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?

I often argue with myself when I’m writing. Here’s what’s really awful: Sometimes I lose the argument.

Here’s what I mean. There are a few words and phrases I absolutely hate and have vowed never to use – for example, being, he or she, affect. But occasionally these offenders show up in my writing, and I can’t get rid of them no matter how hard I try.

I think I need to explain why I have a problem with these particular words. Being tends to gum up sentences, in my experience. One problem is that it often introduces noun phrases, and they’re too static for really good writing. (“The fact that” falls into the same category.)

Here’s an example: The parking lot next door is being used as a hangout by some teens who live in the neighborhood.

I think the sentence would be livelier if it were rewritten: Some teens who live in the neighborhood are using the parking lot next door as a hangout.

So: Being is not welcome in my sentences. But it often finds its way into my writing anyway in sentences like this: Being late for the meeting caused so many problems that I’ll never do it again. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to get rid of that pesky being – but dammit, the sentence worked better that way. So sometimes it stays on, mocking me every time I reread it.

He or she is an expression I particularly hate, and I waste big blocks of time trying to get rid of it. Usually I just make the sentence plural, like this:

Be sure to ask suspects to cooperate before you put handcuffs on them.

But there’s a problem: I write law enforcement articles, and sometimes I want to talk about one suspect in a particular situation. I made a New Year’s resolution to start using “they” in these sentences, but that can be awkward too. So all too often, with a sigh, I write sentences like this:

Watch the suspect carefully for signs that he or she might be reaching for a hidden weapon.

The last @#$%! word in this group is affect. Unlike many people I know, I don’t have any problem distinguishing between affect and effect – one of the benefits of years of reading.

But there’s a serious problem with affect: It’s vague. “The new tax proposal is likely to affect your tax rate.” Will it benefit me or make me pay higher taxes? That blasted affect doesn’t give me a clue.

So affect isn’t welcome in my sentences either – except that sometimes affect turns out to be exactly the right word, despite my protests:

The unexpected snowstorm affected everyone’s weekend plans.

I could use changed, but that’s another vague word. (I used to beg my students not to use affect in their essays, and of course I carefully explained why. “Use benefited, or worsened, or damaged, or improved,” I would plead. “Find a word that tells me more about what happened.” Invariably – 100 times out of 100 – the papers would come back with the word change substituted for affect.)

But maybe there’s a way to summon all my writerly powers and banish these these three offenders forever. I’m going to try to put them into a single sentence. Maybe they’ll feel that they’ve had their moment to shine and won’t come back to pester me. Here goes:

Everyone who’s busy being a writer already knows how clumsy words can affect his or her writing and should do his or her best to avoid them.

Done! Poof – begone!