Author: drdoyleeditorial

Character Types to Avoid

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While you’re stocking your plot with characters (or, if you work the other way around, while you’re assembling the cast of characters who will generate your plot), there are some types you want to steer clear of because they will  lose reader sympathy — not just for themselves, but for any characters who happen to be standing too close to them.

One is The Annoyingly Perfect Character.  This character is good at everything, and is always on the right side of any issue — no matter what the normal side may be for his time and place.  Dogs always like him.  He can drive a stick shift without ever stalling at a busy intersection.  He can cook an intimate dinner for two and not have the kitchen stacked full of unwashed pots and pans at the end of the evening.  If the character is female, she can do all of these things and run a Fortune 500 company without ever chipping her fingernail polish.

Another is The Character Who Wins All the Arguments.  This usually happens because he or she is also The Character Who Agrees With The Author.  Readers get annoyed by this one in a hurry, especially when they start thinking that the author is deliberately setting the character up with debate partners who aren’t exactly the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree.  (Yes, Robert A. Heinlein, I’m looking at you.)  If you’re going to be writing a debate, remember that even the wrong side is likely to have one or two good arguments going for them — be fair, and let them have those two measly points before your highly principled hero crushes them under the weight of a dozen stronger ones.

And a third is The Character Who Can’t Get a Break.  This is the guy (or gal) for whom the line “if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all” might have been written.  If he has a job, he will lose it.  If he gets a job, it will be in a sweatshop, or a soul-destroying cubicle farm, or a seething office morass of backstabbing and bureaucratic corruption.   His significant other will cheat on him; or, if faithful, will contract a lingering and expensive malady that will cause him to turn to a life of incompetent crime in order to afford the treatments.  He will leave his only umbrella on the bus.  The reader will begin to suspect that the author hates this character, and will secretly despise the character for putting up with such unfair treatment.

Don’t write these characters.  Your readers will be grateful for it.

Longest Night

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At least, here in the Eastern Standard time zone of the USA, it’s the longest.

A fit night for going back and inserting necessary scenes into the manuscript so that a new development in the middle will make sense.

Gentlewriters, Start Your Engines

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It’s the 20th of December 2012, which means it’s time for a reminder that applications for Viable Paradise XVII open up on 1 January 2013.  Guidelines and further details can be found at the VP web page.

Viable Paradise is a one-week workshop focusing on fantasy and science fiction, held annually in the autumn on the New England island of Martha’s Vineyard.  A couple of pictures, below the fold:

Continue reading “Gentlewriters, Start Your Engines” →

Funny. Scary. Hot.

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That’s humor, horror, and erotica for you, right there.  Three genres where the success or failure of the project depends upon the effect it has on the reader.  Humor that doesn’t make you laugh, horror that doesn’t make you afraid, and erotica that doesn’t turn you on — they’re all failures.  And given that what amuses, scares, or turns on an individual reader varies widely from one specimen of the human race to another, it’s pretty much inevitable that a piece of writing in one of these genres is going to fail at least part of the time — and it’s no wonder that writers in those genres have a tendency to go quietly nuts.

(Or sometimes, not so quietly.  There have been some spectacular author meltdowns, especially in the horror and humor fields.)

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.