Welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time.
Goodness – we’ve been going for a whole year! I cannot believe it. In celebration, for one week only I’m going to post about creative writing every day, including the regular Thursday Barber’s Chair and this, a bonus Monday episode. I expect I shall throw in a couple of pieces dealing with stuff like plot and warm-up exercises that are hard to crowbar into Barber’s Chair, with all its obsession with line edits and swearing.
Thank you for reading the blog! I really enjoy thinking about the craft of writing a good sentence. Working on these posts has helped me refine and develop my thoughts on the subject such a lot. If you enjoy these posts, please don’t forget to recommend them to a friend from time to time. I’m sure you know a couple of people who would find them interesting, and personal endorsements are by far the most effective way of getting new eyes on the work.
More thoughts as the week progresses. For now, let’s just get on with it, shall we? As always, read the extract below – the first page of a writer’s novel or short story – decide what you like and what you’d change, then read my thoughts after ‘The Cuts’.
The Life He Wanted (by Sean)
“We’re going off to war and we need you again.”
“No.”
The old man was assaulted by visions of the past. His past. His old life.
“No.” His voice felt thick as he answered.
“No one knows I came here. I left the officer’s barracks to search for you. They think you’re dead.” He threw up his hands and sighed loudly. “I thought you’d want to see me again, to come back.”
“I don’t want to go back.”
“Maybe you should anyway. Maybe you were meant to.”
The old man turned his head back to see his son, a young man in an officer’s uniform and a heavy jacket. He hardly knew him.
“Come see this over here on the rocks so I can explain something to you.”
“What do you mean? What’s down there? Nothing but the ocean, surely–”
The old man shoved his son forward and the young man’s boots lost their grip. He tumbled off the side with a gasp, hitting his head on the precipice. His body fell noiselessly down from the high cliffs, his coat flapping in the wind. His body hit a rock and slid off into the water. The next wave brought him completely under and the old man stepped back inside because a storm was coming along shortly.
The Cuts
“We’re going off to war and we need you again.”
“No.”
Bonjour Sean, and thanks for your extract. The good news is that you’ve avoided most of the common pitfalls aspiring authors fall into.
The bad news is that you’ve achieved this by adopting a whole suite of highly unusual flaws that most aspiring authors avoid. But hey, at least you’re original!
Opening with dialogue is fine – really the only question is whether the content is interesting. As far as I’m concerned, a single line of unattributed speech is okay, providing we find out who said it within the next few sentences. It creates a small mystery that stimulates the reader’s desire to press on.
Two lines of unattributed dialogue start to feel more like a stylistic statement. It’s as if we’re eavesdropping on a conversation. Why can’t we see the speakers? Again, it’s permissible as a strategy if you’re aware you’re doing it, but you need to have a good reason for letting the exchange hang in the air like that, and the exchange itself had better be bloody compelling, otherwise you’re just drawing attention to its mundanity.
That first sentence set my itchy-chin alarm blaring. ‘We’re going off to war’? Oh fuck off. Who talks in these ludicrously broad Jungian archetypes? What possible exchange could have taken place before this one, that the character would have to explain ‘we’re going off to war’? Surely both must know, unless they’ve been in cryogenic storage, that:
a) the first speaker is a soldier
b) a war is happening
And you know, wars tend to happen in a very specific place and time. Units get moved to locations. One fights specific enemies. I might believe it if the son said: ‘We’re shipping out to Tangiers tomorrow morning. I want you to come.’
Instead of specifying time and place, you have him signpost the concept of conflict for the reader’s benefit, so we know: aha, there’s a war on. The problem is, when you make a character’s internal logic subordinate to transmitting information about your fictional world, the second revelation we will have is: aha, this is a shit story.
The same is true of ‘we need you again’. The ‘again’ is an expositional clanger that kills our willing suspension of disbelief. It’s the equivalent of the person in an old radio serial saying: ‘Is that a gun in your hand?’ Why wouldn’t he just say ‘we need you’? The ‘again’ is purely for the reader’s benefit – a heavy-handed adverb so we know they’ve worked together before.
As a reader, I don’t need you spooning extruded story product into my slack gob. I want to meet two characters and know nothing about them. I want to be making assumptions about them based on their dialogue, but I want their dialogue to be truthfully theirs, motivated by their wants and fears, not co-opted by this need to fill in the blanks for those of us who arrived late.
Real characters owe no debt to the reader. They have no obligation to summarise and overexplain and annotate their utterances.
Have you ever listened in to one half of a phone conversation on the train? They can be maddeningly addictive, especially when you can tell from the speaker’s tone that something important is at stake, but you can’t work out the context. As soon as you figure out what the call is about, you can partially disengage. The same goes when a reader approaches your novel. Epistemological gaps are compelling. Just don’t kid yourself that cutting exposition from the narrative gives you license to sneak it into the dialogue. If anything, that’s worse.
