 30% spike in sales.)

In my own company, we ghostwrite for other people, not ourselves. This blog post right here? I’m publishing it under my own name, but I won’t get a dime for it. I’m hoping it will attract the attention of a client who’s willing to hire us though. Instead, we write blog posts for clients under their name, help them win search, and convince clients they know what they’re talking about. But because we’re ghosts, we don’t tell anyone who our clients are.

For people who want to make money by, as Hemingway put it, sitting at a typewriter, opening a vein, and bleeding, be prepared to do it for other people. Farm out your talents as a hired gun and craftsman. An ink slinger and a wordsmith. The pro from Dover who does what no one else can.

Ultimately you have a choice: be well-known and struggle, or be hidden and satisfied.

My suggestion is to do both. Write for other people during the day, and write for yourself at night. Ultimately, you’ll get the best of both worlds.

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There’s No Such Thing As a Gifted Writer

A recent email newsletter from Jeff Goins posed the question, “is writing a gift or a skill?” That is, are you a gifted writer, or did you work at it?

The better question is, “are the things we do well born within us (innate or a gift) or are they developed through hard work (learned or a skill).

It’s an age-old philosophical question: are we born with all the knowledge and abilities within us, and that knowledge is uncovered as we go through life? Or are we a blank slate, a tabula rasa, and we fill that slate up as we go through life?

If writing is a gift, I want mine to be wrapped in Thomas the Tank Engine paper.

I lean more toward the blank slate side. That we learn what we know through experience, rather than uncovering it. That it takes hundreds and thousands of hours to get good at anything. That we need to practice over and over and over to get something right.

For those people who are very good at what they do — writing, football, music — we work our asses off at it every day. It’s not a gift, it’s not innate. There’s no such thing as a gifted writer.

To call it a gift is to minimize that hard work. It says that only by some quirk of fate and randomly firing neurons did we become writers, athletes, and musicians. It means that we don’t have to work at it, we just have to discover that we’re good at it, and then run with that. It means you can pick up that skill any time you want, and with a little bit of work, you can be awesome a it.

The Myth of the Gifted Writer

While there certainly are people who have specific gifts, these gifts are usually physical in nature, and can’t be developed. For example, Peyton Manning is 6’5″, which contributes to his success as a quarterback, but that’s a gift. You can’t learn “tall.”

But beyond that, the person’s skills — strength, quickness, shooting ability, hand-eye coordination, game knowledge, even Manning’s laser rocket arm — are all developed and/or learned. You can train and learn everything else. You can work out and gain strength. There are drills that will develop quickness. Even fast-twitch muscles can be developed and enhanced (and built up). You may never be as strong as a lineman or as fast as a sprinter, but you can certainly do it better than most people you know just by working at it for a while.

Think of it this way:

  • Peyton Manning is a student of the game, and has been since he was a young boy. He watches countless hours of game film over and over so he can understand and learn what every opponent and coach does in certain situations. He will even watch the game film of a head coach’s former boss to see where the coach learned his game calling skills. The guy is a computer who dumps GBs of data into his brain like they were candy.That’s knowledge and experience learned over the years.
  • After Manning was forced to take 2011 off, he had to rehab not only his neck, but his arm. Sports journalists talked about how Manning’s arm had lost its zip, and they worried that he lost his ability. But his arm strength is back and the laser rocket arm is firing correctly again. That’s not a gift, or the strength would never have gone away. That’s exercise and redeveloping muscle memory.
  • Several years ago, the US Women’s Softball team had an unusual training exercise to improve their reaction time. Their coach had written different numbers on different tennis balls, one per ball. He then fired them out of a pitching machine while the women took batting practice. They had to call out the number they saw before they swung the bat. He was teaching/training them to see and react faster.
  • WNBA Indiana Fever player Katie Douglas grew up in Greenwood, Indiana, graduated from Purdue University, and is now a star in the WNBA. A few weeks ago she became only the 10th player to score 5,000 points in her career. But she got that way because she spent countless hours shooting baskets, over and over and over, from the time she was a little girl up until she scored that 5,000th point. And she still does it. She wasn’t a gifted athlete, she worked constantly.
  • One of the things that every good writer did when he or she was little was read, and read a lot. In fact, they still read constantly. And writing expert after writing expert will tell you that the best way to practice writing, other than actually writing, is reading other people’s work. That’s because we’re still learning and honing our craft
  • When you listen to stories of successful musicians and how they started out, especially the guitar players, they’ll tell you the same thing every time: “I used to play for hours at a time. I was obsessed. I would just sit there and try to learn that new song from the radio, and play it over and over until I got it right.” I met a guy this past Sunday, the lead guitarist for The Plateros. At age 20, he’s better than most guitarists. I asked him how long he had been playing. He said he started when he was 9, and would come home from school every day, start playing, and play until bedtime. At 4 hours a day, that’s 1,000 hours a year. In 10 years, he’s put in Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to become an outlier.

My point is this: nobody is gifted. Nobody picks up a guitar and starts playing at age 27, and is immediately awesome. Tall, athletic kids don’t go out for the high school football team for the first time, and become the starting quarterback. Serena and Venus Williams were not goofing around with tennis rackets one day and decided to give this tennis thing a try.

Every one of them worked hard from way back when they were kids and pursued their dream of doing what they loved when they were adults. They developed the skills and knowledge necessary to pursue the game. There was no gift. There were just thousands of hours of hard work.

