Somewhere in humanity’s distant past, a storyteller was recounting the tale of a skirmish between two warring tribes, embellishing details of a battle he didn’t witness. Elaborating on the strengths and prowess of his tribe, and the weakness and cowardice of their enemies, the storyteller struggled with his limited vocabulary to keep the story going, to turn a simple act of brutality into an epic tale that would be remembered.

In a moment of inspiration, the storyteller compared the leader of the tribe to a bear, large and powerful — and invented the simile. He said their enemies were wolves, vicious and predatory — creating the first metaphor. Cheered by his audience, he described the rest of the story as a battle between bears and wolves — and the allegory was born.

And in so doing, he doomed the future of storytelling to a constant struggle for imagery, a search for similes, metaphors and allegories that would make each story seem greater than those told before — and the simple skill of recounting events as they happened was lost.

It’s Like an Analogy

Similes, metaphors and allegories are the unholy Trinity of bad storytelling, the linguistic embodiment of the over-rated maxim Show, Don’t Tell. Collectively, they are more frequently abused than the exclamation point, the deus ex machina and the phrase "As you know". They can be used to brilliant effect, but more often than not they only exist to demonstrate the author’s inability to tell the story clearly.

Similes, metaphors and allegories are all essentially analogies: they serve to illustrate something unknown by comparing it to something known. But, like writers, they usually don’t work. This simple principle of description-by-comparison has been largely abandoned to a game of linguistic excess, where writers construct ever more outlandish and distracting imagery as if there was a merit badge for it (or, more accurately, to prove their literary cred to the critics in their writing group).

Similies and metaphors have their place, though: in 19^th Century Symbolist poetry. The worst of the trio is the Allegory, which has the power to ruin entire stories.

Allegory is not a Character in a Troma Movie

Allegory is when the entire story becomes a metaphor for something else — whether or not the author intended it as such. You’re probably familiar with the term from its most commonly-used phrase, "But it’s really an allegory for … ", usually followed by an unconvincing "Oh yeah, I knew that."

Allegories are written (or interpreted) because people have a hard time justifying the time it takes to read a book without deducing or ascribing a "deeper meaning". This is especially true of so-called "classic" works, which require more effort to read and thus should yield greater reward than a contemporary work. By the same token, writers create allegorical stories because they don’t want their work to be read and forgotten in an afternoon.

There are two kinds of allegories:

• those that pretentious writers build their stories around, and
• those that critics with nothing else to do insist on interpreting into stories.

There’s little we can do about the second group — there will always be a dialogue about the "deeper meaning", because English professors have to justify their tenure, and lit students their tuition, by endlessly re-analysing stories with newly-invented critical frameworks called Post- something — post-feminist, post-colonial, post-caring. The most an author can do is deny the bogus interpretations, as J.R.R. Tolkein did when people insisted that Lord of the Rings was an allegory of the Second World War, or revel in the infamy of competing interpretations, like Don McLean has since recording "American Pie".

But stories designed to be allegories are the scourge of literature, intent on making it impossible to enjoy a story without having discuss it afterwards to check if your interpretation is "right".

When Allegories Attack

There are really only two circumstances that warrant an allegorical story:

• When the author lives in, and is writing about, a repressive society that punishes direct criticism with censorship, imprisonment or worse; and
• When the author is one failed novel from being dumped by their publisher, and really needs to get shortlisted for a literary award this time.

It’s no wonder that some of the best allegorical stories are written during wartime, or in repressive or archly conservative societies, such as Orwell’s Animal Farm. The allegory is an essential tool in those conditions, both for communicating your meaning covertly to a receptive audience, and for deniability when the powers-that-be wise up and come knocking.

Outside those conditions, it’s a tool of literary pretension, deliberately obfuscating the meaning of a story in order to make your readers feel clever for having decoded it, to court critical and academic discussion, and to apply in advance for Penguin Classics reprint rights. It’s also a convenient way of excusing the fact that the story doesn’t stand up on its own.

But What Does It Mean?

That’s the eternal question. In every allegorical story, there is a conflict between the surface story and the deeper meaning. The best ones are entertaining enough on the surface to be enjoyed even if the reader never perceives the allegory. It’s possible to enjoy Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example, as an epic tale of a nation in conflict, without understanding that it’s really an allegory for life in high school.

The Holy Grail of allegorical writing is timing the "aha" moment, when the reader discovers the deeper meaning, for as close to the end of the story as possible. For example, the final sequence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is very powerful when you realise the whole movie, culminating in Richard Dreyfus’ decision to leave with the aliens, is an allegory for the moral dilemma of deadbeat dads.

The problem, though, is that allegories almost never achieve this. Either the allegory is so obscure that you only discover it when the pseudo-intellectual husband of your wife’s friend mocks you at dinner for not having figured it out (after he read it in a review), or the allegory is so blatantly signposted that the surface story reads like its own Cliff Notes.

This is the essential problem with allegories: the surface story is usually dull or even meaningless without understanding the allegory, and once you understand the allegory, it’s boring and predictable.

When Good Allegories Go Bad

All allegories are parables, or satires — but in the information-rich 21^st Century, allegories are preaching, or satirising, to the converted. The "deeper meaning" of your allegory has almost certainly already been discussed ad infinitum on talk shows, blogs and message boards, and if your readers don’t understand the idea already, they won’t get it from your story.

