Maybe I’m just being more than usually peevish this week . . . but for the love of Mike, people, it’s “for all intents and purposes”, not “for all intensive purposes”!
That is all.
Tag: peeves
Peeve of the Day
Today’s peeve, gentlethings of the reading audience, is “seemed” (with a guest performance by its close cousin, “appeared.”)
Nine times out of ten, “seemed” is unnecessary. This means that you’ll encounter ineffective sentences that say things like, “He seemed to be enjoying the party” when “He was enjoying the party” would do — the “seemed to be” doesn’t add to the force the verb, but detracts from it. “Appeared to be” works the same way.
Q. All right then. So when is it appropriate to use “seemed”?
A. Mainly, when there is in fact some kind of contradiction between the surface appearance of something — its outward seeming — and its inward reality:
“He seemed to be enjoying the party. (But inwardly, he was a seething mass of nerves and insecurity.)”
Today’s Link of Interest
A post from harm·less drudg·ery about descriptive and prescriptive grammarians, and what (in the opinion of a reasonable descriptivist) a reasonable prescriptive grammarian ought and ought not to do.
Full disclosure, here: I’m firmly in the descriptivist camp, both by training and by inclination. A language that doesn’t change is dead; the spoken language is primary and the written language — however much I may love it — is secondary; and trying to stop language change is like trying to stop the tide from coming in.
(Nevertheless: it’s sneaked, not snuck, in written discourse; alright is a barbarism; and orientated instead of oriented is wrong, wrong, wrong. We all have our bits of beach we want to keep dry.)
Peeve of the Day: Dashes vs. Ellipses
There are two ways to end a line of dialogue that isn’t meant to stand as a complete sentence. One is with a dash, the other is with ellipses (those three spaced dots, remember?)
They aren’t interchangeable.
Ellipses are for utterances that trail off in some manner:
“Well,” she said, “if that’s what you really want . . . .” (That’s the ellipses, plus a period.)
“Well . . . if that’s what you really want, I suppose it’ll have to do.” (That’s just the ellipses, showing how the speaker lets his or her voice trail off into a significant pause before going on to the rest of the sentence.
Dashes are for utterances that are broken off or are interrupted:
“I told you I wanted–”
“I know what you told me, but the store was all out of them.”
Or:
“And the winner is–”
(Drum roll.)
“Anastasia Oddfellow of East Drumstick, New Jersey!”
Got it? Good.
John Scalzi Gets His Rant On
…in “A Creator’s Note to ‘Gatekeepers'”, a post with which I agree, as they say, times eleventy-one.
(A lot of self-nominated gatekeepers, in my own experience, are stuffy purists of one variety or another–the sort of people who, if they’re cooks, only write recipes for people who live where they can purchase absolutely authentic ingredients, rather than making do with locally available near-equivalents; the sort of people who don’t want anyone to listen to a Bach concerto unless it’s played on authentic Baroque instrument; and so on. The sort of people, in fact, for whom an experience is spoiled once the wrong sort of people show up and start enjoying it. It’s a variety of snobbery, and it annoys me greatly.)
Peeve of the Day
Today’s pet peeve, O my readers (you patient and long-suffering lot), is presentism in historical fiction.
What, I ask you, is the point of writing stories set in the past if everybody in them — or at least every character intended to be liked or admired by the reader — thinks and at least desires to act like an enlightened specimen of twenty-first century humanity? And yet there is a market for such stories, possibly because not every reader-for-pleasure wants to spend his or her time working at the admittedly difficult job of empathizing with characters who might possibly hold opinions or indulge in practices of which twenty-first century persons do not approve. For it is an almost inescapable fact that even the most enlightened and progressive person of a past era will hold at least one or two opinions which are at best incomprehensible and at worst repugnant to the modern mind. (They smoke like chimneys. They spank their children. They truly believe not just in the rightness but in the vigorous exportation of Western civilization and Protestant Christianity. And so on.) The past isn’t just another country; sometimes it’s practically another planet. And space aliens live there.
In the immortal words of the old New Yorker cartoon, I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. But then, I’m a science fiction and fantasy sort of person, with the science fiction and fantasy cast of mind, which means that I’m the sort of reader who can derive pleasure from trying to think like a space alien for an hour or two. That cast of mind makes the awareness that these people are not like us into a feature, rather than a bug, of true historical fiction. The “not like us” factor is also what, in my opinion, distinguishes historical fiction from historical romances,† which choose to emphasize the points of commonality — the “these people are a lot like us after all” bits — rather than the points of difference.
