Here’s something I do often: read books about writing. Here’s something else I do often: gripe about books about writing. I’ll be talking about some of those complaints in upcoming posts.

Today I want to offer a general observation (okay, a gripe) about these books: Even the famous ones tend to dance around the topic of writing without really telling you what to do. (Adair Lara’s wonderful book Naked, Drunk and Writing is a notable exception.)

For example, here’s something I hear all the time from writers who are headed in the wrong direction: “I want readers to make up their own minds about ________.” (Fill in the blank – a character, action, or situation).

Translation: You haven’t really worked your material. You don’t yet know your characters, or you haven’t really dug into your plot. Good writers care – a lot – about what’s happening to the people they’re writing about. If you’re not deeply involved with your characters, why on earth should your readers care about them?

One remedy is to have the other characters react to what’s unfolding. In fact this is a handy rule of thumb for anyone who’s writing fiction, a personal essay, or a memoir. If you’re creating a scene where several people are present, each one should react to everything that happens.

Of course then you’re faced with another problem – potential chaos as responses fly from one person to another. But skillful writers pull this kind of thing off all the time.

Here’s an example from Ernest Hemingway’s masterful story “The Killers.” Two thugs have just walked into a diner to kill a man named Ole Anderson. They’ve heard that Ole comes to the diner every evening at six. George, who waits on customers, sends young Nick Adams to find Ole and warn him.

“Mixing up in this ain’t going to get you anywhere,” the cook said. “You stay out of it.”

“I’ll go see him,” Nick said to George. “Where does he live?”

The cook turned away.

Hemingway moves the story along by having Nick decide to deliver the warning to Ole. But we’re not allowed to forget about the cook – and it takes just four words: The cook turned away.

(How many of us are afraid to write short sentences because we’re worried about sounding juvenile? But Hemingway didn’t worry about it!)

Here’s something else I hear from writers that immediately raises a red flag: “My story is going to build up slowly.” So will your readership! You have to sell whatever you’re writing quickly. Readers who don’t feel engaged are going to start looking for something else that’s more interesting.

I used to ask my college students to find the first interesting word in an essay they were handing in and then count how many words it took to get there. Skilled writers usually put an attention-getter into the first or second sentence.

Other sins are telling readers what they already know and doing readers’ thinking for them. I’m going to address these in a future post, but for now I’m going to suggest that you do what I did – think about those warnings.

“Don’t do your readers’ thinking for them” is an idea I first came across in Stephen King’s On Writing. He offers only one brief example – but it’s a principle I’ve thought about again and again, in all kinds of contexts, and I’ve learned a lot that way.

And now I’ve arrived at my most important point: You know more than you think you do. You’ve been reading for almost your entire life. As a kid you probably read books under the covers when you were supposed to sleeping. Decades later, you’re still reading voraciously (all writers do it).

Maybe you’ve even done what I did – sneaked away from a dinner party because you were so absorbed in a book (in my case it was Emma Donoghue’s Room) that you couldn’t wait to see how it turned out.

Before I finish this post, with its list of no-no‘s and don’ts, I want to leave you with an example of what writers should be doing. Here’s a sentence written by Ryan King, a member of a prison writing group I used to sponsor.

“With the other inmates, I finesse my way through the shoulder-butting and out the door.”

Suddenly you’re there in the prison dorm, and you know what kind of person Ryan is, and you understand what kind of people his inmate companions are, and it hits you what he’s up against. All of that happens in only 16 words. Whew.

That’s exactly what we’re talking about, isn’t it?