In Western countries at least, there is just no need for allegory anymore — when the moronic antics and draconian douchebaggery of the sitting US President are daily fodder for bloggers, talking-head pundits and comedians alike, what is there that you can’t say, except allegorically?

The only thing worse than a story that relies on allegory is a one with no deeper meaning at all. The allegory then becomes an exploration of why a reader would want to waste their time.

There is a moment in the career of every writer where they realise, however dimly, that they have run out of ideas. Whether their Muse deserts them, their creative wellspring runs dry, they forget to run around the desk three times as part of their writing ritual, or they run out of dusty manuscripts from their dead grandfather’s chest to plagiarise, they find themselves suddenly and incomprehensibly unable to form an original, coherent idea.

Unfortunately far too few writers see this as the moment to stop, either by retiring, or the hard way. Many hope it’s just ‘writer’s block’, and that the block will give way if they throw enough angst at it. Some see it as a sign that their standards are set too high, and once they remove the word ‘original’ they’re able to carry on as if they never doubted themselves. Far too many, it seems, fail to recognise this moment when they experience it, because their standards never included the word ‘original’ in the first place.

There is no shame in admitting that you’ve run out of ideas. The shame comes when you try to charge people to discover for themselves you’ve run out of ideas.

As an illustrative example, I’m going to venture out of this blog’s typical focus on fiction writing, and examine another allegedly creative endeavour: the songwriting of Chad Kroeger of Nickelback.

Songwriting is the spoiled, simpleminded cousin of poetry — which, let’s face it, is just overwritten prose without a plot. Songwriting is to poetry, as letters to Penthouse are to literature. Songwriting is for people who need someone behind them playing drums to keep the meter while they recite. At its best, songwriting is beautiful, affecting poetry you can dance to. At its worst, its Simon-says-put-your-hands-in-the-air, for people too poorly coordinated to play air guitar.

If you’re lucky enough not to live in Canada, your first introduction to Nickelback was probably the bitter relationship power ballad "How You Remind Me", a monster hit from their breakout 2001 album Silver Side Up. If you like your power ballads to sound like one half of a phone breakup conversation overheard in a bar, this is a leading example of the form. The song was so successful for the band that they’ve taken to simply re-releasing it every three to six months, with a new name and modified lyrics, and very occasionally a modified melody.

The aching, monotonous sameness of here’s-your-nickel-back songs is perhaps best exemplified by this video, in which "How You Remind Me" is mixed with the band’s later single "Someday". As well as the blatant structural similarities in the songs, with verses, choruses and even the mezzo-piano bridges coinciding, singer Chad Kroeger’s hoarse delivery sounds the same whether he’s whispering or screaming.

The video’s creator did modify the timing of the original songs to match up more precisely.

Bassist Mike Kroeger (brother of Chad) defended the similarity with this sage opinion:

"I think that’s remarkable for someone to notice that there is a hit quality. If all hits sound the same, then sorry. When you are a band that has a distinct style such as us or AC/DC, that happens. When you have a distinct style, you run the risk of sounding similar." (Source)

Mike, there’s similar, then there’s Chuck Berry not being able to perform "School Days" and "No Particular Place to Go" in the same concert. There’s also a difference between having a ‘distinct style’ and music that is so unremarkable that you can only tell which song you’re listening to by the chorus.

They’ve made millions from selling the same album to the same fans who have exactly the same emotions, musical tastes, relationship problems and job in 2007 as they did in 2001."

To be fair, they have varied the theme over the years, swapping the broken-hearted whinefest for virtually every other cliché in rock: from the anthemic voicebox chorus of "Figured You Out", which celebrates the joys of sexually abusing an emotionally weak partner, to the hollow charity-starts-with-someone-else soft-rock ballad "If Everyone Cared" — which might’ve sounded sincere if it wasn’t preceded and then followed by the release and re-release of "Rockstar", a country-rock ode to how freaking awesome it is to be a rich musician — which itself might’ve sounded satirical if it wasn’t an accurate portrait of the band’s lifestyle, right down to the description of a "new tour bus full of old guitars". These songs would be obnoxious even if it was the first time we’d heard them — but every other group of half-caf venti mochachino college rockers has ripped the same pages out of the Aerosmith songbook.

Nickelback are frequently described as an "alt-rock" band, though with their singles on high rotation on FM stations worldwide, and some twenty-five million album sales, you have to wonder what they are an alternative to. An alternative to musical and creative integrity, perhaps. They’re also labelled "post-grunge", in the same unimaginative way that everything after Modernism is called "postmodernism". But they are "post-grunge" in the sense that they are a throw-the-nickel-back to the same over-produced, misogynistic stadium-rock hair metal that the grunge movement was reacting to. They’ve even been called "Metallica meets Nirvana", a ridiculous comparison taken together or separately, but it sounds cooler than "Goo Goo Dolls meets Matchbox Twenty".

