UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

Author James McCreet looks at the ‘archaeology’ of our individual writing styles and how we can clear the rubble of hackneyed words and phrases

Watch out for James McCreet’s forthcoming special series on Advanced Creative Writing Techniques – coming soon!

Learning to write is a neverending process. It’s also a process that occurs in stages and which accrues throughout our lives. We learn the rudiments at school. Then we read more widely and learn new techniques. University may add a new set of skills, then professional writing might add more. When we start to write fiction, we bring all the strata of our accumulated writing experience to the page – and that’s usually a bad thing.

We need to think of our writing ability in archaeological terms. Like an ancient city, our experience is a combination of (supposedly) solid foundations, strong defensive walls, battlements and turrets – but also a lot of rubble filler, clogged drains and rubbish tips. We bring all of this to our work: the good and the bad.

The trick is to identify which remains are the bad ones – the ones that impair our writing – and concentrate only on the actual finds: the jewels, the treasure.

CLEARING THE RUBBLE

Most people’s writing is littered with trash – the fag ends and sweet wrappers that swirl around modern language. Cliché and formulaic writing slip naturally into our prose because we hear it and see it all the time in the media. In real life, we ‘pop out’ for a coffee and ‘jump into’ the car, but these are not useful or exact phrases in fiction. They’re shorthand and represent ‘writing by numbers’. When we use cliché and formula, we’re not writing. We’re unthinkingly repeating the sounds around us. Of course, characters can use such phrases to sound realistic. Authors should not.