Writing Tips

Hubby is back at work today so it's just me and Jr again. Thankfully he left before she woke up. For the past week or so every time she sees him leaving she tries to grab onto his jacket and then when that doesn't work she'll start crying. It doesn't last long once he's gone but I'd rather avoid the drama altogether. At least we have a play date with friends today to take the sting off the first day back.

My sister introduced me to the app Zite. It's like your very own personalized magazine. You have a variety of topics and sections to choose from (parenting, philosophy/religion, politics, celebrity gossip, etc.) and this app finds all recent articles on the web and gathers your preferences into one location for you to read from. It's pretty awesome. It always asks you if you enjoyed reading the article and if so, it'll find more like it and if not, it'll avoid articles like it. You can also block websites you really don't like and don't want to read from again.

Anyway, I came across an article about CS Lewis (most well-known as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia) and how he wrote back to every fan who ever wrote him a letter. Amazing. This article, however, was devoted to a letter he wrote a young girl who asked him for some writing tips. I thought it was great, so I'm going to post it here.

Writing advice from C.S. Lewis was both adorable and concise

by Cyriaque Lamar at i09

On June 26, 1956, author C.S. Lewis responded to a fan letter from Joan Lancaster, a young Chronicles of Narnia enthusiast.
In a personalized thank-you letter, the writer imparted some simple and valuable stylistic advice for budding prose writers. Behold, how to write like Aslan.
Lewis began his correspondence by provided pointers on literary matters both existential...

If you become a writer you'll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.

...and grammatical.

There are no right or wrong answers about language in the sense in which there are right and wrong answers in Arithmetic. "Good English" is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another [...] Don't take any notice of teachers and textbooks in such matters. Nor of logic.

But the true pith of the letter came when the author offered five easy tips:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."
4. In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."
5. Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Now scoot off to your Narnia-themed imaginarium and pen your Hugo Award-winning tour de force, The Sexy Adventures of Mr. Tumnus and Charles Xavier. For more tips from titans of prose, here are some pointers from Kurt Vonnegut.