Their appalling success proves, to anyone naïve enough not to already believe this, that you can get rich by finding something people like and selling it to them over and over. Yes, they’ve made millions from their brand of pseudo-earnest angst-rock, selling the same album to the same fans who have exactly the same emotions, musical tastes, relationship problems and job in 2007 as they did in 2001. But along the way, their name has become a synonym for formulaic, by-the-numbers, radio-friendly pop-rock unit-shifters, and they’ve overtaken the now-disbanded Creed to become the most widely-despised mainstream band since Hootie and the Blowfish.

Granted, it’s only been six years since their breakout hit (I’ll count that as Year Zero, rather than the go-nowhere earlier albums and their years spent playing grunge covers on the Canadian bar circuit), but lets compare that timeframe to the careers of other artists:

• In less than five years the Beatles went from their first single, the bubblegum blues-pop "Love Me Do", to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, arguably the most innovative and most influential album of all time.
• In six years Elvis Presley went from the blues-rock breakout hit "Heartbreak Hotel" (the #1 US single in 1956), to homoerotic ukulele-playing cabana boy in the 90-minute coconut commercial Blue Hawaii. (Two of those years were spent in the US army.)
• In six years the Rolling Stones went from their debut single, the energetic Chuck Berry cover "Come On", to "You Can’t Always Get What You Want", along the way recording "Satisfaction", "Paint it, Black", "Ruby Tuesday", and "Sympathy for the Devil".
• In only four years Jimi Hendrix went from playing club gigs in London to headlining Woodstock, then had the good sense to retire from the music business.
• In six years the Doors went from "Hey Jim, wanna be in a band?" to "Jim’s dead? In a bathtub? In Paris?"
• In less than six years AC/DC went from their debut album High Voltage to their critical and commercial pinnacle with Back in Black, even though their lead singer abruptly quit the band.
• In only three years Nirvana went from the raw, explosive sound of "Smells like Teen Spirit" (the definitive grunge song) to the raw, explosive sound of soft tissue being forcibly evacuated from the skull cavity by a decidedly non-musical instrument.

Chad Kroeger once said in an interview:

"I can play and sing anything I write really well, but I don’t consider myself to be great in either department." (Source)

This is actually a good litmus test: if you truly believe this about your own ability, you have no right to inflict your mediocrity onto a world that isn’t finished enjoying the great artists we already have. You’re just clogging the distribution channels with derivative rubbish, in the hope that it will find an open wallet attached to a mediocre mind, seeking reassurance that their life so far hasn’t been futile and empty by purchasing something new that sounds/looks/reads like everything they already own.

To return to fiction writing for a moment: it’s certainly possible to make a living as a writer producing a consistent stream of derivative rubbish — usually writing novels with Star- in the title. But with incredibly rare exception, it’s virtually impossible to get rich doing it — and by this I mean rockstar rich: new tour bus full of old typewriters, no brown M&Ms on the signing table, snorting coke off the naked asses of book tour groupies rich. Even the drummer from Nickelback who got fired in 2005 makes more money than you.

There are clichéd words: mostly adjectives and adverbs, such as “grizzled” (usually followed by “detective”), pretty much any word that ends in -ly, and the queen of all clichéd words, “quirky”. Let me tell you now, everyone is quirky when they think no-one’s looking (for example, I find delight in ripping random pages out of books in bookstores). Resorting to using “quirky” to describe a character is a stop writing moment.

There are a couple of easy ways to spot clichéd words in your writing:

• Words that you frequently read in fiction but almost never hear anyone use in everyday speech (Do you know anyone who would appreciate being called “grizzled”?)
• Adjectives/adverbs that appear more than three times in your entire writing output

There are the clichéd phrases: ”to all intents and porpoises”, “lies, damned lies and goddamn awful fiction”, or “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw clichés”. They’re often tired similes and metaphors that no longer inspire comparative thought (“a drop in the bucket”). Others are elegant variations: using five words where one would suffice (“in the fullness of time” instead of “eventually”). Still others are little more than punctuation — think about how many writers use “let’s get out of here” because they can’t figure out how to end a scene. Even synopses have their own clichés, such as “and then they”, “it turns out” and “little did they know”.

You can determine quite simply if a particular phrase is a cliché: ask yourself if you’ve ever read those words in that exact sequence before. If you’re not sure, Google it. A few hits might be coincidence, but more than ten and you might as well contact the authors of those pages to form a bad writers’ support group.

There are clichéd characters: the bitter (“grizzled”) detective with a secret that explains his bitterness and his limp, chasing the preternaturally intelligent serial killer with the absurdly complex and predictable psychopathology who appeared as a minor character on page 50; the self-aware anthropomorphic robot who is fascinated by or yearns to be a chemically-imbalanced talking meat-bag; the school bully with latent homosexuality who winds up as a twice-divorced fry cook; the hooker who inexplicably does something nice for someone without expecting so much as a bag of crack and a shot of penicillin in return; the emotionally disconnected elf (or, indeed, any ‘elf’); the young agricultural worker who it is prophesied will rise up to save the kingdom from the tyranny of market forces; or pretty much every supporting character in your fiction that you had to make ”quirky”.

You probably know who the clichéd characters are in your fiction, because you remember the original stories they come from. You didn’t really try to hide the similarity, because although you’re ostensibly writing a WWII-era spy thriller, subconsciously you really want people to figure out it’s thinly-veiled Star Wars fanfic.

