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HOW TO WRITE GOODER

Here are several very important but often forgotten rules of English:

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.) 4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
14. Be more or less specific.
15. Understatement is always best.
16. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
17. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
19. The passive voice is to be avoided.
20. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
21. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
22. Who needs rhetorical questions?

Good rules. I wood add that won should always use a spel checker cents pour spelling will ruin one's credibility.

Excellent! I'll keep those in mind.

Here's a list Eileen and I give the writing class we've been teaching once a month for several years:

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories “Close Range.”

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”
“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

About ten years ago Ken Howell posted a series of writing lessons on this site that were very good. Worth looking up.

Entertaining. Whoops.

"The wine was bad, but not dull. It took the enamel off your teeth, and left it on the roof of your mouth."

A colorful description, with really simple language.

Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

I like "gooder". It is one of my favorite illiterate word uses.

Free thinkers.

The bestest advice to date.

The works of Robert Parker come to mind. He carries nearly the whole story with dialogue using little other than "said." He must have been an Elmore Leonard disciple. It only becomes intrusive if you read it out loud.

After the 927th "said" you do tend to search for an alternate way of identifying the speaker.

"Go to hell", said Joe.
"After you", said Mary.
"You first", said Joe.
"Up yours", said Mary.
"I like it up yours", said Joe.
"Oh, Joe, you say the sweetest things", said Mary.

Later,

"Oh!", said Mary.
"Oh, oh, oh", said Joe.
"Faster", said Mary.
"Ohohohohoh", said Joe, faster.



You get the picture...

Bravo for bringing up Elmore Leonard on Steinbeck and Sweet Thursday.

This line of dialog from Sweet Thursday had helped me a time or two with a difficult family member.

“The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.”

Invisibility not withstanding, forever grateful to Steinbeck for that.

Nobody can't do nuthin'.

Well, yeah. "Said" has its place.

'"Hello," she said' is proper. '"Hello," she breathed, huskily' bodes something a whole lot less so.

Well said.

Jim,

Neither Elmore Leonard or Robert Parker ever put "XYZ said" next to every piece of dialogue, because during a dialogue there's no need for each speaker to be continually identified.

In fact I'd hazard a guess, due to considerable reading of both Leonard and Parker, that each wrote entire books with far less than a total of 927 "XYZ saids."

I'm sure they didn't but I've never read either one, I was thinking of my own minor stabs at creative writing. About halfway through your characters' dialogue you yearn for a "he exclaimed" or "she blurted out" to break up the monotony.

Then there's the technique employed by a couple of writers I've struggled through where no identification seems needed.

"You're wrong, Bob."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah"
"Well, what do you think, Joe?"
"I dunno, could be."
"I still think it's a homicide, how about you, Mike?"
"Maybe."
"Nah, it's a suicide, see how those sixteen bullets all entered the right side of his head from the same angle as those twelve stab wounds?"
"Yeah."
"He was depressed, after all."
"Yeah, right, especially after winning all that dough at the track."
"What dough?"
"The dough Yolanda spent on that Mazeratti."
"No, she didn't."
"Hello, boys."

"Who said that?", Bob, Mike, Joe, Pete, Sam and Fred exclaimed said in unison.

Don't ferget 'worser' !!

OMG John, I can't believe you said neither.... or! Must have been a typo.

The only thing I worry about is I before E except after C.