Leela Bruce Fights ALL the Dialogue Attribution Advice

Every once in a while a martial artist like me has to pull a Yojimbo. Because both sides of some particular form of advice are just asking for it.

I came into the Dialogue Attribution Town, and found there were two factions warring for everything from style guide attention to the way children were taught. Passions ran hot and almost no one in town hadn't sworn allegiance to one faction or the other.

At first I joined up with the Saids. They seemed a simple people, not prone to ostentation and flashy displays. They almost blended into the background, they were sometimes so subtle it was difficult even to notice them. I assisted them in their struggles against the bombastic Neversaids, a group that couldn't utter a word without making a fucking production out of it, drawing attention to their every remark. Emboldened by my presence, they dealt a critical blow to the Neversaids, and it seemed they might be about to win the ongoing struggle for the town.

However, soon after that fateful battle, I left the Saids and joined the Neversaids. The Saids were simple and unobtrusive, but they were also passionless and boring, and after a while their inability to convey the slightest emotional resonance when they spoke began to grate. Soon their attempts to be subtle and unnoticed became the very thing that made them stand out. At least I knew where the Neversaids stood and what their emotional state was. The Neversaids, happy to have me, delivered a terrible attack to the Saids.

Then with both groups weakened, I tipped my hand. I wasn't with either of them. I was here to defeat them both. They both were ridiculous and prescriptive and annoying. In a climactic battle in the lightning flecked rain, I defeated the leaders of both, dealing the final strike to the leader of the Saids.

"We had a deal," he said. "Why?"

"Because you're bad advice," I explained. "Maybe not as bad as the Neversaids, but still bad. And I'm really here for the people you're trying to control."

"This is a goddamned fucking travesty!" he said.

"See what I mean," I pointed out.

When it was all over, I stood before the citizens of the city who didn't quite know how to handle the new freedom they'd been given. I spoke:

"The Saids were right. You can't "gush," "sputter," and "ejaculate" every time someone is speaking. It's comical. It's distracting. It'll pull a reader right out of a moment. Using 'said' tends to blend in with the dialogue itself, and most readers glance over it without even fully registering it.

"But the Saids were not free of sin. The Neversaids were right as well. After a while you want something more than said. You want a snip or a sneer or a scoff. Not everyone speaks in the same modulation with everything they say, and the worst thing they would do is add a clunky adverb like 'said condescendingly' instead of just sneering. We have emotion, and that is what words are made to convey.

"You should be a Said most of the time. Go through the world and let your words draw attention to themselves, not their attribution tag draw attention to HOW they are spoken. But every once in a while, you've got to mix it up. You have to break that uniformity with variety in the same way you would any motif within art. You need to throw a word in there that shows a line isn't just being 'said.' And sometimes you might even describe action in a separate sentence for variety. Humans do not just...'SAY' everything. Neither of these factions was right. Both tried to control you. But now it is time for you to learn...moderation. Now it is time for all of you....to control yourselves."

And then I turned and left the town, never to return. I walked into the setting sun amidst a flurry of late summer abscission by the local flora. For reasons that will defy explanation, someone in the town put Shadow's Theme (from Final Fantasy 3) on the town's PA as I walked away forever.

Leela Bruce Kung Fu Fights "Fake It Till You Make It"

Like cliché schoolyard bullies in the movies (and not so much the real ones according to recent studies), bad advice isn't evil for evil's sake--it just had a bad upbringing. It got lost along the way. It may have been important at some subdued interpersonal level (so people know there will be social sanctions on antisocial behavior and don't pull out their junk and check for scabs at the dinner table, for example) but in its modern extremes it falls to pieces. Bad advice is often the same way. It is a product of neglect and a shitty home life. It wants to be loved. It doesn't always know the long term damage it does or understand its social implications. It just wants to feel good. This advice might actually be complex, subtle, nuanced, even good advice when viewed holistically, but when it gets out into the world it is seen only as a stereotype.  And while there is some truly terribad advice out there hurting people just because it wants to watch the world burn, most of it goes home and cries at night that no one cares. A pithy, rhyming meme, that slams like a ham-hock fist into the heads of innocents all around it doesn't think it's really hurting anyone.

It might even think it's helping in a twisted sort of way.  It may even think it's right.

But good intentions and misunderstood implications do not mean that bad advice doesn't just need the crap kicked out of it once in a while.  And just like anyone (who hadn't played Command and Conquer: Red Alert) would try to kill Hitler if they somehow went back in time.....EVEN knowing his sad upbringing led to who he was, I will be kicking the crap out of this advice even though I know it's monstrous harm isn't really its fault.

And one such bit of advice is "Fake it till you make it."

A long time ago, in the fires of the great wisdom forge, this advice came to life.  It went forth helping people succeed by showing them how to have self confidence and faith in the fact that a professional was just an amateur who didn't quit.  But back then they knew that it was really about hard work leading to results in a situation where sometimes there was a frustrating delay between the work and the result.  Back then "fake it" meant you did the work without getting the rewards, not that you demanded the rewards without doing the work.

"Fake it" meant that even though you weren't making money (or lots of money) or fame or other accolades, you kept working hard at what you want to be doing until success happened.  If you were faking it in writing, you keep writing like you were a writer--a lot, regularly, with as much skill as you could muster. It was about having faith in a few artistic truths: that you will get better with (lots of) practice, that there would be (because there always are) people out there who will like what you are doing if they're exposed to you, and that pretending you have confidence in yourself as an artist will lead to a more genuine confidence in yourself as an artist.

And in this context, this advice is still good today.  A.A. uses it as a simplified slogan of Aristotle's idea that acting virtuous can make someone actually virtuous.

However, what you see today is actually an act of subterfuge and fraud.  Instead of working like a real artist even though there's no "lifestyle of success" people have begun to live the lifestyle of success even though there's no work.

Artists (and writers in particular), take the idea of "fake it till you make it" to mean, "Pretend you already are a success" and hope that you trick someone important. Its not about confidence, not about the idea that you just need exposure for those who like the sort of art you are doing to find you.  It's certainly not about practice.  No they treat it like a ruse or a con job--literally behaving as if success has already come and that people are foolish not to acknowledge it.  This idea may have worked in 80's mistaken identity comedies.  It's not so awesome in real life though.

In real life, this strategy works out to look more like
"Fake it till SWAT arrives to arrest you."

Thus enter the legions of the pretentious.  Most are only guilty of a conceit based in artifice, and maybe some light chicanery. But honestly, they never really do anything more harmful than spending hundreds of hours learning the intricate ins and outs of the publishing business before they've even submitted a single story, or worry about how they're networking and marketing is going, having drinks and rubbing elbows with industry names and making sure they have a "label image" before they've actually written anything more than a manuscript draft and a couple of short stories.  And for these people who are worried more about monetizing their product before they have an actual product to monetize, the worst society might think about them is that they are probably putting the cart before the horse and maybe need to get their heads out of the clouds.

But there is a darker manifestation of faking it that involves outright dishonesty.  People who simply lie about how far along their book deal is or which publishers have picked up their rights and talk about their success more like pathological liars.  You'd think Google would have slowed down the number of people who insist that they have written a book that "you just haven't heard of," but it just leads to more spectacular delusions.  Yep, I've met several of these people--usually JUST on the cusp of their book being published by a big six.

This isn't "faking it."  This is being a fraud.  And any advice that recommends fraud needs it's teeth kicked in a little.

Of course this level of pretentiousness has become a cliche in Hollywood and in the music industry as well.  The person who pretends to be friends with stars they've met once...in front of the back stage door.  The person who has met EVERYONE at some party.  The person who says their script is being read at top levels.  The actor who got passed over for a major role because "Vin Diesel broke up with his girlfriend and ended up being available after all..."  We've all seen and heard this shit enough that it's actually pretty funny.  Observe:

But in the writing/publishing world these folks aren't quite so transparent, or maybe it's just that writer world's bullshit detectors aren't as sensitive as Hollywood's, I'm not sure.  Either way, people who outright lie about how far along their publishing career is seem to be a little less easy to ferret out in the writing world.  Just remember that and keep your sham shields at maximum even if your bullshit sniffing torpedos and phasers of truth aren't even loaded.

Back in the before time of "fake it till you make it," no one ever meant "lie about your accomplishments" or "just act successful but don't actually do any work" or even "imagine your career is about two years (of hard work) beyond where it really is."  When they turned Aristotle's philosophy into a pithy rhyme they just thought they were making it easier to remember.  And thus "fake it till you make it" has slipped into the Bad Advice column not because it meant to be cruel, not even due to its own failings, but because it lost its way.

That means it's ass kicking time.

