I love that title. It would make a good book title. But then I started thinking about what I would write, and it was mostly about what a fool the reader was for buying a book on writing. Don’t get me wrong. I love books on the finer points of writing. But I hate books about how to write in a general sense: “How to Write a Best Selling Mystery.” That stuff just disgusts me. The best writing advice is to stop reading whatever writing advice you are reading and go out and write!

Just the same, I think that the art of writing is fundamentally the art of reading. What writers most often lack is a sense of what is good and what is not. I remember many years ago, I wrote a short screenplay — for what would be maybe a 20-minute film. It was about this guy who was addicted to messing with telemarketers. I loved it. It was very funny with a great denouement. But a writing friend of mine hated it. I forget exactly what she didn’t like about it, but I am convinced that it was nonsense — something about realism, as though that matters in the least.

But as an insecure writer, I took the advice and wrote draft after draft. And with each draft, it got worse and worse. And my friend never liked it because she just didn’t like the whole idea of it. By the end, it was a mess with far too much motivation and far too little fun. But it is a good example of the life cycle of a piece of writing. There were many drafts before I showed it to my friend. And that was the point at which it was as good as it would ever be. The problem with the following rewriting was that it was at base about making the screenplay into something it wasn’t.

Knowing when to stop is critical to the writing process. You must know when something works. New writers tend to think that everything they write is golden. There is rarely any point in rewriting because they can’t tell what crap they are writing — even though they can often tell this in other people’s writing. This is what we can probably call “kiddie writing.” There’s an obvious solution to this: read a lot more great writing and write a lot more of whatever it is you are capable of.

But not knowing when to stop can also mean endless revisions — never stopping. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t tell what good writing is; it often means you can tell, but you just aren’t a good enough writer (Yet!) to accomplish the kind of work that you know is possible. This we can probably call “middling writing.” And I don’t mean to disparage it, because it is usually pretty good. It’s always important to read great writers, but clearly the issue here is to keep writing. But that means different writing projects, not beating a work to death trying to perfect it. If you find you are in your sixtieth rewrite, it is time to set it aside and try something new.

And that brings us to serial killers. I read an article the other day, 5 Myths about Serial Killers and Why They Persist. This bit of it really struck me, “Contrary to mythology, it is not high intelligence that makes serial killers successful. Instead, it is obsession, meticulous planning…” Ah, I think I understand that! This is what writers need!

In as much as I can write, it is because I have been writing like a serial killer for decades. I’m obsessed with it. I know lots of people who used to be far better writers than I was and now they have nowhere near my skill. It’s because they don’t care about writing like I do. And they are better off for it! But if you want to write, you need to write. And you need to write a lot.

In 1985, Frank Gilroy (father of Tony, Dan, and John) made a film called The Gig. It’s really good. Yet it is totally wrong about the way that expertise works. In particular, there is a trumpet player who has a nice cushy life. He’s a professional-level player, but he’s not interested in being a professional musician, because it sucks as a lifestyle. Then there is a clarinet player who practices and practices but will never play at a professional level. And there is a great line in the film, said by the one professional musician in the film to the clarinet player, “It’s not religion — devotion isn’t enough.”

This is a common idea that has been beaten to death by writers who really should know better. Now it is true that there are limits. Regardless of how hard I work, I will never be David Foster Wallace. But anyone can become a professional writer. You just have to be like a serial killer. It really has to matter to you. Being a natural doesn’t take you very far at all. But it might make you more inclined to do all the work that you need to do to become something really worthwhile.

Afterword

I always feel a little weird talking about this kind of stuff on Frankly Curious because the writing here is pretty much all first draft. This is stuff that I knock off without much thought. I usually have only the vaguest of ideas about what I’m going to write before I start. And if things go sideways, I usually let them. I’m actually a much better writer than any article here would indicate. But I’m not a great writer. What I am is a garden-variety professional writer. But people have been paying me to write for almost 25 years now — back in the days when I couldn’t write nearly as well as I do now — when my final drafts were worse than my first drafts today. It doesn’t take much to be a professional writer.

I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett’s The Truth each night in bed. And I love it. I still hold a certain romance for the news industry, even if it is reserved to fiction. And I love the two main characters in this novel. First there is William de Worde, the founder and publisher of The Ankh-Morpork Times. And then there is Sacharissa Cripslock, his star (and at this point only) reporter. And they work so well as a team, there just has got to be romance in the air. And that got me thinking of fan fiction.

According to online sources, the books were never explicit about this. But it was implied that the two of them eventually married. And then there was this tweet by Pratchett himself back in 2011, “Sacharissa Cripslock married William de Word but keeps her maiden name for professional purposes.” (Interesting: even though he is dead, he still have over 143,000 followers; I’m sure a lot of people just can’t let go.) This got me thinking that it’s too bad he didn’t write more about it. I can see a very good novel focusing on William and Sacharissa. And I could write that! And for the first time in my life, I understood the nature of fan fiction.

One of my personal annoyances as a writer is having people give me ideas for stories and articles. Don’t get me wrong. Most of the ideas are actually rather good. But I’ve never known a writer who wasn’t overwhelmed by her own ideas. I’m the same way. There are too many things to work on. And the process of writing begets ideas for other things to write about. It’s only the would-be writer who struggles for ideas; actual writers struggle with the actual writing.

But the impulse to fill in the details left by the unjust death of a beloved author is different. It is effectively an act of reading. And I don’t say that as a slight. Reading is an enormously creative activity. Writing is necessarily incomplete. It is like a screenplay for your mind. It is only fully realized in the reader’s mind. And so I have my own clear image of William and Sacharissa and the little subtle things that indicate that they are meant for each other. So to write a story about their courtship would be a continuation of that. And it would clearly be quite different than anything that Pratchett ever imagined.

