Month: December 2012

A Pitfall for the Unwary

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One of the bits of advice given to fledgling writers in the current era is “the spellchecker is your friend.”

Like a lot of advice-for-writers, this advice is both true and not-true.  Or, to put it another way, the spellchecker is your friend, but it’s not your best friend.  It’s the friend who’s fun to be with and helpful on the easy stuff, but who’s nowhere in sight when you’ve got a lot of heavy lifting to do, or the one who’s got your back right up to the point where they run off with your prom date.

A spellchecker will catch your typos, and it will catch your misspellings . . . but only so long as the typos and misspellings aren’t also legitimate words in your spellchecker’s language-of-choice.  It won’t do you a bit of good with the its/it’s problem, or the to/two/too problem, or the there/their/they’re problem, or any of those fatally similar and easily confused homonyms.  It won’t remind you to put apostrophes in your possessives, and it won’t catch embarrassing stuff like pubic for public or untied for united.

As for your characters’ names, or for any terminology coined especially for the story you’re working on . . . unless you remember to add those words to the spellchecker’s user dictionary, it’s not going to keep you from messing those up either.  And heaven help you if you accidentally add a wrong spelling to the user dictionary, because getting in there and taking it out again is not something most word processors tend to make easy.

The sad  fact is that spellchecker or no spellchecker, there’s still no substitute for going over your manuscript by hand and eye before sending it out.

Snow, Still.

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But at least I’m no longer quite so peevish.  Snow that looks like it’ll stick around instead of melting and then refreezing into sheets of ice is good.  A large part of what passes for the local economy up here runs on winter tourism, especially snowmobilers, and last year’s lack of heavy snowfall was devastating.

Meanwhile, I chase the words “THE END” on the current deadline like Achilles trying to catch that blasted tortoise.

It’s Snowing, and I’m Feeling Peevish

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Listen up, people.  It’s not hone in on, it’s home in on.  Like a homing pigeon, or a heat-seeking missile, or one of the assortment of other things that pick out a home base, or a particular target, and are drawn or guided to it.

Also:  The past tense of the verb to lead is led.  If it’s spelled lead and pronounced the same as led, then it’s a noun not a verb and it’s a metal.  On the other hand, the past tense of the verb to read, which rhymes with to lead, is read, which rhymes with led.  English spelling is not logical.  There are a lot of reasons for this; one of them is that the language started taking on its modern written form while the spoken language was still going through some heavy changes, particularly where the vowels were concerned.

And it isn’t orientated — it’s oriented.  (If you’re disoriented, you don’t know which way is east.  If the history of European cartography had gone differently, you might have been disoccidented instead, but fate decreed otherwise and a perfectly good adjective never even existed.)

Pick One and Stick to It

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Or, what to do about variant spellings.

This advice brought to you by OK/O.K./okay, that typically American and variously-spelled affirmative.  All of the above spellings are acceptable, but you will not make your copyeditor happy if you use more than one of them in your manuscript.  (And using ok in lower case is also iffy.)

Which one you prefer to use is your own business, and you can make the choice on the grounds of what you think looks good, or what you were taught in fifth grade, or what you will.  (I chose “okay” on etymological grounds, because I prefer the theories that derive “okay” from either Native American or African terms to the theories that derive it from abbreviations of various American English phrases such as the humorously-misspelled “Oll Korrect”†or the nickname “Old Kinderhook”‡ — if you’re interested in the arguments on the subject, there’s a pretty good summary here.)

Just be consistent in using whichever one you decide works for you.  You can get away with a great deal, at least in dealing with editors and copyeditors, so long as you make consistency one of your virtues.

†Well, people thought it was humorous at the time. Fashions change, and a good thing, too.
‡Martin van Buren.

A Seasonal Opportunity

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In honor of the midwinter holiday of your choice — or the summer solstice, if you happen to live in the Southern Hemisphere — Dr. Doyle’s Editorial and Critique Service (i. e., me) is offering a special seasonal opportunity:

Now you can give your writerly friend, relative, or significant other an editorial-services gift certificate.  Purchase it now on their behalf at the usual rate, and I’ll enter it on my scheduling spreadsheet as a paid-for job, date TBD.  I’ll even supply a printable PDF gift certificate suitable for putting into an envelope and sticking in somebody’s Christmas stocking.

 

Blogs for the Word-Obsessed

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If, like me, you’re a member of the legion of the word-obsessed, here are some websites to keep you going on the long march:

Take a look, for starters, at harm•less drudg•ery, the blog of an actual working lexicographer.  It’s literate, amusing, and full of the inside-dictionary baseball.  A sample quote:

English is a little bit like a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned light sockets. We put it in nice clothes and tell it to make friends, and it comes home covered in mud, with its underwear on its head and someone else’s socks on its feet. We ask it to clean up or to take out the garbage, and instead it hollers at us that we don’t run its life, man. Then it stomps off to its room to listen to The Smiths in the dark.