~fade to asskick montage~

Leela Bruce is on Walkabout

Dear Writing About Writing Readers,

Our esteemed guest blogger Leela Bruce has gone on a Kung Fu style walk about.  Leela was pretty close with Lt. Lambaste as they both did a lot of ass kicking and liked to compare notes, so her death hit Leela pretty hard.  In fact, Leela's eulogy at the Lieutenant's wake was moving.  ("Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels....her's was the most.......human.")  Leela really hoped that she and Lt. Lambaste were going to help Writing About Writing pass the Bechdel test.

Her last words to me before leaving were particularly poignant: "I'll find your next guest blogger, Brecheen," she said.  "I'm not going to be the only woman in your fucking sausagefest."

I nearly wept.

Anyway, I'm taking the time to set up Twizzlefizzlepop who will make semi-regular appearances, but is not a full fledged guest blogger.  And there may need to be some cosmetic changes to incorporate W.A.W.'s growing content.  So if you see some things changing throughout the day, it's just me fiddling with the knobs.

Leela Bruce Kung Fu Fights "Write What You Know"

Hi everyone.  Leela Bruce here.  Today will be short and sweet.  Well....shorter and sweeter than my normal ass-kickings, anyway.

As you've probably noticed by now, sometimes bad advice is trying to be good.  It wants to be good advice.  It thinks it's good advice.  It may even be rooted in something that is good advice.

But it's just desperately ignorant advice in need of a serious ass kicking.

There's not a lot of evil advice running around the world unless you're asking some dude with severe "nice guy syndrome," who likes you, for dating tips on getting the older, tattooed motorcycle guy to ask you out.  But most of the advice I beat the shit out of isn't completely wrong or off base.  It's kind of right.  It's just that people treat it like it's always right.  People treat it like it doesn't come with context. People distill it down into fortune cookie wisdom and bumper sticker platitudes.  And that's when things get dangerous.  When a complex idea is spat at young writers like some sort of advice Pez dispenser, and they dutifully, sincerely, and reverently carry that advice into their writing and pass it on to others, that's when the problems start.

No advice to writers--none--is as guilty of oversimplifying a good idea to the point of being bad advice as "Write what you know."  No advice is more misunderstood, less contextualized, more helpful when cocooned within subtle shades of nuance, and more harmful when lacking them.

And that's why I have to kick its ass.

Millions of writers flutter across the earth parrotting "Write what you know.  Write what you know," like some horrible macaw that has been taught a single phrase to get its food, water, pets, and cage cleaned.  The offerings of fiction are filled with nothing but highly autobiographical characters of entire generations of writers.  And the writing programs of the entire English speaking world seem unable to conceptually grasp the idea that their students might want to write something other than their own story with a few cosmetic details changed.  Much of "literary fiction" and the outpouring of MFA programs is so transparently autobiographical as to be the basis of many literary genre cliches.

Let me start with a power-fist of bluntness to the face to set the tone for the savagery of the ass-kicking that is about to take place here.  I'll even make it bold and big and put it in the quotation font just to slam this mofo home extra hard with hard sauce:

Unless you want to publish your goddamned fucking diary, you will ALWAYS be writing some stuff you don't "know."

If you want to embrace essentialism as a writer, all your focalizer characters must be your race, your sex, your gender,  your religion, your creed, your political philosophy, your socio/economic class, your education, have pretty much your abilities, and be roughly your age.  Because, you can't possibly imagine what it's like to be anything else.

Sound like much fiction you've read?  No, and that's why I'm power punching this advice...again.  Half the fun of fiction, more to some people, is how it can render experiences to us that aren't banal and pedestrian.  Look at this picture next to this paragraph.  Is this kid looking over the wall to a seedy rehab facility.  Is there a pair of disapproving parents whose religion makes it impossible for them to support their child's sexuality?  Do you see a widower or divorcee raising three kids on their own?  No man!  It's like rockets and balloons and shit.  The rehab and the mean parents kind of look like the side that the kid is actually on.  Sometimes "what we know" kind of sucks, and we want to read about anything but that.  It's even got a name--it's called escapism.  We wouldn't be able to get very far if we only ever escaped to what we know.

So as I pepper this advice with body blows to slow down its reaction time enough to start getting in some kicks let me just point out that even as bumper sticker wisdom, "Write what you know," fails the test of good advice because it would be better, even reduced to some platitude, by saying "Write what is familiar."  It's true that you can't plug into someone else's brain and experience what they've gone through, but that is why empathy is so important to a writer.  A writer forms experiences they haven't gone through by drawing on experiences they have gone through.  We may not know exactly what it means to lose a father, but most of us have experienced loss.  We don't have to experience our father's death to have a character who does.  Write what is familiar more accurately encompasses this.  You don't want to go so far out of the range of your own experience that you have no idea, but "what you know" probably has more core truths and thematic experiences to extrapolate quite a bit further than your own pedestrian life.

It's true that you don't want to write what you don't know.  If you have a car mechanic as a character, and you want to describe their job in detail, you better not say that the chasis is a little bit that goes in between the transmission and the drive train.  If you want to extensively detail the use of tachions in your faster-than-light space ship, you probably want to know what a tachion is and how it works.  You'll end up with Prometheus level stupidity if you don't.  But it's just as easy to avoid those things directly or have a focalizer who doesn't know how shit works.  We don't care that Star Wars has sound in space, lightsabers, and space stations that would take a billion workers a thousand years to build but somehow show up without anyone having heard about it.  We don't care because Star Wars never tries to explain that stuff.  We care greatly about The Force being a bunch of microorganisms in someone's body because that tries to explain it...in a really stupid way that ignores a lot of fundamental aspects of human nature and science.  Seriously watch Gordi LaForge go on for five minutes about the positorons in an anular confinement beam and no nerd will even stir, but if Sherlock in the new series says he's not a psychopath but a high functioning sociopath, a thousand bloggers rush to their computers to point out that, psychologically speaking, those are the same thing.

But don't get too comfy, bad advice.  I was just giving you a breather.  And the foreshadowing for the spinning kicks that are coming next were all over the last paragraph.

There is an entire genre and a phenomenally rich literary precedent of writing things that no one could POSSIBLY know.  Do you think Tolken or the Beowulf poet actually slew dragons?  Do you think that Mary Shelly really built a human out of cadaver parts?  Do you think that Orwell had some talking animals he interviewed as source material?  Do you think that he time traveled to an alternate universe to write 1984?  Do you think that Bradbury really liked to burn books?  Do you think Spencer really knew some fairies?  Do you think Shakespeare actually hung out with Danish ghost dads?

Speculative fiction isn't what writers know--it's exactly the opposite.  And while that might make the "literary world" insist that it's not realistic, I have it on pretty good authority that Mirakame, Martin, LeGuin, Orwell, Bradbury, Tolkin, Shelly, Heinlein, and half the pre-20th century authors of the Western Canon say that the literary world can go fuck itself.  H.G. Wells specifically coined the term "Lit snobs can eat a bag of unwiped asses."  Speculative fiction draws on what the writer knows at its emotional core and explores what is familiar through an imaginative lens. These writers use a fusion of what is familiar and what is absolutely not what they know even a little to create something wonderful.  How dry and dull and boring the world would be if Pullman, Caroll, Ishiguro, Lewis, and even "commercial" writers like King, Rowling, and Chriton had stuck only to what they knew.

For the final back spinning side kick, I would point out that as a writer, you are a reader.  You have to be.  And a reader knows so many things--so very many things.  A reader knows what it is to get expelled and have a breakdown in 1949 Pennsylvania.  A reader knows how revolution can go wrong and the revolutionaries can become the very thing they sought to overthrow--be it a farm or a nation.  A reader knows that the next door neighbor might have a horrible reputation, but most people are good and decent once you get to know them.  A reader knows how even the most pure hearted can be corrupted when they hold true power and that even those who don't want such precious, precious power, find giving it up to be impossible.  And a reader knows that the world is filled with beautiful roses, but the one back home that loves you is special.  What a reader knows spans the slaying of Smaug and the Battle of Five Armies to the eradication of the Bugger's home world by some kid in the G.A.T.E. program.  Readers have lost spouses, climbed mountains, come out to their parents, and hidden the truth that they killed their best friend.  They have faced impossible odds and won, and faced reasonable odds and lost.  What a prolific reader "knows" spans the length and breadth of human experience even through time and space.

Never EVER discount this knowledge.  For while there is always a disconnection between reading something and really experiencing it--a difference that is not lost on any writer of even minor merit--a writer has the tools to take what they know, what they've read, and their carefully cultivated empathy, and combine these things to portray each moment with integrity and genuine compassion.  What you KNOW is almost anything you choose to know, for someone at some time has written about it.

