On Wearing Whore-Red Lipstick and other Stylistic Choices

Horrible kinky curly perm. Big bug shaped glasses. Flannel shirts. Pearls. Tapered jeans. Horizontally striped shirts. Colored jeans. I could go on and on. These are the bad, bad fashion choices that I shared with the world as teenager. Why did my mother let me walk out the house in those clothes? Why didn’t my friends tell me that I looked hideous? Probably because they all looked equally hideous at the time. However, if I made those same choices today, I would hope my friends would stop me.

Writing is like fashion. Choices that worked in the past no longer work today. In the 1970s, the hero-heroine rape scenes were “fashionable” in romance writing. Writing a hero-heroine rape scene today would be the equivalent of wearing MC Hammer pants or 1970s leisure suit -- something that you should try to avoid at all costs.

Once upon at time, it was ok to have your characters look in the mirror and describe themselves. These days it is considered a cliche. To be sure, there are exceptions to this rule. A writer can do anything if they do it well. It’s sort of like pairing vintage sunglasses with an ultra modern outfit or wearing a vintage jacket with anything. To steal the words of Tim Gunn from Project Runway, “Make it Work.”

Then, there are what I call the “should-nots.” This is where a good critique group comes into the equation. Your critique group/partner are the fashion consultants of the writing world. They are the people that say “No sweetie, that works for Nora Roberts. It doesn’t work for you. You should not do this.” Let me give you some examples of a fashion “should-nots” that I’ve seen in my life. The floral "house dress" and curlers in public. (Can you tell I'm from the south?) The college student wearing the pajamas and house slippers in walmart. (I am guilty of this one.) And the most recent and possibly worst. Drum roll please. The short, tight pink satin and black lace number worn with hooker heels by the large woman who walked into the grocery store ahead of me on Sunday. I could see her butt cheeks. It was very, definitely a “should not.” Someone should have told all of these people that they should not be wearing those outfits. Critique groups/partners have a responsibility to prevent their critique partners from making a writing “faux pas” like overuse of adverbs (which in my opinion is liking someone wearing Tammy Faye Baker makeup), overusing to-be verbs, overusing commas, em dashes, and other puncutation, excessive head hopping, etc. Stylistic choices that could annoy the reader.

I hope that the TriMus will be my writing fashion consultants and tell me not to wear that leisure suit rape scene or backless tank top head hopping. I also hope that they will be my real fashion consultants and remind me that perms, tapered jeans, flannel shirts, and bug-eyed glasses are very bad ideas should I ever consider them again.

Showing, Not Telling, and Not Trusting

Any writer who has serious ambitions about writing wants feedback on their work. I have never heard of anyone who wrote a perfect manuscript and sold it without ever showing it to anyone for some kind of critique. It's just a part of the process; as writers, it is impossible for us to read our work the way a normal reader is going to. We're too close to the story and we know too much about the characters and the background. We don't spot inconsistencies, we miss gaps in logic, darlings wink at us and bat their eyelashes and we follow them wherever they might lead, even if they do run the plot right off the rails. Constructive criticism and feedback do not indicate that you failed as a writer, just that you are human.

But constructive feedback, though very necessary, can be hard to take. We all have certain things that we hate hearing. Perhaps my least favorite piece of feedback to receive is "show; don't tell". I hate that little phrase, probably more than any other phrase in the English language. And not just because I hear it so often I feel I should know better by now. For a long time I hated it because I simply didn't understand what it meant. Now I hate it because hearing it means that I have, on some level, failed my potential readers by not trusting them.

Most of the time when I slip up and start telling rather than showing, I can usually track the cause back to my not trusting the reader. There is an emotion or feeling or thought that the reader simple MUST understand, but I don't trust them to puzzle it out on their own. So instead of saying "Nikki slumped in her chair at the computer and sighed, one hand massaging the back of her neck as she glared at the blinking cursor until the page of text faded to black and random ribbons of color prevented the image from burning into the screen", I say "Nikki was frustrated because she couldn't think of a good example for showing instead of telling".

Now somewhere in the back of my mind, the lessons of Strunk and White that were beaten into me in high school cry out "OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS!" and insist that the second sentence, conveying the same idea in far fewer words, must be better. But the key word in that sage pearl of wisdom is needless. You should almost always omit needless words (and I threw that example out there pretty quickly and tend to over-write, so I'm sure both sentences are full to bursting with needless words), but that doesn't mean shorter is better. If it did, I have no doubt that the rule I remember from Elements of Style would be "Shorter is better" rather than "Omit needless words". The second sentence is shorter, but the first sentence shows what's really going on. The second sentence is just me yanking the reader out of the story and telling them what's happening.

("Omit needless words", incidentally, is one of only two things I remember from my study of Elements of Style. The other is the proper usage of the words "nauseous" and "nauseated" because I thought the advice "unless you truly feel you have that effect on people, you should not say you're 'nauseous'" was amusing.)