Category: Revision and Editing

Go Read This

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Charlie Jane Anders, over at io9, provides a helpful list of ways to tell if the first draft of your novel is worth salvaging.

If you decide that in fact it isn’t worth revising, don’t despair.  First, just by finishing it you’ve accomplished something that most people never do.  Second, you’ll have gained some insight into your artistic obsessions and thematic concerns (“Hello, traumatic high school experience– nice to see you showing up again in yet another story!”) .  And finally, it all counts for practice, like the scales and Hanon studies and Czerny études that a concert pianist does before he can play at Carnegie Hall.

Another Thing Not to Do

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Suppose you’ve got a character who’s a poet.  This is dangerous territory, because readers are wary of characters who are poets or playwrights or novelists or artistic sorts in general, because the readers have a well-founded suspicion that any  artistic character is liable to be the author him-or-herself in a thin disguise . . . but let’s say that you’ve got good and sufficient reasons for doing it anyway.

And suppose, then, that your poet-character at some point has to write, and possibly even to recite (or sing, if this is a fantasy story and your poet-character is not just a poet, but a bard) a poem.

And suppose, further, that this poem is supposed to be a masterwork, something so profound and affecting that it moves the villain to mercy, or the populace to revolution, or the poet’s beloved to bestow love in return.

If that’s the case, then do not write that poem.  Do not give your readers the chance to read it and say, “Huh.  That poem isn’t really anything to write home about.”  Because if that happens, your reader will not believe in the villain’s mercy, or the people’s revolution, or the beloved’s affection — all those things that were supposed to have been caused by this masterwork of poetry will fail when it falls short.

What to do instead:  Don’t show the work of art.  Instead, show the other characters reacting to it.  Show the villain weeping, the crowd picking up paving stones and chair legs and broken bits of pipe, the beloved person meeting the poet’s eyes and smiling at last . . . that sort of thing.  The readers will believe in your great fictional work of art, because they will have seen your other characters behaving as though they were in the presence of greatness.

(Yes.  I know that Shakespeare actually did a Great and Moving Oration live on-stage in Julius Caesar, but he was Shakespeare and the rest of us aren’t.  And Tolkien crammed The Lord of the Rings chock-full of his own poetry, but point one, while he wasn’t William Shakespeare he was a competent versifier in his own right, and point two, his characters never asserted that their poems and songs were great works of art.)

Proverbially

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One of the first bits of style-improvement advice most writers get is “eliminate your adverbs.”

Like most entry-level advice, it’s good right up to the point where you don’t need it any more, and after that it can hinder as much as it helps.

The thing is, most entry-level writers do have a tendency to rely on adverbs to fine-tune the descriptive power of their verbs, or to be placeholders for better words that they promise themselves they’ll think of later.  (And sometimes they do think of the better words later, in the second or third draft, which is a sign that they’re not entry-level writers any more.)  For those writers, “eliminate your adverbs” is a real and valid step toward improving and streamlining their prose.  The act of going through their manuscripts and deleting all the words ending in -ly is, if nothing else, instructive — they see how little meaning is lost in that process, and how much force and directness is gained.  They train themselves not to be compulsive adverbializers.

At that point, though, it’s time to stop, before they train themselves to be obsessive adverb eliminators — because adverbs, like all the other parts of speech, exist for a reason.  Sometimes the only way to express a precise shade of meaning, or to give a sentence the exact rhythm that it needs, is by using a carefully chosen adverb.

(See “carefully”, above.  Yeah.)

Trust Me on This

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You don’t need an adjective attached to every noun.

You really don’t need two or more adjectives attached to every noun.

Distribute your adjectives with a light hand.  Also, choose better nouns.

Strong descriptive writing is all about the nouns and verbs, not about the adjectives and adverbs.

A Thankless Task and a Helpful Tool

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One of the hardest things to do, in the writing business, is proofreading your own text.  I know that every time I give a story or a novel the final run-through before printing it out or e-mailing it, I worry that I’m going to miss something — an “untied” where there should be a “united”; a sentence that should have a period at the end of it but somehow mysteriously doesn’t (cut and paste is great for revising, but sometimes not everything gets picked up when it should); a “not” that’s gone missing, to the  complete and utter detriment of the intent of an entire paragraph, if not the whole work.

One reason the final proofing is so hard is that by the time you reach that stage of the project, you’ve already read every sentence in it multiple times, and your brain is going to take advantage of that experience to helpfully supply anything that might be missing, and correct anything that might be wrong.  To fight against that, writers do all sorts of things to counteract the familiarity of the text — have a text-to-speech program read it aloud; make a printout if they’ve been working only on-screen; change the page from the standard double-spaced publisher’s-guidelines layout to double columns; and my own favorite, change the font.

For work like this, you don’t want a pretty font.  You want one that’s almost aggressively in-your-face with its distinctive letterforms, one where the errors are going to leap off the page at you and go for the throat.

One such font is Lexia Readable; it’s also good for printing out a text you’re going to be reading aloud from.  Another good proofing font is DPCustomMono2, which was originally developed for proofreading OCR-generated texts.  But any font will do in a pinch, so long as it isn’t the one you’ve been reading the text in all along.

