Cooger and Dark's Guide to Writing

"Omit needless words," said Strunk, and a great deal of writing advice hinges on this dictum. This has led to even starker imperatives: never tag speech with a verb other than "said"; eliminate adjectives; prefer simpler words.

But if Strunk's advice was the touchstone for 20th Century writing and every creative writing workshop thereafter, Ray Bradbury never heard that dark whistle-warning sounding over the plains. Consider, for example, the merry-go-round rush, the hall-of-mirrors sentences of Something Wicked This Way Comes:

The surface slit itself further in a wide ripping smile across the entire surface of the gigantic pear, as the blind Witch gabbled, moaned, blistered her lips, shrieked in protest, and Will hung fast, hands gripped to whicker, kicking legs, as the balloon wailed, whiffled, guzzled, mourned its own swift gaseous death, as dungeon air raved out, as dragon breath gushed forth and the bag, thus driven, retreated up.

How many needless words, redundancies, not to mention opaque constructions, metaphors, contradictions?

Reason for the need, however, and the case is clear. Bradbury's cavalcade prose, his carnivalesque expression, his mirror-house language, is the dark carnival, the show, the temptation, and the action that resides within it: the urge to engage, be thrilled, and the fear, the wish to escape. If it subverts the rules, well, doesn't the big show subvert the real, and that's where the terror and the lure of it lie?

Misters Cooger and Dark understand the fear, the temptation of the rules the #writingcommunity and workshops and classes lay down: omit needless words! follow the rules for good writing, and find an agent, impress a publisher, or follow the lonely path of the unpublished.

Consider another rule that sometimes boils up, the proscription from Elmore Leonard: Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

Fine. J.K. Rowling abuses dialogue tags to an excessive degree, but compare:

• "I love you," she said.
• "I love you," she whispered.

And ask which verb means more, which has more imaginative potential, given the right scene and context?

No one wants stark prose, boring prose, bland styles, or we all end up writing for the Web, flat and technically correct. The writing challenge is not to excise the needless, but to find the needful in every word and sentence. What does it serve: atmosphere, character, action, plot? 

When the characters in Something Wicked This Way Comes realize there is no perfection in life, as there is no perfection in craft, that's when they find liberation, compassion, joy even. That's not a good reason to stop trying, but a pretty good rule for all rules.

Writing/cloud

From time to time one reads about how word-processors transformed writing, breaking writers from the slow and considered process of writing and re-writing tethered to pen and paper, then typewriter and paper.

This mythic writer of old taps out a manuscript, juggles and annotates a stack of papers, contrives to have the whole thing typed cleanly again, and consequently writes with due respect for the weight of every word. Occasionally, manuscripts are left in shoeboxes or on public transport, but so be it.

Then comes digitization, computers, and the manuscript is instantly editable, always live, and we contemplate the impact of the means of production on output.

But it strikes me that another, more significant change is underway in our writing habits and processes, which has less to do with the mechanics of keyboard and screen than the infrastructure of work itself. This is the effect of the digital cloud for writing.

I have always used a personal computer, from an Apple 512KE to a MacBook Pro, to write and revise, but only in recent years have I had access to cloud services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, which allow me to save a manuscript remotely, and to access it almost wherever I go, on either my own computer, a tablet, or another device. In other words, the manuscript is no longer tied to the typewriter, the writer's desk, the study, even the personal laptop. The manuscript goes with you. It's almost as accessible as your thoughts.

For a long time, even with word processors, if you had an idea, reimagined a scene, even thought of the name of a character while you were out, or at work (by which I mean the job most writers take for material support) then that idea had to stick long enough for you to get back to "your" computer. Now, there's a way to reach out to your manuscript, to find yourself writing at odd times and in odd locations. Your creative life can follow you in the cloud, but what kind of discipline is now required? Are thoughts refracted, concentrated, or ephemeral, when you can edit at any time? This adjustment is at once, I think, more substantive than a change in tools, and harder to evaluate. Is the process different when you can craft words virtually anywhere?

Why study creative writing?

It's been a few months since I've posted, one of the reasons being that at the end of February I completed the dissertation for a PhD in Creative Writing that I've pursued part-time, with many gaps and hiatuses, at The University of Queensland.

Reflecting on the experience, I have cause to ask myself: why study creative writing? Surely my own experience suggests you don't need to study writing in order to be a writer; why make a detailed study of one's own vocation, at the expense of time and effort a research degree demands?

Some brief, provisional responses:

• Firstly, every deep, complex field of human activity is, I think, worthy of study. The foundation of scholarship is not necessarily gain – that job, that publication – but interest.
• Now, you can't teach creativity, but you can, of course, practice it, and practice can strengthen.
• And practice can also refine. The self-reflection inherent in scholarly practice may not make me better, but it makes me clearer about my interests, my strengths and weaknesses, my influences, and formalizes of my techniques and approaches. Writing about one's own writing helps to refine intuitions and make them explicit.
• Finally, writing to a task and reflecting on that work not only allows you to apply skills but to experiment, to take risks and write out scenarios and possibilities that test ideas and your personal capacities. Not all writing in the academic context may be publishable, but it is constructive, a workbench for concepts and techniques.

Where this will lead next, I don't know. A new historical mystery is almost finished, and beyond that there are only sails on the horizon, suggestions of destinations. But studying creative writing has at least given me some sense of how I set the sails, what stars I steer by.