Single best piece of writing advice?

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  • Single best piece of writing advice?

    The other day I was thinking about what I would say if anyone ever asked me that. There are a lot of gems dished out by books and famous screenwriters (Billy Wilder's list comes to mind), but I would probably say that for screenwriting, one of the wisest ones is "arrive late, leave early." And I like Elmore Leonard's famous line: "I tend to leave out the passages that readers tend to skip." What are yours?

  • #2
    "Park yourself in your writer's chair at your writer's desk and be the writer who writes something every day." -- Said various ways by many a well-known writer.
    “Nothing is what rocks dream about” ― Aristotle

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Clint Hill View Post
      "Park yourself in your writer's chair at your writer's desk and be the writer who writes something every day." -- Said various ways by many a well-known writer.
      Absolutely, but I was referring more to the craft of writing. Things we learned along the way that really improved our writing.

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      • #4
        “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” - said by me.

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        • #5
          Read your work aloud to yourself and others.
          Advice from writer, Kelly Sue DeConnick. "Try this: if you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft.-

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Rantanplan View Post

            Absolutely, but I was referring more to the craft of writing. Things we learned along the way that really improved our writing.
            “Whereas the story appeals to our curiosity and the plot to our intelligence, the pattern appeals to our aesthetic sense, it causes us to see the book as a whole.” — E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (he seems to ask to ignore the comma splice)

            Re: “Things (I) learned along the way that really improved (my) writing”: Structure, and which type best fits which story.
            “Nothing is what rocks dream about” ― Aristotle

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            • #7
              This is something trivial, but I notice it all the time in my translation work: writers saying things like, just under an hour, just a little over a year, nearly fifty miles, etc. Those approximations add nothing to the story and just take up valuable space. Just say, an hour, a year, fifty miles. Or use "about" or "or so" to keep it lighter. "A year or so after I moved t the country, I..."

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Rantanplan View Post
                This is something trivial, but I notice it all the time in my translation work: writers saying things like, just under an hour, just a little over a year, nearly fifty miles, etc. Those approximations add nothing to the story and just take up valuable space. Just say, an hour, a year, fifty miles. Or use "about" or "or so" to keep it lighter. "A year or so after I moved t the country, I..."
                That's okay for business or scholarly works, but IMO, one would need to be careful in doing as you describe not to eliminate “voice.”

                “He's a person of low intellect” is a far cry from “That feller thar is dumber than a bag of hammers.”
                “Nothing is what rocks dream about” ― Aristotle

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Clint Hill View Post

                  That's okay for business or scholarly works, but IMO, one would need to be careful in doing as you describe not to eliminate “voice.”

                  “He's a person of low intellect” is a far cry from “That feller thar is dumber than a bag of hammers.”
                  Not exactly what I'm saying though. And I've noticed this in French a lot, specifically--maybe they feel it adds nuance, but usually it serves no purpose. It's like it's a national reflex or something. Be vague. Most times, a writer would just state someone's age. The only time you might specify that someone was just barely 10 or just about to turn 11 or whatever would usually be because something drastic happened that made that nuance important. "He died a tragic death just 2 days shy of his 11th birthday."

                  Anyway, it's just something I noticed. It's using more words than necessary and that's one of the things that we usually try to avoid. And the examples I'm talking about typically concern time, distance, and age--some form of measure. I'm translating a graphic novel right now where the author did it twice on one page (hence my post): "I didn't get a haircut in an actual hair salon until I was older than 20." (not necessary: until I was 20). "I hate the thought of having to make conversation with a total stranger for at least an hour." (not necessary and lessens the impact. Just say "for an hour."). Etc.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Rantanplan View Post

                    Not exactly what I'm saying though. And I've noticed this in French a lot, specifically--maybe they feel it adds nuance, but usually it serves no purpose. It's like it's a national reflex or something. Be vague. Most times, a writer would just state someone's age. The only time you might specify that someone was just barely 10 or just about to turn 11 or whatever would usually be because something drastic happened that made that nuance important. "He died a tragic death just 2 days shy of his 11th birthday."

