How to Improve your own writing or fix someone else’s:
Intent:
Have you ever read an excerpt from a work of fiction and just could not understand it? Or were you able to understand it, but it was riddled with errors, over-explanations, or unrealistic dialogue? In this series we will tackle How to Fix Terrible Writing.
Sometimes you are tasked with editing, proofreading, or writing a project yourself. Other times you may be ghostwriting in service of someone with stellar ideas, but lacking the ability to fine tune stories into a novel format. Now, that said, I’m not going to go out and find other people’s work to insult and correct.
Yes, you heard that right. For this series I will be correcting samples of my own work. Luckily, I was able to dig up a flash-drive from 20 years ago. And on that flash-drive was a folder titled “Novel Notes”. And after converting the files from the defunct .wps format into a document readable by Microsoft Word, I was horrified at what I saw.
How we got here
Young and fresh out of high-school I had grand aspirations to write highly successful fiction novels. I had a solid grasp of the fantasy and science fiction genres, so after spending all night waiting tables I decided to put the stories I’d come up with onto page.
I remember finishing my first chapter on notebook paper and celebrating with a night out and drinks. Then life happened, and suddenly these stories were filed away, typed up and put into folders. Notes and physical prints stashed away in a cardboard folder. One massive hurricane later and all of those notes are destroyed.
Years later, after becoming one with the mud and sand, the story lies abandoned for so long that you forget about it. But then you find a flash drive in a laptop case pocket that you haven’t seen in more than a decade. You are suddenly overcome with nostalgia as you see the folders and the titles. And then when you finally are able to open the files you recoil and cringe.
Reality Check
That story that you thought was the pillar of fiction 20 years ago. The chapters that you wrote that you believed so excellent that you went out and celebrated with drinks upon completion. They were terrible. Why did you write dialogue like that? Nobody talks that way. Why did you over explain every detail instead of crafting subtle hints?
The foundations of a really good story where there, but you have to face the fact that you just weren’t ready back then. And now, with 20 more years of education and practice, how can we take that terrible writing and make it acceptable to your current standards?
I am going to put my own sub-par work from my youth on display, but I’m also going to show a new revision. I’m going back 20 years into my past to unearth a story long forgotten, and try to save it from the depths of shadow.
Series Introduction
Throughout this series you will see examples taken from excerpts of my old work, and then I will compare it to excerpts of how I ultimately “fixed” it. I will provide notes and examples where necessary and try to convey how these changes were indeed necessary, and made the work remarkably better.
For Part 1 of this series we will start with the first page. Each additional post will cover the additional pages. Part 2 will examine page 2, Part 3 Page 3, and so forth. For each post in this series I will add numbered headings where I will pick a certain flaw and attempt to clarify why it needs fixing.
So, lets get started with How to Fix Terrible Writing.
Here we are with Page 1. We’ve opened the file, and we begin to scan the page:
1: Unnecessary Flair
Ok, wow, that is terrible. Lots to unpack here. Jagged underlines are not a good sign. And look at that God-Awful attempt at coloring the title and headings trying to be unique. None of these colors will even make it into a published draft. They are unnecessary unless you just like to look at them. If you are trying to make your work stand out to an agent or employer it is simply unprofessional. We don’t need the subtitle either. It is out of place and can be explained later. We will change the chapter heading too. Hyphen it up and the reference can be inferred more easily.
2: Bad Vocabulary -Words that sound good but don’t fit the meaning.
We are only in the first sentence and I’m already cringing. The word “dissonant” does not fit here. This is a prime example of someone pulling up a thesaurus, typing in words related to “sound”, and then picking the coolest looking word. A morning cannot be dissonantly silent. And if it was, I can guarantee I didn’t want to convey “harsh sounding” or “discordant” silence.
3: Stretching your sentences to over explain.
Second sentence we see a prime example of over explanation without giving thought to narrative flow. We don’t need to explain that there are “ground level mists” when we all know that fog is thick and covers the ground.
The attempt here is to convey that there are rays from the sun, but also to remind the reader that the sun isn’t penetrating the ground level fog. It’s not necessary. Readers can infer that. It’s just too on the nose.
Ok, and then we want to say, yes there are clouds in the sky, but the sun is shining. So we make it an explanation that there are few of them. It is just not flowing.