I won't do a death blow on "Write what you know" because like most bad advice, it is just misunderstood.  It is like taking the most prominent ingredient out of a wonderful rich and flavorful soup and declaring that it is what matters (which probably means it will be as un-enriching as the water from the metaphor would be).  I will simply let "Write what you know" think about its ass kicking, lie there and bleed, and consider the ways in which it could be better advice in the future.

Leela Bruce Kung Fu Fights F. Scott Fitzgerald

Good afternoon.  Leela Bruce here.  It's been a while since I beat the crap out of a dead white guy, so I'm looking forward to today.

F. Scott Fitzgerald got onto my radar with his quotation not to write unless one has something worth saying.  ("You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.")

Oh do my fists ever tingle when I see bullshit like that.

I was digging through some of Chris's old entries and I found out that he once had an encounter with a creative writing instructor who basically demanded the same thing.  There's a strong concept of "the book inside you" or "the thing you're dying to say."  There's a real sense that you won't (or can't) do any "real" writing until you figure out what that thing is as well.  It is so prevalent in the pedagogy of CW programs that rather than focus on teaching a marketable skill (who goes to college for something like that, right?) an inordinate amount of energy is spent trying to "defeat" those trivial themes students are interested in exploring to get to some mythical creamy center of "worthy" subject matter--which... apparently has to do with childhood trauma and/or sexuality if the overwhelming subject matter of "literary" magazine short stories is any indication.

Yep, definitely time to kick some ass.  It's probably not fair that I'm going to punch Fitzgerald in the face for every high-art, lit-snob, writing teacher that has come along since, but who says I'm fair?

Unless you're a masters in literature, or a seriously huge book nerd like Chris, there's only an infinitesimal statistical likelihood that you've read more than one thing of Fitzgerald's.  Ever.   Granted it is largely considered to be "The Great American Novel" in as much as what is missing from that should be: "The Great American Novel of White Heterosexual Males of the Last Century" but it is hard to say it isn't a decent read.   The Great Gatsby is one of those books that almost everyone has read, most have read a few times, and this was even true before it was basically installed as a fixture in the American high school curriculum.

You may have heard a few things about Fitzgerald if you take an interest in that sort of thing.  You might know he was born in the last few years of the 19th century, and did most of his well-known writing in the 20's.  You may know about his friendship with Hemingway, about his raging alcoholism, about the fact that his wife was named after the eighteenth best selling video game franchise of all time (Zelda--we're glad she wasn't named Thetrisa).  You may know he lived opulently in the French Riviera with other expatriats in a very romantiziced "writerly life" that still leads to misconceptions about writing to this day.  These are the stories that are popular.

But here's what you maybe didn't know about Fitzy.  This man was the biggest sellout ever to walk the purple mountains majesty.  Take that you money-hating Humanities professors who think commercialism is a dirty word! Fitzgerald was the literary equivalent of a politician owned by the NRA. This guy couldn't convince Zelda he was worth taking a chance on until he sold This Side of Paradise (which did quite well for the day.) Then he goes back to her. If someone told me they couldn't get with me because I didn't have enough money, what I would do is peel out in their front lawn, race over to my nearest place of worship, and thank everything I think has any influence on such things that I found out before I was financially entwined.  This guy finds out she's a gold digger and then COMES BACK WITH SOME GOLD.

The really sad part is that he was absolute shit with money. After his first novel went viral, he up and blew all his money....in the French Rivera....during the depression. How fucking unwise do you have to be to realize that spending all your money during the depression is not a good plan? You would think that somewhere along the line "Maybe we should move back to the States" would have crossed his mind. And in order to make money more he started writing short stories with what he called "commercial twists" (insisting they were deep and meaningful literary masterpieces within earlier drafts--before he grudgingly added the commercial parts). Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway called his work with Hollywood "whoring," but he did it anyway, and it soured that friendship. He sold short stories to magazines like Esquire to help shore up a flagging income.  He borrowed so many advances from his agent that they had a falling out. Essentially he drank himself to death, claiming he had TB to hide the symptoms of his alcoholism, having heart attacks in his early forties and his fatal one at forty-four.

Are you starting to get the picture? Maybe not so much a guy you want to be taking advice from even though he was sort of the literary equivalent of a one-hit wonder? Even if you happened to be alive during the time. And you might be aware that there have been a few cultural and social changes since then as well.

Let me help bring it into even more focus. He was expelled from St. Pauls for being a poor student. He dropped out of Princeton for being a poor student. He joined the army after WWI was pretty much over. He adopted the lifestyle of New York Celebrities, which was why he was always in financial straits. When his wife, Zelda, published a book about their lives together and being captured by a monster named Gannon, not only did Fitzy get the book changed, but he also made Zelda's psychiatrists promise that they wouldn't let her write anymore of "his material." (Men could pull that shit on their wives back then.) Just so I make sure that last part was crystal clear, he got proprietary about their relationship as being "his material." He also talks constantly about the quality of genius in a way that makes it startlingly apparent that he thinks he unequivocally is one.

This guy pretty much screams "entitled assmongerface" from every pore of his body. Not only did he not really "have anything to say" when he wrote for a paycheck again and again (and again and again), but apparently what he did have to say involved a control of a story that we would find shocking and hideous in any modern context. Today, post-colonial literary analysis, Orientalism, and critical race theory have some pretty pointed things to say about the idea of voices in power that are unable to let go of controlling the narrative.

Now...when you're a young, white, heterosexual male, living the celebrity life the French Riviera off the proceeds from your FIRST AND ONLY book (technically it was his second--another was rejected) during the 1920's, when you're pretty much convinced you're a genius, literary and otherwise, despite flunking out of everywhere, and when you sort of view all the stories that you're involved in as "belonging to you" (even the one formed by the relationship between you and another fully sentient person), you reveal something pretty fundamental about your sense of self importance. Maybe you think that writing is something one does with purpose and determination like a precision laser, and maybe you have a certain disdain for those who use it in any other way.

But when a writer needs a paycheck (and not just because they overdid it in the Riviera but maybe because they want to pay your normal bills) they may just write to say something. When a writer writes more than four books before they're even a success, never mind EVER, they may develop a sense of what they want to say over their career. When a writer is not the most privileged voice in this world, but instead comes from a culture where their voices are marginalized, they may need to FIND that voice.

Joan Didion puts this succinctly as "I write to find out what I want to say," but many other writers echo her sentiments. When a writer has spent their recent cultural life having their stories stolen by assholes like you, Fitzy, they may need to find their words and even struggle a bit with them. Trust us when we say that the writing life is not so easy as it was for you Mr. One Book Success.  Most of us do our best whoring at the BEGINNING of our career and aren't so self righteous about it later on.

And let's not forget when and where he was born. Life wasn't necessarily simpler back then, but people sure seemed to pretend that it was. America's star was on the rise. Men were MEN (*cough*). And women were women. And no one questioned those roles (or was taken seriously if they did). And everything in Fitzy's writing suggests he was pretty okay with that. And no one had yet looked at The Scream and thought "Yeah, that pretty much says it all."  And no one had realized that the "war to end all wars" not only wouldn't, but was going to have a higher-budgeted and bigger-special-effects-sequenced sequel. And no one yet had to deal with the multiculturalism of an anti-communism immigration policy or women's liberation or civil rights or any of that stuff. And intellectually they didn't yet have deconstruction or post modernism or role theory or other kinds of criticism that involve the serious question about certain voices having control over all the stories. A privileged voice today might sit and wonder what the hell it even has worth saying. But you didn't really have that problem, did ya Fitzy?

Those of us who the universe DOESN'T revolve around have to actually work at this shit.

So that's why you get this power punch to the face Scotty, my boy. It's not because you never said anything poignant, meaningful, or resonant, or because your one uberbook isn't AWESOME. (It is.) It isn't because you aren't a fine writer. (You are.) It's for that crap that still gets echoed today by every high art snob as a reason to tell someone not to write what they enjoy. You get it right in the face.

KA-POW!!!

Leela Bruce Goes To the Mat With the Cliche Police (A Story of Good Gone Wrong)

Leela Bruce here.  And today, I'm going to tell you a story.

www.clangnuts.com
A site with funny stuff that you should totally check out.

Last night, I ran into a patrol of the cliche police coming out of a bookstore.  I just rounded a corner and there they were.  Obviously they were headed in to continue their relentless pursuit of cliches, scouring various writings like hawks--books, blogs, short stories, articles and such--in pursuit of phrases and ideas that have been so overdone that they start to lose meaning.  One was a guy with a chiseled chin, the other was a woman who looked like even though she could kick some ass, she wasn't afraid of her own femininity. They maintained a cold professionalism, but the sexual tension between them crackled and buzzed with their every word.

