Let the writing tips begin!
I’ve spent decades as a writer, and as a teacher and professor of writing. For fifteen years now I’ve run a publishing company. There’s material in all that for a Substack, I thought – unload all that wisdom about writing and the industry.
Then ‘To hell with that!’ I decided. As writers, we’re learning all the time. ‘We’re in this together!’ I used to tell my students and it was true. I learned from them as they learned from me. Then I skipped away from academia and back to being a writer.
Then as a writer I started making notes of all the things I’ve learned. So there is material for this Substack after all. I’ll be posting three at a time.
If you find the points useful, you’re welcome! And if they trigger points of your own, please pop them in the comments box.
Here goes!
1. Move time phrases, such as ‘in the afternoon’, to the beginning of the sentence. It will help your sentences flow.
To understand how that works, check out some excellent long-form journalism, such as in The New Yorker or the Financial Times’s Weekend Magazine. See how those writers vary the starts of their sentences, avoiding the dull thud-thud-thud of subject + verb + object.
I’ve just jumped into the FT magazine for a random example. This is from Tom Faber’s “Gay Old Time” about London’s first LGBTQ+ retirement complex. This starts a new section, and tits opening two sentences both start with a time phrase. “Around 7pm at the drinks evening, I find myself sitting at the bar with Nicola Fenton, 60, one half of Tonk’s only lesbian couple, who is wearing a black Asics T-shirt with her reddish hair pulled into an unfussy ponytail. When I ask how she ended up at Tonic, she starts speaking at a hundred miles an hour in a strong New Zealand accent.”
2. Instead of ‘there is’ + object, try object + verb. e.g. There is a chair in the corner > A chair fills the corner.
That nugget of advice was fed to me by the writer (and film maker and teacher) James Broughton, when I gave him a proof copy of my first nonfiction book. I was looking for a more jubilant response, but it was useful.
3. A sentence is a unit of delivery for what comes at its end. Place the important stuff there and close the sentence.
I was with a group of students and we were reading a skilled writer’s work, looking to give her useful feedback. In the middle of one long sentence a character was hanged. Had anyone in the group taken in that fact? No. They had all missed it. Because the information was in the wrong place. They had been busy navigating the sentence with the belief that it was leading them towards its end, where important things belonged.