There are clichéd plots and plot elements: that one crucial forensic clue the oafish police overlooked, that the preternaturally observant amateur detective finds on page 87 but only tells you about on page 279; the paradox of travelling back in time just to explain the time-travel paradox to the one smart person in the primitive tribe who conveniently learns to speak English fluently in less than a chapter; the mysterious object imbued with the mysterious power to to remain mysterious, that must be found/rescued/destroyed at any cost but never adequately explained to anyone; and dear God, any story that is driven by, makes reference to, or includes a recipe for, a “prophecy”.

How do you find the clichéd plot elements in your writing? That’s easy. Look at page one. Or, more likely, page 27, where your plot actually starts.

There are also clichéd writing careers: there’s the sophomore slump, where the author spent six years writing their first novel, then the publisher wants a follow-up in eight months; the runaway bestseller, where the author can’t think of any story that will live up to the surprise hit of their last novel; the trend chaser, where the writer keeps writing knockoffs of current hits, hoping that the money train will hit their house when it derails; and the all-time number one, the imawriterdammit, which (roughly translated) means the person who claims all the social benefits of being a writer because they once scribbled down an idea for a story combining two clichés they saw on different episodes of The A-Team.

For those who genuinely fear they have been unwittingly infested with clichés, here are some external resources which have selectively quoted the worst parts of your own writing for you:

• Jessica Morrell, at one of the many websites called The Writing Life, has a handy list of clichéd phrases.
• TheInfo.org has an even more handy online cliché finder.
• John VanSickle, with the help of dozens of generous nerds, has compiled a spectacularly detailed and redundantly-named Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés. If you have two or more of these clichés in one story, you’re banned from even reading SF.
• Kathy Pulver and J.S. Burke risked a lawsuit with the Grand List of Fantasy Clichés and Amethyst Angel tries the humility defense with the Not-So-Grand List of Overused Fantasy Clichés.
• Strange Horizons provides a list of Horror Stories [They've] Seen Too Often.
• If you want to kill the clichés almost as they occur, check out Lake Superior State University’s annual Banished Words (and phrases) list.
• And the acme of all cliché lists, the 3,300+ strong Cliché Finder. For random demotivation, visit 10 Random Clichés often.

(I’m assuming you know what a cliché is, and not just because people keep saying your writing is full of them, and that your life as an unsuccessful writer basically is one. If you don’t know what a cliché is, then it’s time to hitch a ride on the Stop Writing Express to Acceptance, where you can catch a bus back to Reality.)

Here’s an important point to remember:

Cliché is the plagiarising of what has already been plagiarised

Every cliché begins with an act of plagiarism — for an idea to be overused, it must be used by one writer and ‘re-used’ by another, then another and another. The idea becomes a cliché when it has been copied so many times that no-one remembers the original text — or at least, it’s been copied so many times that it seems acceptable to copy.

If the original idea was sufficiently broad, and the copying of the idea sufficiently popular, the cliché may be charitably described as “trope” or “convention”, or in rare instances, “sub-genre”. Which leads us to:

Cliché is a form of fan fiction

One of the (many) arguments against fan fiction is that the fanfic writer relies on the reader’s understanding and expectations of the original work, avoiding the difficult work of creating plot, setting and character, and skipping straight to the “action” (often man-on-man, or man-on-wookie). Clichés, especially “genre conventions”, function in the same manner, invoking a familiarity in the reader to spare the writer the arduous labour of creating original meaning. Which leads us to:

Cliché is the antidote to originality

Unless you’re specifically setting out to plagiarise, or create genre-fanfic, you use clichés when you’re just too lazy to think of something original. Not sure what your character would say in a given situation? Or how to move the story from point A to point B? Or how to describe a particular setting, or action, or emotion? Then fall back on your internal database of What Other Writers Have Done™, and hide your shame with the Everyone Does It™ defense.

If you string enough clichés together, you can reduce the amount of work you have to do yourself to little more than typing.

There is a myth about publishing, propagated and regularly renewed by bad writers desperate to justify their futile reveries. The self-sustaining power of the myth is such that writers in its thrall cannot see, much less correct the basic problems in their writing — problems so fundamental, the writers are forever doomed to get form rejections that don’t alert them to how severe these problems are. This myth is:

Publishers employ copy editors to fix the spelling and grammar in your manuscript.

This myth is pervasive because in the most literal sense, it is true. Publishers do employ copy editors, and their role (in part) is to fix errors of spelling and grammar during a book’s pre-publication phase. But in the funhouse mirror that is the bad writer’s state of perpetual denial, this simple fact has been tortured into a comforting, yet utterly untrue corollary:

It dont mater how bad is my speling or grammar, cause thats’ what copyeditors is for.

And thus a sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate’d, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn’t initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.

I don’t think it’s much of a secret that this is the fault of the massive wussification of education in Western countries over the last forty years. After the peace movement of the 1960s, the powers that be decided that kids were getting too darn smart, and a smart kid was much less likely to say “sure Mister President, I’ll spend six weeks learning to field-strip an M-16 and having my sense of self systematically destroyed so I can be sent to murder some poor, ill-trained conscripted suckers with a different skin color trying to defend their country with outdated weapons you sold to them before you decided that stealing their natural resources was cheaper than buying them”. It’s far easier to maintain a massive standing army ready to fight and die for no reason other than “the President says it’s cool” if you don’t teach them to think for themselves in the first place.

