Good writing

In 2009, Maverick Books published John R. Erickson’s Story Craft: Reflections of Faith, Culture and Writing from the Author of Hank of the Cowdog. With permission from the publisher, we’re posting in our Saturday Series a chapter each month through January. Here’s a chapter titled “Eight Keys to Good Writing,” which starts with a quotation from Gene Edward Veith’s Reading Between the Lines: “The answer to bad books is good books.” —Marvin Olasky

Eight Keys to Good Writing

I have never been employed as a teacher or had to face the task of teaching a class on writing, and I give thanks for that. I might enjoy teaching for a week, but after that I would find it tiresome to hear myself talking for hours every day.

Also, I would be operating under a handicap because I’m not convinced that writing can be taught at all, and, if it can be, I’m not sure that a classroom would be the best place to do it. My own experience has caused me to think that only a few of us are meant to become writers, artists, and musicians—and most are not. Those with that destiny often know it at an early age, can’t explain where it came from, and can’t be stopped. The others can’t be pushed, coaxed, or led into a vocation that wasn’t meant for them.

Further, I’m aware that my approach to writing has been highly subjective and rather eccentric. Consider that:

This should confirm that my approach to writing has been odd, and my opinions on writing are only opinions. They were chiseled out of the hard rock of experience, but another writer might regard them as complete nonsense.

Every time I hear composer Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie Number l,” I am reminded that skilled artists are able to find beauty in places I have never been or even dreamed of. I can’t imagine where he found his haunting melody and harmonies, but I’m grateful that he wrote the piece. I think it’s beautiful—and nothing in my experience can tell me why.

But let us suppose that something about writing can be taught, that I have a few insights that are worth passing along, and that you have some curiosity about hearing them. Read on in this and the next chapter for what we might call Sixteen Principles from the Hank the Cowdog School of Writing. [Editor’s note: WORLD Digital plans to publish the next chapter as part of our Saturday Series in January.]

1. The first ingredient in good writing is content, not style.

If you’ve taken a writing course or read a few books on writing, you’ve probably run into the word “style.” I did, and I never figured out what it meant. I always suspected that everyone but me knew about style.

It took me a lot of years, and a lot of manuscripts that went to the city dump, to figure out that style is what remains after the writer has finished the job. It appears at the end of the process, not at the beginning, like the vapor trail that follows a high-flying jet aircraft.

It’s not something we should try to cultivate, in other words. Our job as writers is to reveal content, not to establish style. If the content is good, the style will take care of itself. If the content is dull or dishonest, no amount of style will conceal it.

In a good story, the individual words blend together and become invisible. Readers lose the sense that they are reading, as though the story were reading itself or were being told by an unseen narrator. The reader is aware of the story, not the style.

One result of this is that we might not even recognize our best writing until someone points it out. This has happened to me several times and it always came as a shock.

We might not even recognize our best writing until someone points it out.

In 1981, I wrote a series of humor articles for The Cattleman magazine, twelve articles that drew on my day-to-day experiences as a ranch cowboy. I wrote them strictly for money and without any thought about their literary value and turned them out at a rapid clip, one article per day for two weeks.

In 1982, I read some of those stories aloud to the Rotary Club in Perryton. Rotarians are always looking for a speaker at their weekly lunch meetings and I was looking for an opportunity to let people in my community know that I was trying to be an author.

One of the stories I read was “Confessions of a Cowdog,” a short story that featured two dogs I had met on ranches, Hank and Drover. I didn’t think it was anything special or even the best in the series, so I was astounded by the response it got from the Rotarians. They howled with laughter and after the program, one of them came up and said, “John, you need to do more with that dog!”

Up until that day, I had never suspected that there might be magic in those characters. Shortly thereafter, I started writing the first Hank book. It scares me to think that if I hadn’t done that thirty-minute program for the Perryton Rotary Club, I might never have developed the Hank series.

Here’s another example. On a hot, windy Sunday in March 2006, a fire broke out on the 6666 ranch in Hutchinson County, Texas, and went roaring across the northern Texas Panhandle. It was an enormous fire that burned, off and on, for five days, killed twelve people, and scorched close to a million acres of ranch land. Our ranch on the north side of the Canadian River was right on the edge of the fire, and for most of a week, we lived in fear that a shift of wind would send it our way.

