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Right, that’s enough housekeeping guff. As usual, read the extract below, work out what you like and don’t like, then read my thoughts after ‘The Cuts’. If you have anything to add, feel free to leave a comment in the box below. Please try to keep your feedback constructive – the purpose of the exercise is improving our self-editing skills, not drive-by snarking.

Beautiful People (by Dylan)

The acid blotter was stamped with a cold war era, old fashioned, paranoid American fallout symbol and sat shining beneath a desk lamp, a phosphorescent yellow; ragish, peeling, and soon to be integrating/disintegrating with our higher functions. It was created in some moldy basement on the West Coast, I’d bet on California, all chemical components synthesized and bonded and crafted precisely, with delightful intent and moisture from the blue Pacific. Beakers bubbled over with unknown liquids and years of schooling were put to use to expand the mind of metropolitan, east coast, college students reaching lazily for their liberal degrees. A large perforated sheet containing dozens of these apocalyptic fallout symbols was dipped in a homemade solution of LSD, ethanol, and melted glacier water then carried across state lines, hundreds of miles to sit right here in the clammy palm of my hand.  A trans-continental trip, coast to coast, broadcast on hidden frequencies by throw away cell phones, passed off as damp pages of a book, the type of book someone asks you about on the subway and before you answer you wonder whether this person is worth talking to, based of course, on their attractiveness and potential.

Say no to the leaflet man with a trench coat bursting with ennui. When his eyes glaze over you know he’s dead. Report any suspicious activity to your nearest transit authority.

The Cuts

The acid blotter was stamped with a cold war era, old fashioned, paranoid American fallout symbol and sat shining beneath a desk lamp, a phosphorescent yellow; ragish, peeling, and soon to be integrating/disintegrating with our higher functions.

I am not against long, complex sentences. I am not against rich, wet prose.

But this shit has got to stop.

‘The acid blotter’ is a good way to start – provocative, specific, immediately starts implying a world, refining our sense of where we are and what kind of story we’re reading.

‘was stamped with’ is permissible, just about. I don’t want to come off too doctrinaire when it comes to the passive voice – I realise it has its uses – but at the same time, you can’t deny that it sounds clunky. It’s an awkward, if accurate, formulation. It’s not wrong per se, but do you really want to be opening your story with prose that only might be okay? I’d suggest that you aim higher than ‘pfft – all right, I guess’.

And so we come to my first major complaint. The object of this initial clause – ‘symbol’ – has eight adjectives or adjectival nouns modifying it: cold, war, era, old, fashioned, paranoid, American, fallout. Now, Dylan, dear brother, you can use as many adjectives as you damn well please, providing that each one is pulling its weight.

Obviously, some considerations are purely rhythmic. Reading a sentence out, one might discover that an extra syllable or two is important for cadence. Varying sentence length to reflect tone, content and the personality of the narrator is an important stylistic skill.

This is not, however, a license to pad your prose with meaningless/tautological bollocks for the sake of sounding nice. Every adjective has to earn its keep, and the more you stack before a noun, the harder it is to keep them from repeating or undermining or otherwise muddying something that a previous adjective has already established.

In our ruthless hierarchy of composition, strong, specific nouns take precedent over adjectives. Better to say ‘the truck’ than ‘the large haulage vehicle’. When it comes to choosing adjectives, concrete adjectives are almost always better than abstract ones. That is to say, ‘red’ is better than ‘lovely’, ‘platinum’ is better than ‘horrifying’, ‘six-fingered’ is better than ‘eldritch’.

By ‘better’, I mean more engaging, more evocative, more economical. Your goal is to sharpen our perception of the noun in visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory terms, not to editorialise on its significance or how we ought to judge it.

Note I said ‘almost always’. If you’re writing in the first-person, a narrator might well explicitly describe a person as ‘stupid’ or ‘ugly’ or a place as ‘hellish’. It’s fine for a narrator to express the occasional explicit opinion about story elements, although even then, some of their most interesting reactions will be the ones they can’t admit to themselves – the moments where we can tell from their word choices that they’re attracted to a character, for example, even though they don’t explicitly say ‘he was well fit’ or whatever.