Clearly they hadn't yet realized the irony of their very existence.

"Hey," they said to me.  "You avoid cliches right?"

I knew.

I knew who they were as soon as I spotted them, but their words cinched it, lock, stock, and barrel.  The fucking cliche police!  I felt my fists begin to tingle.  Sometimes you have to hunt down bad writing advice like a wild animal to beat the shit out of it.  But sometimes...not often, but sometimes...bad writing advice finds you.

"Oh yes," I said.  "I avoid them."  They smiled with humorless displays whitened teeth, and turned from me to continue their way into the bookstore.

I grinned sweetly and added: "....like the plague."

Some bad advice is bad advice because it just sucks. If someone tells you that they really have found a site that gives away trips to Disneyworld, that's bad advice. If someone tells a guy to be an asshole because women love assholes, that's bad advice. If you're having marriage troubles and someone suggests opening it up to other sexual partners that's really bad advice. If someone tells you to put your cover letter for a book query in Comic Sans, that's really, really, really bad advice.

But like the best comic book villains, the most dangerous bad advice is the kind of advice that used to be good, but just lost sight of what mattered in its fanatic zeal. Avoiding cliches is such advice. It's the Magneto of the writing advice world. It has strayed from the path. It is fanatical, pedantic, prescriptive, judgmental, often outdated, and usually the kind of limp one-size-fits-all bumper sticker oversimplification that gets me primed to do some serious ass kicking.

But it wasn't always that way...

Righteousness is so cliché.

Once upon a time, back in the 18th century, the cliche police were a force for good.  They noticed that certain phrases lost meaning.  They realized that the fifth or sixth time a metaphor was used, it stopped being delightful and provocative, and just became stale.  They set forth across the countryside, like paladins of yore, with the noble goal of informing writers everywhere that the words they had chosen weren't adding anything to their prose.  They pledged their lives to quality writing, swore fealty to something higher, and worked their fingers to the bone trying to make the world a better place.  They used the french word for stereotypes--"cliches"and struck out to make a difference.

Cliches can be problematic, they pointed out.  Overused expressions lose meaning.  They don't really tell a reader what is going on, but can be vague and uninformative.  They tend towards lazy   The cliche police helped writers reach more readers. Who couldn't see the benefit of a force of paladins constantly trying to combat stereotypes?  These were the good guys.

But then...something went rotten in the state of Denmark...

No one knows how it really started.  It was like watching the grass grow.  But slowly, the cause became less about helping writing be better and became more about fighting cliches.  They would no longer ride into libraries and bookstores with tender smiles, but with suspicious scowls.  The language changed.  Where once it had been about clarity and good prose, the cliche police had begun to talk about cliches as evil--something that needed to be stamped out.  They had begun to expunge them with a prejudice that bordered on zeal.  They forgot the people.  It all became about the cause.

Soon after, out of the clear blue sky, they widened their search to include tropes and idioms.  Anything they felt was even slightly overdone became "a cliche" and cliches were "to be destroyed at all costs."

We are the righteous.
And frankly I'm tired of this whole "you've been corrupted" thing.
Would my armor be this cool if I were corrupted?
I don't think so.

But when it all went to hell in a hand-basket was when they turned on the writers themselves.  They started blaming writers for giving shelter and comfort to cliches.  Writers were rounded up for aiding and abetting the propagation of cliches.  Writers who used cliches were forced to wear a scarlet C on their clothes. Giant databases of cliches were compiled along with all their known associates.  Where once the police had talked about "making a more creative world," now they talked about "bagging their first cliche" and "kill scores."  Many kept the remains of dead cliches as trophies and wove them into their armor, again missing the irony of such an act. Writers lived in fear.

The thing is, there is still some good in them.  A glimmer of their purity lingers, and some of what they say is still so relevant and important for writers to keep in mind.  And when you look them deep in the windows to their souls, you can see that a part of them--some small part of them--still wants to help people.  That's why it was really hard for me last night when I was kicking their asses up one side of Oakland and down the other.

I mean it was sort of hard.

Okay, it was bittersweet.

All right...I felt a little dirty about how much I fucking loved it.  Okay?  Are you happy?  Can we move on?

Cliches are like memes.  Not the pictures of cats with the misspelled words, privilege denying dude, or ridiculously photogenic guy (although those ARE memes), but the ideas in our society that spread like self-replicating viruses.  The reason they spread like wildfire is because they are really GOOD at expressing the idea they mean to convey.  The reason a good metaphor gets stale and loses its verve is because we love it so much!  We grab it and stroke it and pet it and call it George, and we eventually break its little neck.  And of course some people go on petting it even though its little neck is broken and saying "Please don't be dead, little cliche.  Lenny won't let me tend the cliches if you're dead."

But here's the thing to keep in mind while you're off expunging cliches from your manuscript because you're a real artist who writes real literature that is concerned with the human condition.

Cliches are part of the human condition.

Have you ever actually listened to people talk?  We talk in cliches.  We think in cliches.  We often act out cliches.  The human condition is a motherfucking walking talking cliche.  There is a reason stereotypes exist and there's a reason yesterday's cliches are today's idioms.  The more cliches you expunge, the more your writing is fresh, innovative, and totally not how any humans actually communicates in this plane of existence.  So if you want that Circulation-1500-Literary-Journal feel to you writing, go ahead and go cliche police all over your own ass.  But when you're following the more mainstream wisdom to write how you speak in order to establish a more intimate and casual connection with your reader, you may want to consider that part of the human condition is that we like our familiar comforts--the toilet at our house when our bowels rumble, the meal our mommy made us when we were sick, and the phrases we actually hear echoed around us all the time.  They set us at ease.

Also "the human condition" is a cliche in case you were keeping score.

In the sixties there was a major literary shift away from the omniscient narrator and a deep push into character studies--even in genre fiction, you can see this influence taking hold.  Even in omniscient 3rd, the narrative tends to jump from one focalizer and get into the heads of characters rather than staying above it all.  (Consider the Woundwart chapter in the 1972 novel of Watership Down.) While it is true that a purely omniscient narrator should avoid a lot of cliches.  A first person narration or a close third that rests inside the head of a character even if it's somewhat omniscient [such as the character of Ender in Ender's Game] would, and should, reveal the voice OF THAT CHARACTER.  If the character is a bubbling cauldron of cliches, avoiding them would be pretty f'ing stupid.  Rick Blaine wouldn't be very Rick Blaney if he weren't constantly saying "hill of beans" or "here's looking at you, kid."

The reason to avoid cliches is that they can dilute your meaning.  An intense combat scene with the cliche "dropped like a rag doll" will actually mean less to a reader than a concrete description of the character falling.  So if you're reading this and thinking you can give out the advice that cliches don't matter and you can leave them in, I might be beating the shit out of YOU in a few months.  However, if a cliche isn't vague and meaningless, if it really is the perfect description of what's happening or it is doing the job of characterization, leave it in.

Of course there really are some cliches you want to avoid as if they are villages that have been afflicted with the viral form of the Black Death.

Character cliches are worth understanding so that you can avoid them.  You can't avoid every trope ever because it's all been done before.  The only thing you can do is breath your personal essence into a tired old scenario and give it new life.  But what you can do is avoid the really huge, really overdone tropes that are so tropish that they've drifted into cliche territory when you are making your character.

You may not even realize you're doing it because you had formative experiences based on such characters and you're just pulling from your cherished memories.  So it's good to know them so you can be careful.  The brooding prettyboy (Cloud Strife), the sex interest who is a dirty badboy/bad girl (anything Hugh Grant is ever in), the love interest who is "pure" of heart (every princess ever), the robot that wants to be human (I'm not dignifying this with an example), the ambiguously suave guy that is obviously the devil (O'Conner gets a pass) , aliens that all have one single overwhelming planetary culture that defines them in a very narrow way (Klingons anyone?), evil twins, scientists who don't care about the cost, generals/admirals who are practically salivating to use nuclear weapons.  There are so fucking many of these, I would need a sandwich, a bottle of electrolyte drink, and six expresso shots to get through half of the list.  Yes, you can have a couple and no one will care.  Yes you can start out with a stereotype and then go deeper or turn it on its head to great delight.  We would all like to read about how Princess Peach really likes Kupa a lot more than Mario and spends inordinate amounts of time using the pulse mode on her hand held shower nozzle.  But if you populate your stories with cliches and never take them anywhere....well you will deserve every righteous beating the cliche police give you.