So, now we’re on the second generation of kids who are getting a free pass through the school system while barely learning to read and write at a functional level. The frightening thing is that some of them still think they can be writers — while the saddening thing is that if the education system was designed to develop intelligent and capable citizens instead of consumers and soldiers, they could have been writers.

Some of them (surely) have interesting lives, and strong ideas — it’s just that they lack the linguistic capability to express themselves, and what’s left of today’s reading public have less and less patience to wade through books that read like they were typed by throwing pebbles at a keyboard across the room.

And — here’s the kicker — for the same reasons, skilled copyeditors are now rarer and more expensive than when your high-school-dropout granddaddy was nurtured by his publisher through a long and unremarkable midlist career. Publishers are desperate for the Next Big Thing, and they’re prepared to spend even less money on even more books than ever before. So, while slushpile manuscripts are getting worse, less money and time is being put into polishing the rough gems. These days it’s write well, and sell well, or get the hell out.

(You might wonder, if literacy levels are dropping, why you can’t write for people who are just as illiterate as you. Simple answer: illiterate people don’t buy books. The people who do buy books love words enough to recognize lots of them.)

If you’re one of these writers, with great ideas and a passion for writing but lacking confidence in spelling and grammar, you’re just fscked. Give up. You’re wasting your time writing when you should be reading — Modern English Usage, preferably, but at least read the spelling suggestions and grammar warnings in your word processor.

To help you figure out if you’re in this category, here are some different types of spelling errors, ranked in increasing order of ineptitude:

1. Typos. Everyone makes the occasional tpyo. See? Especially in web forums and blog comments. Only the most pedantic grammar nazis get a bug in the butt over a few typos (and pedantic grammar nazis only buy new editions of OED anyway, so who gives a fsck what they think). They’re easily fixed (the typos, not the nazis). But it’s a problem if you make:
2. Consistent Typos. These are actually:
3. Words You Don’t Know How To Spell Correctly. This category includes Words You Spell Phonetically. This is where it gets bad, because it demonstrates that you haven’t read widely enough to see these words spelled correctly. You may be forgiven a (very) few of these, as the intended meaning will probably be understood. But agents will reach for the form letter when they find:
4. Words You Don’t Know How To Use Properly. This includes tortured phrases like intensive purposes and classic mistakes like its/it’s and their/there/they’re. They’re very simple rules, kids, and it’s a shame you keep breaking them.

This last category is the (slush)killer, the “auto-no”, the point at which your manuscript may simply become unreadable. They’re especially dangerous because spellcheck software won’t pick them up; indeed you may only discover them when a patient and better-educated friend looks up from your manuscript and says “What the fsck does this mean?”

Really, if you’re going to write in English, you’re expected to understand it. Category four blunders are like interrupting a serious conversation to tell a bad joke: people might ignore one and pause politely for two, but three or more and someone’s going to throw something at you. You should be glad at this point that your manuscript didn’t get published — a hardcover hurts more.

You are not Dan Brown. I’m sure you’ve noticed this, unless you happened to wake up this morning with the surviving members of Pink Floyd playing “Money” live in your bedroom. In case you’re still not sure, here are a few other indicators that you’re not Dan Brown:

• Your computer is not made of solid gold, according to specifications on a long-lost page from Leonardo’s Codex Arundel.
• There’s no voicemail from James Patterson offering to ghostwrite your next novel.
• You are not under permanent surveillance by the NSA, CIA and the Vatican, even if that pizza guy looks shifty and Catholic.
• The paper you’re using is not made from recycled hundred dollar bills.
• The CEO of your publishing company doesn’t drop by every Friday to see how the next book’s coming along, and to ask if there are any odd jobs around the mansion that need doing while he’s there.

If you don’t know who Dan Brown is, stop writing. You obviously haven’t set foot in a bookstore in the last four years.

If you are a Dan Brown, and God knows there are probably thousands of you, including a few Dannys, Danielles and Dons, then you should head down to your local courthouse and change your name. Even if you have no intention of writing. The jokes and funny looks will never stop. (If you’re thinking of changing your name to Dan Brown or a close variant, publishers are on to you. Just ask King Stephen, Stephan Kiing and Steven K. Ng.)

If you are the Dan Brown, and you’ve worked your way through the last ninety-eight pages of Google results to get here, I have a couple of Reasons to Stop Writing that only apply to you:

Special Dan Brown Only Reason #1: You Have Nothing to Look Forward To

Nothing you ever write will have the impact of The Da Vinci Code. There just aren’t any ideas that “explosive” left for you to plagiarise adapt to fiction. It was a total fluke, and you know it. You already know that only a quarter of TDVC readers went on to buy your other books. It’ll only get worse. Every literary critic and blogger has their knives sharpened, ready to eviscerate the terrible language, hackneyed plot and bad research/science/philosophy of your next book. Everything you do, ever, will be called “failure” compared to TDVC. J.K. Rowling already has you beat, you’ll never catch her. King, Cussler, Koontz, you’d have to sell another hundred million before they even return your calls.