I feel much the same way about Moist von Lipwig and Adora Belle Dearheart, even though they are such different characters with a far more (in my mind) colorful marriage. But obviously, I won’t be writing about either. Fan fiction doesn’t lead anywhere. And I’m sure there are writers of fan fiction who are far better than I would ever be. If some good writer has created a story about William and Sacharissa or Moist and Adora Belle, I’d definitely read it. But I’m not going to be writing it.

In my day job, I was recently working on something that went over different writers’ attitudes toward fan fiction. Some hate it and some love it. But one of them (I think it was Stephenie Meyer, the writer of the Twilight books) said that she thought it was a shame, because the best fan fiction writers were very good and they should be working on their own stuff. I obviously agree, because I think writers should get paid. But I do understand the impulse in a way I didn’t before.

I particularly enjoy reading P M Carpenter when he writes about language or literature. On politics, he’s very liberal. But on these other issues, he’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. But that’s okay. So am I in my own idiosyncratic way. Sunday, he wrote, Language Crimes and Misdemeanors. (How do you not like a guy who references Woody Allen films in his article titles?) It is about the big happenings at The Washington Post. It seems that they are changing their style guide in a mad rush to catch up to the publishing world of 2000!

The big news is the move from “e-mail” to “email.” This brings back nightmares of the “Internet” Capitalization War. I don’t especially care, but it seems that simpler is always better if clarity is not harmed. And there could hardly be more clarity than “email”; I think “e-mail” is a bit clunky. Another change is from “Web site” to “website.” That one is especially repugnant to me. First, who capitalized “web” after 2006? Second, two words? Not even a hyphen?! At this point a website is something distinct from a site on the web. It deserves its own word, just like “gravesite” (which many websites represent).

But for pure silliness, The Post has decided to switch from “Wal-Mart” to “Walmart.” The truth is that the corporation’s name has been “Wal-Mart” since 1969. But the company calls itself “Walmart,” and has done so for a very long time. That’s the thing about style guides: they are autocratic. But all autocrats should know the limits of their powers. And continuing to call something by the wrong name is, well, wrong. We can argue all we want about capitalizing “internet,” but people and institutions have names. They define them — not the copy editor at The Washington Post. (BTW: I format The Post’s name like that because that is what it calls itself; I try to do that with all names.)

Carpenter doesn’t have a problem with these changes, but he doesn’t seem to be keen on them either. He describes the changes in the terms of war, “There are tactical moments, however, when ground should — and perhaps must — be ceded…” This is more or less, “I’ll give you ‘website’ but you can have ‘internet’ when you pry my cold dead hands off that capital I!” Fair enough. But what is this war being fought over? If The Washington Post gives up “Internet,” will it lead to George Will writing sentences like, “Me and him gone down to the fishin’ hole”? It’s absurd.

To me, it is always about clarity first and ease of writing second. As a result, unlike Carpenter, I am fanatical about the serial comma. Why? Because it is often necessary for clarity (“Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, and Burns and Allen”), and it is easier for the writer to simply put it in and not worry about whether it is or is not necessary. So these are what guide me in writing. The problem is that a stubborn commitment to past practice is very often an impediment to clarity and ease of writing.

I try, in my writing, to get things right — as defined by intelligent opinion. But that’s clearly third on my list of priorities. As for style guides? They are more about branding than grammar.

I remember when I was in the ninth grade, we went through a section on the haiku. They really are very interesting, but there is nothing like good old fashioned American systematization to destroy, well, everything creative. So we were taught what is always taught: a haiku is a three line poem where the lines have five, seven, and five syllables. And that’s about it, other than that they usually have something to do with mood or weather or whatever the hell the Japanese are on about.

The result is some pretty horrible drivel. Here’s something absolutely terrible I was able to come up with in about 20 seconds:

See: it has the proper number of syllables in the proper order. I can tell you one thing: that is an A+ haiku by the standards of my ninth grade English class. But it does have a few problems.

Let’s leave aside that it’s deadly dull: I am, I stole, I got. There shouldn’t be any reference to the writer, because that’s implicit in the form. A haiku is supposed to be a report of what is happening from the writer’s perspective. This “haiku” misses all of these points. But it does get the syllables right, so that’s something. Or maybe not.

I was recently editing a article about mobile games when I came upon a statement about one of the game’s “about us” page that was given in the form of a couple of haiku. It mentioned that a haiku was a poem with blah, 7 syllables, blah. So I sent off a message to Madeleine Kane, my personal expert on all matters involving limericks and haiku. I had a vague memory that haiku is not so regimented as all that. And she sent me to an article by Naomi Beth Wakan, Dispelling the Myth of 5, 7, 5.

The article is primarily for teachers who want to provide segments like the one I took on haiku, but who don’t want it to be as useless. It’s worth checking out. But according to Wakan, syllables in Japanese are shorter than they are in English. So the 17 syllable business is normally abandoned by serious English language haiku writers. Instead, they “usually do a rough 2 beats, 3 beats, 2 beats.” That’s actually kind of exciting! For one thing, that provides almost no time to get the information out. I like a challenge.

The truth is that the standard, 17 syllable, format is too easy. Here’s something typical of what I can do in about a minute:

But how do you make that work in a couple of beats per line? It isn’t exactly hard. The main thing is that it makes you get to the point of what you are trying to render. But doing it well is really hard, as five minutes of work shows in this remarkably uninspired translation:

Let me try again! Here is a Mary Barnard translation of a poem by Sappho, which I love:

It’s almost a haiku already. It just takes some minor changes:

The problem with going rogue and writing haiku that is true to the tradition is that there are millions of people who will tell you that you don’t know what you are doing because your haiku doesn’t have 17 syllables. But if anyone bugs you, I give you permission to respond with the following “haiku”: