by Ben Blatt
On the website FanFiction.net, the most popular of many fan-fiction websites, people have written more than 1 billion words of Twilight fiction. I chose Twilight for its enormous sample size. Below is a plot of all stories with 60,000-plus words (long enough to be a full novel) dating from Twilight’s first release until the end of 2014. In total, there have been 5,000 novel-length Twilight stories posted on FanFiction.net, which I would be comparing to the four novels in the original series. You can see the mounting popularity of fan fiction as the books (marked B1 to B4) came out, and the huge leap immediately after the first movie (marked M1) was released.
Stephenie Meyer wrote 600,000 words in the Twilight series, and 153 writers on FanFiction.net have bested her word count in their own Twilight fan fiction.
I ran the Mosteller and Wallace test on Meyer’s Twilight books and the top fifty most prolific authors. All these authors, except for Meyer, have written more than 1 million words.
Harkening back to my initial test on Animal Farm, I removed one Twilight book at a time and compared that to (A) the other three books in the series and (B) the complete bibliography of each of the fifty fan-fiction writers. No author passed for Meyer. That’s a record of 200 for 200.
If you compare all fan-fiction writers, like airedalegirl1, against one another, the results are nearly as strong. Out of all 24,445 combinations of comparing one fan-fiction work to the other fan-fiction authors (or Meyer), the math was right 24,365 times.
The 99.7 % success rate is near identical to what we found when looking at writers who varied greatly in genre, era, and subject. If you think that genre is a major tipoff, then Twilight fan fiction would be a major obstacle. Still, Mosteller and Wallace recognize the differences between each author.
I reached out to the top-writing Twilight fan-fiction author of all time, airedalegirl1. I wanted to know how her writing process works (and how long she spends on it). Airedalegirl1, whose real name is Jules, has written 38 stories of 60,000-plus words, totaling 3.7 million words. She is a married woman in her fifties who lives in England. She writes “each day for two to three hours.” When I told her she’d written more than anyone else, Jules said, “I’ve never really thought about how much I’ve written. I don’t plan my stories, they evolve . . . it’s just organic.”
In addition to sample size, I think airedalegirl1’s attitude explains part of the success of Mosteller and Wallace on the fan-fiction corpus. Because these are writers who have written an incredible amount of fan fiction in an incredibly small span of time, they are more or less putting words on the page as they think of them. Once they finish one story they start the next. Almost all of these amateur fan-fiction authors have written more words in a few years than professional literary novelists do in a lifetime. The chance that a fan-fiction author decides to shift style and write an experimental novel with a new voice is slim.
The Twilight example and the J. K. Rowling/Galbraith example demonstrate two sides of the question of how genre affects writing style. Rowling changed genres, yet her writing style was still distinct. Fan-fiction authors write the same exact genre, yet their voices remain quite distinct from one another.
Mosteller and Wallace would likely not be surprised by the success of their model on Twilight because their first test of the case was also on the study of two writers with similar backgrounds, writing in the same series. They postulated that because writers use a consistent voice, it was possible to tell them apart.
All I did here was replicate the simple equations to test their theory on novelists. Ninety-nine times out of 100 the two statisticians were right: Within the prose of every writer, whether obvious to the reader or not, there is an underlying fingerprint setting them apart from all other authors who anyone has ever read.
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I. Since Clancy’s death in 2013 the series was relaunched after a nine-year break. The new books are written by new authors, Dick Couch and George Galdorisi.
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
—JOHN STEINBECK, THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
When famous writers give advice, people listen. The logic is simple: These are the few people who have made a living, who have achieved renown, by stringing together a few dozen letters and symbols in the right order. Most of us haven’t figured out how to make a dollar out of our words. So if one of the success stories is willing to spill the secret, it’s time to pay attention.
Before taking anyone’s advice, though, there are a couple of simple considerations worth making:
1. Does the person giving advice actually follow their own advice?
2. Does anyone else who has succeeded follow that same advice?
If a successful writer says that some aspect of writing is essential but doesn’t follow her own rule—or if she’s the only writer who follows the rule while a flock of other successful writers doesn’t—then maybe that rule isn’t so essential. On the other hand, if everyone we look at does follow a certain rule, then we’ve found a real secret to writing at its best.
With all this in mind, I decided to test a range of tips offered up by famous authors. This chapter picks apart examples ranging from Strunk and White’s advice in their famous The Elements of Style to Chuck Palahniuk’s proscription against “thought verbs” like understand and realize.
Exclamation Points
Let’s start with something simple. In his book 10 Rules of Writing Elmore Leonard offers a rule about exclamation points. He states, “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” A writing rule in the form of a ratio is a blessing for a statistician, so I ran with it.
Elmore Leonard was prolific. He wrote more than 40 novels in his career and 19 of his works have been adapted for the screen so far, including 3:10 to Yuma and Jackie Brown. With a long and successful career he had time to fine-tune his preferences, down to the dots at the end of his sentences.
