Show Don't Tell, but Look Before You Show · 12:18pm May 13th, 2016
For hundreds of years, I had never known about George Orwell's rules of writing. Apparently everyone else learns about this in their writing classes, so it's common knowledge, but I only discovered that famous essay a few years ago.
Now some of the advice I see passed around makes a lot more sense. People would say, "don't use passive voice", and when asked why they just say it's a rule, and something vague about how it automatically makes things sound worse. Well, those people are bad writers if they can't explain it (or maybe they never actually read the essay, and they're just passing it around as dogma). Orwell himself gives a much better context for the rule. In any creative field, rules are useless if you don't understand why they were formed.
But here's an important paragraph, near the end, that made such an impact on me. Lots of confusing things about writing suddenly.. clicked.
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally.
Whether he realized this or not, this is very similar to what it's like when you "learn" to draw. There's a famous book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, that's entirely about guiding the reader through this mindset with exercises, before actually getting to the true "basics" of lines and shading, etc.
For a beginner, vagueness is the exact same problem, because of the mental shortcuts we all use. Anyone can draw a stick figure, because that's how we define human beings without thinking too deeply. Head, body, two arms, two legs, face. Draw a hand? That's just a palm, 4 fingers, and a thumb, right? They're all just prefabricated abstract shapes in your mind, despite that you see humans every day. All that must be unlearned, and then you can see such things as shapes and objects. Much like Orwell's recommended approach to prose, you need to actually LOOK at it (whether it's before your eyes or within your mind) and ignore those left-brain shortcuts as long as possible.
It's not even about being perfectly realistic and representative, as even a simple cartoon-style drawing can be convincing just by having a strong sense of form. Ponies are just a bunch of vectors, but they're based on physical shapes (the spheres and cylinders of drawing guides, you've probably seen those) and it's obvious when a vector just looks "wrong" because they're trying to imitate the show's cartoon style, rather than actually picturing the structure underneath.
Thanks for introducing me to George Orwell's essay! I had never even heard of it before now. It was a great read. You're right, a lot of writing advice I've heard before makes a lot more sense now, in terms of why people say it.
One thing I really liked about it was that he basically says, "thoughts come before writing" and so "good thinking makes good writing." This is what I learned when I took a nonfiction writing class, which really impacted how I look at the craft. Our professor taught us to think creatively about our subject (maybe we were writing about cars, or a tourist destination, or a celebrity), to think of new things to say about it and new ways to say it in. I mean, there was still lots of focus on prose, but there was just as much focus on the thoughts behind it as the words themselves.
I'll have to see if I can find some selections from the nonfiction materials we read. It's really very good writing.
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I get worried that these kinds of things are so obvious and already familiar to all the good writers.
but then I remember it wasn't obvious to ME, and I hadn't read these essays either. so it should still be useful to others, too.
therefore, time for everyone to start Writing Advice blogs!
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Go advice blogs go!
Information is always new to someone, after all. By the way, here's a link to some of the writing I promised. They're selections I copied from different places. The first is a (supposedly) nonfiction novel by Truman Capote, the second is a nonfiction piece taken from my class workbook; the third and fourth and fifth are taken from an anthology of travel literature we read for class called The Conde Nast Traveler, Book of Unforgettable Journeys. And here is the Amazon page for a book about oranges, of all things. You can read part of the first chapter in the preview. I thought this book would bore the crap outta me when I first read it. I was totally wrong.
You don't have to read any of these, by the way, so don't push yourself if you don't want to ^.^ I just wanted to share them because, for me, they're examples of really good writing, and they're about real people and places! Studying how to write well about the real things taught me about writing about the non-real things. And a lot I think matches up with George Orwell's essay.