Month: December 2012

Comma-tose

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Of all the punctuation marks in English, the comma is probably the one where usage varies the most.  The period, the exclamation point, and the question mark are simple and straightforward by comparison; dashes and parentheses only become controversial when used to excess; semicolons are respectable and well-behaved.  But every era has its own ideas about what constitutes the proper use of the comma, and every author has his or her own preferences as well.

Some writers deploy the comma with a light hand, and strictly according to textbook grammar.  Others regard the comma as a tool for controlling sentence rhythm and pacing, over and above its grammatical functions, and use it accordingly.

Determining which sort of writer you are is one of the steps toward recognizing and cultivating your own prose style.

(At some point in your journey, you’ll probably find yourself developing a strong opinion pro or con on the question of the serial comma.  No matter which side you choose, you will at some point end up in an argument about it with an editor whose house style calls for doing it the other way.  Think of it as a rite of passage.)

Peeves of the Day

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Because deadlines make me peevish.

One:  The past tense of tread is trod.  Not treaded — trod.

Two:  Even in its extended sense of “to inflict great damage,” decimate applies to countable things, like people, not to solid and singular things, like buildings.  (In the strict sense, decimate refers to the old Roman punishment meted out when an entire military unit had done something disgraceful, like mutiny — lots were drawn, and one man in every ten was clubbed or stoned to death by his fellow-soldiers.)

Three:  And the past tense of shine is shone.

So there.

Crass Commercialism for the Win

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It’s that time of year again — the time when I remind all my faithful readers (and anybody else who happens to drop by) that in addition to nattering on about words and writing in this blog, I also offer freelance editorial services.

If you’ve got a NaNoWriMo first draft that you’d like help whipping into shape, or a finished novel that you want to spruce up for submission, or a self-publishing project in need of an editorial eye . . . I’m available.  I’ve still got some slots open at the moment in late December and in January; if you’re interested, best to grab them while they’re hot.

A Useful Rule

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(Well, all right.  It’s more like a guideline….)

Don’t violate natural chronology in your story without a really good reason.

I’m not going to say you should never do it, because sometimes there’s just no other way to get necessary information across to the reader, and because sometimes the violation or alteration of natural chronology is the main effect or whole point of the tale.  But before you send your plot into a temporal zigzag, think long and hard about whether or not those conditions apply, because the failure modes can get ugly.

Possible failure mode number one:  Your reader may get lost and confused by all the flashing back and forth, and give up on finishing the story.  If you’re going to use the flashback technique to deal with important events in the story’s past that deserve a full and direct presentation, be extra-careful to provide your reader with markers and signposts.  Give them details (verb tense changes, time and place references in the narrative, even explicit chapter or section headers if you think you need them) to let them know they’re heading into the past, and more details on the other side to let them know they’re coming back out of it.  No, it’s not mollycoddling your readers to do this; and you aren’t building a mental obstacle course for them so they can get a gold medal for running it, either.

Possible failure mode number two:  your readers may get more interested in the past of your story than in its present.  This happens a lot with the sort of books where the main plot arc involves finding out the deeply buried family secret, or the suffering hero’s secret trauma, or the dreadful thing that the students of Professor Thingummy’s Early Western Drama class did during the summer of 1995.  If you’ve got something portentous and dramatic like that lurking in the backstory for the hero or heroine to find out, you need to make sure you’ve got something even more portentous and dramatic going on in the front story, just to make certain that your reader cares enough about the story’s present to want to keep on reading about it.  Otherwise, your readers are likely to read the interesting backstory bits and skip the boring front story bits, which will leave them with only half the book that you meant them to read.

(Yes, I admit it.  I once co-wrote a book where a good portion of the plot involved a bunch of interpolated backstory bits.  In my defense, I set them off from the main text in separate chapters and labelled them and timestamped them clearly, and ran them in their own proper chronological order.  I thought it was necessary.  And I hope it worked.)

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 7 Comments

If you’re writing a story in the past tense — as most of us do — then events and actions that took place in the past of the story go into the past perfect tense.  You know, the one with all the “haves” and “hads” in it.

If you’re writing a story in the present tense — not so common, but it happens sometimes — then you can put past events and actions into the simple past tense.

(What about all the verbs with all the “mights” and “shoulds” and “oughts” and stuff in them?  Those are the so-called modal verbs, the ones that are principally responsible for the observation that looked at one way, English only has two verb tenses, but looked at another way, it has roughly thirty-odd.  If you feel uncertain about dealing with them, your best bet is probably to find yourself a beta reader with a really good feel for language and prose style and run everything past him or her.)

The Fire in Fantasy Rant

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

In honor of the first day of December, a few words on a subject near to my heart (or to my chilly feet and fingers, anyhow):

One of the persistent errors of cheap genre fantasy (along with horses that are really motorcycles and ships that have late 19th-century rigging and construction in an early-medieval environment) is a complete unawareness of how complicated a process heating with wood actually is.  The way fantasy characters build and light fires in the mere blink of a subordinate clause, you’d think they were using gas logs or an electric space heater.  What’s worse, once the fire is going nobody pays it a bit of attention thereafter.

Well, the first twelve years we lived in our current house, we heated it by means of a wood-burning furnace lurking like Moloch down in the basement, and I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t work that way.  Even with the aid of matches and butane-powered firestarters and similar modern innovations, building a fire is still a fiddly process, involving a lot of messing around with tinder and kindling and carefully putting two or three bigger sticks on top of the resulting tiny blaze — which just went out, so you have to start over with the tinder and kindling and then the two or three bigger sticks again — and then you have to keep the smaller sticks going until the bigger ones catch fire, and then you can start putting on some serious logs and if you’re careful and put the structure together right the first time the logs won’t crush the whole thing and snuff it out — and God help you if you’ve got wet or green wood, because then the whole process is going to take twice as long and put out only half as much heat.

And once the fire’s actually going you have to keep feeding it more logs at regular intervals, and — especially in an open fireplace — keep rearranging the logs so that they’ll burn better, not to mention periodically clearing out the ashes. (Which in a pre-modern society would be saved for soapmaking and other uses, but which these days are a pure nuisance to get rid of.)

A wizard with a reliable fire-starting spell could probably eat for free at any kitchen table in the kingdom.  Especially if he had a reliable flea-and-bedbug-eradicator in his other pocket.