The old man was assaulted by visions of the past. His past. His old life.
I like it when you step in to clarify ‘His past’ – as if the reader were imagining a montage of pterodactyls, ancient Sumerians digging irrigation trenches, English longbowmen, the spinning jenny. You do know your keyboard has a backspace key, right Sean? If, after writing a sentence, you purse your lips and think ‘ooh, I could’ve been a bit more specific there – what if they think the old man is imagining Waterloo and the moon landing?’ you can simply delete ‘the past’ and replace it with ‘his past’.
More problems: it’s not immediately clear who said what in the previous exchange. From reading on I get that the old man is the one who says ‘No,’ but the ambiguity is distracting and serves no purpose.
Even more: ‘assaulted by visions of the past’. No. You are not allowed to write this. This is furrowed-brow breast-beating cheesiness of the highest order. It’s vague and abstract, so we don’t engage with the feelings. You’re telling, not showing. Engage our senses. Get specific.
I appreciate you might erroneously believe that by keeping the content of these ‘visions’ secret, you are creating a compelling mystery. You’re not. You’re creating a bland, textureless world and expending a huge amount of effort to do so.
Notorious batshit paranoiac purveyor of bigotry Orson Scott Card put this better than I ever could (demonstrating rather neatly that possessing a shrewd writerly mind and being a great person are by no means related):
Most novice writers imagine that this is how suspense is created – by holding back key information from the reader. But that is not so. Suspense comes from having almost all the information – enough information that the audience is emotionally involved and cares very much about the tiny bit left unrevealed.
I absolutely agree – although of course this is not an endorsement of info-dumps. Get specific. Honest specificity cannot help but haemorrhage information about your world and its inhabitants.
“No.” His voice felt thick as he answered.
You’ve started a new paragraph, which by the normal conventions of prose fiction implies a new speaker. But no, it’s the old man again. It’s not that I couldn’t follow this, just that it’s ambiguous, which creates unhelpful uncertainty and undermines the reader’s trust in your ability to hold the show together.
I like ‘His voice felt thick as he answered’. It’s a bit of POV that is nicely specific, engages our senses, and suggests an emotional reaction. You’re showing, not telling.
“No one knows I came here. I left the officer’s barracks to search for you. They think you’re dead.” He threw up his hands and sighed loudly. “I thought you’d want to see me again, to come back.”
So I like the first three sentences. There’s a tinge of clunkiness – ‘I came here’ feels unnatural because it’s cast in the past tense. Again, it betrays the fact that you’re thinking as the author, in story mode, rather than the character, wherever the fuck he is. (a line or two describing the surroundings would help – at the moment they’re conversing in a white void) ‘I’m here’ would make more sense.
Would he really specify ‘I left the officer’s barracks’? Is that your trying to let us know he’s an officer? ‘to search for you’ is unnecessary – they both know this was his purpose. Perhaps ‘I had to sneak out of the officer’s barracks’ would be a better sentence. It feels borderline plausible – he’s placing his escape in a specific location, to help the old man picture it.
‘They think you’re dead’ is great. It advances our understanding, raises a bunch of questions. It’s a surprise. It feels real. Nice work.
‘He threw his hands up and sighed loudly.’ What a coincidence, so did every fucking person who read this. Your pronouns are running riot. Up until now, the pronoun ‘he’ has referred to ‘the old man’. You don’t get to switch without flagging up the change, otherwise it’s confusing – again, not so confusing that we can’t follow the story, just confusing enough that we lose faith in your skill and give up.
Switch same-gender pronouns like this:
Keith scratched the mole beneath his left nipple.
‘I’m going to find that baby and bite its nose off.’ He closed his eyes and mimed gnashing.
The train conductor nodded with an air of professional indifference. He had learned neither to endorse nor condemn his passengers’ small, passionate disclosures – merely to acknowledge them, punch their ticket, and move on.
Using the person’s name or title (e.g. ‘the old man’) passes the pronoun back to them.
“I don’t want to go back.”
“Maybe you should anyway. Maybe you were meant to.”
Pfft. This reads like a bad improv scene conducted by nervous rookies under the gaze of a volatile director wielding a cattle prod. Why won’t anyone fucking commit to specifics? How does this exchange further the scene?
We know he doesn’t want to go back – he’s already said no. And wouldn’t the son have prepared a better argument than ‘Maybe you were meant to’? Would that honestly be his go-to strategy? Who’s first move in an attempt to convince someone is a nebulous appeal to fate? It’s like writing:
‘Give us a bite of your eclair mate.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Maybe you should anyway. Maybe you were meant to.’
