When Taught to Write, Are We Taught to Write Badly?

I was thinking recently about all the things not to do that I've been taught in the Creative Writing segment of my university course, and how many of those things I was told to do back in primary school (I can only talk of the primary education system in England as it's the one I grew up on). I noticed that quite a few things I was told when I was just starting out writing I now see as bad habits I need to get out of. Some examples of these include...

Don't write 'said' all the time; use more interesting words like 'cried', 'exclaimed', etc.
Yeah. Don't do that. 'Said' is one of those words that the brain doesn't really process; we're used to reading it, and we don't really take it in, it's just there. 'Hello,' Terry said. If every line of dialogue is followed by a more colourful word, suddenly the reader's eye is drawn to it, and that can be problematic in three ways: 1) it draws attention away from the dialogue and the action, 2) it makes you look very self-conscious as a writer, as if you were sitting at your desk fretting about writing 'said' too many times and you're compensating, and 3) if you use too many, or too outlandish synonyms for 'said', the reader will find it tiresome and ridiculous. Luckily I got out of this habit fairly quickly, and although I do use alternatives to 'said' I never feel like I have to just so I won't write 'said' too many times. Long story short: 'For god's sake, just write "said"!' Terry vociferated.


Describe your character's appearance in detail
Okay, so I wasn't told to do this directly, but whenever I did describe a character in great detail, I was told it was very good, so I got it in my head that I should always do that. Now I know better. Lengthy descriptions of how a character looks have a very Mary Sue-ish, children's-books-for-girls-ish, Twilight-ish feel to it, so I tend to keep it far, far away from my writing. Of course, you can reveal a lot about a character by how they dress, how they wear their hair, how clean they are, etc. and I even find that you can tell a lot about the narrator by what they focus on and how they describe someone, but there is a limit. There's no real reason to describe every minute detail, unless the narrator is really, really interested in that cluster of freckles just under her left nostril, or those freckles are an important plot point later on or something.

Use lots of adverbs; it livens up your writing.
No no no no no no no. This has been covered in all four books about writing that I own: avoid adverbs unless they are absolutely necessary. Seriously, they can't get enough of bad-mouthing adverbs. But back in school, I was encouraged to use as many as possible to make my writing 'more interesting' or some such. This is probably one of my biggest problems in writing now; the last portfolio I handed in, my tutor told me to go through the entire thing and delete every single adverb that wasn't crucial, and my god there were so many. I even know that I'm supposed to use them sparingly, but I do it without even realising it. In fact, if you have time, and want to laugh at my bad habits, use the CTRL+F search function and search for 'ly' and see how many adverbs I used in this very post. I'm sure the result will make me ashamed.


But, I shouldn't be too hasty to write off what I learned in primary school, as I did learn a few things that are still useful today. Such things include...

Don't use the word 'nice'.
I think 'nice' is one of my least favourite words. Probably my second least favourite word after 'annoying', and I hate both words for the same reason, so I'll stick to 'nice'. It's just so nondescript. It's plain, it's boring, it has low lexical density, it's a bad word. Like 'very', it's just not something you want in your writing because it doesn't really add anything. The only time such words would be acceptable is in dialogue, as is the case with most literary rules I've come across.

End sections on a cliffhanger.
Speaks for itself really. If a chapter ends on a cliffhanger, the reader will have to keep reading to see how it resolves itself. Granted, I would often write a cliffhanger with no idea of how it would resolve itself, but it's good advice nonetheless.

Use other works as inspiration
Another self-explanatory one, but I'll go into some detail here. The first things I ever wrote were based on this kind of stimulus: read this book, and write your own version. They were short picture books, so it was never particularly time-consuming, and it was a fun, relatively easy way to get started in writing; all you need to do is change a few things: the setting, the characters' names, the little fiddly details, and you have your own work. Now, obviously I don't encourage plagiarism, which this really borders on, but I do encourage looking at works you like and building your own work around a certain theme, idea, character, plot element or overall tone of that work. It was essentially what got me started in writing, before I even knew that was what I wanted to do, so I do recommend it.


So we have a balanced argument, I'd say. Do the beneficial things I learned outweigh the more ill-advised things I was taught as a child? I would say yes. Those bad habits will be a pain to get out of, but I'm still grateful for the leg-up I was given back then. If I wasn't taught any of that, I'm certain my writing would have suffered in at least some small way, and I probably would have been set back quite a bit, having to learn the importance of lexical density instead of it being near second nature, and torturing myself trying to come up with my own completely original idea, because using someone else's work as inspiration is cheating!

So, to answer the question posed in the title of this post, I would say no, we are not taught badly. We are taught well, we were just taught some unfortunate bad habits along the way.

Why Origin Stories Need to Go Away

This will be my first of a new segment I'm calling 'Why Things Need to Go Away', in which I will talk about certain things that I think no longer have a place in the world and should go away.

Today's instalment: Origin Stories. You know the ones; the prequel to a franchise which shows how it all began. I'm definitely not alone in disliking these; just find any film or game with 'Origins' or the number zero in the title and you'll find reams of negative reviews for it. But I thought I would take some time to explain just why these are not only unnecessary, but actually harmful to a franchise or character.