From there, you can go to separated by a common language, a blog that deals with the differences between American and British English.  Here’s a couple of paragraphs from a post on the difference between American and British mattress sizes, and the terms for same:

The short version: the basic sizes for American beds are twin, full, queen, and king, in ascending order. The basic sizes for British beds, respectively, are single, double,  king,and super-king. Single bed and double bed are understood and used in the US, but they are not precise bed sizes there. For example, in AmE I could say that a (AmE) cot/(BrE) camp bed is a ‘single bed’ (it fits a single person), but not that it’s a ‘twin bed’, because twin is a particular size. Two twins make an AmE king–as one can find to one’s back-breaking and love-dampening horror in hotels where they make AmE-king-size beds out of two twins and a king-size sheet. (You said king-size bed! Singular! I want my money back!!)

So, if you buy king-size fitted sheets in one country, they won’t work as king-size in the other. Will the other sheets transfer? Probably not exactly.

Finally, there’s languagehat, the most venerable of the three — its archives go back to 2002.  It’s full of interesting stuff on word histories and origins, along with a lot of good book reviews.  A sample:

I’ve started Gene Wolfe’s Peace (recommended by Christopher Culver in this thread), and on the very first page he used a phrase unfamiliar to me: “I took the cruiser ax and went out…” (It’s not at all unusual to have to look things up when reading Wolfe; he has an extensive vocabulary and is not reluctant to deploy it.) There is definitely such a thing (here‘s one for sale: “2 1/2 lb. Double bit axe head 28″ Hickory handle. Overall length approximately 28″. Weight 3.63 lbs.”), but it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, and I wanted to know where the name came from. Google Books told me it was sometimes called a cruiser’s ax (“And don’t forget to bring a light ax—a cruiser’s ax. Where you’re going, you could freeze to death without an ax and matches”—John Dalmas, The Reality Matrix, 1986), but that didn’t help much, since no definition of “cruiser” seemed appropriate… until I heaved my ancient and well-used Webster’s Third New International up from its honored place on my dictionary shelf and found definition 4a, “one who estimates the volume and value of marketable timber on a tract of land and maps it out for logging.” I’d still be interested to know exactly why and how that particular job description got matched with that particular ax, but the general idea is clear, and I am satisfied.

At all of these blogs, the comment sections are as lively and full of good stuff as the entries themselves.

It’s Different When It’s on Purpose

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In writing, there are some things you never want to get caught doing by accident.  These are three of them.

One: being funny.  Intentional humor is hard to do — humor, like horror and erotica, is a genre that works or doesn’t on the basis of the emotional effect it has on the reader, and if that effect is missing, no other virtues in the work will make up for its absence — and failed humor is flat and leaden, but accidental humor is downright embarrassing.

Two: being ambiguous.  Artfully handled ambiguity can add richness and texture and layers of meaning to your story.  All accidental ambiguity does is confuse your readers, who will not be happy with you any more.  And no, you can’t get away with claiming after the fact that you did it on purpose when you really didn’t, because your readers can always tell.

Three:  using internal rhyme and alliteration and other sound effects.  This one’s especially tricky, because the same things done well and on purpose can be wonderful.  What you don’t want is for your reader to think that those rhymes (or whatever) crept in while you weren’t watching, and that you didn’t notice them.

It’s the difference between looking in control of your medium and looking like it’s too much for you to handle.

At the Mountains of Madness

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I am so close to the end of this book that I can taste it. Only a handful of scenes to go. But I have to fit them together in just the right configuration, and right now that feels like playing a game of three-dimensional Tetris in my head.

A Point Well-Pointed

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Because the looming deadline grows ever loomier, today’s post is a pointer to the estimable John Scalzi, saying some very true things about why it’s never a good idea to ask a professional writer to write you something for free.

The comments are also worth reading, since they point out that the same sentiments apply to, e.g., knitters and other craftspersons; and also make it clear that the friends-and-family exception to the rule is just that, an exception, and one that’s made at the discretion of the one granting it.

Not that I think anyone reading this would be so tactless as to ask a professional of any sort to do their job for free; but I do think that apprentice and journeyman professionals need to take Scalzi’s words to heart. The time to start practicing your “I’m sorry, but I don’t work for free” speech is before somebody comes around and asks you to do it.

Causes of Reader Disgruntlement: #2 in a Series

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Readers get disgruntled when they feel like they’ve put more effort into reading your book than they got pleasure out of it.

(It’s always important to bear in mind, when you’re thinking about this, that there are all sorts of readers deriving all sorts of pleasure from what they read, and you have to be able to distinguish between genuinely disgruntled members of your own audience and readers who are disgruntled because your book wasn’t written for them.  The latter aren’t your problem, no matter how much they may sound like it sometimes; the former are your problem, because you’ve failed them somehow — and while you probably can’t fix it in the book they’re unhappy about, you can try to do better in the next one.)

Anyway.  A common source of the more-effort-than-pleasure problem is unsatisfying characters.  The need for satisfying characters sometimes gets mistranslated as a demand for likeable characters, or for admirable ones (the phrase “positive role model” comes into play a lot here), or for ones with which the reader can identify.  In fact, the reader will happily follow along after a character who is none of these things — an unlikeable scoundrel who has little or nothing in common with the reader — so long as that character is interesting.  An interesting villain will hold the reader’s attention better than a boring hero, any day of the week.

How do you make a character interesting?  That’s a bigger problem than a single post can handle, but here’s one idea for a start:  give your character important things to do, and have him or her actually do them.  A proactive character is an object in motion, and objects in motion draw interest.