Writing Advice: David Farland on Tone
Sometimes you don’t have the language you need to adequately discuss a story’s flaws. For instance, I used to dread the “pretty good” stories when I was a creative writing tutor. And by pretty good, I mean the stories that were technically pretty solid: they didn’t have any major flaws in characterisation or plot, nor did they have any egregious errors in language or formatting. You’d read them and immediately know that something was missing, but there wasn’t anything mechanical to point at and explain “you need to fix this.” One of my colleagues used to refer to them as BP stories. Shorthand for “Make this Better, Please,” which appeared all to frequently in their notes. I’m sure it used to frustrate the students who got that response. Hell, I know it frustrated me – one of my lecturers wrote the comment good, but not great on one of my poems in undergraduate, and I spent the next two weeks bugging the hell out of them