If you’re a writer and you’ve ever looked up “writing advice” you’ve probably come upon a vast google list of various articles offering tidbits of—well, honestly—things you already know because you’re not an idiot. You then decide the best thing to do is search Amazon, surely Jeff Bezos, with all his wealth and power will have a curated list of “how to write” guides for your convenience. You’ll pick one from a writer you know and then it’s off to the races.
To your horror, you’re met with 20 pages of a spectacularly un-curated wild jungle saturated to the brim with no-names and gimmicks. Some of it isn’t even about writing books, it’s about Amazon marketing or prepping or parenting. Some of these books don’t even appear to be written by anyone at all, but by a faceless corporation. Not only that, while they’re cheap as a Kindle book, if you’re more of a “paper and ink” person, you’ll be shelling out twenty to thirty bucks on a new copy.
That’s where I come in. I’ve read dozens of these kinds of book and some of them have really wasted my time, others have helped build my confidence or given me a useful piece of advice I’d never thought of.
I’ll be honest I’m not exactly sure how to review a book that offers writing strategies and guidance. I’m not going to judge it based on its technical flair or it’s plot or it’s narrative structure. The only thing left is the level of use I got out of it.
That’s probably the only way to review a book like this—or any “self-help” book out there. In the end, I won’t be rating the book out of 5 or 10 or what have you. Instead, I’ll offer my observations on how useful I think the book is and who I think is best served by reading it.
Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark
I don’t know anything about Roy Peter Clark. The blurb on the back of his book says he’s the VP of the Poynter Institute, a prestigious journalism school. Now, let’s not hold that against him, because Writing Tools is a pretty useful book.
Clark’s book is broken into 4 parts: Nuts and Bolts; Special Effects; Blueprints; and Useful Habits. Each part has a number of chapter that Clark calls “Tools.”
For example, Part One: Nuts and Bolts, features Tool 3: Activate your verbs. Clark uses an example from Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love in order to show that Fleming took to heart the simple advice given by George Orwell: “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”
This is a great tool for writers of all levels and experience—avoid verb qualifiers. Instead of using “he sort of wanted ice cream,” or “he seemed to want ice cream.” Activate your verbs, “he wanted ice cream” or “he chose chocolate” or “he got ice cream.” Clark then reminds us that you can overstuff a paragraph with activated verbs. When you play with this concept, you can see what he means by the need for temperance.
This tool has become extremely useful to me, especially when editing. Often, when writing, I’m desperate to get everything out onto the page with the idea that I will prune later. This leaves my writing with a lot of ugly verb qualifiers. I find myself scraping these barnacles away, especially in my action-oriented scenes, where I need swift, clean sentences to keep up forward momentum.
Tool 5 is another excellent gem of advice. Clark charges writers to “watch those adverbs.” He states: “at their best, adverbs spice up a verb or adjective. At their worst, they express a meaning already contained in it.”
To make his point, Clark uses the example “she smiled happily” and “she smiled sadly.” “She smiled happily” is immediately cringe inducing. It’s a bad use of adverbs. “She smiled” already intonates happiness. You don’t need to qualify it. But, “she smiled sadly” is a good use of the adverb “sadly” because it changes the meaning of the smile.
Of course, he does conclude with a disclaimer, stating that J.K. Rowling uses loads of adverbs.
Another tool I found extremely helpful is in Part Two: Special Effects. Tool 16 tells us to Seek original images.
Clark begins with an Orwell quote, “never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Orwell had no love for clichés and thought of them as a substitute for thinking. Tool 16 taught me this lesson very well.
During a recent rewrite in a novel I’ve been working on, I came upon a cliché that jarred me right out my own narrative. It was a not-so-common Shakespearean euphemism for marital infidelity, but I knew it well enough to know that I didn’t want it there.
I spent a couple hours looking for alternatives online. In the end I was forced to think about the specific culture I had created, the kind of place the characters lived in, and I created my own. The scene was immediately better, it made the setting feel more lifelike.
This tool is useful for all, but I find it particularly necessary for speculative fiction writers. Your high-tech space aliens aren’t going to say “you’re putting the cart before the horse.” And in your medieval fantasy adventure where reading is a luxury, your peasants aren’t “reading between the lines.” Even if it takes hours, sit down and think because Orwell is right, most clichés are a substitute for thinking.
For my last example, I’m pulling from Part 4: Useful Habits. Tool 41 tells us to Turn procrastination into rehearsal.
I work a full-time job, the only real time I have to write is on the weekends and two days can be cruelly short if I’m having difficultly finding my groove. Clark writes: “writers experience procrastination as a vice, not a virtue. During the process of not writing, we doubt ourselves and sacrifice the creative time we could use to build a draft. What would happen if we experiences this period of delay not as something destructive, but as something constructive, or even necessary?…what if we call it rehearsal?…we all rehearse, and that includes writers. Our problem is that we call it procrastination or writer’s block.”
This is was something that I desperately needed to read. As my work day dragged on and I found I had difficulty writing on the weekends, I began to punish myself with the typical mental abuse we writers hurl at ourselves—you’ll never write anything worthy, you’ll never be published, you’re creatively bankrupt, you’re lazy, etc.
But the drive to write is innate in me. Even as I abused myself, I found myself writing up scenes and ideas in my head. Usually just before bed, during downtime at work, or while in the shower. And when I was unable to get them out onto a page, I continued with my self-abusing. It created a vicious cycle than began to put a real strain on my mental health.
Clark’s advice, that I allow those periods of none-production to become a time when I rehearse what I’m going to write on the weekend.
When the weekend comes, I have no standards. I write. I throw everything at the page, I get everything out and prune it later. I no longer allow myself to suffer “writer’s block.” I rehearse. If I’m really struggling, I look back at some earlier work and do a little basic editing. I keep a daybook where I write little musings and interesting ideas, snatches of poetry, insight or epiphanies.
Its difficult to reframe the “typical ideal” of the “struggling” author. But once you liberate yourself from that concept, you’ll be free to actually do some writing.
Final Thoughts
Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer is one of the most useful “how to write” guides I’ve ever read. It has become the standard by which I rate all “how to write” guides.
There is something in here for every type of writer. It has useful tips to ease beginners and concise reminders for the experts.
Absolutely recommended. Buy it, buy some highlighters, take notes.
The Salon at Elfland 