Racial/ethnic stereotype cliches should be anathema to a writer.  If you're using them you should either be trying to deconstruct them, or very very ashamed of how lazy you are being as a writer.  Everyone will end up with a person of color in their stories, and unless you ARE the ethnicity in question (and often, even if you are), someone is going to have a problem with the way you portrayed that person as not being correct, or as not being didactic in a perfectly public service announcement kind of way--or they may have trouble with the fact that you did do that and the character didn't seem real.  You walk a razors edge between appropriating other cultures and presuming everyone experiences the world in the same way that you do.  And you WON'T make everyone happy with how you strike the balance.  You won't.

But you won't make anyone happy if you don't even try.  And if you dive into ethnic stereotypes without a second thought, you will end up with the sort of characters that get writers labeled as racist assholes.  And you will deserve that label.   You have so much creative potential when it comes to breathing life into characters.  Magic negros, wise, folksy matriarch housekeepers, kung fu knowing Asians, wise Asian asshole mentors, black male thugs perpetuating violent crime, are the sort of characters that demonstrate no imagination or creativity whatsoever.  These are all offensive and they are stupid.  And you should know better.

The same is true of gender stereotypes.  Make your women all wear high heels and fuck their way to the top and your men all bumbling buffoons who think with their dicks, and you are going to get some righteous flack for being a sexist (not to mention a gender essentialist). The same is true of sexuality stereotypes. Make your villains all effeminate and more cultured than the protagonist and you have taken the lazy color-your-villain-by-numbers route. 

I know! I'll give the black guy powers. Powers that seem almost MAGICAL.
And then he'll be a mentor figure. And he'll make a noble sacrifice.
And the white person will totally learn the lesson.
Jesus is this ever some sweet post-racial ambrosia!

There isn't a formula for getting cliches out of characters.  I can't tell you what's over the line and what isn't because there is no line.  This entire issue is intertwined with your compassion and your generosity and your humanity as a writer.  The more you treat these characters with integrity and truth, the more you won't need to worry about some formula.  We all have a weak spots and the suck of them is that you don't even know they're there unless you take the time to figure it out.  Stephen King probably wrote so many "magic negro" characters without ever realizing it and without ever thinking himself racist. Probably the worst thing we can say about him is that he is a product of when and where he was born and raised, and to acknowledge that he seemed to have stop doing it since it has been brought to his attention. Finding your insensitivities may mean you have to cull that knee-jerk urge to say "I'm no racist!" and listen to someone who isn't you tell you that something you do offends them.

It's humbling.  It's sobering.  You get to feel like shit for something you didn't even realize you were doing and surely didn't mean to.  You're a writer, though, so suck it up.  Your ability to portray a character with integrity is on the line, so feeling like shit for a while and walking away better for it is the least you can do.  Otherwise you deserve what the cliche police give you.

And really, what you should be doing is empathizing with how fucking lucky you are that you only have to feel like shit for doing something you didn't mean to, rather than knowing what it means to have it done to you.

Some stereotypes are based on truth and so some characters should conform to them.  That's right!  Characters should be a little cliche!   I said it.  You probably conform to dozens--if not hundreds--of stereotypes about your race, ethnicity, creed, gender, and class. That's part of the human condition too.   But you probably shatter many others as well.   What I can tell you is that every person is their own main character of their own story.  If you treat each character as if they are MORE than just their stereotype-conforming traits, if you also give some words to the parts of them that are not stereotypes, then you get more leeway with the parts that are.  There's no equation, but  ignoring someone's full humanity in favor of making them nothing more than their cliche is basically the ultimate not rowing with both oars.

Of course, as a writer, one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox can be a cliche that you turn around.  I don't mean to parade through the cliche police's rain, but the reason that a reader finds a good twisted cliche more fun than a barrel of age-appropriate toys is because they recognize where something is going and are happy as a clam-eating gourmet to be surprised.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a seven season show and a movie essentially wrapped around the premise of reversing the helpless female cliches of action and horror movies.

Which is a very round about way of telling you that even though I beat the piss out of these cliche cops, I didn't kill them.  I took them to a rooftop while it was raining so hard that you would have traded out cats and dogs for pumas and wolves and I waited for a lightning flash.  It was like two hours of waiting, but when it happened I grabbed the dude by the lapel and I said:

"I want you to go tell all your friends about me.  I want you to tell them Leela Bruce is kicking the shit out of bad writing advice."

"WHAT ARE YOU!?!???" he cried.

I paused.  "Dude, I just told you.  I'm Leela Bruce.  You have a hearing problem or what?"

"Sorry," he said.  "It's the rain.  Plus it's really windy up here."

"I'M THE GODDAMNED BRUCE!!!"

"What?" he said.  "I'm sorry, the wind on the top of a skyscraper in a storm is really loud!"

Anyway, it sort of ended less awesome than it began.  I had to take them to coffee and let them stanch their wounds before we could have a real conversation. I may have even ended up telling them that I really admired some of their earlier work.  That part's less important.

Eschew THIS! (Leela Bruce takes on Richard Bausch)

These guys have learned to love.
Why do you have to be a h8er, Richard Bausch?

Making my fists tingle for the sweet taste of battered bad advice isn't usually something I can control.  Someone just says some ridiculous prescription about what writing must entail (or not entail) and I immediately go into ass-kicking mode. I like to think I do it for the children--for all the young people out there who are trying to take a shot at writing and maybe don't have all the tools to filter through the advice that might not always apply to them...

Oh who am I kidding? That's a total lie.  I do it because it feels really good to punch someone in the face who's just being self righteous about telling the world the way they write is the One True Way.  And usually they are wrong.  So they're actually being self wrongteous.

So when Chris Brecheen told me he was going to some political speech and could I tailor my Wednesday offering to a politics theme, at first I thought "Hey man, I can't can't control who deserves an ass kicking in a given month."  But then he kept talking about some guy named Richard Bausch and his advice to "Eschew politics."

And I'll be damned if my fists didn't start to tingle.

Normally I only fight dead white guys, but since this is advice-centric, I can make an exception for someone who tells writers something so blatant as to actively avoid politics.  So come at me Richard Bausch('s advice to eschew politics!)


I'm going to start with a sucker punch, just to throw this bad advice off balance. So I'll walk up and say "Oh my god!  Richard Baucsh's advice to 'eschew politics'!  I can't believe I'm actually meeting you.  I'm your biggest fan!  You have spoken so deeply to me.  There were times when I really felt like joining the DNC, but then I remembered you and your advice, and I--"

BAM.  Suckerpunch!  This advice is in Richard Bausch's ten commandments to a young writer.  Wanna know what the tenth commandment was?  His last piece of advice?  It was to ignore general advice.  Advice as general as, say, his entire list.  Advice like eschew politics.  Yes, exactly like such advice.  He even invites us to discard all other commandments if they get in the way of writing a good story.  This almost makes me feel bad about the rest of the beat down to come.

Almost.

I will now unleash the butterfly/bee dance/sting combo-move of pointing out that this is advice to a young writer--one just starting out in the world.  Much like C.S. Lewis's similar advice, this must be considered when evaluating the whole.  We tell young piano players not to mess with the pedals as well.  That doesn't mean they never learn to use them.  It just means that it can complicate the initial process.  As a writer's sophistication grows, they can learn to love the flaws in humanity, and acknowledge the imperfection of a political party or political position without needing to give up that position completely.

Now that this bad advice is reeling a bit, I'm going to risk telegraphing a little so I can deliver a few Angry-Rhino punches.  Reading Richard's advice, it is very clear he's talking about a writer's fiction, not a writer's whole life.  He talks about historical backdrops to your story and offers the example of "if your character gives a speech with deeply held beliefs, make sure you don't believe a word of it."  These are examples on the page, not from the writer's own life.  Bausch isn't saying a writer can't be political, he's saying that a story shouldn't be political.  That leads to didactic crap at best and rank propaganda at worst .  But there's nothing to suggest that a writer can't be political themselves.

And let's be honest here.  This isn't advice about how to write.  Really, it's not.  This might be advice about how to write honestly, or genuinely, or possibly even "well," but it's not advice about how to write.  And it's certainly not advice about how to be a monetarily successful writer.  Plenty of writers the world over, in every time and political climate, have done well for themselves by writing didactic literature and even propaganda.  People will always pay to be told that they are right, and be patted on the head for what they already believe.  Headbutt to the bridge of the nose!

Now that this advice is really weak and loopy, I'm going to start throwing kicks to end this, starting with a wheel kick to the temple.  Hello?  McFly?  There's an entire genre of fiction called political fiction.  I'm going to write that again.  It. Is. Called. POLITICAL. FICTION.  Do we think somehow that has eschewed politics?  Did The Republic eschew politics?  Brave New World?  The Chocolate War?  Animal Farm?  No, these works were directly political.  They didn't eschew politics!  They slipped their hotel key into politics's front pocket and told it to give them ten minutes before coming up so they could put on something sexy.  And then these authors and politics had a steamy rendezvous that involved strawberries and a flogger.

