Two writing tips I've unlearned since joining TNBW.

I'm sharing the following from personal experience if it's of use. Corrections welcomed! Especially since the theme of this post is bad advice gone wrong. My credentials are trial and error -- nothing more. :-)

So, I was pretty new to writing when I joined this site a few years ago. Kind reviewers made lots of great suggestions on my novel*, which helped immensely**. But there are a couple lessons I've needed to unlearn since my early days here:

1) When I first began posting my novel, I was strongly urged to remove as many instances of the word "that" from my manuscript as possible, because it would reduce the word count. I was also told that replacing "that" with "which" would help mix up the repetition of the word "that" throughout the manuscript. I've believed since then that "which" could stand in for "that."

- In fact: "That" and "which" are not interchangeable in American English. PROBABLY a good idea to look this stuff up. I assumed reviewers knew what they were talking about when they advised replacing a few of my "thats" with "which", but they were (I assume) merely passing on what they'd been told and hadn't realized opposed grammatical standards. Removing the "thats" is sound advice when they become cumbersome and repetitious. Don't replace them with "which" unless that's the grammatically correct choice (look up restrictive/nonrestrictive clauses), and don't remove them when they are necessary to the sentence. "That" is an actual word and sometimes the appropriate choice. (If you have a lot of "that" in your manuscript, you might rephrase some of these sentences so the "that" is no longer necessary. Don't just delete them, or replace them with "which.")

2) I was told by several people that an active verb is better than a passive one. (I realize now this might have been better stated "active sentence construction is preferable to passive," for I fixated on the "verb" part of the advice and tried to think up some extremely creative ones. And my eye is on a few of you, for I've seen the same folly.)

- In fact: Rewriting a sentence into active voice doesn't mean you take a perfectly good subtle sentence and stick in a strange verb to make it interesting. Example: if I rewrote the sentence that begins point one above, I might say something like, "Reviewers stampeded me to remove as many instances of the word..." STAMPEDED! I would have written that! There's a right active verb! I'd think. But come on. This certainly isn't a better sentence than the one I wrote above. No one stampeded. Now I'm thinking of horses for no reason. CLUNKY. I realize now it just sounds better to write "Reviewers suggested (etc.)" "Suggested" is a serviceable word that does the job. "Stampeded" is a strange word that has no place in the context of the sentence. Also? It's completely fine to put in some passive: "I was urged" makes me the receiver of action and the star of the sentence. "Reviewers suggested" places the focus on reviewers. Different emphasis. It's a subtle shift but can change the feel of a paragraph and certainly have a big effect on the manuscript as a whole, depending on where you place the focus. My personal feeling? Don't write completely in passive voice unless you want to exhaust your reader (which may be the point), but DON'T transform it all to active, either. Think through what you're doing. It's not all or nothing. A passive moment in the middle of active writing stands out. Remember not to strip passive from your dialogue: people often speak passively. It can say reams about them psychologically. And when you are transforming to active, don't think that a vicious verb makes your writing fierce. It might when used strategically. Not so much when used to dress up the manuscript for the sake of interesting verbs. If I want that in my literature, I'll read a thesaurus. Tension, plot, character arc -- this stuff makes the story. Pretty verbs take away from it because words are stage directors: they're supposed to hide in the background, silently directing. You don't want your stage director wearing hot pink and pouncing on the stage in the middle of a tense scene to sing a solo.

These tips might seem elementary to some of you, but I could have used this note back when I was dousing my manuscripts with misplaced whiches and odd solo singers.

PS: Adverbs and adjectives are lovely. Let us not obliterate them entirely, despite the popular tendency to suggest they all be deleted. You don't want a bunch of verbs and no adverbs. How uncreative...

Please correct me on anything above if I've misspoken. I'm speaking from opinion, not experience, and would welcome the latter!

(Writing talk! It's what we used to do! Back when I first joined the site, conversations like this were very friendly: we weighed in, shared suggestions, offered friendly insight on one another's viewpoints, shook hands all around and walked away with some new ideas. I feel that it has been far too long since we've done that.)

* A novel long since dead, but let us all mourn it independently, please.
** Ironically, I have no idea if I'm supposed to use "which" or "that" in this sentence. I've tried both. /faints