Tag: techniques

Another Thing Not to Do

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

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

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

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.)

Disaster Prep

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

It looks like Hurricane Sandy is going to hit the East Coast like a fist.  Even here in far northern New Hampshire, with an entire mountain range between us and the shoreline, the local public works guys are pre-positioning road barriers and suchlike in case of flooding from heavy rain.  (When you have local landmarks with names like Roaring Brook, it’s not hard to guess what lots of rain coming down on the tops of the local mountains can do to the land at the bottom.)  And everybody in Vermont is hoping that this storm doesn’t decide to pull an Irene and come ramping and stamping up the Connecticut River Valley, because some places over there haven’t yet recovered from the last set of floods.  And all of our friends on the coast, from Boston down to Baltimore, are white-knuckling it while they wait to find out just where Sandy’s punch is going to strike hardest.

If you’re in any of the likely-to-be-affected areas, don’t forget to secure your writing while you’re bringing the lawn chairs inside and laying in a supply of bottled water and batteries.  Nobody wants to be left in the position of having to either rewrite an entire book from the beginning or toss it out as an impossible job.

There are a number of different ways to make certain your work-in-progress stays safe.  Offsite backup to the cloud, via services like Dropbox or Google Drive, is a good starting point.  (If you don’t like or trust cloud computing, you can always e-mail a copy of the current WIP to a trusted friend.)  A flash drive or portable hard drive that you can shove into your pocket or your laptop case on the way out the door is also a good idea — that way, if you end up crashing for a week with Great-Aunt Eunice who lives in a big house on high ground with no internet and a dozen cats, you can still keep on working as long as you’ve got power.

As for the storm itself — you’re a writer.  Observe, and take copious mental notes.  It’s what we do.

More on Names

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

A couple of thoughts on names, as I surface from the depths of deadline madness:

Avoid alliteration and echo.  (I know — you saw what I did there.)  If you’ve got one character named Fred, don’t name his best friend Frank.  The same goes for his worst enemy, his favorite second cousin, or any other major character he’s likely to interact with on a regular basis.  And don’t name his sister Frances, either.  Your readers will thank you.

In the real world, of course, you’re likely to find clusters of alliteration all over the place — we’re all of us likely to know more people than there are vowels and consonants in the alphabet.  But fiction isn’t the real world.

Also: When inventing names for characters in a created-world fantasy, it’s generally a bad idea to borrow names wholesale from an existing or past this-world culture — your readers may make assumptions about your imagined culture that you didn’t intend, or may decide that you’ve borrowed more than just the names.  This is a can of worms you don’t want to open by accident.  (Cans of worms should only be opened deliberately and after considerable forethought.)

Making up your own names out of nothing but a handful of phonemes is a tricky process, depending a lot upon having a good ear for such things — and fewer people have a good ear for such things than think they do.  There are computer programs these days that generate English nonsense-words, meaningless but pronounceable collections of phonemes that can be sifted through for potential names:  Gammadyne’s Random Word Generator is a full-featured program with a lot of customizable options; or if you’re looking for something quick and free, the nonsense word generator on this page will display you a list.  Of course, you’re still stuck sorting through lists of words like Acenmithok, Cegraen, Heunara, Seligis, Cersposhe, Lis or Ellets, Michapere, Abiled, Aliger, Dernald for the ones that’ll actually work .

My own keepers out of that bunch, if they were all going to be characters in the same story, would be Heunara, Seligis, Lis, and Dernald; Heunara and Lis would be female and Seligis and Dernald would be male.  But that’s mostly because I’m arrogant enough to believe that I do have a good ear for such things.  Or at least a trained one.

(A quick-and-dirty shortcut, if you don’t want to go the computer-generated route:  Look at the names of minor characters in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.  They’re pronounceable, they’re in the fantastical vein, and they draw on the raw material of the common French/English/Celtic name-hoard without being obvious about it.)

A Thankless Task and a Helpful Tool

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

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

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

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.”

While I’m Discoursing on Trivia

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

I’d just like to say that I find the use of the European-style initial-dash method of dialogue punctuation by writers of English-language fiction to be pretentious in the extreme. It contributes no extra meaning to the text itself; it’s present solely as a signifier that the work in question is — despite the presence of possible overt genre clues to the contrary — meant to be read as serious literature.

Not that I’ve got any firm opinions on the subject, or anything.

(It also makes me feel like the characters aren’t actually talking loudly enough to be heard — instead, they’re standing somewhere just out of earshot and muttering.)

Bowknots

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

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.

No POV Beyond This Point

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

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.

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

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.