Okay, this crummy advice is just standing there, bleeding, so I can do a spinning camel hump death kick to the sternum.  Bausch is a white male.  White males have a greater latitude to avoid politics for the actionable results of politics are least likely to affect them.  They have almost nothing to gain and very little to lose from engaging in politics--at least compared to people of color, women, or other marginalized groups.  Politics can be extremely important if they are the most effective means one has to pursue equality or opportunity--which for many non-white male (het, cis) groups, they very much are.  It's kind of like like most people who say there's "no difference between the two political parties" or salivate over Ron Paul's "brilliance" are almost always white, heterosexual, and predominantly male.  To them, there probably isn't much of a difference because they're not vested in the fights that don't concern them.  Ignoring the fight is easy when one doesn't have much of a stake in the outcome of it, but it's considerably harder when it involves someone directly.  Make no bones about it, Richard Bausch lived in The South during the civil rights era, so he knows exactly what politics can do and exactly what a powerful force "eschewing" can be.  That's why he says that writing about the personal impact and damage that "bad politics" has on people IS a part of a writer's job, and why he says totalitarians are rightfully afraid of such writers.  Even his advice about eschewing politics admits that eschewing the personal impact of such politics would be bad advice.

Lastly, as I take this advice's broken body into my hand like a groom holding a bride to cross the threshold, lift my knee, and slam "eschew politics" down to snap its spinal column like a broomstick, I will point out that "politics" is a word of enormous breadth, but with the potential for incredible specificity.  Artists often involve themselves in causes without necessarily entwining themselves in politics.  Many artists today struggle for LGBT rights, but that doesn't mean they are volunteering to man the Democrats' phone banks.  Artists relentlessly pursue truth, as Chris wrote about yesterday, and the truth of an issue can be political--depending on who wants that truth to come out....or who doesn't.  But while artists' truths might be political, they rarely politicize them.  As Bausch himself says: "The writers who have gotten into trouble with despots over the shameful history of tyranny did so because they insisted on not paying any attention to the politics except as it applied to the personal lives of the people they were creating. They told the truth, in other words, and refused to be political."  What Bausch is describing is very much what we might today consider deeply within the realm of politics--be they identity politics or otherwise.  So don't let the semantics of his advice fool you into being apolitical in you writing or in your lives.  Just because he doesn't want your book to be the talking points of Mitt Romney's campaign doesn't mean you can't be political in context.

I end with Richard Bausch's own words, using them to deliver the ironic death blow:  "The paradoxical truth of the matter is that a writer who pays attention to the personal life is subversive precisely because he refuses to pay attention to anything else."  While this might seem to reinforce his idea to eschew politics, he is essentially providing the secret back door to be more political than anyone who speaks of it directly could possibly imagine.

Eschew politics is bad advice, until you take it with all the grains of salt and realize that what Bausch is really saying is..."so that you can do even MORE damage than politics ever could."

Leela Bruce Kung Fu Fights the Active Voice Wanks

Leela Bruce here, and hello. Time for another round of Kung-Fu fighting really bad writing advice.

If you say something is a suggestion, most inexperienced writers will ignore it.  Completely.  Utterly.  They, of course, know better. Unfortunately, if you say something is a rule, they internalize it upon a steel plate of commandments within their brain, and in a few years when their writing career tanks and they become some kind of editor or agent, they run around power scoffing at anyone who breaks the rule--even when it is the better choice.

This is pretty much exactly how passive voice got such a bad rap.  Perhaps with a few more tweed jackets from Cornell thrown in there. (Oh that's right Strunk!  I'm looking at you!)

That's why today I'll be taking on legions of Active Voice Wank's.  What famed kung-fu fighter hasn't taken on dozens of opponents at a time at least once in their career?

First, a cerebral attack akin to starting out with battle aura (in order to ensure that everyone is too intimidated to attack me more than one or two at a time).  Think of active and passive voice like a transformer (that's transformer with a little T so I don't get sued, but I'm not talking about the electrical boxes).  Imagine you're a giant robot that can turn into a Lamborghini. If you need to get across town because someone thought they saw Harold Bloom, you don't go on foot.  You turn into a car, and zip across town.  When you GET to Harold Bloom, you don't stay in car form.  You transform into a robot so that you have prehensile thumbs with which to grab him by the lapels and a fist that you can drive into his trachea.  I mean maybe if he's in the middle of the road you can just run over him, but if he's behind some of those cement pylons or there are innocents, you're going to need a different mode.

Passive voice is exactly like that.  Exactly.

Now, let me start with some quick punches.  Passive voice is a grammatical construction.  It is not "anything you think feels weak or callow," consisting of verbs without "spine," it is not any sentence with "to be" as a verb, it is not any sentence written in perfect tense, and it is not it a way to refer to writing that generally takes a passive stance.  It's an actual grammatical construction that consists of removing the agent or actor.


[Okay here's a lightning quick lesson in passive voice--just to show all you active wank assholes that I totally know what I'm doing: 

You can't use just regular old high school grammar to unlock what the hell passive voice means.  Because "subject" is a word that has to do with the geography of a sentence and if you try to talk about what happens to the subject in passive voice, you will get confused since another subject comes along and takes its place.  English sentences have to have a subject (unless they're a command with the implied subject of "you").  Even if there really is no subject we put in a filler subject.  "It is raining."  It has NO antecedent in this sentence.  "There is a book on the table."  There has no meaning.  It just wouldn't be grammatical in English to say "Is book on the table."  (Which you can do in other languages.)

So saying "move the subject into the object position" with passive gets funny, since a new subject shows up to take its place.  It's easier if you understand the linguistics concept of an "actor" or "agent."  This is the person DOING the action of the transitive verb.  (Another reason that subject thing can get weird is that intransitive verbs can't be passive.)  So in a sentence like "I punch Dead white authors," I am the agent or actor.  

Got it?

Okay, so in passive voice the agent goes away and the object swings around into the subject position. "Dead white authors are punched."  It requires some tweaking of the tense that is a grammar lesson I'm not getting into here.  You can add the agent or actor back in with something called a By Phrase.  That would look like this.  "Dead white authors are punched by me."  You can see how this can get really clunky and weird when you're describing action.  But I'm not here to validate the Active Voice Wanks.  I'm here to do various kinds of spinning kicks into their spleens and pancrei...um.... pancreases....whatever.

The problem is, young writers do this a lot, so experienced writers tell them to expunge passive voice, as a reactionary swing, and all the really good reasons for using passive voice get thrown out as well.  And those writers go on to become passive voice equivalents of ED-209s.  Big, nasty, and with no ability to walk down stairs.   Um....metaphorically speaking.]


I'm not here to tell you why passive voice is bad, because the style and grammar equivalents of the Puddies from Power Rangers can tell you all about it.  Over and over. Suffice to say that if passive voice is used when it isn't appropriate, it sounds a little strange. (See.) What I am here to do is kick ass and eat sushi. And the gas station just ran out of sushi.

Let me move from punches to some quick kicks. Passive voice is not a grammatical error. Get that out of your brain. While saying "The book was read by me," might seem quite odd, it is grammatically correct. Passive voice is a stylistic choice that has to do with clarity and the emphasis English speakers place on the agent, which culturally mirrors the emphasis English speaking cultures put on agency in general.*throw one attacker into another*


Reasons you use the passive voice:

1- You don't know who did something.  Maybe you don't KNOW who did something.  Coming up with ambiguous subjects rather than using the passive voice gets weird really quickly.  *sidekick*

("My house was broken into," sounds a lot better than, "An unknown person or persons broke into my house.)

2- You don't care who did it.  Often the action is much more important than who did the action, and an actively constructed sentence will draw emphasis from where it belongs.  *hammer-fist*

("The Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937," reads a lot smoother--despite being passive--than "A bunch of construction workers working for the McClintic-Marshall Construction Co. completed the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937.")

3- To emphasize the object or recipient.  Sometimes the object of an action is more important, and you can get a shift in meaning you don't intend by forcing it into active voice.  *spinning back kick*

("Our Marketing Strategy was adopted by several multinational conglomerate," properly emphases the awesomeness of the marketing strategy where "Several multinational conglomerates adopted our marketing strategy" pulls the focus away and places it on the companies.  The meaning clearly shifts.    "Fifty one votes are required to pass a law in the Senate," puts the focus on the number of votes whereas, "Passing a law in the Senate requires 51 votes," puts more emphasis on what happens if they get the votes.)