Special Dan Brown Only Reason #2: You’ve Made Over a Quarter of a Billion Dollars.

You could finance your own global conspiracy for this. Goldfinger would’ve totally kicked James Bond’s ass if he had that kind of operating capital. For the money you’re spending on shredding the crackpot manuscripts/manifestos that are mailed to you every day, you could overthrow the Congo, Dogs of War style. Why write about the Freemasons when you could start up the Brownmasons, and live out your days on L.Ron Hubbard’s yacht?

And while you’re here, Dan, there are a few regular Reasons that apply to you:

• Reason #92: Your Best Fiction is Your Research
  Sure, four books under your belt and editors and reviewers just assume you know what you’re doing. But any reader who can use Google Maps can prove in a minute that you don’t know where Versailles is.
• Reason #37: You’re Writing The Same Damn Book Over and Over
  Just how many global conspiracies can there be at any one time? Is Amazon taking orders for your Jack the Ripper book yet?
• Reason #55: We’ve Heard This One Before
  If I give you five bucks, will you just send me a list of the nonfiction books you’re plagiarising using for research for your next novel, and save me the trouble of reading it?
• Why don’t you just start at Reason #1 and weigh up the preponderance of the evidence.

But this is pointless. Brown’s incredible chutzpah in plagiarising basing a novel on someone else’s (entertaining but ultimately bogus) speculative nonfiction has demonstrated that rivers of undeserved wealth are out there for the enterprising bad writer to exploit. Brown has built a fortress out of sixty million hardcovers, unassailable to the flaming arrows of criticism and the siege engines of copyright infringement lawsuits. If everyone who hated TDVC created a bonfire of derision by soaking their copies in burning vitriol and piling them against the walls, Brown could stand atop the Illustrated Edition battlements and put out the fire with Champagne.

For everyone else, depending on your point of view, not being Dan Brown is a good or a bad thing. There are two schools of thought on this:

• “Gee, I’d love to be Dan Brown. I could drag out all my unsold novels and they’d sell ten million copies each. I’m already trying to emulate him, in my choice of plots, my research, my writing and most importantly my query letters.”
• “I could not live with myself, or even tolerate my own presence for more than ten minutes without choking on my own umbrage. I’d have to issue a press release acknowledging that the only part of the book that’s even based on a verifiable fact is the disclaimer that says it’s a work of fiction, and dedicate my life to walking the streets of this world, handing out refunds to everyone who read the book or saw the movie.”

If you’re in, or leaning towards the first group, stop writing. The “next Dan Brown” is Dan Brown. The outward ripple of interest in religious cryptogeek thrillers crested in 2005. Those unscrupulous hacks who dusted off their manuscripts in time found only the humble pie left uneaten on Brown’s plate, as publishers expensively discovered that one inexplicably successful novel does not translate into a renaissance in literature. Now, writing “the next Da Vinci Code” on your query letter is automatically translated to “Shred Me”.

If you’re in the second group, you can still learn from Brown’s example. The New York Times described TDVC as “[a] primer on how not to write an English sentence”.

Dan Brown is the quintessential example of the Breakout author. He has no fscking idea how it happened. If he had the slightest awareness that TDVC would be successful at all, let alone a top-ten all-time bestseller, why did he write three midlist cryptogeek/technothrillers beforehand? He certainly wasn’t honing his writing talent. That’s why his next book will be more of the same, sans whatever it was that made TDVC a hit. Take out the material that was plagiarised borrowed from other sources, and TDVC is about a professor solving anagrams.

Eventually his readership will dwindle back to the core fanbase of mild-mannered cryptogeeks he was always writing for, who clearly don’t give a crap about factual accuracy or beauty of language. Hopefully his publisher won’t go bankrupt in the process.

It’s an endless cycle. Brown read a Sidney Sheldon novel and thought “I can do better than that”. Now, thousands of wannabe writers are doing the same to him. But the really bitter pill is that one of them will be right. And then I’ll have to change the name on this article.

(Oh, how it hurts to type that.)

Grammar is not just the green squiggly line under most of your sentences in MS Word. Nor is it something your septuagenarian English teacher invented because your stories were just so edgy, so radical, he had to fail you.

Words are not distributed randomly in sentences. If you want to be understood by your readers, you place words in a certain order, based on common rules. In case you’ve forgotten, we call these rules grammar.

(This casual definition is worded specifically to fibrillate the hearts of the Grammar Nazis, who trawl the Internet looking for dangling participles and plural noun confusion, and who secretly hope that I am one of them. Fsck you, Nazis! It must be so hard to clean that glass house in which you live.)

Unless you’re over 40, you may not know what I’m talking about, because public schools stopped teaching grammar sometime around 1970. Now, even the teachers don’t understand it.

This is both the problem, and part of the solution. If you don’t know what an infinitive is, let alone how to stop splitting them, you can be sure that 99% of modern readers couldn’t care less. The world has moved on from the expectation of syntactic exactitude – now you’re considered “bright” if you can read a newspaper after 12 years of schooling. What matters is whether readers can interpret meaning from your sentences.

