Matt Black's Writing Attack: Making Bad Writing Good and Good Writing Great

Chapter 1. It was a dark and stormy night.

Chapter 1: It was a dark and stormy night.

It was a dark and stormy night.

If we're going to talk about bad writing, why not start with one of the most common examples of the worst way to start your story—the infamous opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Okay. It's overused. Cliché. I get it. But what else is wrong with the line? Any ideas? What if I told you every single word could be improved. Would you believe me?

Let's begin with a simple analysis. How many of the words in this sentence actually create a specific sense of time, place, character or conflict? You know, the key ingredients of a story.

I mean, what does this sentence actually describe? Could you draw it? Record it? If fifty people drew it, would their pictures look similar?

Yeah ... no.

Alright. Let's be more specific and take it word by word in order of appearance.

Word 1: "It"

So, here's the problem with starting a story with "it." As a pronoun, "it" gets its meaning from the first noun (person, place, things or idea) that came before the pronoun and can effectively replace it. But in this case, there are no other words in the story yet. So there's nothing to tell us what "it" means. Basically, this story starts with a word that has no meaning. Ugh. No worries, we can fix "it" by rewriting our sentence and getting rid of this empty word. How about the following?

A night was dark and stormy.

Word 2: "was"

Oh no. "Was." I've reached the point as a writer where I always red-flag the word "was" when it rears its useless head in my drafts. "Useless?" you ask. "Useless!" I scream.

You see, "was" is a linking verb in this sentence, which is the opposite of an action verb. Yay, action! Boo "linking." These labels indicate the deeper problem. When "was" is used, it's often at the expense of action. Action is the motor that drives the story forward, so we typically don't want to write sentences that don't include at least a hint of action.

In this case, "was" links "night" to "it." In its simplest form, our opening sentence is saying, "It was a night." How many of those words actually say anything meaningful? Just "night," right? So we've used four words to convey the meaning of one. Maybe it would be a good idea to get rid of "was" since it adds very little meaning to the sentence. But how? And can we do so without losing what "was" adds—that this took place in the past?

Yep. What if we turn one of our adjectives into an action verb? That would keep the meaning of the adjective but now we'd be adding some action to the story. In other words, what if we said the following instead?

A dark night stormed.

Does that mean the same thing as "It was a dark and stormy night"?

Mm hm, I think so. But in four words instead of seven and with a greater sense of action!

Word 3: "A"

This one is easy. "A" is called the indefinite article. Which means it is a generalized example instead of a specific one. Generalized examples can't be pictured very easily, and narrative writing is strongest when the reader can picture what is happening. The quick fix is to swap out the indefinite article "a" for the definitive article, "the."

Here's our new version of our sentence. Note that changing "stormy" to a verb has allowed me to eliminate the "and," as well.

The dark night stormed.

Word 4: "dark"

Hm. Dark definitely offers something we can visualize. The absence of light. Something obscured by shadows. Fair enough. But night is defined by multiple dictionaries as "a period of darkness." Let's substitute that into our sentence and see if a problem emerges.

The dark period of darkness stormed.

See it? Yeah, describing night as "dark" is redundant. Now describing night as "bright" would be cool because it goes against expectations. But "dark"? The word simply has to go.

So, yet another version of our sentence.

The night stormed.

Word 5: "night"

Finally, a word that has meaning we can sink our teeth into! Or does it? Where I live, night covers a period of twelve hours in the winter and barely seven hours in the summer. That's a lot of ground for one word to cover. Nine o'clock at night is very different from three AM.

This one is harder to revise, though, without adding words—meaningful words. But more on that later. For now, let's use one word that is a specific time at night. Oh, and look, bye bye "the"!

So yet again, a revised version.

Midnight stormed.

Word 6: "Stormy/stormed"

So, we've boiled down our horrible sentence to two words that say more with more action than our original seven. We know exactly what time this takes place (although we don't know day or year), and we have some action. But, again, if fifty people tried to draw or paint this scene, couldn't we get fifty very different pictures? There are lots of reasons for this—after all it's only two words. But our second word especially doesn't provide much specific detail still. I mean, how many different ways can it storm? Rain, hail, sleet, snow, hurricanes, tornadoes ... you get the idea!

Here's where we really need to build up our sentence again. It's time to paint a more vivid picture. So here's one:

Midnight sleet rattled my drafty bedroom windows.

There. Seven new words that paint a much more vivid image. Hopefully, these words offer a little of everything. A suggestion of character, time, place, and conflict. And an appeal to sound (rattled), touch (drafty), and sight (windows).