So it goes with writers. We were all readers as little kids. We all liked telling stories, and even wrote them down. And we did it obsessively, never realizing that we were building skills that would make us writers when we were adults.

Is writing a gift? No, unless you count the gift of those thousands of hours we all used to read and write when we could have been playing football, tennis, or a guitar.

If writing was so easy, then every athlete who wrote a book wouldn’t have a co-author.

Photo credit: Donovan Beeson (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Erik Deckers’ 8 Rules of Writing

I’ve been so inspired by the Brain Pickings weekly installments of Rules of Writing (that link goes to Neil Gaiman’s 8 rules), that I decided to come up with my own rules of writing that I’ve learned over the last 25 years (sweet Jebus! that’s a lot).

1. Write like real people speak. Your 7th grade English teacher didn’t know shit about real writing. If you have to contort your sentences to fit what she taught, drop it. Say your thoughts out loud, and write them down.

2. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. Write like a journalist, not a college professor. Smart people sound smarter when they can make difficult things easy to understand.

3. There is no such thing as inspiration, just like there’s no such thing as writer’s block. Real writers sit down and do it every day. It’s a job. You start, you do the work, you stop (sort of). Accountants don’t get accountant’s block. Plumber’s don’t wait for inspiration. They do their job because they have to. So it goes with writers.

4. Write with a pen, never a pencil. Pencils don’t require you to commit to your ideas. You can erase a pencil, you have to scribble out a pen. At least then you can see evidence of your thought process.

5. Never write for other people. Write for you. Write the stuff you want to read. If you write for other people, you’ll never make anyone happy, including yourself. If you write for you, at least someone will be happy.

6. Read poetry. Listen to music by poets and songwriters. Start thinking in metaphors. Even the most boring non-fiction can liven up with a few metaphors. And if you don’t like poetry, listen to some Tom Waits albums. I’m particular to Nighthawks At The Diner and the song “Putnam County.” Now that’s some poetry.

7. Don’t assume you don’t need marketing. “My work should stand on its own merit” is the mating call of the coward. If they don’t promote their work, people won’t find it, and they can protect their fragile ego. Promote your work and get people’s opinions. It will make you a better writer.

8. “Write drunk, edit sober” (Peter DeVries originally said a version of this, not Ernest Hemingway.). This doesn’t extol the virtues of drinking and writing. Rather, it means alcohol lowers our inhibitions. That’s when our real essence comes out, and we write (and act) like we don’t have those voices and filters that keep the “real” us from coming out. Write like you’ve been drinking a little bit, and then edit like it’s the next morning. Don’t smooth everything back to “normal.” Knock off the rough edges, and keep the best stuff.

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Six Writing Terms That Are Fun to Know

I listen to enough writing and language podcasts that I keep hearing certain writing terms bandied about like I’m supposed to know what they are. After hearing some of the same ones over and over, I decided to look them up. And then, because I constantly need to feed this beast, I decided to turn them into a blog post.

These are words that every writer should know, if nothing else, than to explain with a wild look in their sleep-deprived eyes why they do what they do, or at least, how they do it.

At the very least, it just makes you sound smart at parties.

Hypergraphia

The manic need to write. This is more than just the weird obsession that most writers have. Wikipedia says “It is not itself a disorder, but can be associated with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy, and hypomania and mania in the context of bipolar disorder.” Don’t worry, if you feel like you need to write all the time, you probably don’t have hypergraphia. You’re just obsessed. True hypergraphia is the overwhelming desire to write, even to the point that you don’t eat, sleep, or visit the bathroom. (Ewwww!) But you can also tell people you have “mild hypergraphia” and watch them edge slowly toward the cheese dip.

Prescriptive versus Descriptive grammar

Prescriptivists are real bastards about grammar rules and the way language should be used. These are the ones who rend their garments, gnash their teeth, and wail whenever another sacred grammar cow is threatened. Scads of prescriptivists were truly upset when the Associated Press said you can start sentences with “Hopefully,” or when they learned you can end sentences with prepositions.

But Descriptivists — also called linguists — are more concerned with language as it’s actually used by speakers and writers. They’re the ones who shout “common usage!” like it’s a Get Out Of Jail Free card whenever a prescriptivist corrects them on something.

Metonymy

Replacing the name of one thing with the name of something else that’s closely associated with it. For example, referring to “Detroit” when you mean “auto makers;” “Washington” when you mean “politicians, Congress, or the President;” and, “Wall Street” when you mean “those thieving bastards who wrecked the economy.” Hat tip to @RyanBrock, owner of Metonymy Media, for teaching me this word.

Synedoche

A type of metonymy where a specific part of something that is used to refer to the whole. “The White House” when you mean “the President and his staff;” “graybeards” as “a group of old men;” or one that I’ve been talking about a lot lately, “Coke” when referring to “any carbonated beverage.”

Trope

A figure of speech where the words are used in a way to change their meaning. It comes from the Greek verb for “to turn” or “to alter.” I include it here, because metonymy and synedoche are both tropes, as are metaphors and irony (Completely useless trivia: These four figures of speech are considered the four master tropes)

Will these terms make you a better writer? Will they transform and uplift your words into the realm of the powerful and noble?

No. Not at all.

But are they fun to know because they make you feel smarter? Definitely. Trot one or two of them out at your next writers gathering, and use them in a sentence like it’s the most natural thing in the world. If nothing else, you’ll feel smarter than that smarmy, hatchet-faced Evelyn who’s always prattling on and on about her latest self-published “office romance” novel.

Photo credit: Djuliet (Flickr, Creative Commons)