I can’t believe an actual person would say those words out loud.
The old man turned his head back to see his son, a young man in an officer’s uniform and a heavy jacket. He hardly knew him.
‘turned his head back’? What does that even mean?
What does the ‘officer’s uniform’ look like? Colours? Insignia? And isn’t the ‘heavy jacket’ part of the uniform? Can you go more specific than ‘young man’? This feels like a cursory topography of the character’s most obvious, broadest traits.
‘He hardly knew him.’ I know exactly how he feels!
“Come see this over here on the rocks so I can explain something to you.”
“What do you mean? What’s down there? Nothing but the ocean, surely–”
The old man shoved his son forward and the young man’s boots lost their grip. He tumbled off the side with a gasp, hitting his head on the precipice.
Congratulations, Sean. This is the funniest moment I have ever read in Death Of 1000 Cuts. I think you could go further:
‘Well, you’ve convinced me,’ said the old man, ‘but if I’m to go to war I shall I have to get my rifle working. The barrel seems to be blocked. I say, would you mind having a squiz for me?’
‘Like this? It’s awfully dark, father. I can’t see anything.’
‘Just a little closer. Look right inside the muzzle. I’ll hold it steady.’
‘Okay, but I’m not sure this is the best way –’
Or perhaps:
‘I say, is that a Pog?’
‘What are you talking about father?’
‘There, lodged in the floorboards, in the shadow of that gently-swaying grand piano. I think it’s a shiny.’
Or even:
‘Before we head off to war, you must try out my magic bread knife. Wonderful contraption – Japanese, I think. Slices a cottage loaf quick as Billy-o, but plunge it into your gut and it passes through harmlessly. Have a go.’
One of the reasons this moment is hilarious is that, up until old man fils tumbles to the unforgiving rocks below, there has been no mention of a cliff, or an ocean, or any indication that they aren’t indoors. It feels like an improv scene, where one actor panics five minutes in and makes reference to the fact the whole exchange is taking place inside a miniaturised submarine. We laugh as we watch the other players struggle to adjust to the new reality (and often such big, high-risk moves are the death knell for the scene). It’s a pull back and reveal gag.
I don’t think you intended this bit to be funny. Blackly, quietly humorous perhaps, but not ha-ha boink pratfall reality-undermining Naked Gun style funny. If you don’t specify a location, the reader will hunt for context in the speech and probably imagine a generic white room or a generic street depending on whether they guess it’s indoors or outdoors.
Of course one can deliberately mislead the reader into making an assumption about where we are before upending that assumption – such deceptions are the mainspring of good suspense – but you can’t cheat by simply blindfolding us. That kind of coy wankery is just frustrating. We need to feel complacent – you need to use our expectations against us, so we haven’t even considered we might be wrong until the switch.
But if you do this, you need to have a good reason. Why obfuscate the fact that they’re standing by a cliff? Why not introduce that tension right at the beginning?
The next wave brought him completely under and the old man stepped back inside because a storm was coming along shortly.
How does he know ‘a storm was coming along shortly’? This level of certainty feels like a POV slip – like you’ve moved from the old man’s interiority to an omniscient narrator. And ‘inside’ what?
Most of the openings we look at on Death Of 1000 Cuts are creaking under the burden of clumsy exposition – novice authors prematurely blowing their load, unable to undertake the stimulating pull-push foreplay of escalatory withholding and rewarding.
You have the opposite problem, Sean. This extract is like a burlesque act who spends 20 minutes provocatively extending a single slippered foot from behind a brocaded screen, then the screen collapses to reveal a small bald man with a horribly misshapen nose extending into the shoe.
Actually that would be fucking wicked.
Your opening is like a movie where they forgot to turn the camera on. So they just ADRed the lines over some b-roll of clouds.
The actual synopsis of what happens – soldier son tries to recruit retired father into a war. Retired father refuses, then (for reasons unknown) murders his son – passes all sorts of tests for notability. That is an exciting, provocative opening! We want to know what motivated such an extreme action.
But you haven’t inhabited this scene properly yet. You need to unpack it a bit. Engage our five senses. Give us some crunchy specificity. Give us enough of the son that we care about him a bit, that his death is meaningful. Thing about power dynamics – the relative statuses of the characters. Really you want us to be worried for the father, only to execute a brilliant tilt when he turns on his son.
It’s good that you’ve overadjusted, Sean. That suggests you’re doing your best not to bog down your story in turgid explanation. But you need to swing the pendulum back the other way a tad. Give us some little concentrated blasts of richness. Really lock into the father’s perspective – what he sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels – make your nouns and verbs stronger, your adjectives less abstract, and cut your adverbs. Make this scene a real cliffhanger.
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