On the third or fourth day of the fire, I decided that I needed to write down my thoughts and observations, so I wrote a long letter to my friend, author John Graves of Glen Rose, Texas. It was just a letter, not a piece of “writing,” and it contained no “style,” just facts and feelings.

A week later, I received Mr. Graves’ reply. “This is excellent, and you should get it published.” The thought of getting it published had not occurred to me, but on Mr. Graves’ suggestion, I sent it to Jesse Mullins, editor of American Cowboy magazine. He sent back an immediate response. He bought the story and ran it in the September issue.

Unknown to me, he also entered the story in the National Cowboy Museum and Heritage Center’s Wrangler Awards contest … and it won. Best magazine article of 2006.

Both the Hank story and the fire story had strong content and were written without any literary ambition of creating a “style.” I wrote them quickly and without much effort. The effort came before the writing—living the events and knowing the characters. The writing itself was just a matter of capturing the details in simple declarative sentences.

2. Good writing communicates information and emotions to someone besides the writer.

At one time in my life, I worked with bricklayers and carpenters. I always admired their ability to build a good honest structure and then walk away from it. They didn’t sign their names to it and it never occurred to them to think, “This is my house, my brick wall.” When they had done their best job, they left and gave it over to someone else.

We writers have big egos, and sometimes it’s hard for us to remember that our purpose is not to build monuments to ourselves, but rather to communicate. Yes, our names go on manuscripts and we want to get paid for our work, but we write for someone else. We are translators and interpreters of experience. We should always be aware of the audience, speak to the audience, and respect the audience. If we speak only to ourselves, we have failed to communicate.

What makes our writing good is not just that we did it, and put our best effort into it, but that someone else benefited from it.

3. A good story is composed of good paragraphs that are composed of good sentences.

Let’s return to the example of the bricklayer. When he lays up a wall, he goes through a ritual that is simple and even monotonous: mortar, brick, measure, level, mortar, brick, measure, level. When he’s finished, there stands a brick wall that is plumb, level, square, and sturdy.

The magic a bricklayer brings to his work is his constant attention to fundamentals and small details. Every brick must be set in the proper way. Every batch of mortar must be mixed right. It’s simple … if you can do it.

It’s the same with writing. The bricks in our craft are words, and the walls we build are stories.

The bricks in our craft are words, and the walls we build are stories.

When I was a young writer, I wasn’t content to build good honest walls. I wanted to build cathedrals. Instead of using plain brick, I tried to use granite blocks. Instead of describing the specific, I wanted to go straight to the universal. But even a cathedral is built one stone at a time, and if you can’t lay a simple course of bricks that is plumb and level, you shouldn’t be in the cathedral business.

I had to learn to lay brick and spread mortar, which in our craft means learning to use nouns and verbs. “Jesus wept” is a simple declarative sentence that contains powerful emotional content. The power doesn’t derive from the words themselves, but from the subject.

These two simple words convey action and emotion and an element of suspense—why did he weep? It’s a good sentence and, as odd as it might sound, I would hold it up as an example of good writing. There is no “style” here, nothing flashy, no fancy words from the thesaurus. It just does the job a sentence is supposed to do. It communicates information and emotion. It contains solid brick and good mortar.

Put enough of those sentences together and you might have a good story.

4. Good writing is clear, not obscure.

It should be obvious that good writing is clear, yet there is so much obscure prose in our society, it makes you think that someone doesn’t believe in clarity.

Every day we come into contact with obscure writing: owners’ manuals for chainsaws, tractors, cell phones, pickups, and electronic gadgets; “serious” literature, contracts, insurance forms, government reports, and all communications from the IRS.

When I was in college, I sometimes got the feeling that our professors cultivated techniques for writing opaque prose. Their objective was not to communicate or to clarify, but to use language as a tool for intimidating the reader, to make the reader think, “Well, if I can’t understand what he’s saying, he must be a lot smarter than I am.”