If your grammar is terrible, which is extremely likely, readers will have a difficult time trying to work out what the fsck you’re on about. On the other hand, if your writing is grammatically perfect, you may pass the “old fogey” test but most readers will find your writing stiff and boring, and many will find it just as difficult to read.

A common understanding of grammar is the primary method by which you communicate your ideas to the reader. (I say “primary” because your writing is still full of dull, lazy cliches which communicate old ideas to the reader who already understands them, but that’s another Reason entirely.) If you don’t have this common understanding of how readers turn each sentence into something approximating what you meant, your work is going into the bin before the end of page 1.

Sure, you can learn the rules of grammar, just as you can learn to say “How much for the private dance with the happy ending” in another language. There are some fine books on the (former) topic. But unless you already have a good understanding, you’ll never pass for a local, and you’ll always wind up overpaying.

101 Reasons to Stop Writing is a work in progress. Yes, there will be 101 reasons. No, they are not all here yet. No, they’re not in any specific order. Yes, I really do know what I’m doing. Kinda.

This post will be linked from the sidebar, so new readers can read the list without being troubled to browse the archives. The list may not always be up to date, as I’m really lazy.

The Reasons:

1. You Don’t Buy Books
2. You Are Not Stephen King (Addendum)
3. You Think Anyone Can Be A Writer
4. That’s a Lot of Words
5. I’ll Just Pad This Out
6. You Don’t Read What You’re Writing
7. Publishing is Dying
8. What’s Your Exit Strategy? (Addendum: Stay the Course vs Cut and Run)
9. Put the Thesaurus Down
10. You’re Not Doing It Right (Addendum: Now With Even More Sex!)
11. You Think Web 2.0 Will Change Publishing (Addendum: You Think You Can Fix Publishing)
12. You think Grammar is the Amish Word for Your Mom’s Mom
13. You Are Not Dan Brown
14. Youre Speling is Atrowshus
15. You’re a Clich
    ]]> http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/2007/01/01/the-reasons/feed/ 3 http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/2006/12/31/stay-the-course-vs-cut-and-run/ http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/2006/12/31/stay-the-course-vs-cut-and-run/#comments Sat, 30 Dec 2006 15:10:00 +0000 Sean Lindsay http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/2006/12/31/stay-the-course-vs-cut-and-run/ This is really an addendum to Reason #8: What’s your Exit Strategy?. I’m posting it in the dying hours before the title becomes last year’s top catchphrase.

    Hopefully you’ve spent some time with your family this week, if they haven’t already left you. Maybe you’ve had a chance to consider your writing goals, and how they impact your need for simple human intimacy.

    Every writer gets rejections, and every writer can tell you an anecdote or two about the rejection that was totally bogus and personal, the one that turned up a year later, the one that really nailed the problem with the story, and the one that nearly drove them insane. (You might have to buy them a drink per anecdote, which is overpriced in my book.)

    Most biographies of successful authors make note of how many rejections they received before their big break. A handful of unpublished novels, dozens, even hundreds of rejections are not uncommon. The common implication to these tales, however, is not “It took me that long to get a handle on this writing game,” or even “Gee, my early stuff really sucked.”

    It’s “My, those dolts in the publishing industry wouldn’t know a good writer if they bashed them over the head with a Royal No. 10 typewriter.”

    And it’s exactly this attitude that keeps the truly talentless from ever taking stock of the reams of first drafts spilling over their “writing nook” floor, the hard drive full of “fragments”, the pile of dog-eared, hand-annotated writing books, the notebooks scrawled with cuneiform-like characters once thought to be poetry, the used envelope with the next submission for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine already stuffed and taped in, postmark steamed off and ready for resending, or the grimy mirror covered with yellowed rejection slips for “inspiration”, some older than their marriage.

    At no point do they think, “I have wasted my adulthood. I am beyond help. The guys who beat me up in high school all drive BMWs now and have sex with their secretary. I spent next month’s rent on story arc software. When the divorce papers were served, I revised and added six pages of backstory. I don’t know what day it is and I think the dog died in here, somewhere.”

    They Stay the Course. They keep going until the cataracts form and they start typing on their televisions, and they start arguments with the postmaster about how he lacks the insight to fully appreciate how to mail his story. They don’t stop until Old Man Death says “Just finish the sentence you’re on.”

    You’re probably not at this stage (yet). Your friends still call to let you know when they’re getting married or moving away. You haven’t wondered if you can save on toilet paper by wiping your ass on the rejection slips, then rinsing them off. You haven’t tried to reassemble back into the shape of the original tree. When you get a rejection, there’s still a small part of you who knows it’s because the story was crap.

    Now is the time to set a timetable for withdrawal.

    I’m not saying you have to Cut and Run, just think about when to slow down. When to permanently retire those execrable early novels you still send out every three years or so because you think the agents will have changed jobs by now. When to just burn the story rather than reworking it (again).

    Then, think about when you will stop writing. Set some specific conditions, and a date.

    Then tell someone.

