Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Pretty Little Nothings and Purple Prose

"She took in a deep and powerful breath like mountain winds as they careen against a granite cliff. The gentle stream ruptured forth, spraying the effervescent landscape with the spray of mist, washing across her in the process. Her lips quaked ever so slightly as the droplets coalesced on her skin like honey dew before falling down the sides of her cheek, resembling tears.  

Shrill cries pierced her ears, causing tingles to dance up and down her spine, the luminescent moon and stars caressing her soft skin with a subtle but brilliant moonlight. As far as she could see, the trees and forest whispered to her, overwhelming her senses with the majesty of the night. The night animal's shrill cries bounced through the forested canopy as if they were the echoes of a breathless trumpeter, stopping ever so briefly to breathe and take another blast of the horn. The world was just edges away from a loud cacophony that never came.  

No sound could be heard. She took her last breath, and that was only the beginning."  

*********** 

If the little excerpt (and chapter title) above didn't tip you off, today I'm going to talk about 'pretty nothings'. A pretty nothing is a phrase I like to use to describe a certain kind of writing style that I see a lot of on Wattpad.  It's a tendency to write something that sounds beautiful and intriguing to the ear, but says very little when you actually try to understand what is happening in the story.

It spawns when new writers try to emulate more advanced published writers. They end up generating something akin to what I wrote above. Grammar and spelling be darned, but the goal of a pretty nothing is to write a scene that sounds a pretty and as flowery as possible. The problem is that by the time you are done, you've barely said anything at all.  

The pretty nothing comes from inexperience. It can be a lot of things, and can have a lot of things wrong with it. Some authors end up writing incomplete sentences. Some authors end up writing incomplete thoughts. It is also common for an author to use adjectives incorrectly, suggesting imagery that conflicts with the preceding actions. These writings constantly suffer from subject/verb confusion, which is the tendency to not understand what subject the verb is referring to.  

"I saw the beautiful boy. He had a tie with brown hair and beautiful blue eyes."  

That suggests you're wearing a tie and that the tie has brown hair and beautiful blue eyes.  

Over the course of a pretty nothing, the actual actions and words soon find themselves buried in a series of similes, hyperboles, and comparisons that cause it to become even more illegible and difficult to read. The worst offenders become completely unreadable. You can read it, it can sound beautiful, poetic, and proper, and it can say basically nothing.  

That, and many times these pretty nothing writers will write the first chapter or prologue using the pretty nothing, and then within 2-3 chapters revert completely to a standard form of writing generically without emotion or description. The pretty nothing was only there to make the story sound more interesting than it does. Sometimes it's just the fact that they "get better" as they write. Other times is because they "try to hard" on that first chapter. I remember the first sentence I ever wrote in an attempt to write a novel. I was only 13 and I think it was something like.  

"The woman glanced through the window, watching the spaceships blast off through the luminescent stars into the farthest reaches of the universe."  

It happens, and it's not necessarily the end of a story, however, pretty nothings are something that should be fixed. The problem is that it's pretty hard to know that you're writing pretty nothings.  

You see, most critiquers eat up the pretty nothing. They love the pretty nothing. Commenters will rave in the comments below the chapter about how great of a writer they are and how pretty what they wrote was. Many of these pretty nothing authors can go years writing their stuff without anyone ever informing them that what they are writing is basically nonsense. When someone does inform them, they blow up and become angry, having been critiqued and complemented hundreds of times from hundreds of people, and offended when you offer a differing opinion.  

I have a theory about that, by the way. The theory goes that most new authors are used to not understanding the stuff they read. In high school and in college, you're reading complex works from generations long passed, and you have to analyze every word and over analyze it until your bleed from every orifice.  

The assumption becomes that books are supposed to be hard to read. You're supposed to not understand words, and when a work is hard to understand and uses a lot of big words and sounds pretty, that must mean it's like the Kafkas and the Tolkiens, and the Faulkners and all of the stuff you've had trouble digesting over the years.  

However, in the end of the day, even Kafka and Faulkner have organized books that read in a way where you understand the scene. They use imagery, but that imagery and simile is done in a controlled and moderate manor. The more you read, the more you will understand the difference between a complex work and work that sounds complex.  

Only 3 years ago, I couldn't read a scientific paper. Go to pubmed, look up any paper, and try to read it. Doesn't it sound like gibberish? However, after reading paper after paper after paper, I now can read one as easily as you could read a standard story. And if someone from college tried to write a paper and use a bunch of big words to sound sciency, I could easily pick it out.  

In the end, most of you will have to get there as well. Figure out the difference between flowery language and someone trying to throw out as many big words as they know so that it sounds flowery. I have a thought on this. If a reader your age has to translate what you wrote, if they have to stop and reread it and reread it again, and then go back three paragraphs and cross reference it, just to get a gist of what is going on in the scene, then it is probably a pretty nothing.  

Pretty nothings and the people who write them are a dangerous breed. Part of this is because writing pretty and writing flowery are styles and that doesn't necessarily mean they are a bad thing. Poetry, for example, is all about flowery images. It's all about hyperbole. There are certain authors that thrive on simile and imagery. Having pretty sayings in a writing can quickly infuse a peace with emotions, description, and a general nice piece of mind. Cutting out everything in a fiction piece makes it really sterile, and potentially dry and boring.  

So, the important thing about the pretty nothing is something I've said a dozen times in this book. It is best done in moderation. Don't write an entire two page chapter with constant pretty sayings. Stretch them out. Make sure to put actions, and dialogue, and plot in there. The more time you take to say something, the more boring it becomes no matter how pretty it sounds to the ear. So make sure that actions are happening, that the story is moving forward, and that the reader is actually learning something relevant to your plot. I'd almost go so far as to say... add the pretty stuff later, after the chapter has already been written.  

And most of all... try to keep your writing sensical. In the end, someone your age should be able to read your story and understand what is going on in it. If they can't, it probably doesn't mean you're a savant writing more advanced than other people your age; it probably just means your writing is confusing.