4- When it is obvious within a multi-clause sentence who is taking the action.  Sometimes your sentence contains multiple clauses, but it could become repetitive and strange if you insist on active voice.  *crescent kick#

("I punched the snobby academic in the face, but being pummeled didn't seem to affect his ability to accept other voices into the canon." It is clear who is punching, and you would have to have a repetitive sentence and force pummel into a possessive gerund to keep it active, which would be clunkier than the passive. "I punched the snobby academic in the face, but my pummeling didn't seem to affect...")

5-General Statements.  General statements often sound more universal and less personally directed in the passive voice.  *spinning kick that hits three attackers*

("Mail should be sent prior to 5pm," seems like a rule everyone has to follow. "Everyone should send mail prior to 5pm," or "You should send mail prior to 5pm," both feel like they are encouraging people to send mail rather than discussing a rule.)

6-Process descriptions.  An agent would often muddle the idea in a process description and cause confusion in meaning.  *flippy reversal*

("The two mixtures are combined to form nitroglycerin."  Describes how to make nitroglycerin.  "Combine the two mixtures," feels more like instructions since it is using the command exception to avoid having an agent at all, and adding in agents creates unneeded confusion. "The person in question combines the mixtures to form nitroglycerin.")

7-Verbs where the agent is obvious.  Certain verbs always have the same agent/actor.  Always.  *super power punch to the brain pan*

(If any of you write "My mother bore me on September 29th," you will probably get some very strange looks.  Pretty much that verb is always in passive voice.  "I was born on September, 29th.")

8-Academic detachedness (also journalism) confused for official or objective.  Careful, this is where newbs get into trouble.  Journalism and politics use a lot of passive voice, but journalists (usually) know what they're doing  ("Saddam Hussein was found!") when they leave out the agent/actor for emphasis and politicians are usually trying to obfuscate blame.  ("Mistakes have been made in this process.")  People think passive sounds "official" and "objective" and drift towards it because of this.

Don't.

However from time to time adding an agent to a sentence can undermine its intention, and then you need the passive voice.  The rule of thumb here is that if the by phrase in any way clarifies the meaning or intention of the sentence, you should probably put the sentence in active voice.  *foot sweep and subsequent ax kick*

("Kafka was thought to be a terrible writer in his time," convey's the full scope of meaning more than, "Literary critics thought Kafka was a terrible writer in his time," and doesn't take away the focus from what's important the way adding in all the necessary agents would: "Literary critics, agents, editors, MFA graduates, and 'high art' sophisticates thought Kafka was a terrible writer in his time.")

9-Diplomacy.  Sometimes saying who did it really points fingers and raises hackles.  This is sort of the nobly motivated version of what politicians do.  *Muay Thai spinning leg kick*

("We only militarized because we were attacked," tends to assign less blame than "We only militarized because you assholes attacked us.")

10-You are Herman Melville.  Seriously!  *The never-before-seen Melville secret attack*


Oh, and by the way, three of the Strunk and White example sentences of why passive is bad aren't actually passive, and George Orwell used the passive voice when he told people it should not be used.  *grabs last standing attacker by head and twists*  Just sayin....

As I stand in the wake of this fight, with hundreds of active voice wanks unconscious around me.  Some struggling for medical attention; others dead or dying; most saying some variant of "I got the crap kicked out of me," in an obvious moment of sheer passive irony, I just want to leave you with this:  passive voice doesn't just have "a few uses."  It has several.  It has many.  And it is positively bizarre to try to make certain constructions into active voice.  Doing so will change your meaning--sometimes slightly, and sometimes greatly.  Even a purely objective narrator needs passive voice sometimes.

And this is to say NOTHING of all the myriad of narrative voices within fiction that might have their own reasons (psychological, educational, or just wanting to sound official) for leaning towards passive constructions.  Don't be an idiot.  Learn what passive voice is and how to use it effectively and don't just join the h8er zombies that I've just decorated the room with who unimaginatively limit themselves.

This is Leela Bruce.  See you next month when I will Kung-Fu fight some more bad writing advice!

Leela Bruce Kung Fu Fights Bullshit Adverb Hatred

Beating up bad advice since....
um, well...actually only since 2012

If you've been writing for more an hour or two, or have ever read anything written about writing that was penned after 1920 or so, you've probably heard someone tell you not to use adverbs.  You've heard that adverbs are not your friends.  Adverbs are the devil.  No good writer uses adverbs.  You should never have more than one adverb per page?

Sound familiar?

Just the sort of art-by-numbers absolutist rule that makes my fists tingle for the sweet taste of putting shitty nonsense in its place. Time to kick some serious bad-writing-advice ass.  Ka-POW!

First of all, let's talk adverbs.  Understanding anatomy is crucial for delivering pressure point strikes of sanity to insanely bad advice, so understanding the adverb will help us stalk our prey. Adverbs are kind of like the "Miscellaneous" of the parts of speech.  Anything that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb is an adverb, and that's just the high school grammar definition.  You get a few fantastically weird adverbs out there modifying things like adjectival or adverbial phrases, entire clauses, or verbs in ways that don't make them look like adverbs.  For example in the sentence, "Do it now,"  the word "now" is an adverb.  It modifies "do" with time information.

Without ever ending in "-ly."  Pretty spiffy huh?

Anyone who's ever had kids or been in an action movie knows how difficult life would be without the word "now."  So let me start my smack-down with a flurry of body blow strikes that point out words that you might not know are adverbs--words that would be quite difficult to live without.  Some of these may function as prepositions, conjunctions, filler subjects, or more depending on where they are in the sentence, but all of them could be adverbs.  And each of them would make for a substantially less understandable sentence if they were absent  This is not a definitive list.  Just a few words that generally get the reaction "THOSE are adverbs?" from the down-with-the-adverb crew.

Now
Then
Only
Soon
Later
Well
Abroad
Anywhere
Somewhere
Here
There
Because
To
Always
Sometimes
Never
Usually
After
During
Tomorrow
Almost
Far
Less
More
Not
Mostly
Upbeat
Upright
Just

And my personal favorites...

Too and Very.

Yeah, try saying "I am very excited about leaving tomorrow to study abroad," without any adverbs.  That should be an interesting sentence.  ~SMACK!~

Still think you don't need adverbs?  Still think you can write meaningfully with only one per page?  Still need me to keep bringing the pain?  Yeah...let's keep going, shall we?  I'm just getting warmed up.

Now that this bullshit advice is softened up and losing reflex speed, it's time to do some kicks.  Let's start with the side-kick-of-what-happens-when-you-give-bumper-sticker-advice-without-explaining-it.  Tell a young writer not to use adverbs without them really understanding what adverbs are DOING in a sentence and you will end up with adverbial phrases.  The sentence "He walked across the room stealthily," is using an adverb in what is typically considered a problematic way.  But if you don't explain WHY that's a problem, the writer won't look to the verb for the solution.  The writer will figure out another way to write "stealthily."  And then you end up with "He walked across the room in a stealthy manner." or "He walked across the room using utmost stealth."  Yay!  No adverbs!  Except those sentences, with their adverbial phrases, are even clunkier than the first one. Legions of inexperienced writers are scouring their pages for any word ending "ly," ruthlessly expunging them from existence, and half the time putting even worse writing in their place.  So if you want to see "with enthusiasm" instead of "enthusiastically, or "in a profound manner" instead of "profoundly" keep telling people to avoiding adverbs without explaining why.

Way to be shitty advice, Shitty Advice.  Now I elbow strike you.  In the face.

Still need me to keep the ass-kicking coming?  No problemo. With this shitty advice winded and dazed from my ongoing onslaught, telegraphing my strikes won't be such an issue. I can probably get in some spinning kicks to really up the damage.  So let's start with a spinning roundhouse to the radial nerve of adverbs-suck advice by looking at some authors who laugh in the face of adverbial prejudice.

Here is a paragraph from the 2011 Pushcart (that's an anthology of the best literature from all the literary journals in the U.S. generally considered to have the best American short stories of a given year in it.)   It's from a story called "Remembering Samuel Becket" by Barney Rosset.

"Usually, however, Sam the writer and I the publisher just went out drinking and talking.  Becket always had very set ideas about where to go and what to eat.  At first his tastes were quite broad, but as the years went by, they narrowed down, exactly like his writing, and the choices got fewer and fewer.  In the beginning Beckett favored the Closerie de Lilas on Boulevard Montparnasse, where Hemingway had liked to go, and where the names of famous writers were embossed on the tables.  There was also the grandiose La Couple, a small bar called Rosebud, and allegedly English pub Fallstaf.  But especially congenial was a seafood brasserie..."