Obviously the same applies to dialogue, where – stylistically – all bets are off. This is about composing effective, flab-free narration.

Whether concrete or abstract, the more adjectives you stack before the noun, the longer the wait before we discover what noun the adjectives are modifying, and the harder the reader has to work, holding a stack of unanchored modifiers in abeyance. With a single adjective-noun combo, the words come so quickly that we’re not aware of a gap. With eight adjectival words, it’s a long old march to the object. You can exploit this delay for comic or dramatic effect, but most of the time it taxes the reader with no real payoff.

The point is, any adjective not essential to the flow of the sentence needs to be executed. Authors are way too easy on themselves when it comes to this, citing nebulous concepts like ‘flow’ and splitting hairs on how two similar adjectives have slightly different meanings and thus are both necessary. Fine. Cling to your adjectives. You will die surrounded by them, unpublished and unread, crying out for ‘Rosebud – a smooth, wooden, varnished, handcrafted, meaningful, poignant, fast-moving, innocent… blarrgh!’, expiring before your valet gets to hear what the sweet creeping Christ you’re blathering about.

So: ‘cold war era, old fashioned’ – assuming this is a contemporary narrative, ‘old fashioned’ is just a less specific way of saying ‘cold war era’. Why repeat yourself with less precision? Cut it. I’m not even convinced that ‘era’ materially adds to our comprehension.

‘paranoid American’ is tedious editorialising. It’s a distraction – don’t make a half-hearted stab at ideological digression only to immediately abandon it. It feels like you’re trying to be gritty and political but don’t have the will to see it through. ‘American’ is irrelevant and more or less implied, in any case.

‘fallout’ is the only truly indispensable adjective in this whole string. If you removed it, we’d be left with ‘a cold war era, old fashioned, paranoid American symbol’, which could be any one of a hundred things. See how fucking useless the rest of those descriptors are? Without ‘fallout’, they’re just fluff.

1 in 8 of your adjectives is necessary. That’s an appalling hit rate. You’re carpet bombing your nouns in the hope of catching something of semantic significance in the blast. The main casualties are your readers, who by this point have all fled to the relative safety of non-shit novels.

‘and sat shining beneath a desk lamp’ is less interesting than ‘fallout symbol’ but tangentially relevant, and so belongs earlier in the sentence. ‘sat’ feels like a fluff word – why not simply ‘shone’? Applying our changes thus far, the first part of the sentence becomes:

The acid blotter shone beneath a desk lamp, stamped with a fallout symbol…

‘ragish, peeling, and soon to be integrating/disintegrating with our higher functions.’ I hate to tell you this, but ‘ragish’ isn’t a word. Did you mean ‘ragged’? And look, I’m no drugologist, but I’m not convinced that LSD shuts down higher brain functions.

Okay, so we have a narrator about to take a hit of acid, and – given the mention of ‘our’ – an implied group we have yet to meet. This is potentially interesting, providing there are other dynamics at play – a drug story isn’t inherently exciting or engaging in and of itself. Most readers over the age of 16 don’t find it quite so thrilling and transgressive as you might imagine.

I say this is a big fan of Hunter S Thompson – I think he’s absolutely brilliant. But, at best, intoxication can be used as a confounding factor. It’s not unusual enough to provide the motor for an entire story. Most people on drugs are interesting only to themselves.

It was created in some moldy basement on the West Coast, I’d bet on California, all chemical components synthesized and bonded and crafted precisely, with delightful intent and moisture from the blue Pacific.

See, like, who cares? How is this revelatory or pertinent or interesting? ‘all chemical components synthesized and bonded and crafted precisely’ is vague and dull – it could apply to pretty much any chemical process, from making shampoo to ketchup. How is this expanding on our understanding of the character or the scene or the stakes? Why are you giving us an info-dump on how acid is made, as if this were SF and you were explaining the rudiments of a matter transporter? What the fuck is ‘delightful intent’?