    ]]> http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/2006/12/31/stay-the-course-vs-cut-and-run/feed/ 4 http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/2006/12/30/reason-11-addendum-you-think-you-can-fix-publishing/ http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/2006/12/30/reason-11-addendum-you-think-you-can-fix-publishing/#comments Sat, 30 Dec 2006 12:40:00 +0000 Sean Lindsay http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/2006/12/30/reason-11-addendum-you-think-you-can-fix-publishing/ Disclaimer: I don’t work in publishing. I’m not going to pretend that I have a thorough understanding of the business. I’m fairly sure no-one does. I don’t think that paying attention to the publishing industry has given me some unique insight. It’s not like I work for a government contractor.

    There are problems in the publishing industry. Unless you’re writing iambs by candlelight with a feather quill from your pet dodo, you probably know what a few of these problems are. Likely, you’ve also whined, grandstanded, and otherwise complained over these problems in coffeeshops, writing classes and convention after-parties, coming to no conclusion other than that the industry must be run by retards.

    It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that you have come up with a solution to the problems that is both a) practical, and b) hasn’t already been considered, tested or enacted by someone in a position to make a difference.

    Arrogance is okay, though. It takes a special kind of arrogance to believe anyone wants to read your work. But if that arrogance extends to thinking everyone in publishing is stupider than you, and your only contribution is unoriginal, unworkable ideas, then you’re just like every other schizophrenic barfly who thinks he’s running for President.

    The problems in publishing tend to break down into four categories, depending on who they affect:

    Readers: Books are more expensive than they used to be, so many to choose from, this book sounds interesting but I don’t know if I’ll like it enough to buy it new, the new book by Favourite Author sucks compared to their earlier stuff, no-one’s writing the books I want to read, these authors are all so rich they don’t understand me anymore, I could write a better book by squirting ink out of my ass.

    Publishing Industry Professionals: Paper costs rising, reading audience declining, annual profits not rising fast enough, no one buys short story magazines anymore, hard to differentiate new product in crowded marketplace, hard to stay two years ahead of the trends, authors are egomaniacal crybabies who think our job is to print money for them, I should just write a book myself.

    Published Writers: Publishers only care about Big Name Author, they won’t pay for me to stay in nice hotels while I bitch about doing signings, the Borders in Bumfsck Iowa won’t stock my book, NYTBR won’t return my calls, I can’t feed my 87 cats on this advance, my royalty check seems to be missing a few zeros, I think I could’ve been a lawyer, what do you mean I have to wait for returns?

    Unpublished Writers: Help! I’m drowning in the slushpile! Won’t someone please validate me? There must be a way I can bypass actually writing a good book and get into print quickly so I can show all those haters who don’t know who the fsck I am.

    Unpubs tend to focus on the slushpile, not because it’s the worst problem (it isn’t), but because it’s their interface with publishing, the Iron Gates of Approval that they’re desperate to sneak under. Of course the slushpile is broken, if they don’t immediately receive a grovelling acceptance engraved into a gold ingot. “Reclaim the slushpile!” they cry. “Asylum doors stand open! Change the system, so that my crap gets in.”

    Of course the response from the publishing industry is silence. Or a form letter containing a transcription of silence. Because as far as the industry is concerned, the slushpile isn’t broken. Good writing stands out like the effervescence of a just-opened Perrier bottle when you’re standing in a lake of fermenting pus. (It could happen, and you’ll want a Perrier when it does.)

    It’s possible, even likely, that publishing will change dramatically in the coming years. But the slushpile ain’t going away anytime soon, and the other problems really ain’t yours to fix.

    Imagine for a moment that every problem in publishing was solved. Readership doubled, and doubled again. Improved, targeted marketing allowed every reader to find books they wanted, and those readers bought more books. Sales went through the roof. Advances and royalty payments got sweeter and sweeter. Ten times as many books were published.

    There will still be more manuscripts written than there are readers interested in reading them.

    Even if no-one else took up the pen, the odds on publication might shorten from 1000-to-1 down to 100-1. That’s still 99% rejection. If there was a proportional increase in new writers, agents would needs teams of slush readers to comb through hundreds of thousands of submissions.

    Or imagine that magically, writers everywhere start improving. They hone their talent, postponing submission until they’re convinced that their work is as good as they can make it. But the market can only support so much product. More rejection slips are handwritten, and the books that make it are great, but …

    The song remains the same.

    Really, the “problem” of the slushpile could be halved, overnight, if agencies started insisting that every submission be accompanied by a signed statement reading “I have read and adhered to all the submission guidelines”, and trashing any submission that doesn’t.

    Since that isn’t going to happen, you might as well just “write a better book”, or get used to disappointment. Or just stop writing, and make a real difference to the slushpile.

    If you think you can fix publishing, you need to do a couple of things:

    • Come up with an idea – one that is feasible and hasn’t been tried before
    • Make sure it isn’t completely retarded, and would be accepted by the people it’s supposed to help
    • Figure out how it could be implemented, and how it would benefit the company who pays for it
    • And maybe, oh I don’t know, allow feedback from people interested enough to comment

    If you’re not prepared to take these steps, you’re just adding more noise to a discussion already choked with a million little whiners.

    At least you’re not writing. There isn’t any problem in publishing bigger than your craptacularity.

    ]]> http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/2006/12/30/reason-11-addendum-you-think-you-can-fix-publishing/feed/ 1