That's a lot of adverbs.  Way more than "one per page".  Is Barney Rosset a wild maverick?  Or maybe he just knows bad advice when he sees it.

Unconvinced?  Let's look at something by Murakami, a writer who is basically expected to win the Nobel prize for literature in the next decade or so.  This is from 1Q84 and I tried to find a paragraph without spoilers:

"They left the seaside road, drove a short way into the hills, and arrived at the crematorium.  It was a relatively new building but utterly devoid of individuality.  It seemed less a crematoriam than some sort of factory or office building.  The garden was lovely and well tended, though the tall chimney rising majestically into the sky suggested this was a facility with a special mission.  The crematorium must not have been very busy that day, since the casket was taken right away.  The heavy lid was shut, like a submarine hatch."

Lots of adverbs.  Couple of adverbial phrases.  Anyone think that's bad writing?  Anyone?  Cause I can kick more than one ass a day, no problem.

Too modern for your literary sensibilities?  Or perhaps you don't trust translations.  Here's Virginia Woolf from Mrs. Dalloway:

"It was a splendid morning too.  Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.  There was no fumbling--no hesitation.  Sweeping and swerving, accurately, punctually, noioselessly, there, precisely at the right instant, the motor-car stopped at the door.  The girl, silk-stockinged, feathered, evanescent, but not to him particularly attractive (for he had had his fling) alighted."

FIVE. ADVERBS. IN. A. ROW.  Anyone still think one per page should be the limit?  Or do me and Virginia need to go back to back and do a face-the-mob battle sequence?

General adverb hatred needs a crescent kick to the temple because it fails to address what is problematic about certain adverbs and WHY a writer might want to avoid them.  So allow me to do what gagillions of lazy writing teachers have spent decades avoiding and has become the "organ harvester" urban legend of writing.

In a sentence that you want your reader to experience as closely to the action as possible, you should use a descriptive verb.  If you want some kind of narrative distance for artistic sake between your reader and the guy walking stealthily across the floor, that is your choice, but if you want your reader to be there in the moment, and experience that with all the tension of the person taking the action, you should try to pick the verb that combines the ideas of walking and stealthily.  "He tiptoed across the floor," for example.  We have zillions of verbs.  The chances are pretty good that most verb+ly adverb combinations have a verb equivalent.  Run+quickly=sprint.  Close the door+angrily=slam.  Eat+messily with horrible table manners=slop.  I could do this all day, but you get the idea.  A punchy verb tends to be better than a simple verb+ an -ly adverb.  But then there are just some times when the simple verb+-ly simply doesn't exist, or it does but would be too esoteric (either for your reader or for your narrative voice).  Sometimes clouds simply have to "drift lazily across the sky."

Redundant uses of adverbs can be problematic.  You don't need to "slam the door loudly".  The idea is already covered in "slam."  If you just have to emphasize how loud the slam was, write a sentence about the windows rattling or something, but using a redundant adverb will almost always draw attention to itself in a negative way.  The only reason you might want to do this is if you are exploring a narrative voice that CAN'T WRITE.  A story in first person from a fourteen year old's perspective might talk about slamming doors angrily, but most narrative voices will allow the punchy verb to stand alone.  It's like using the phrase "very unique."  You just don't need both words.

Adverbs in dialogue attribution are a risky proposition. Not only can you usually find a better verb for said+ -ly adverb (he said+angrily=he shouted), but also adding words to quotation tags can undo how "invisible" they are.  You have to decide if that is worth it because quotation attribution visibility becomes irritating to a reader.  Readers reading dialogue almost always skip over "he said" and "she said" as they read and just read the parts in quotes.  This is a good thing because it can give your dialogue a more natural feel.  You start throwing adverbs in there ("I like cheese!" he said enthusiastically.) and your reader won't unconsciously skip over the "he said" part.  Your reader will read them.  And then your dialogue becomes less natural.  But if you want a break in the rhythm of dialogue a "she said flatly" is almost certainly going to do the job perfectly.

These dialogue adverbs also break the second reason to be careful quite often.  They tend to be redundant given the context. Anyone need to be told that a quotation with an exclamation point is enthusiastic? Trust your reader to pick up on some of this stuff and only tell them when you need to.  ("Love your tie," he said sarcastically.)  If you have already made it clear that the tie is hideous, your reader doesn't need to be told every single emotional inflection.  Let them figure it out.  If you treat your readers like they need to be spoon-fed the action without leaving some wiggle room for their interpretation, your writing will tend to feel stilted.  You only want to do this rarely.  And only when you want to control the scene very tightly.

That brings me to the next point.  Value judgement--especially in character interaction.  Unless your narrative voice is passing through the filter of a character, you shouldn't be using adverbs to judge the quality of things.  "...he said sarcastically" is a value judgement.  Let your reader make the decision if someone is being sarcastic.  If you want your narrator to THINK it was sarcastic, fine because maybe that says something about how the narrator views the world.  (For example, someone who thinks everyone is being sarcastic will come off in their portrayal as clinically paranoid, without you ever having to say so)  But if you are trying to have an omniscient narrative voice that is neutral, this is just the sort of opinion to be careful about.  Try other ways to show someone is being something than just telling your reader.  ("Nice tie," he snorted, smirking.)  When a neutral narrator tells a reader how to feel about something, the writing can feel very problematic.  Readers like to make their own judgments.

Adverbs out of certain adjectives just sound clunky.  Yes, by the rules of grammar, you can technically make an adverb out of most any adjective by adding "-ly" to the end, but it doesn't always make for a good word.  Clumsily, deceivingly, healthily, speedily, piercingly, unnecessarily are all adverbs that just put the clunk into a sentence.  Use those words and you just are asking your writing to take you to...take you to....Clunkytown.  Someone reading those kinds of strange adverbs will stop (even if only for a split second) to think about what the word means.  And that means you have interrupted the flow of your story.  Then again, maybe that's exactly the kind of reality-check/pause feel you want.  Then that's a good adverb to use.

("You smell like a peasant," she said condescendingly) is basically everything that is troublesome about adverbs.  You could substituted "sneered" for said+condescending.  The adverb is drawing attention to the dialogue attribution tag, so the reader doesn't just read "You smell like a peasant," and then skip to the next line. There is almost no way the reader would NOT have known what the inflection of "you smell like a peasant" should have been in context--this writer doesn't trust their reader, and it's killing their sentence.  It is a value judgement about how she is speaking which would be better served by a nose tilted upward or a curled lip.  Unless a character were INTERPRETING her look, the writer should stay out of opinions like that and leave it to the reader whether she is being condescending or not.  And "condescendingly" is a clunky-ass adverb that most people won't read without being pulled out of the moment in the STORY to look at the language.

I should take a caveat here to gently say that you might also want to especially be careful about splitting infinitives with adverbs.  "To boldly go where no one has gone before" might ring familiar in your head, but it is kind of clunky writing.  Now I punch bad writing advice in the face, so I'm the last person to accusingly tell anyone never to rebelliously split their infinitives, but knowing WHY advice is sometimes considered good advice is probably important.  Split infinitives can create really clunky phrases if you aren't sure of what you're doing, especially when split with adverbs.  When you modify a verb THAT YOU ARE STILL IN THE MIDDLE OF SAYING, it can draw attention to the language.  The last thing you want is to stupidly pull your reader out of the moment in your story because you were too good to wisely learn why there might be something to certain advice.  (See what I did there...multiple times?  See how sometimes they're really not as bad as the pedants would have you believe....but sometimes they totally are?  Don't forget this lesson, Grasshopper.)

Now I know it's easier to just say (oh...did it again!) "avoid adverbs" than to understand ten or so whole paragraphs worth of ideas about why they can be problematic but seriously....Eagle Claw to the forehead.

None of these ideas for avoiding adverbs are absolute.  There are always marvelous, brilliant, breathtaking exceptions.  But mostly there are other places--places that are not listed above--where an adverb is EXACTLY what you need.  (See what  I did there?)  If you are reading as much as you should be to be a serious writer, you probably furrowed your brow (with no need to confusedly furrow your brow) when someone told you that adverbs were anathema or to have only one per page.  This is probably because you already knew they weren't always bad.  And you probably are already able to tell when an adverb is being clunky and when it is the right tool for the job.  So have a little faith that any advice so trite is probably that much bullshit.

An adverb is a tool.  It is as problematic to use an adverb in a place where they don't quite work as it is to try to nail in a screw.  But it is equally stupid to declare hammers are the devil and try to use your screwdriver's butt to slam home nails.  If you have a Carver or Fitzgerald style, you might eschew the adverb.  Great.  But don't go telling people never to use them, or Leela Bruce is going to have to go Karate Kid Montage on your face.