 

 

Go Look Over There

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Or, somebody who isn’t me, saying something useful and interesting.  This time, it’s John Barnes, on the subject of what to do about Mary Sue when she (or he — Barnes also makes a convincing argument for why he, at least, applies the term to characters of both genders) turns up in your story.  Good stuff, and it goes beyond the usual alternatives of “give her a couple of cosmetic flaws” and “terminate her with extreme prejudice.”

The Floating Eyeball Problem

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Actually, it’s not just floating eyeballs.  It’s disassociated body parts in general.  Eyes are possibly the most common offenders — “her eyes darted around the room,” “his eyes fell to the floor,” and so on — but just about any part of the external anatomy can suddenly start wandering around and acting on its own.  (When this happens in the romance and erotica genres, the results can be . . . disconcerting, to say the least.)  At least in my opinion, if the word “eyes” can be replaced by “gaze” without changing the meaning of the sentence, then it damned well should be.

Likewise, if the whole sentence could just as easily be phrased, “he/she looked at whatever-it-was”, then for heaven’s sake, write it that way.

Disassociated body parts turn up in all sorts of writing, but the problem is most acute, and most dangerous, in the science fiction and fantasy genres.  Why?  Because those are the genres in which metaphor becomes reified, and in which — for example — detachable and/or self-propelled eyeballs are not outside the realm of possibility.

(I can think of at least three fantasy/science fiction examples right off the top of my head, and I’ll bet you can, too.)

Let There be Light

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I’d file this one under “common errors of fantasy”, except that it’s more ubiquitous than that.  Call it a common failure of visualization, maybe.

The thing is, no matter where your scene is set, the light is going to be coming from somewhere . . . and a lot of beginning writers forget that you need to keep track of such things.  If the action is taking place outdoors in broad daylight, or indoors during the modern era, illumination can be more or less assumed.  The reader will need to know if something happens to make the light diminish or go away — power failure, dense cloud cover, a darkness at noon of biblical proportions — but unless there’s something special about the source or quality of the light, it doesn’t need to be mentioned.

Outside of those circumstances, though, things change.  If the characters are operating at night, or underground, or in deep woods, or indoors during any pre-electric era, then you-the-writer are going to have to be aware of how much or how little light there is available for every scene.  A cloudy night, a clear night in the dark of the moon, and a clear night with a full moon are going to have different light levels — enough to make the difference, for instance, between your characters being able to operate unseen (if they can avoid tripping over tree roots and large rocks) and being plainly visible to any alert sentry on the castle wall.

Meanwhile, inside the castle, the wizard perusing his books of lore by the flame of a single candle isn’t going to have all that much light to work with either.  As a writing experiment, try lighting one candle in a dark room and then describing how much you can and can’t see.  If you’ve got access to an oil lamp, try that sometime.  Life without incandescence or fluorescence looks a lot different.  (And it’s no wonder that the reading-light spell is a classic beginning wizard’s trick in so many fantasies, right after the fire-lighting one.)

And if your characters are going exploring someplace where they’ll need to take their light source with them, don’t forget that someone in the group is going to have to be carrying the torch or candle or lantern, and that person won’t have both hands free to do other things.

Common Errors of Fantasy, Transportation Division

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Horses are not motorcycles.

If your protagonist’s interactions with his/her gallant steed could equally well (with a change of costume) be interactions with his/her Harley-Davidson, then you have a problem.

If you don’t feel comfortable writing the horse stuff, but are dealing with a fictional milieu where horsepower is what you’ve got, then either do the research (as I’ve said here before, horse people are, taken as a group, glad to be helpful in this regard) or keep your characters indoors and on foot as much as possible.

While you’re at it, take a moment to consider whether or not the horses-as-motorcycles issue might be symptomatic of a larger problem with your story.  Pre-industrial societies are different from modern ones, even if they’re entirely imaginary, and it takes doing the research (again) to get them right.

The One-Third Principle

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On the days when I’m wearing my editor hat, I write revision letters.  On the days when I’m wearing my writer hat, sometimes I have to read them — and having read them, have to do something about them.

On those days, I spend a lot of time dealing with what I think of as the one-third principle of editorial commentary.  The way it works is this:

In any given set of editorial comments, roughly one third of them are going to inspire sentiments along the lines of “Oh, thank God you caught that before I ended up looking like an idiot in public!” or “Yes, that is absolutely true and insightful and every writer should be so fortunate as to have someone like you for an editor!”

Another third of the commentary is going to cause a reaction more along the lines of “Well, maybe . . . I’m not saying that I buy it, but it isn’t worth arguing over, either.  I might as well save my energy and make the changes.”

And the final third of the commentary is going to be the cause of neck-cracking double-takes and exclamations of “Say what?!” and “Over my dead body am I changing that!”  Which is, of course, where the saved energy  gained by not arguing over the middle third ends up getting spent.

When I put my editorial hat back on, I try to remember these things.