Page 1 Summary
The examples above illustrate the types of choices that permeate the entire page. Words used in the wrong way. Sentence structure and punctuation are off. We have what seems to be cut and pastes from a thesaurus. It seems as if the sentence was written plainly and then words were run through a thesaurus and randomly chosen for dramatic effect.
4: The best tip I can give for the most egregious error:
And I know you guys have been screaming at me to mention this but I wanted to save it for dramatic effect. You all have guessed it. Why everything feels so off? That is because the present tense is being used. It’s jarring and yet subtle but it makes reading it feel uneasy. 99% of novels are written in the Past Tense. This has to go. That had to go.
The Re-Write
So, I’ve gone in and re-done the entire 1st page. I eliminated the present tense throughout. I also tried to be more subtle in explaining actions and environment. Throughout the edit I replaced just about every word. In an effort to educate on How to Fix Terrible Writing I will explain in detail some of my thoughts.
I tried to give it a cohesive narrative sense. We don’t need an entire thought quote to explain that he is searching for something. That can easily be tied to the narrative to flow with the events in a chronological paragraph.
Make changes that count:
1. Don’t make the reader feel like they are reading a fourteen year old’s train of thought.
Sometimes the bones of a cohesive story exist but the words and grammar are quite jarring. I make sure to go through the next paragraph and try to uplift some of the more elementary wording. I also look out for bad punctuation. In the old draft, it seems as though I was more concerned with giving the reader a very clear picture of what was in my head than how it looked and flowed as written.
Some examples of this are semi-run on sentences, where you’ll notice the subject and an explanation, and then a comma and further explanation, but adding a new subject. These examples can be fixed by truncating the explanation to fewer, more impactful words, or by splitting the sentence and giving both subjects primary focus of their respective sentences.
2. Edit out redundancy and increase flow.
“In a desperate attempt to warn the other soldiers of the watchtower, he grabs his blow horn with shaking hands and blows bellowing notes of warning.” What’s wrong here? Well, why do we need “blows bellowing notes of warning”? It’s redundant. It can be inferred. And it’s terrible wording.
If we look at how I fixed it you can see that the story is conveyed but with better flow. There are more hard stops achieved with periods to add tension. We know that the thunder is approaching. Of Course we know he’s scared. So we add some color to this by giving the reader descriptions of his breathing, some better animation of his actions, and then we follow the blast of the horn down the tower, instead of simply saying bellowing notes of warning.
3. Trust the reader to put context clues together.
Going back to the previous paragraph we see the idea presented as an effort to transform the thunder in his mind into the thunder of the cavalry. Not only was it a grammatical hodgepodge, but we don’t need to directly tell the reader that the watchman thinks it’s just thunder out there. In this case it’s better to be subtle.
Hit the ideas you want to convey, and let them roll out in sequence. If you aren’t satisfied that the reader will grasp a certain idea or a certain intent, you did it wrong. Don’t add a direct explanation like the reader is stupid. Go back and subtly suggest in your narrative what you want your reader to grasp.
Allegorical Anecdote:
I want you to imagine that you are out camping. It is story time out at the campfire. There are two people with stories to tell. The first guy starts off and throughout the story he stops to explain every single ancillary detail. He thinks that without his explanation you will not grasp the entire story. Each and every scene, every pivotal moment he has to stop and tell you why such and such or what such and such before he will move on. When he gets to the end you have been told a story.
Now its the next guys turn to tell a story. In his story he immerses you into the narrative with subtle hints. There aren’t many direct explanations, but some quality allusions, that allow you to infer and draw some conclusions yourself. Most importantly, you experience the flow of the story in real time because there aren’t extended pauses to explain every detail. There aren’t abrupt subject changes mid sentence because he thinks you wont understand without those additions. Instead, at the end of the story, all of his subtle hints and allusions thread together in your mind to complete the story.
You have to stop for a second. Then it all comes together and you get it. Then you sit back as the realizations dawn on you and you just whisper “wow”. That is how a reader wants to experience a story. They want to be entertained. They don’t want to feel like they are being force fed narrative.
Your input is valuable:
Below you can analyze a side by side comparison. As you make your way through the rest, I hope you can see how the changes fit with what I’ve been explaining. I hope you came away with an answer to solve How to Fix Terrible Writing, whether it be your own, or for a project. And how the original work was lacking in those regards. Please engage in the comments below, I’d like to hear your thoughts. I hope to see you again in Part 2, when we cover Page 2. For now, I’ll turn the page. See you then.
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