I’ve often heard new writers complain about the rules of writing. They lament the constraints of three-act structure or claim that punctuation doesn’t matter. Writing is art, they exclaim, and cannot be boxed in.
But knowing the tools of your trade is hardly akin to selling out. On the contrary, mastering the components of your art allows you to combine them in new and interesting ways. Simply whacking away with words and hoping that everything will fall magically into place is the role of an amateur and while their passion is admirable, and the occasional happy accident does occur, bodies of work are built on experience, not luck.
If we want to master our art, to write stunning prose in truly new and surprising ways, we must first come to know, in intimate detail, the basic tools of the trade: diction, grammar and structure. And then we must practice them until they are second nature.
Diction
The words you choose matter. Just as a sculpture made with paperclay will look different than one made of marble, the words you work with will define your finished art.
This is not to say that you should always strive to impress with multi-syllabic tongue twisters (though it’s always fun to find an opportunity to sneak in words like rubiginous or deipnosophist). Often these ten-dollar words aren’t appropriate to your story, or wouldn’t fit with your narrator’s voice. But you can always be specific. A cat is never just a cat. It’s a pristine Siamese with grey paws or a ratty Persian with matted fluff. And beware of boring verbs such as walked, saw, sat, and touched. Consider instead: strolled, spied, flopped, and stroked.
As a writer, words are your medium. Take the time to stockpile some great ones. You can start by checking out my collection on Pinterest. Every time you come across a word that you aren’t 100% sure of, look it up. Read “Lolita” with a dictionary at hand. Embrace every opportunity to learn a new word.
Grammar
If words are your clay, grammar is your carving tool.
Take some time to study different sentence structures: simple, compound, and complex. Play with short sentences and long ones. If you’re not sure when to use a colon or a semicolon, take a minute to look it up online (or download my free grammar guide). You are a writer. This is your job.
Structure
Structure is probably the hardest of all, because every story will call for a unique configuration.
Take, for instance, The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. The story unfolds in a linear fashion, sometimes jumping ahead, but never skipping around. It moves forward like a train, making the structure perfectly suited to the story.
On the other hand, in the recent work A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, the narrative jumps at places, suddenly landing the reader in a situation that the narrator has not brought us to, and then backing up to bring us back around to where we started. It’s a peculiarity that matches the voice of the narrator beautifully.
Whatever structure you choose for you story, be it a short story told in first person or an epic novel with multiple POVs, find examples and study them. Then practice.
Practice
There really is no substitute for experience. So dive in. Collect words, question grammar, stop in the middle of a great book and consider how the author has structured it. Attempt to mimic their work by writing short paragraphs of your own project in the same style. These are all things that we, as writers, get to spend time on.
And as we do, we gain the experience that transforms diction, grammar and structure into a playground where we get to play. In short, we will become masters of our trade.
It was my 3d year of studying at literature department when I read an article written by J.L. Borges. It was about the 4 genre classification. Good writing (and it doesn’t matter what kind of story is written: fiction or non-fiction) always starts with intimate knowledge of the literature theory. Only the symbiosis of erudition and creativeness gives the birth to flawless texts. Of course, a strong word should be fortified by grammar and stylistics (as you have already written in the post). The tendency that I’m seeing now depicts the laziness to dig deeper. I mean, there’s a great many of those who don’t want to study and create original content. Instead of working hard, unskillful hands start to google patterns. So no wonder, that nowadays our world suffers from plagiarism. Stealing idea is easier than making research, right? Being a writing snob, I cannot but use a software called Unplag https://unplag.com/. Not only it checks for plagiarism my torrent of thoughts, but also helps me to catch copycats red-handed.
Absolutely. My mom always said “if it was easy, everyone would do it.” I think of that a lot when I get tired and I don’t want to do the work of digging deep to make my prose more specific. As for plagiarism, I never even thought to check myself, but I read so much, I actually wouldn’t be surprised if I unconsciously borrowed something. The idea is mortifying. I will definitely check out Unplag. Thanks for the tip.