Leonard’s 45 novels totaled 3.4 million words. If he were to follow his own advice he should have been allowed only 102 exclamation points his entire career. In practice, he used 1,651. That’s 16 times as many as he recommends! (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
But before you start thinking that Elmore Leonard was a secret exclamation point fanatic, consider the chart opposite. I counted the exclamation point usage of fifty authors, many considered the greatest writers in modern literature and many huge commercial successes, in their 580-plus books (the sample was the entirety of each author’s novels unless otherwise noted), and the results ranged wildly.
Elmore Leonard did not live up to his own advice in absolute terms, but relative to other authors he used the exclamation point with great rarity. Leonard did offer one caveat to his rule: “If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.” His assessment was dead-on. Wolfe used exclamation points at a rate of 929 per 100,000, a higher number than everyone in the sample except James Joyce.
When it comes to his own usage, perhaps Leonard was just not the best estimator. It wouldn’t be surprising if he chose 100,000 words as it’s a nice clean number which happens to amount to the length of a longish novel.
Another possibility is that Leonard did not start paying close attention to his exclamation point totals until he sat down to gather writing tips. The strict limit he offered to others could have been a rule he began to aspire to after he delivered it.
Consider the table on the next page showing his use of the exclamation point in each of his 45 novels. Leonard first stated his rule in 2001 in the New York Times. The bars in lighter purple are the books released after the rule surfaced in 2001.
At the beginning of his career, Leonard was throwing exclamation points into his books by the hundreds. All told, in the books he published before 2001, Leonard used exclamation marks at a rate of 57 per 100,000. After 2001, it was 10.
Leonard’s eight books with the lowest rate were all written after 2001. The
one exception to his post-2001 ways was A Coyote’s in the House, which was Leonard’s sole children’s book. Perhaps he thought a little more excitement was needed to keep the attention of his new young readers.
Of all 580-plus books in my sample, only two can claim to have obeyed the strict “no more than two or three per 100,000 words” rule. One was Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea with a single “Now!” The other was Leonard’s second-to-last novel, Djibouti, published in 2010, which also used just one exclamation point. On the following page are the ten books in my fifty-author sample with the fewest exclamation points. Notice the years on Leonard’s books.
Leonard did not explain why he despises the exclamation point. But he’s hardly alone in his opinion. Many style guides caution against its overuse, explaining that a flood of exclamation points will water down all moments of a text, and that the exclamation point should be reserved for those rare actions and descriptions that warrant extra attention. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage advises, “Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”
Top Ten Books with the Fewest Exclamation Points
BOOK
AUTHOR
! RATE PER 100,000 WORDS
Djibouti (2010)
Elmore Leonard
1.3
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Ernest Hemingway
3.6
Road Dogs (2009)
Elmore Leonard
4.1
Across the River and Into the Trees (1950)
Ernest Hemingway
4.3
Comfort to the Enemy (2006)
Elmore Leonard
5.4
True at First Light (1999)
Ernest Hemingway
5.9
The Garden of Eden (1986)
Ernest Hemingway
6.0
Tishomingo Blues (2002)
Elmore Leonard
6.2
The Hot Kid (2005)
Elmore Leonard
6.6
Up in Honey’s Room (2007)
Elmore Leonard
6.6
I wanted to know if Fowler was right: Is there a difference between “practiced writers” and “unpractised writers” in their punctuation usage? I had to generalize (I’m sorry fan-fic writers), but for my “unpractised” group, I downloaded all stories of at least 60,000 words posted on FanFiction.net since 2010 in the 25 most popular book universes. In total, the 9,000-plus works combined for more than a billion words. Then I compared their usage to my “practiced” group: the 100 most recent bestsellers and 100 most recent books to win literary awards.I
It turns out there is a drastic difference in the use of exclamation points. The median New York Times bestseller used 81 exclamation points per 100,000 words. Modern literary award winners used 98 per 100,000 words. And fan-fiction authors used a median of 392 exclamation points per 100,000 words—about four times as many as our “practiced” group.
Too many exclamation points can come off as a sign of a writer relying wholly on a device to make their dialogue more exciting. Consider the six straight lines of dialogue below:
“What’s the matter with you!”
“Let me go!”
“You think I came to see you!”
“Take your hands off of me!”
He shook her violently. “You think I came for you!”
“I don’t care why you came!”
That’s not from a fan-fiction story but a passage from Leonard’s second novel, The Law at Randado, where he neared 350 exclamation points per 100,000 words. It was Leonard’s second book and the author would never return to that level of forced excitement again.
It’s important to note, though, that the question of any word or punctuation frequency is not completely clear-cut. There are plenty of classics, written by what Fowler would certainly deem “practised writers,” that use exclamation points at an exceptional pace. A rate of 2,000 per 100,000 means around six per page. Of all books in the sample, Rushdie’s Booker Prize–winning Midnight’s Children tops the list.