                    Anyway, it's just something I noticed. It's using more words than necessary and that's one of the things that we usually try to avoid. And the examples I'm talking about typically concern time, distance, and age--some form of measure. I'm translating a graphic novel right now where the author did it twice on one page (hence my post): "I didn't get a haircut in an actual hair salon until I was older than 20." (not necessary: until I was 20). "I hate the thought of having to make conversation with a total stranger for at least an hour." (not necessary and lessens the impact. Just say "for an hour."). Etc.
                    From what I can gather from the two examples offered, theirs is a more “colorful” way of expressing themselves and in their “voice,” which can be indicative of education and/or socio-economic status, even nationality.

                    It does have to do with colloquialisms, too. If you translated a New York City cab-driver’s patois into a formalized version of what he/she said, you'd lose a lot of flavor.

                    The truncated translation seems more formal and comes off as spoken by a better-educated person. Mais, il y’a longtemps que je n’ai pas parler français.
                    “Nothing is what rocks dream about” ― Aristotle

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                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Clint Hill View Post

                      From what I can gather from the two examples offered, theirs is a more “colorful” way of expressing themselves and in their “voice,” which can be indicative of education and/or socio-economic status, even nationality.

                      It does have to do with colloquialisms, too. If you translated a New York City cab-driver’s patois into a formalized version of what he/she said, you'd lose a lot of flavor.

                      The truncated translation seems more formal and comes off as spoken by a better-educated person. Mais, il y’a longtemps que je n’ai pas parler français.
                      This is not a matter of dialect, and I personally don't find it colorful, but either way, when you're translating subtitles or comics, you lose the stuff that doesn't matter because space is of the essence and you don't waste it on that kind of information (and that's also what I'm in the process of doing with my novel, getting rid of the stuff that slows it down and is superfluous). It can take the French forever to say something... maybe that's why they tend to read American novels As a translator, you just pick up on some of this stuff after seeing it pop up over and over again. For example, the passive voice is used much more frequently, which a lot of us would find tasteful and have been told to avoid. As screenwriters especially, we need language that moves and is active.

                      By the same token, the noun is favored over the verb --the opposite of dynamic language. I remember this one sentence struck me in particular, from some artsy fartsy academic text on experimental cinema I was translating and that had me wanting to throw my laptop out the window:

                      "The machine, whose construction had benefited from the assistance of Man Ray..." Versus: Man Ray helped build the machine.

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                      • #12
                        The machine, whose construction had benefited from the assistance of Man Ray..." Versus: Man Ray helped build the machine.
                        I think it depends on the part of the sentence you replaced with ellipsis. Do you recall what it was?
                        Advice from writer, Kelly Sue DeConnick. "Try this: if you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft.-

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                        • #13
                          Originally posted by sc111 View Post

                          I think it depends on the part of the sentence you replaced with ellipsis. Do you recall what it was?
                          No, but the point is that the French love to take something fairly straightforward and turn it into something passive / indirect via more convoluted syntax. I see it all the time. "She was the object of an assault by XXX..." "The tail job that we were subject to" (to say "we were followed"). It's the opposite of dynamic writing. They don't favor the verb / action. "Allowing her to avoid the assault that XXX was preparing to inflict on her... " Can you imagine putting that in a screenplay LOL?

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                          • #14
                            Way back when I was trying to break in, feels like it was the 1950s, I used to send hundreds of letters out asking working writers for advice. One guy wrote "WRITERS WRITE" on the top of it and mailed it back to me. It honestly was the most helpful advice I ever got.

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by JeffLowell View Post
                              Way back when I was trying to break in, feels like it was the 1950s, I used to send hundreds of letters out asking working writers for advice. One guy wrote "WRITERS WRITE" on the top of it and mailed it back to me. It honestly was the most helpful advice I ever got.
                              It sounds so obvious and yet it's the hardest part.

                              As I said in another thread, you listen to interviews with any of the mega-writers, the ones selling millions of books all over the globe, and the one thing they all have in common is that they get up every day and put in the hours. Of course they have deadlines and millions of fans to please and publishers breathing down their neck, so there's that, too. It must be a lot of pressure, actually. You have all that money but you're not just sitting around by the pool all day sipping cocktails.

                              Meanwhile, I am having fun designing the cover for my second book before it's even been written, so this is a whole new fun way for me to put off the actual writing part. But I'm going to use the cover as motivation.
                              Last edited by Rantanplan; 06-02-2022, 05:34 PM.

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