Beakers bubbled over with unknown liquids and years of schooling were put to use to expand the mind of metropolitan, east coast, college students reaching lazily for their liberal degrees.

Wank, wank, wank. Is this just a potted history of America now?

Why ‘unknown liquids’? I thought you said all the ingredients were ‘synthesized and bonded and crafted precisely’? Who, exactly, doesn’t know the contents of these beakers? You, the author, I suspect.

No need for a comma between ‘east coast’ and ‘college’. I’m not sure why ‘students’ only get a singular ‘mind’ between them. I’m not even sure why the narrator is farting on about lazy arts students, nor where the narrative present is supposed to be.

A large perforated sheet containing dozens of these apocalyptic fallout symbols was dipped in a homemade solution of LSD

No. If the narrator is speculating about the origin of this acid tab, since you’ve already established that your narrator is delivering the narrative present in the past tense, then any events prior to the narrative present need to be in the pluperfect, i.e. ‘these apocalyptic fallout symbols had been dipped’.

No need for ‘large’ given that the sheet contains ‘dozens’ – its size is implied. ‘perforated’ is nice and specific – good. ‘apocalyptic’ is a drab value judgement that adds nothing. You’ve just dropped it in because it sounds like it ought to be dramatic.

ethanol, and melted glacier water then carried across state lines, hundreds of miles to sit right here in the clammy palm of my hand. 

But you just said it ‘sat shining beneath a lamp’! That implies it’s lying on a desk, not that the narrator is holding it.

And I’ll say it again – who cares? Why does this matter? We know how drugs are made. All this chuntering navel-gazing isn’t building our sense of wonder and anticipation – it’s boring us. For all the flowery words, the content is obvious and pedestrian.

A trans-continental trip, coast to coast, broadcast on hidden frequencies by throw away cell phones, passed off as damp pages of a book, the type of book someone asks you about on the subway and before you answer you wonder whether this person is worth talking to, based of course, on their attractiveness and potential.

‘throw away cell phones’ do not ‘broadcast on hidden frequencies’. They just don’t have contracts traceable to an address. From ‘the type of book’ onwards, this sentence veers into the type of tortuous dreadfulness usually reserved for those lists of ‘Funniest Analogies Used In REAL English Essays’. Cut it all.

Say no to the leaflet man with a trench coat bursting with ennui. When his eyes glaze over you know he’s dead. Report any suspicious activity to your nearest transit authority.

I have no idea how this relates to the previous paragraph. It feels like vaguely antiauthoritarian word salad. Who is the narrator addressing? What the fuck is he or she talking about? Is this still trying to instil in us a sense of wonder about how far this plucky little tab of LSD has travelled?

Look, you’ve attempted some gorgeous, opinionated prose, flitting across various frames of reference, and your ambition is to be lauded. Please keep trying to be interesting.

This is not interesting. It is not good.

Give us some content. Give us some story. I feel like you did this as a freewrite with no idea where it was going, and it shows. When we read countercultural authors with stylistic verve like Hunter S Thompson and Michael Herr, the electric prose is balanced by an obsessive knowledge of names and dates and cultural touchstones, and a strong, clear point of view that unifies the freewheeling chains of associations. It’s reportage gleaned from direct observation – even the fictional bits.

Don’t spurn plot, dialogue, relationships, and conflict located in the narrative present. Don’t reject the tangible. Powerful prose is not about affecting a sneering, adjective-laden insouciance. It’s about capturing truth alive and transporting it – still living – to the page.

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Enjoying this blog is no guarantee of enjoying my award-winning book on writing, gnawing jealousy and death, We Can’t All Be Astronauts. But I do call Geoffrey Archer an ‘arse-countenanced hack’ – Ebury’s lawyers had no problem with that phrase in the libel read, so I can only assume this fact is enshrined in British law.

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