Top Ten Books with the Most Exclamation Points
BOOK
AUTHOR
! RATE PER 100,00 WORDS
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie
2,131
Finnegans Wake
James Joyce
2,102
The Chimes
Charles Dickens
1,860
The Cricket on the Hearth
Charles Dickens
1,793
Elmer Gantry
Sinclair Lewis
1,352
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
1,351
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
D. H. Lawrence
1,348
Back to Blood
Tom Wolfe
1,341
Dodsworth
Sinclair Lewis
1,274
Nonetheless, it’s clear that amateur fan-fiction writers use the punctuation mark way more than professional writers. On the whole, I’d say that Leonard’s advice holds. He follows it himself and it’s common enough throughout successful writing to be worth paying heed to. Is that extra exclamation point really necessary? Or is it, as Fowler says, just “a spurious dash of sensation”?
Suddenly!
Just as the exclamation point can be a key or crutch, there are certain words that can make or break a great moment. They can provide just the right touch of drama or shatter a scene altogether. For a perfect example, let’s look at the sixth rule of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing: Never use the word suddenly.
Just about everyone uses the word suddenly, and like the exclamation point, Leonard used it a lot during his early career before giving it up nearly altogether.
In the nine novels he published after 2001 he never used the word suddenly. When Leonard said “never,” he meant it.
Despite Leonard’s early use of the word, his overall frequency of suddenly still ranks third lowest—behind Chuck Palahniuk and Jane Austen. On the other end of the spectrum, with career usages of about 70 per 100,000, are J. R. R. Tolkien, Joseph Conrad, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In the sample of 580-plus books, there are only 26 books that never use the word suddenly. Fifteen of these were written by Leonard. The remaining 11 were by Chuck Palahniuk, Mark Twain, or Stephen King.
Unlike exclamation points, suddenly doesn’t have an enormous difference between fan-fiction writers and professionals. The same sample of fan fiction had a median suddenly rate of 22 per 100,000 words, while the samples of bestseller and award-winning novels written in the same time frame come in at 16 and 19, respectively. The usage is slightly lower in the pros, but too similar to be universalized into a rule.
Sometimes, and with some writers, like super-user J. R. R. Tolkien, its usage can be too obvious. (Take this example: The valley seemed to stretch on endlessly. Suddenly Frodo saw a hopeful sign.) But this is one case where Leonard’s “never” seems over the top. Finely tuned bestselling books use suddenly just as much as unedited fan-fiction. And while Leonard indeed practiced what he preached, he’s one of the only authors to write entire books without it. His hardcore stance, as seen through the wide range of other authors using it, comes off as extreme. Perhaps the better piece of advice would not be to suddenly stop altogether—but to use the word in moderation.
Thought Verbs
Chuck Palahniuk’s writing is distinct. We just saw him land on the extreme ends of both exclamation-point and suddenly usage, and in Chapter 1 we saw his avoidance of -ly adverbs. He has explained many of his own theories on writing, and one of his most interesting recommendations is to avoid the use of “thought verbs.”
As the author explains in a
2003 essay, “Instead of characters knowing anything, you must now present the details that allow the reader to know them. Instead of a character wanting something, you must now describe the thing so that the reader wants it.” It’s an idea very similar to other writers’ proscriptions against exclamation points, suddenly, and adverbs in general: Don’t rely on a single device to create an atmosphere that you could instead create in context, with a chorus of other words and punctuation marks working in concert. With his denouncement of “thought verbs,” Palahniuk is cutting to the core of another oft-repeated piece of writing advice: “Show; don’t tell.”
He identifies thought verbs as “Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.” He singles out loves and hates later on in his essay. And for our purposes, we’ll limit the search to these 11 words (and their other tenses).
Like Leonard, Palahniuk lives by his own advice and ranks near the top of the list for fewest thought verbs.
And also like Leonard, it’s unclear what came first: his radical desire to eliminate thought verbs from his writing or his advice to do so. His eight books with the lowest rate of thought verbs are the eight books he wrote after his 2003 essay. Palahniuk’s usage dropped almost in half from an average of 88 to 45 thought verbs per 10,000 words. In the graph above, the light shade indicates books published after 2003.
Palahniuk’s advice is different from Leonard’s because it deals with ordinary fundamental language. It is possible to write a book without suddenly or ! by making minor adjustments. Thought verbs are harder to avoid altogether and therefore the variation is much less extreme. Romance writer Nicholas Sparks used thought verbs at a rate of 200 per 10,000 words in his major hit The Notebook. That’s close to the most extreme rate I could find, and it’s just about four times as many as Palahniuk uses post-advice. But did Sparks’s profusion of thought verbs hurt his work?