†And I’ll save time right now by agreeing that it isn’t either the quality of the research or the quality of the writing that distinguishes historical fiction from historical romance — it’s the angle of approach. And I enjoy a historical romance as much as the next person, when I’m in the right mood.
Thought for the Day
The shape of a good story in usually implied in all of its parts, including the beginning.
It’s always a good sign when the reader is able to guess at that ultimate shape from reading the first two or three chapters, rather like a paleontologist inferring the shape of a T-Rex from a couple of bones. Conversely, if the animal as ultimately reconstructed turns out to be wildly different from the one suggested by that first handful of bones, an acute observer may well conclude that something went wrong — either in the final assembly, or in the selection of parts.
Most readers are more acute observers than you might think. And writing a story whose front end promises something that the rest of the story doesn’t deliver is a prime route to reader disgruntlement.
A Plaintive Query
Doesn’t anybody know how to use the past perfect any more?
(I’m reading slush these days, along with everything else. All aspiring writers should do some slush reading if they get the chance. It’s an enlightening experience, and far more entertaining than, say, grading freshman essays, which I’ve also done in my time. Even the worst slush in the world was written by somebody who actively wanted to be putting words on paper, or pixels on screen; even the very best freshman essays, on the other hand, have a certain forced, gun-to-the-temple quality about them. Also, when you’re reading slush, once you get to the point where you’re convinced that a piece is hopeless, you can stop. With freshman essays, there’s no such release.)
Another Thing Not to Do
If you’ve got a character speaking a line of dialogue and also performing an action, don’t get into the habit of always putting the action into a participial phrase tacked on after the dialogue tag:
“This is an important announcement,” she said, taking her place at the podium and opening her notebook.
No. It needs to be either:
“This is an important announcement.” She took her place at the podium and opened her notebook.
or
She took her place at the podium and opened her notebook. “This is an important announcement.”
Save the participial phrases for occasions when the dialogue and the action are truly simultaneous:
“Listen up, people!” she snapped, slamming the notebook down on the podium.
or when the action’s mostly a bit of stage business, there for characterization or setting-establishment or pacing:
“Listen up, people,” she said, shooing away a moth that was trying to fly into the Coleman lantern.
(Who gets to decide what’s important and what’s stage-dressing? You do. It’s your story. Just remember to keep on listening to what it’s telling you. And remember, audiences like variation.)
Unnecessary Endings
Thanks to the magic of home video, I finally got a chance to watch Spielberg’s Lincoln — which is not, despite its title and its director, a sprawling epic biopic. It’s actually, for the most part, a tightly focused docudrama about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, in which Abraham Lincoln employs every political tool in the book, up to and including bald-faced lies and outright bribes, in order to secure the crossover votes in the House of Representatives necessary to bring about the abolition of slavery. The story ends with Mr. Lincoln leaving a gathering of his political associates in order to join Mrs. Lincoln for a night out at the theater, in a lovely moody shot of the President walking down a darkened White House corridor toward the lighted doorway at the end.
Unfortunately, the movie goes on for several minutes after that.
We get the assassination — well, actually, we get an audience at a different performance in another theatre being told that the President has just been shot. (I suppose this was meant to be clever film-making, but it felt to me like a bait-and-switch. Mileage, of course, may vary.) We get Mary Todd Lincoln weeping at the deathbed. We get “Now he belongs to the ages.” We get a final Inspiring Voiceover Montage. And I’m damned if I know why the movie needed any of that stuff, unless it was for the historical enlightenment of the three or four people in Outer Mongolia who don’t already know that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while watching a play at Ford’s Theater.
The whole thing reminded me of another movie with an equally unnecessary ending — First Knight, the Arthurian film with Richard Gere as Lancelot and Sean Connery as King Arthur. Except for the assumption that any woman in possession of her right mind could possibly prefer Gere† to Connery, First Knight was a perfectly serviceable film adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight of the Cart, and would have worked just fine if they’d left it at that. But the film-maker stuck a Mort D’Arthur sequence onto the end of it, presumably because nobody involved trusted the audience to remember what was going to happen a few years down the fictional road.
One of the good things about being in the business of making novels and short stories instead of films is that we can get away with putting a bit more trust in the intelligence — and the literacy — of our audience.
†Of that vintage, at least. Perversely, as Gere’s gotten older he’s acquired a kind of sleazy shopworn charm that is attractive in its own right. But I digress.
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