It is the writer’s job to communicate. If he doesn’t, it’s his fault, not the reader’s. Clear writing originates in clear thinking, and clear thinking finds its natural expression in lucid prose.

It is the writer’s job to communicate. If he doesn’t, it’s his fault, not the reader’s.

At this point, you might accuse me of having a bias against complex forms of writing, some of which might appeal to readers whose minds are more scientific, philosophical, or poetic than mine, and I have to agree. My opinions about writing are highly subjective and should be weighed against the opinions of others.

I admire simplicity. Some writers don’t, and I would rather not put myself in the position of saying that Hegel, Marx, Bergson, Hume, Kant, Tillich, Melville, Joyce, and others who caused my eyelids to sag were bad writers.

C.S. Lewis is a writer for whom I have acquired an enormous admiration, but I found his essays hard to penetrate at first. I started and quit Mere Christianity three times before I was finally able to finish it. Sometimes I had the feeling that I was peering through a microscope and watching as Lewis pulled tiny hairs with tweezers and wove them into a delicate tapestry. In reading his essay on miracles, I often felt that he had disappeared into a fog that stretched for entire pages. I could still hear him but had no idea what he was talking about.

Under my rules, Lewis did his best writing in A Grief Observed. There, still stunned by the loss of his wife, Joy, he spoke in a voice that had none of the embellishments of a poet, none of the complexity of a theologian. The voice was stark and bare, like a man muttering aloud. Listen:

“I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”

This is English prose that goes straight to the bone. I don’t think that Lewis ever wrote better prose than in that essay on grief. But you know what? I’m thankful that he wrote exactly as he wrote and didn’t ask my opinion. His phenomenal success as a writer speaks for itself.

5. Good writing is active, not passive.

Compare these two sentences. First, “Jesus wept.” Then, “Jesus was observed weeping.” Which is the better sentence? Number one, “Jesus wept.” It is direct, honest, and clear.

Sentence number two speaks in the passive voice, and notice what has happened. We have doubled the word count, but have we doubled the information or emotional impact? No. In fact, we have diminished the integrity of the statement by injecting a question that is never answered: Jesus was observed weeping … by whom? Who did the observing?

The best way to analyze a sentence is to diagram it: subject, verb, object. A diagrammed sentence imposes discipline on the author, forcing him to see the parts of speech and how they relate to each other. It sharpens the focus and tells us exactly who did what to whom. (If I taught a writing class, I would encourage students to diagram their sentences.)

Diagram a sentence in the passive voice and you expose its lack of honesty.

Out of clarity comes honesty. Diagram a sentence in the passive voice and you expose its lack of honesty. One of the most often-used statements in modern politics and diplomacy is, “Mistakes were made.” If you diagram that sentence, you find that the subject is “mistakes,” but it is receiving the action instead of causing it. Hence, we have a semantic cover-up for some unknown skunk who made the mistakes.

The sentence is actually saying, “Okay, we have a real mess here, but we’re not going to tell you who did it.” If “mistakes” are the villains, nobody gets fired and nobody can be held accountable. But when you put the sentence into the active voice, you know where to put the blame: “I made mistakes.” Subject, verb, object. We have clarity and honesty.

The passive voice encourages fuzzy thinking and even shady behavior. That’s why people who are under indictment, dodging responsibility, or have something to hide often choose the passive voice. It’s the natural mode of expression for people who don’t want to be identified or understood.

6. Good writing consists of good sentences made of nouns and verbs.

Let’s go back to our example of “Jesus wept” and jazz it up a little more, not only casting it in the passive voice but throwing in an adjective and an adverb: “A distraught Jesus was observed weeping sorrowfully.”

Here, instead of the original two words, we have seven. We have increased the word count 350% and have gained … what? We have added nothing but words and noise. If Jesus wept, we don’t need to add that he was distraught or that he wept sorrowfully, because intelligent readers can figure it out.

When we add words, we don’t always add meaning. Old Solomon made this point when he said, “The more words you speak, the less they mean” (Ecclesiastes 6:11, Living Bible). We should use adjectives as spice, not meat, and regard adverbs as something close to poison.

