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.”
Tag: revising
The One-Third Principle
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.
Tales from the Before Time
This is a story from the days before electronic submissions, when all the internet was on dial-up and the web hadn’t yet been invented, and printing was done by dot-matrix printers on fanfold paper, and writers — by which I mean in this case my husband/co-author and I — turned in their novels in the form of four-and-five-inch-deep stacks of hard copy.
So there we were, on a sunny summer day, motoring down to New York from far northern New Hampshire, with the intention of handing over a stack of hard copy to our publisher and (if we were lucky) getting a lunch downtown on the strength of it. Under ordinary circumstances, we would have used the post office like normal people, but as it happens we were piggybacking the novel delivery onto a family visit in Westchester County. We were also hauling our complete computer setup — CPU, monitor, printer, and all — with us in the back of our mini-van, because my co-author’s other paying job at the time was as managing sysop for one of the pre-web online communities, and he couldn’t leave the place unwatched.
About fifteen minutes into what was going to be a six hour drive, my co-author said, “The middle of the book doesn’t work.”
I made a noise like Donald Duck being goosed with a cattle prod. “What do you mean, ‘the middle of the book doesn’t work’?”
“Don’t worry. I know how to fix it.”
And, in fact, he did. Because the novel in question was a space opera, “fixing it” ended up requiring the insertion of an entire space battle of epic proportions, plus all of its foreshadowing and repercussions, written in a single thirty-six hour push by the two of us hot-seating it at our computer in the living room of his family’s house.
But that turned out to be the easy part, because then we had to print out the hard copy — something we’d originally planned to do in a leisurely manner the day before we were to take the train from Mount Kisco into Manhattan, and which we now had to accomplish in the narrow window of time between writing “The End” to the revised novel at sometime past midnight and leaving for the train station in the mid-morning of the following day. And then, at around two in the morning, we discovered that the brand of dot-matrix printer we owned had a Feature: in order to protect the print head from burning out through overheating, whenever the print head got too hot the printer would simply stop printing until the print head cooled down.
We were in a house without air conditioning, on a sultry night in August, and we had a deadline.
“We do not care about the integrity of the print head,” we said. “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.”
So we took the cover off the printer, set a fan blowing directly onto the print head, and let ‘er rip.
We finished printing out the manuscript with a couple of minutes to spare, and spent the train ride into Manhattan separating the fanfold pages and tearing off the perforated tractor-feed strips so as to turn the printout into a stack of hard copy fit to hand over to an editor.
Which we did, and then we had lunch. Martinis may have been involved, because we felt that under the circumstances, we deserved them.
I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, other than that if you need to fix the middle of the story, you do what you have to do in order to get it fixed; or possibly, that writers under pressure can come up with workable solutions to all sorts of things.
Also — laptop computers, broadband internet, and electronic manuscript submissions are all awesome developments; and I don’t miss fanfold computer paper at all.
Bowknots
If the endgame of a novel is hard to write, the bit that comes after the endgame is even harder. This is the part I think of as the “tying up all the loose ends into a bowknot” stage of a project – and when I reach it, I have to struggle every time against the urge to simply ring down the curtain on the action climax and be done
But I know that I can’t let myself do that, because skimping on the bowknot stage is a quick way to leave the readers unhappy and unsatisfied with the entire rest of the book. The bowknot is the part where all the plot coupons get gathered up, and What Was Really Going On gets summarized and explained, and everyone gets played out with sweet music and the implication that the world of the story extends beyond the FINIS and the fade to black. Tying the bowknot is not the fun part of writing the novel, it’s the part that has to be done with sheer bloody craftsmanship, and sometimes it’s like pulling teeth.
The other thing to know about bowknots (and this took me longer that it should have to figure out, which is why the last scene of my first novel got rewritten multiple times) is that the length of an effective bowknot is proportional to the size of the work itself. A short story can be tied up in a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. A novel can take a whole chapter, or sometimes more.
How do you know you’ve tied up your bowknot in an adequate fashion? Your best bet is to find a reliable outside reader and bind him or her with strong oaths to tell you truly whether or not the ending works. Don’t be surprised if it takes several iterations of the process and more than one outside reader to arrive at an acceptable finished product.
And don’t worry too much. Getting the ending right is a matter of craft, which means it’s something that can be learned, and that can be improved with practice.
Go. Look. Read This.
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.
Revision Research Weirdness
Today’s odd job: Invoking the awesome power of the internet in order to determine whether or not the closed and abandoned 86th Street Station on the commuter train line in to Grand Central could be used to gain access to the street above.
Our editor had queried this, since the stairs leading up from the old platform are covered at street level by secure hatches.
We eventually found a photo reference showing one of the hatches standing open, with the panic bar on the underside clearly visible. Victory!
(All this, in the service of about three paragraphs whose sole purpose is to get our protagonist from point A to point B without being spotted by the people who are watching for him at all the regular exits. But here as elsewhere, God is in the details.)
Dots and Dashes
Or, This is Not a Guide to Proper Punctuation.
Because where punctuation is concerned, the dirty little secret is that most of the rules are a lot more like local customs. Different languages have different customary punctuation, and so do different time periods. Medieval English texts had next to no punctuation at all — once in a while, if the text was meant to be sung or chanted, the scribe might throw in a mark that would someday be a comma or an apostrophe, as a way of saying to the reader, “take a breath here; you’re going to need it.”
Modern editions of older texts — especially the renaissance and medieval stuff — often impose modern punctuation on the material, in the interest of making it more accessible to the reader. Standardized, or at least sort of standardized, punctuation came in with printing, and it was the printers, not the writers or the readers, who more-or-less codified it.
Even today, there’s a lot more leeway in the area of punctuation than your old high-school grammar texts would have had you believe. Sure, sentences need to end with a period or a question mark or an exclamation point, and using a comma splice instead of a semicolon is just plain wrong, but when it comes to things like whether to use a colon or a dash, or paired dashes instead of parentheses, or serial-comma-yes versus serial-comma-no . . . you’re on your own.
And don’t worry too much. You can get away with almost anything, so long as you’re consistent about it.
(Get your dialogue punctuation right, though. It’s all purely arbitrary, done according to conventional rules that are easy enough to learn and to follow, and to check for errors in the final draft. And messing them up is likely to put off a potential reader faster than almost anything.)
Sentence Structure Peeve of the Day
(Because I’m the sort of person who gets peevish over sentence structure.)
It’s a common fault in the work of beginning writers, or in the early drafts of texts by experienced writers (but what makes the writers experienced is that they know how to spot their faults and remove them in the second draft): They will write sentences where the important idea, or one of the important ideas, is relegated to a subordinate clause — or, worse, a modifying phrase — like this:
Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided, his desire to act on his own still surging through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.
That’s a bad sentence for a lot of reasons (and deliberately writing a bad sentence is work, let me tell you), but structurally it’s a bad sentence because there’s an important idea buried in it that should be given space to stand on its own. Important ideas deserve their own independent clauses. Like this:
Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided. His desire to act on his own still surged through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.
It’s still a bad sentence (or set of sentences.) But at least it’s not a structurally bad sentence.
He Said, She Said, They Said
A quick peeve-in-passing, and a word or two of advice:
Continue reading “He Said, She Said, They Said”
Sometimes Spellcheck is Not Your Friend
Everybody knows by now to spellcheck their manuscript before they send it out into the wide wide world. What they don’t always know is that for a certain category of problems, spellcheck is not enough. Continue reading “Sometimes Spellcheck is Not Your Friend”
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