Category: Words and Language

Fatal Verbs

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There are a couple of verbs — both of them used at times for dialogue attribution — which might as well be specialists in character assassination.

One (and I have Teresa Nielsen Hayden to thank for the tip) is “whined.”  As soon as a character whines something, he or she loses the respect of the reader.  Heroes don’t whine.  Strong villains don’t whine, either.  If you want your readers to dislike some character, all you need to do is hint that the person might have whined at some point.

The other verb is “to smirk.”  Only smug, self-satisfied characters smirk.  Likeable characters don’t. A smirk is not a smile; nor is it a grimace; and it doesn’t substitute for either one of them.

(I’ve been fighting that fight for going on four decades now.  I’m nothing if not persevering about these things.)

Homonym of the Week

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Because I’ve been bumping into this one all over the place lately.

Things that are discreet are quiet, unobtrusive, not-noticed, and don’t draw attention to themselves.  “Smith made discreet inquiries into Jones’s financial history.”

Things that are discrete are separate and distinct from each other.  “Jones set up discrete budgetary categories for his various expenditures.”

Got that?

Good.

 

Another Thing Not to Do

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As a general rule, avoid writing dialect.  If you don’t have a dead-on ear for that sort of thing, it’s not going to work — and the failure state of attempted dialect is truly dire.  Not only do you risk coming off as unintentionally funny (and “funny” is just one of the many many things in writing that you only want to be on purpose), you’re putting yourself in position to get called out for imposing a privileged outside-observer point of view upon the native speakers of whatever dialect you’re trying to write.

Furthermore, styles in writing change, and dialect has been out of fashion for some time now.  But it wasn’t always so.  English literature of the nineteenth century, in particular, was crammed full of painstaking representations of different dialects:  national dialects, regional dialects, class dialects, all carefully done in what passed (in those pre-International Phonetic Alphabet days) for phonetic spelling.  Sir Walter Scott did it — the characters in The Heart of Midlothian speak Scots broad enough to carpet a floor with — and Mark Twain did it and even Alfred, Lord Tennyson did it (check out his Northern Farmer: Old Style and Northern Farmer: New Style for a couple of wince-worthy examples.)  One reason for the popularity of written-out dialect pronunciation may have been the common practice at the time of reading books out loud in the family circle; if the reader wanted to “do the voices”, the written-out dialect would give him or her some guidelines.

Sometimes, the way the writer transcribed a character’s dialect said as much about the writer’s own dialect and that of his or her intended audience as it did about that of the characters.  Check out the coastal New England dialect as depicted by an educated Englishman for an English audience in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, for example.

(The Heart of Midlothian and Captains Courageous are both good books in spite of the dialect writing.  I don’t really recommend the Tennyson, though, except as a curiosity.)

 

 

Peeve of the Day

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(Because I’ve got a summer cold and it’s a day for feeling peevish.)

Another pair for the Homonyms to Watch Out For list:  canon and cannon.

Canon, with one n, is the received texts for something, or the authorized meaning of it.  (Or a piece of music written in counterpoint, or a member of the clergy.)

Cannon, with two n‘s, is a piece of artillery.

Not the same thing at all.

No POV Beyond This Point

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That’s what the sign said, anyway, in the parking lot of the Base Exchange.  What they meant, of course, was Personally Owned Vehicle — which is military-speak for the family car.  All the same, it gave aspiring-writer me a memorable moment of mental bogglement, because the same acronym, in writer-speak, is shorthand for Point Of View, and Point Of View is everywhere.

In the universe of fiction, nothing happens without an observer; without observation, the story would not exist.  Even the so-called “third person objective” has an observer — third person objective is nothing but observation.  It’s the “fly on the wall” viewpoint, the “camera’s eye” viewpoint, which gives the reader action and dialogue and description but nothing interior to the characters or to the narrator.  (This is all elaborate sleight of hand, or sleight of mind — the writer is only pretending not to judge or comment on what’s going on.  In fact, every detail is selected out of the near-infinite number of possible details with an eye to how it’s going to contribute to the impression the writer wants to make on the mind of the reader.  Not surprisingly, third person objective is fiendishly hard to do well, or to carry off at length; most of the famous examples, such as Hemingway’s “The Killers”, are short stories.)

At the other end of the spectrum from third person objective is the omniscient point of view favored by Victorian novelists.  For a long time in the mid to late twentieth century, omniscient POV fell out of favor, the victim of changes in literary fashion.  Not surprisingly, given the lack of contemporary models, most of the writers who attempted to write in omni POV struggled with the process; failed attempts at omni were denigrated as “head-hopping.”  It takes a keen eye and a steady hand to manage access to the interior lives of all a story’s characters, and to move freely between them without jarring or disorienting the reader.

