There are
several ways of learning to write well, and one of them, certainly, is to learn
by reading good writing. My junior high school journalism teacher, Jack
McDonald, understood this. He taught us the fundamentals of journalistic style
— the five W’s, how to write a lead paragraph, the inverted pyramid — in short
order, as we were putting out the student newspaper for one semester only.
So after
the brief instruction, he added, “If you really want to know how to write a
good news story, read the front page of the Times
every day and do what they do.”
That would
have been early 1965 in Southern California, so he was of course talking about
the Los Angeles Times, which, under
the direction of Otis Chandler, was rapidly becoming one of America’s best
newspapers. Situated in an area that was booming economically and growing
rapidly, the Times could spend all
the money in the world on its news department and still be spectacularly
profitable. And they spent it well, hiring top-notch people who taught and
learned from each other, producing a paper that was a joy to read.
Learning from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I took his
advice and read the front page thoroughly almost every day for the next year,
and, by George, I learned how to write a news story. Now that I’ve published a
mystery novel and am working on another, I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries
by other writers in much the same way I used to read the Times back in junior
high. That is, I’m trying to watch what they do and see what I can steal.
Any
aspiring mystery writer who could learn plot from Agatha Christie, voice from
Raymond Chandler, and sense of place from Tony Hillerman would certainly have a
leg up on the competition. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I’ve been learning
something else in my readings. You can pick up a lot of writing pointers from a
bad book, too.
Not too
long ago I read a self-published mystery that I felt wasn’t very good. You can
find it on Amazon, but you’ll have to do it without my help. Attacking an
unknown author is bad form; public attacks should be saved for big-buck authors
who are coasting, and if you find this particular author yourself, you might
disagree with my assessment.
Not So Good, but Compelling
In spite of
the fact that I concluded early on that the book wouldn’t be very good, I read
it all the way to the end. A major reason was that I wanted to break down what
was going wrong, if only to avoid doing the same thing in my own writing.
Part way
through the book, I realized that one of the major problems the book had was
the author’s use of adjectives. In almost every paragraph, there was an
adjective that was wrong in some way: it didn’t need to be there at all; it
jarred because it wasn’t descriptive enough or overly descriptive in the wrong
way; or it editorialized. After all, if you’ve accurately and specifically
described what the villain has done, there’s no need to keep referring to him
as “wicked.”
Strunk and
White famously wrote, “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak and
inaccurate noun out of a tight place.” Bud O’Brien, one of my mentors at the
newspaper, used to say, “The adjective is the enemy of the noun.” Like guns,
adjectives are good tools, too often wrongly used. The next time I sit down to
write, I will be herding adjectives tenaciously and keeping them on a tight
leash.