As a young writer, I thought that adverbs created emotion: happily, sorrowfully, mournfully, wistfully, and so forth. Those are words that ought to create emotion in the reader, right? But they don’t. The emotion in a piece of writing originates in a mysterious way. If the author feels emotion, those feelings will reach the reader through nouns and verbs and, in fiction, through characters. If the emotion is genuine, the author doesn’t have to pump it up with adverbs.

When I see a lot of adverbs on a page, it tells me that the author doesn’t feel what he’s trying to write and is trying desperately to convince me that he does. I don’t like adverbs. There is just something counterfeit about them and most of the time, they insult the intelligence of the reader.

Did you notice that I used an adverb in the previous paragraph? Desperately. I used it to give you the thrill of catching me, and also to acknowledge, however grudgingly (there’s another one), that adverbs have a place in our kit of tools. But we must use them with care. (I almost said “carefully.”)

7. Good writing deals with the specific instead of the general.

Look at this statement: “Back during the Second World War, times were pretty tough.”

That is the sort of comment people are apt to make when they look back on their lives. Maybe it means something to the speaker, but it doesn’t tell the rest of us very much about life in those days. There is nothing specific that the reader can grab onto. You’ll notice that the subject of the sentence is “times.” Times is an abstract concept, not a person. Times don’t do or feel anything.

Now look at this statement:

“During the war, my husband was on a ship in the Pacific and I never knew from one day to the next if he would come home. My youngest child had never seen his father and the other two cried at night and asked, ‘Where is my daddy?’”

That little vignette contains specific details and strong emotions. It doesn’t tell us everything about the war, but it gives us some insight into what the war meant to my mother and her three children. Given this information, the reader can draw broader conclusions—not only that times were hard but that average citizens made sacrifices and performed acts of heroism on a daily basis.

We reveal the universal through the specific.

We reveal the universal through the specific. A war is too big to comprehend, but we can catch a glimpse of it in the story of one family.

8. What is the proper writing “voice”?

Several years ago, I corresponded by email with a friend. He wrote good letters and I told him so, and one day he sent me an article he had written. I usually don’t read outside manuscripts, but he was a friend and asked for my honest opinion, so I gave it.

The article contained a number of sentences written in the passive voice. The subjects of those sentences were not people but abstract concepts. I told him that it created a fog that concealed the human characters and their emotions, including his own as the narrator.

I sent him a sample text that contained what I considered good writing: one of his own letters.

It often happens that when we try to write something “important,” such as a novel, story, or poem, we become self-conscious. We try to be profound and authorial. We concentrate on the elegance of individual sentences and forget that all writing is a communication between one person to another—a process we follow in a letter without even thinking about it.

My friend accepted the critique of his article and admitted that he had tried to keep himself out of the story. He didn’t want to write about himself. That was a noble instinct, but somebody has to drive the bus.

Formal writing, especially fiction, offers a writer the opportunity to conceal his identity and to wear disguises. That can be fun and beneficial, but at some point, the reader deserves to know who’s doing the talking. And, turning it around, the narrator should have some idea to whom he’s speaking.

Those are the two main questions involved in choosing a writing voice: Who’s telling the story and who’s listening?

Good writers don’t always write good novels and stories, but they usually write good letters.

Good writers don’t always write good novels and stories, but they usually write good letters. In a letter, the whole process is reduced to its simplest level. We know who is talking and who is listening. We have established the identity of the narrator and have defined the audience.

For that reason, it is often a good idea for a beginning writer to compose the first draft of an article or story as a letter to someone he knows and trusts. It makes everything simple. You can always go back and make changes in a later draft or leave it in letter form. St. Paul wrote some of those and they are still being read two thousand years later.

The narrator in your story doesn’t have to be “me,” your actual physical self, but that’s the most natural place to begin. I am the character I know best. Start simple and build from there. Learn to skate before you play hockey. Before you try to build a house, learn to measure a board and make a square cut with a saw.

From Story Craft: Reflections of Faith, Culture and Writing from the Author of Hank of the Cowdog by John R. Erickson. © 2009. Published by Maverick Books. Used with permission. All rights reserved.