Tag: words words words

A Surfeit of Good Advice

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Aspiring and neophyte writers are always looking for advice (though sometimes, I suspect, it’s not so much advice that they’re looking for as company in their struggles, and a sign that somebody out there takes them seriously), and lots of people are happy to give it to them.

People tell them, “Avoid adverbs.”

People tell them, “Don’t use the passive voice.”

People tell them, “Make your prose lean and economical; eschew elegant writing and special effects.”

So they weed out adverbs assiduously from their final drafts, and turn every possible passive sentence into an active one, and put their prose on a fitness regimen guaranteed to take it down to zero per cent body fat.  All of this is hard work, and they are proud of it when they’re done.

And usually, their prose is the better for it, because they were, after all, neophyte writers, and stood to learn a lot from that much intense concentration on their texts.

But then they start hanging out with more rarefied givers of advice, who speak disparagingly of the elimination of nuance by the compulsive eradication of adverbs, and who point out that sometimes the passive voice is just what’s needed to convey the relationship between the subject of the sentence and the action of the verb, and who wax eloquent in their appreciation of leisurely, expansive prose.

And the neophyte writers bury their heads in their manuscripts and weep.   Will nobody, they say, will nobody tell them which side is right?

Alas, no.  Becoming a writer means learning to live with uncertainty.  All I can offer are some general guidelines:  don’t use too many adverbs; don’t overuse the passive voice; and try not to use more words than you need for whatever it is that you want to try.  But don’t stop trying.  It’s better to attempt something new and not have it work right the first time than it is to never try anything new at all.

We didn’t become writers because we were risk-averse.

On Writing Forsoothly

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“Writing forsoothly” is the term we like to use around the house for all the different varieties of bad pseudo-archaic diction that infest modern fantasy — historical and created-world fantasy in particular.  J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly to blame for a lot of it, because his characters do like their elevated language; what unobservant readers miss is the way that Tolkien modulates his characters’ dialogue, moving effortlessly from plain vernacular to almost-archaic high formal speech and back again, depending upon the situation and the company.  Strider the Ranger has a much commoner way of talking than Aragorn the Heir to the Throne of Gondor, but at the same time they’re both recognizably the same guy.

It’s probably unwise to play with writing in extreme forsoothly unless you can at least approach Tolkien’s level of skill and language-awareness.  It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, and the failure mode is dire.  But if you’re determined to give it a try — and nobody ever makes any progress in this game unless they regularly try things that they aren’t certain will work — there are a few things it will help to do first.

One:  Ask yourself, “Is this really the direction my writing talent lies in?” and answer it honestly.  If your interior Magic 8-Ball refuses to yield up anything more specific than “reply hazy; ask again later,” find a kind but honest friend and ask them.  Kind, because you don’t want your self-image pulled down and stomped upon with hobnailed boots; and honest, because you’re not asking them for sympathy, you’re asking them for the truth.

Two:  Prepare yourself.  Read genuine period or formal writing until it dribbles out of your ears.  If you start talking in Shakespearean or Regency English at the breakfast table, you’re probably ready.  And a good thing, too, because at that point your friends and family are either bored stiff with your project, or convinced that you’re going nuts.

Three: Stop researching and write.  Don’t worry about getting all the nuances down perfectly; you can always polish the heck out of the language in your second — or third or fourth or fifth — draft.

Four:  Go find that kind but honest friend again.  This time, ask them if the archaic or formal language in fact worked; and ask them, also, whether they think you got it right but took it too far.  As with so many other things in writing, a light hand is best.

(For an interesting example of archaic diction done well in an unexpected venue, check out the historical romance For My Lady’s Heart, by Laura Kinsale, now available again in e-book format after a long while out of print.)

Because I Couldn’t Post in Time Last Night

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And because I hate to miss two days in a row when I’m not on a road trip, and always feel guilty when I do:

Presented for your amusement:  The Most Interesting Writer in the World.

Another Brief Note on Names

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The other day, I talked about portentous weather.  Which led, in the course of time, to thinking about portentous names — by which I mean the sort of name that tells the reader right up front what he or she is supposed to think about a character.

The Victorians loved this sort of thing.  Dickens positively reveled in it, especially for his secondary characters, who rejoiced in names like Thomas Gradgrind and Wackford Squeers; Gilbert and Sullivan parodied it in Ruddigore, when the trusty servant Adam Goodheart, upon his employer’s assumption of the role of Bad Baronet, changes his name to Gideon Crawle.

These days, most writers go for subtler effects — with at least one prominent exception.  I refer, of course, to J. K. Rowling, who didn’t hesitate to give her secondary characters names like Malfoy and Crouch and Shacklebolt, and her readers loved her for it.

Elsewhere: In Praise of Good Sentences

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From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a blog post on memorable sentences.

The post, and the comments, have some good ones, though so far they seem to have missed James Thurber completely.  At one point in my life I not only could quote Thurber extensively, I would — under sufficient provocation — actually do so.  (How could I not admire a writer who could come up with lines like “He was six-feet-four and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was”?)

