Good Writing is Secretly Good Production.
Writing is the craft of placing words in a certain order. The moment you add a second sentence however, it colours the way the first sentence will be read. If you add a third, you’ve got yourself a paragraph.
If you don’t like the way that big block of text looks in print, you might drop down a line.
Now you’ve got a new problem, because this one-sentence-line has got to lead somewhere and the way your next block of text interacts with the last is going to change the way any additional sentences are read—perhaps altering their meaning altogether if you’re not paying attention.
But if you feel everything is coming off a little too formal, a bit too preachy and prescriptive, it might be a good idea to burn your words here and there. If you wanna disobey a few conventional grammar rules— or at least bend them in a way that’s not typical, you can try chucking in a bit of slang. The odd swear word, four letter fuck words usually get people’s attention or even just a good old twist of a well known platitude is an effective way to wake up the sleeping cat.
If you want to up the pace, you might drop the paragraphs altogether.
Short sentences.
Skipped lines.
Get your reader’s eyes dropping down.
Down.
Down the page.
If you decide that the next best step is to invoke the sensation that you or your characters are out of breath, you might include a run on sentence that reaches multiple points where it feels like it should end, but simply doesn’t, instead going on and on to the point where the reader might even get frustrated with you as a writer because they’ve trusted you with their attention here and you are really testing those limits by forcing them to work more than they would like.
But they should know. Fiction is not always about enjoyment. Sometimes the writer needs to take a risk and accept that certain readers will tap out. That’s okay. These choices are where style are born, if they don’t like it, you don’t want them as a reader. If they’re not willing to trust you and do the work occasionally. Then they won’t get the payoff.
Normal is boring.
Follow all these rules and suddenly you’ll find there’s a bit of voice in the text. It no longer reads like an automated email that some overworked office hand scrambled to type out before their ciggy break.
Writing is the craft of placing words in a certain order. But it’s also not.
The artist vs the producer.
When I first began writing fiction. Most of what I’ve outlined above wasn’t incorporated into my approach at all. Sure I couldn’t help but apply some of it intuitively, but in truth, my idea of writing could probably have been boiled down to:
-A fancy vocabulary.
-Some novel ideas for where I might take the plot.
-Maybe a better than average knack for wording certain lines.
But there was next to no consideration of what effect I was invoking in a reader. How to the component parts of my idea were working together (or not working) to impact a reader’s experience.
That part had to be learnt. That part is more difficult because it goes beyond, “what I think is cool,” and requires work. It demands a certain element of sterile analysis— departing from the artistic “flow” of creation and channeling those elements in a format that is palatable to an audience.
Recently I’ve found myself oddly fascinated with music production. Not the musicians themselves, but the people behind the board, twisting dials and offering suggestions on how best to capture the raw essence of what has already been created in a manner that people will be able to consume.
(feel free to skip the next paragraph if recommendations don’t interest you. I got a bit carried away with these) To name a few recent examples:
Brendan Obrien’s interview with Rick Beato - Wherein he discusses a career as a sound engineer and producer for small bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Giles Martin’s interview on Broken Record where he discusses remastering classic Beatles albums utilizing AI technology, Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act which draws heavily from lessons learned during his a long career as a music producer. And ranging way back into my days watching the History Channel as a kid (before it became the exclusive home of Finding Bigfoot and Ancient Aliens) the BBC made Classic Albums series which featured insights into (as the name suggests) the greatest albums of all time—feat Black Sabbath, The Doors, Pink Floyd. Peter Jackson’s meta reproduction of the production of the Beatles Let it Be album provides an eight-hour-plus fly on the wall insight into this process from some of the greatest, yet visibly flawed musicians ever to exist.
Listening to these people speak, opened my eyes to the other side of creativity that I hadn’t realized I was in the thick of every day. Once you’ve got the idea, it’s not enough to just call everyone over and say, “Hey you. Look what I came up with.”
If it’s served up as a ladleful of slop, they’re not going to come close enough to even taste it.
Post Revelation
The thing that drew my attention to this shift in my way of looking at art, wasn’t anything to do with writing at all. It was music.
I haven’t always been this way, but upon first listen some of my more anticipated albums coming out in the last year or so, I kept catching myself suddenly concerned with the guitar tone, how well the mix was layered, the panning between left and right headphone, the length of verses. Sure the emergence of spatial audio as a more common element in how albums are formatted has likely broadened the lines on my ear for this stuff, but as I eluded to above, I suspect it comes from all the attention I’ve been paying to my writing.
By standing up every week and reading my work to a group of people, I can’t help but be mindful of how it’s coming off in real time. When you give someone your work in written form, you don’t get to see them taking it in. Even if you were to watch them read it in front of you (which is too uncomfortable to even think about) you can never quite tell by the line of their eyes which part they’re up to. You can’t identify the lift that draws a smile, or the section that makes their eyes glaze over.
And this isn’t to say that you have to be a part of a writers group to apply this knowledge. I’m just trying to articulate, that in that format, you become hyper aware of the reactions that a reader (or listener in this case) is likely having to your work when they consume it in any form.
As writer, your reader’s experience depends on the minute decisions you made after the “art” has already been created. Writing the first draft is your demo tape. From there you’ve got to rework it, decide how many verses you need, does a bridge need to be added, are the drums too loud, is that lyric putting emphasis on something you don’t want it too, have you left enough space in the backing track to give the guitar solo the lift it needs?
The only way your audience can access the art you’ve created in the manner that you envision them seeing it, is if you put in the work and carefully consider the optimal way to deliver it.
That part is not in the realm of the words, the language, the premise. That part is production. Is this part two self indulgent? Could this voice I’m attempting to project do with a bit more self indulgence? Is that line a bit generic? Has it gone too far off the grid?
If done well, I think the most bland piece of prose can be polished into something that people out their might name their favourite story. But if no attention was paid to this “production” element of writing, I’m convinced Faulkner wouldn’t have got a sniff at publication in even his local lit mag.