It probably goes without saying that I love characters. As a writer I love creating them and fleshing them out, and as a reader/viewer/what have you I love seeing them and analysing them (did I mention I'm studying English Literature?). One of my favourite things about characters is what we don't know about them, because it gives us an excuse to speculate and fill in the gaps for ourselves. Especially in the case of antagonists, anti-heroes or just mean-spirited or unhappy characters; they are interesting to analyse and it can be fun to try and gauge why they are the way they are. Tacking on some half-baked backstory about child abuse and parental abandonment doesn't add as much depth as one might think at first, and even if that is the character's backstory, there's nothing wrong with simply hinting at it, or writing it into the subtext of the character's dialogue and actions.

As an example, let's introduce John Smith (creative, no?). We can show John's relationship with his father simply with the way he addresses him. Does he call his father 'dad', 'father', 'sir', by his first name, or by his last name? These all hint at John's past without spelling it out. If he calls his father 'Mr Smith' instead of 'dad' we can speculate on what kind of relationship he has with him; maybe they have a very formal relationship, or maybe Mr Smith isn't his real father, or maybe the two of them had a falling out and John no longer wants to acknowledge him as a part of his family. This is a good way to hint at a character's backstory without giving every single detail. We don't know everything about John, but that's what makes him interesting, it's what makes us ask questions about him. Why does he call his father 'Mr Smith'? What does that say about him? What does it say about his father? Now how would you feel if I were to tell you that John Smith was adopted and his parents told him when he was fifteen and he has called his adoptive parents Mr and Mrs Smith ever since. It's a little disappointing, isn't it? Yes, we have a brief moment of 'oh, so that's why' and then John would be just that little bit less interesting for it, because the mystery, however small, is now gone. This is my main problem with prequel films and origin stories.

This is especially true of villains in horror movies, and the prequel/origin story is perhaps harming this genre the most. One of the key points of a villain in a horror film is really very simple: the less we know about them the more scary they are. We don't know why they came to the conclusion that killing people with a chainsaw and wearing their face as a mask was the path for them, or how they are able to take so much damage without going down, or why they seem to take such sick delight in torturing people with ironic punishments, and that is what makes them such formidable characters. We fear them because we don't understand them. If we did understand them, we would sympathise with them and because we know why they are the way they are and they become more human, they suddenly become less threatening. Why? Because we now know that they are just like us, and we aren't that scary. Suddenly a horror movie is no longer scary, meaning that it has failed, and it instead becomes a full character profile. Full character bios, in my opinion, should stay in the writer's saved files and never see the light of day. The bio should be used as a reference for the writer, but only certain details should be fed into the story, little by little, to build up a picture of the character without giving everything away. Less is more. People are afraid of the unknown, and that's what creates many great horror stories. Imagine a man who wanders the streets and stares into people's bedroom windows, even when the curtains are drawn. Why is he there? What does he want? How haven't the police caught him? Why won't he leave, even when people shout at him and threaten him? We don't know. He won't tell us. He won't even speak. He can't be understood and he can't be reasoned with, and that's what makes him frightening. We don't know his motive, we don't know what he's going to do, and like hell is he going to tell us a damn thing about himself. That's the way horror movie villains should stay: shrouded in mystery and surrounded by question marks. Villains like these are what make people crowd together and argue over his motives and backstory. They make people ask questions and think about the criminal mind, or the unstable mind, or both. They keep the audience guessing, and keep them wanting more, which is exactly what you want.

Now, for the sake of fairness, I do have to argue that point somewhat. While I do believe that not understanding a villain's reasons and motives is what makes them scary, it's right to point out this is not always strictly true. In the case of The Shining, being in Jack's head and understanding what he is going through and what he's thinking is actually quite frightening as we follow him into madness and he slowly loses control. This proves that it can be done, but I would argue that it isn't easy to pull off, and it can be dangerous territory. After all, there's a fine line between 'oh my god, I kind of understand where he's coming from, maybe there's a bit of psychopath in all of us!' and 'nobody really thinks like that, this writer is just trying to get in my head and failing. Next'. Also, although we are in his head, we never do get a vivid idea of his past; we only get the details we need in order to flesh out his character and move the story along.

What it comes down to is that writers need to understand one simple truth: viewers are writers too. Good writers in fact, who will often come up with better explanations for things than the writer ever could. Why do you think we never see Maris Crane in Frasier? Or whatever is under Edd's hat in Ed Edd n Eddy?* Because nothing the writers could come up with would live up to the audience's expectations. The audience is much happier to imagine than they would be to see one person's idea. I thought I'd wait until the end to crank up the pretentious with a little something I learned at uni (that's right, I am getting my money's worth): Roland Barthe's essay 'The Death of the Author' explored the idea that the author is not god of his own writing, and that a work is never truly finished until it has been read, because readers bring their own interpretations and experiences into their reading of the work, consciously or otherwise. The same applies to film and other forms of media: the viewers will 'finish' a work for you by filling in the gaps you leave for them. Readers and viewers enjoy filling in the gaps, so to all you writers out there: please let us.


*Sorry, I cannot believe I can't come up with any better examples.


And hey, it may be two days late, but I got a Halloween-esque post out. It mainly focuses on the horror genre, so I'm counting it.