Occupying the middle of the spectrum is tight-third POV, and its variant form, multiple tight-third.  In tight-third, the writer allows him- or herself privileged access to the interior life of only a single character — or, in multiple tight-third, to only a single character in a particular scene.  Tight-third, whether single or multiple, is probably the most common point of view in contemporary fiction, and to the extent that anything in this business is easy, it’s probably the easiest to get right.

Outside of the objective/tight-third/omni spectrum we have the varyingly-weird outliers:  first-person, the “reader, I married him” point of view; second-person, the “you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” point of view; and oddities such as the epistolary story, told through letters and other documents.  They’re all hard to write in their different ways, and a certain proportion of your audience is going to find them off-putting (there are readers out there who will never read a first-person story, for example, or a first-person story where the gender of the narrator doesn’t match the gender of the author, even though the text is plainly labelled “fiction.”)

What point of view should you use for your story?  As so often in the writing business, the answer is, “It depends.”  If your main character is talking to you in a distinctive voice and won’t shut up, first-person may be the answer.  If you’re concerned with how the society of the story both affects and deals with the events of the narrative, and if you feel up to the challenge, then omniscient POV may be what you’re looking for.  When in doubt, though, it’s always a good idea to go first for tight-third.  No reader is going to question that choice, and it’s one with a lot of good models available for emulation.

But if tight-third isn’t working for you, or if your narrative persists in veering toward one of the other models, then try the various alternatives until you find the one that clicks.

Go. Look. Read This.

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Christopher R. Beha’s essay, “The Marquise Went out at Five O’clock: On Making Sentences Do Something”, is chock-full of good crunchy insights and thoughtful advice and things I would have liked to say only he’s saying them first and better.  A snippet:

People can disagree, and have, over whether a novel or a story must itself have a “purpose” apart from being beautiful. But it seems to me inarguable that the parts of a novel or a story must have a purpose within the whole. These days, when I find that a sentence I’m writing isn’t working, I don’t think about what I want that sentence to look like or to be; I don’t pull it from the page to weigh it in my hand; I don’t worry over its internal balance. I simply ask myself, “What do I need this sentence to do?” I ask myself what role the sentence plays in its paragraph, what role the paragraph plays in its scene, the scene in its story. If I can’t answer these questions, even in some inarticulate and intuitive way, then I’ve got a problem, and that problem is bigger than this one sentence.

Speaking as a person who spends a lot of time wrestling with sentences, both her own and others, I can only say, Yes.  This is how it is.  Yes.

Pitfalls Comma the Avoiding of

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Offhand, I’m thinking that “strident,” as a descriptive term, should for the foreseeable future be restricted to things like ambulance sirens and fire alarms.

Getting Tense

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I hate it when an otherwise literate writer uses may in past-tense narrative where might should have been used instead: “If there was any truth to {Name }’s story, {the villains } may already be in hot pursuit.”

No. That’s wrong. It should be “If there was any truth to {Name }’s story, {the villains } might already be in hot pursuit.” May goes with the present tense: “If there is any truth to {Name }’s story, {the villains } may already be in hot pursuit.”

(The question of “was” vs. “were” I’ll let slip, given the moribund nature of the English subjunctive.)

There. I just had to get that off my chest, is all.

One, Two, Three

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The general rule, for position of things in a linear sequence:  The final position is the most emphatic, the initial position is the second-most emphatic, and the middle position is the least emphatic.

In terms of sentence structure, this is why you shouldn’t end a sentence with a weakening word like “though” or “however” (unless you have a specific reason for wanting that particular kind of anticlimactic effect), and why you should arrange your main and subordinate clauses in such a way as to reserve the final position for your most important idea.

In terms of plot structure, it goes a long way toward explaining why the middle of the book is always the hardest part to write.

Reading like a Writer

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If you want to be a writer, they say, you first have to be a reader.

And it’s true.  We learn our craft by emulation, observing those who came before us and patterning our works on theirs, taking what they’ve left us for our foundations and building new structures out of our own material.  But before we start reading as writers, with one eye always turned toward observing how the thing is done, we read purely as an audience, as most people who are not themselves writers read — and we lose this, I think, once we learn to read as writers.

Mark Twain knew the phenomenon, though he first encountered it in his days as an apprentice riverboat pilot.  In Life on the Mississippi, he writes of observing a beautiful sunset on the river, and then of watching the same sunset as a pilot would see it:

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling ‘boils’ show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the ‘break’ from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark.

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.

What he had gained in knowledge, he had lost in the ability to see the river as a naive observer.  Writers suffer a similar loss; it makes us tend to admire technical virtuosity, or the ability to carry off what we know is a difficult effect, or a piece of well-managed complexity, and keeps us from experiencing the text in the same way as a non-writing reader would experience it.

Which wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that those non-writing readers, in most cases, are the audience that we’re writing for.   So we need to keep firm control of the temptation to play complicated games with our text for the sake of amusing and impressing our fellow writers; or if we must play games, we should remember to give the rest of our audience value for money as well.