Be A More Confident Writer
Three Simple Edits that Make Writing Stronger
1. Don’t Hide Behind Parentheses
There is a time and place for parentheses. In fiction, parentheses create a sub-vocal quality. They almost give the feeling of whispering under your breath to the person sitting next to you while someone else is talking at full volume. This makes parentheses an effective form of style, especially for humorous work. Of course, they can also be used practically at the end of sentences to add examples or supporting facts as well in everyday communication (e.g., citing statistics, giving examples, etc.)
While effective when used in the right way, parentheses can also act as a way to hide as a writer and be used as a crutch. I am particularly guilty of hiding behind parentheses in my writing, and if you let them creep from funny asides to being overused, they become a way to say something without really saying something. They start to communicate “don’t take this too seriously” in a bad way, undercutting what is being said or offering nothing additional. If it’s worth saying, say it without the parentheses. If it’s not worth saying and you’re just overprotecting yourself out of fear of being wrong (adding caveats where they aren’t needed). If you balk at including the sentence without the protection bumpers that are parentheses, then it tells you that you should cut what was in the parentheses. Even with humor this can be the case—just make the joke, let it sit out there unprotected and see what happens.
Jennifer Egan is about as universally lauded and admired writer there is, so she can handle some minor critique. Here are a few random sentences from her novel The Candy House that use parentheses:
“Susan (as Miles and Alfred had started calling their mother) looked younger than fifty-seven, lithe and ashy-haired in her blue wraparound dress and soft white sweater—younger, somehow than she’d looked when they were children.”
“Scrolling through her trips to the beach, the park, the zoo (often with our neighbor Janna and her four kids)—ice cream dripping from chins; a video of crayoned pinwheels twirling in the breeze—I could actually feel my heart slow.”
There is no doubt that Egan had her reasons for constructing her sentences like this— perhaps the parentheses do give the sentences a more digressive feel, fitting with the theme of a short attention-span, technology-dominated setting of the novel. In isolation, however, you can see how both of these parentheses are a bit wishy-washy on a sentence level. Can’t we just pick up that Miles and Alfred are calling their mother by her first name? If it’s important to know that the photos also feature Jenna & Co then why not show this instead of jettisoning it to a whispered addendum?
2. Don’t Start Sentences with “And” or “But”
A couple of weeks ago we talked about Mary Shelley’s draft of Frankenstein vs. the edited version that’s most widely read today and includes edits from her husband Percy Shelley. I found giving Percy “with” author credit and claiming he crowded out Mary’s voice was a bit of an overblown assertion—even if Mary’s draft was more to my liking. We went into a lot of depth about the differences and the nature of Percy’s edits, but there wasn’t time to discuss one of Percy’s best pieces of editorial feedback, which the scholar who put these works together into one volume notes in the introduction:
“The curious reader who compares the text in these two versions printed below will notice in the early chapters how often Percy cancelled the words ‘And’ or ‘But’ that Mary used to begin her sentences”
Irrespective of how Percy made Mary’s language more flowery in the edited version of Frankenstein, this is rock solid advice that, like Mary’s novel itself, works flawlessly 200 years later. Like with parentheses, starting a sentence with “and” or “but” is not a grave error but one that often impedes a strong sentence. I find that fiction writers intuitively do this because they’re working the architecture and logic of the story as they go, “And this also happened”, “But then their plot was foiled”. And If it helps you write, then by all means use “and” and “but” to keep yourself going, but generally they can be edited out for a stronger, more confidently told story or sentence.
3. “They thought”
Stream of consciousness writing in fiction emerged in the late 19th century, blossomed in the 20th and has since grown and grown to become ingrained in the fabric of fiction and nonfiction writing. Characters used to have thoughts and think, but now readers don’t expect this omniscient distance and ingest almost everything an author writes as part of the character’s consciousness. Thus, “She thought the coloring was slightly tinted with blue” becomes “The coloring was slightly tinted blue.” This may not seem like much, but removing just two words here and there accumulates over paragraphs and pages and greatly increases the immediacy of the writing.
Sometimes, modern writers entering fiction for the first time who have primarily read older fiction tend to take on old fashioned style cues like this—and related storytelling devices such as a character sitting in one place and reflecting on the past. This creates an interesting exercise where style that was once good and remains timeless can’t be borrowed by today’s writers and actually becomes bad style in modern context. For modern writers it sets the style back 200 years and makes it stilted and stuffy in a usually unnecessary way, especially noticeable if the fiction isn’t historical. There are still plenty of tricks to steal from the masters of fiction writing, but trying to copy certain style elements from classic novels is a fool’s errand in writing a modern masterpiece—writers or readers simply can’t wind their brains back to the 1800s.
This same “think” advice goes for nonfiction writing as well, where the rule is even simpler: if you’re writing it, we presume you think it. Edit out the “thinking” and let the thoughts become one with your reader.