Anyhow — go over there and read the post and the comments.

The Nature of the Beast

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Most writers (and by that, like most writers, I mean “most writers who are like me, but not the other ones”) don’t spend a lot of time before or during the writing of a particular piece in fretting about whether it’s straight science fiction/fantasy or magical realism.  We write the story, and worry about determining its genre afterward — or we let the editor and the publisher and the readers worry about it, which is easier, and lets us get on to the next project.

There are a lot of theories about the difference between straight science fiction/fantasy  and magical realism.  For my money, the big difference between the two is that in straight sf/fantasy the non-realistic elements are meant to be regarded as actually there and actually happening (the elves are real and physically present elves; the spaceship is a real spaceship and not — or at any rate, not just –a metaphor for escape; the zombies really are a shambling undead menace and they really do want to eat your brains); but in magical realism, the non-realistic elements serve mainly as extended metaphors.

That’s an incomplete definition, of course.  In my more cynical moments, I suspect that in the end the determination of the story’s genre will be done by whatever market you sell it to.  If it goes to one of the mainstream markets — places like The New Yorker or The Atlantic† (hey, why not think big?) or one of the literary magazines — it’ll probably be classified as magical realism, or possibly as “slipstream” if they’re trying to be genre-friendly.  If it goes to one of the sf/fantasy magazines, then it will be known as sf/fantasy for the rest of its natural life.

My own inclination, with an edge-case story like that, would be to try for the mainstream commercial magazines first, on the grounds that while they’re a long shot, they pay really well and publication there brings instant recognition.  After that, unless I had a strong reason not to want my story identified as sf/fantasy, I’d probably bypass the literary magazines and go straight to the sf/fantasy mags, because by and large the literary magazines pay more in prestige than they do in cash.

†It used to be The Atlantic Monthly, but they changed the name after they stopped putting out twelve issues a year.

Stet

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Stet is Latin for “let it stand.”  It’s also a word of power for dealing with copyeditors who have — in the author’s opinion — overstepped the limits of their job.

A good copyeditor is the author’s friend.  He or she will do things like keeping track of a whole extended family of fictional characters across a multi-volume series, with accompanying fictional place-names and scraps of invented language, so that even if the author fails to do the math and accidentally keeps the same minor character twenty-five years old for almost a decade, the mistake will be fixed before the book hits print.   Characters who enter a scene wearing a t-shirt and jeans will not leave it wearing khaki cargo pants and a flannel button-down, unless they’ve been witnessed changing clothes in the interim.  The setting sun will not shine in through what can only be an eastward-facing window (if the author has supplied enough detail for a reader to infer the layout of the manor house, a good copyeditor will keep that layout in mind.)

In short, a good copyeditor will make you look smarter than you really are, and will ensure that your book is as good as it deserves to be.  If you get a particularly good or face-saving copyedit, it’s a kindness to tell your editor to pass along your thanks to the copyeditor — rather like sending your compliments to the chef — and to mention that if they’re free the next time you have a book come up on the schedule, you’d love to work with them again.

Bad copyedits . . . let’s just say that it’s almost impossible to be a professional writer and not fall victim to at least one staggeringly awful copyedit.    Authors gather in bars and tell copyeditor horror stories.  (To be fair, the group at the other end of the bar is a gang of copyeditors, telling author horror stories.  If no man is a hero to his valet, no author is a hero to his copyeditor.)  At times like these, it helps to keep in mind that the book is, in the end, your book, and to remember the magic word.

Stet.

A Plaintive Query

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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.)

Things It Doesn’t Help to Complain to the Author About:

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The cover art for their book.  You may hate it with a passion; you may think that it misrepresents both the plot and the theme of the book in the worst way possible; you may feel that it reeks of sexism, racism, classism, and other -isms as yet unknown to social science.  Complaining to the author will not do any good, because in the hierarchy of people who have a say in a book’s cover art, the author ranks somewhere just barely above the office cleaning crew and the folks in the mail room.  With the rare exception of publishing’s 800-pound gorillas, the author’s traditional role in the selection of cover art is limited to bitching about it afterward.

Problems with the printing and typography of their book.  If your copy of the book has Chapter 27 replaced by an equivalent number of pages from Love’s Tacky Splendor, that isn’t the author’s fault.  Bad stuff can happen to good books when they go to the printer, and somewhere out there is a printing of Love’s Tacky Splendor that has Chapter 27 replaced by a chunk of impeccably-researched hard science fiction.  Those readers — and that author — aren’t going to be pleased about this either.

Problems with the sales and availability of their book.  The author’s control of these issues is approximately zero point zilch.  Finding out that there are no copies of their book to be found anywhere in the entire state of North Dakota is not going to make them any happier.

In all of these cases, as it happens, the appropriate entity to direct your complaints to is the publisher.