Mistic Pets

Welcome to Issue 56
Created by The Mistic Pets Team

Cas's Guide on How to Make Your Reader Hate You Less
Written By Cas

We all had to learn how to write in English class during grade school: proper spelling, proper grammar, five-paragraph format, the whole shebang. Some of us learned how to crank out essays like a machine, some of us fine-tuned our ability to completely make stuff up for an A, and some of us just didn’t care at all. Regardless of which one you were, you still think that your high school English class prepared you for writing in all sorts of contexts, right?

Nope. Once you start venturing into the world of creative writing, be it for your pet profiles or something bigger, you pretty much throw half of those grade-school rules out of the window. End your sentences with prepositions! Split those infinitives! Five-paragraph format? Take every five-paragraph essay you’ve ever written and yell at them! Why?
Because writing prose like an essay makes for very bad writing. Because writing prose is about finding your own voice and your own style, not about scouring through the MLA handbook trying to figure out how to cite an obscure journal you found in an online database. I’m not going to tell you everything; I’m just going to tell you enough to get you started on the path to not making your readers hate you.

Ready?

No?

Too bad, the knowledge train ain’t got no breaks. So we’re going anyway.

1. Learn the Rules before You Break Them

One of the best things about creative writing is that some of the rules of style and grammar turn into suggestions. You can sprinkle your text with run-ons, sentence fragments, weird punctuation, and all manner of things that would make your old English teacher have a heart attack. However, there is a method to the madness; just because you saw it in a book this one time and thought it was cool does not mean that you can just throw the same thing into your writing. Every single thing you do in writing needs to have a purpose. In a book I recently read, the author included many sentence fragments and left out certain forms of punctuation in order to give the actual text a minimalist feeling that played into the idea of scarcity in the apocalyptic setting of the book. The way you write and the language you choose and the stylistic choices that you make in your piece are akin to how an artist carefully chooses their palette; if you throw a bunch of random stuff together and call it a day, what you end up with will be a confusing, incoherent mess (or modern art). However, learning the rules that you’re breaking and how breaking them affects the way people read your writing is going to help you make something wonderful and uniquely yours.

2. Make Your Dialogue Believable

Whenever you have dialogue in your story, stop and read it aloud. Then go find someone else and make them read it aloud. Did it sound stupid? If it did, don’t feel too bad – it can be really difficult to translate believable spoken English into writing, because we really don’t type the way we speak (I know I edit out about 75% of my expletive usage), especially in terms of punctuation usage. So how do you get better at creating realistic dialogue? What really helped me was basing it off of things that people around me have actually said, and understanding that dialogue is where everything’s made up and the rules don’t matter. Throw in regional accents! Throw in words and phrases that you would never write in a paper! Throw in incorrect grammar and sentence fragments and run-ons and almost anything you want! Why? Because people don’t speak using American Standard English. People speak using weird phrases and inappropriate words and incorrect grammar. Once you understand that writing dialogue is not the same as writing the rest of your story, you’ll be on the way to making characters that sound like actual people instead of robots. Unless your characters are robots. In that case, you keep on keepin’ on.

3. Less is More, Simple is Better

If you have to write 10 pages explaining your 5 page story to someone, something is very wrong. It might all make sense in your head, but unless you include everything that’s in your head, nobody else is going to understand you. On the flip side, if you include everything in your head, your story could turn into this giant mess of exposition and backstory that will immediately turn off anyone who tries to start reading it. So what do you do? You simplify. Look at your idea and say, “what is really necessary to my story? Can my characters be both dazzling and vampires, or do I have to pick one?” Give it to a friend without telling them any backstory not included in the piece and ask them, “Does this make sense to you?” And if it doesn’t make sense to them, ask them about the confusing parts instead of just yelling at them about how they don’t know what good literature is and how they’re just a plebeian. Then go back and pick out the confusing parts, and either find a way to quickly resolve them or take out whatever extraneous information is causing the confusion in the first place.

This concept also applies to your writing style. Contrary to what a certain author wrote in her certain book series with titles based on the times of the day/night, you do not need three adjectives in a row that all mean the same thing. That is called purple prose and that is bad, and anyone who uses it should feel bad, too. Burying the meat of your story underneath description and fifty similes and metaphors of the same thing is going to make your reader hate you. It is not a sin to use simple words like blue and hard and smooth. It is not a sin to trust that the reader will understand what you have to say the first time around without having to repeat it using big fancy words a million times. Creative writing should not be a contest to see who can use the biggest words and the most complex sentences; it should be a way for you to tell your story or write down your poem or get your play out there, hopefully so other people can enjoy it and understand your message. Being clear and concise is much more favorable than being confusing and long-winded.

I understand that not all of you are master writers and that doing this stuff isn’t always easy. Heck, my writing around five years ago is so terrible it makes me want to burn every single page and then curl up in the ashes and cry. But do you know how I got better? I practiced, and I asked (read: forced) other people to read it, and I listened to what they had to say (be it good or bad), and then I remembered that and used it in the next thing I wrote, and on and on and on. Even as I prepare to apply for my Masters in Creative Writing, I still understand that I have a lot to improve on, and I still shove my writing in people’s faces and ask them, “Please read this and tell me everything you hate about it so I can fix it!” And most importantly, I never gave up. People have called my writing trash, and people have called me trash, but you know what? I just use that as motivation to get better.

There’s nowhere to go but up, and you can only get better.

Comments

Written By Crow

Very much enjoyed reading this! It gave me some things to really think about for the non-writing arts as well.

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