Tag: writing

Tying Up the Loose Ends

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The hardest part of a novel, sometimes, is ending it.

Because you can’t just bring the thing to a halt at the end of the main action, no matter how greatly you may be tempted.  You have do the wrap-up, the bit where — if the book in question were a fat Victorian novel — the reader would be told who got married, and who took his prize money and bought a tavern, and who took off for Australia or the Yukon and was never seen again.  This would be the classic Where Are They Now epilogue.

How long should the wrap-up be?  Unhelpfully, the best answer is “long enough.”  A short story can wrap up in a single paragraph, or a single sentence.  A novel takes longer — the longer the main story, the more wrap-up time it’s going to need.  Tolkien is notorious for ending The Lord of the Rings four times before he’s done — taking the hobbits in stages back the way they came from Gondor to the Shire, closing all his parentheses in order.

Wibble.

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I’ve either got a slight but wearying cold or a bad case of three-scenes-left-in-the-novel — whichever one it is, it’s got me feeling cranky and distracted. (For example, I lay in bed for about five minutes this morning, on the cusp between sleep and waking, while my mind tried to settle on whether today was Thursday or Friday. Eventually I woke up enough to tell myself, “It’s Wednesday, stupid,” but yeah. Distracted.)

The problem with the three scenes left in the novel is that in order to make one of them work, I’m going have to go back and tweak about four or five other scenes, because in order for the character in question to do the thing he’s about to do, it turns out that he needs to know something that he currently doesn’t. I could just tell myself, “Assume the knowledge and fix it in the revisions”, but my mind doesn’t work that way. If I don’t go back and fix those bits, the scene will stubbornly refuse to gel.

At this final stage of the game, my distractability level is always high, because so much of my mind is somewhere else altogether. At times, this can bring on a blessed kind of tunnel vision, where all worries that aren’t the book fall away for a while; at other times, all it does is make me more likely to walk into both literal and metaphorical walls.

Short Stuff

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My husband/co-author and I have sold a short story to an anthology.  This is not actually that common a thing for us, because we’re primarily novelists, and most of the story ideas that swim into our nets are novel-sized ideas.

You can’t make a lot of money writing short stories, at least not these days.  There aren’t enough markets, and the rate of pay has not increased that much over the decades.  There was a time, or so I’ve been told, when a writer of short stories could at least keep him-or-herself from starvation by writing alone; but that was also a time when magazine short fiction filled the entertainment niche occupied these days by television and the internet.

Why, then, do we write short fiction at all?

One reason, of course, is that sometimes a short-story-sized idea swims into our fishing net, and it would be wasteful to throw it back.

Another reason is that for novelists, short stories function as advertising — they keep the writer’s name out in front of the public, and they provide readers with a sample that might lure them into buying longer works.  The primary reason that people buy a book, even in the electronic age, is because they’ve already read and liked something by the same author.

Finally, while you can’t make a living writing short stories, you can — sometimes — make a reputation.  And it’s a rare writer who’ll turn up his or her nose at the idea of acquiring a modicum of extra fame.

E-Readers and Salt Cellars

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So there I was in the kitchen brewing the morning’s pot of coffee, and to while away the time while waiting for the water to boil, I propped my Nook up on the salt cellar . . . and had a thought about the depiction of technological advances in science fiction.

Part of the fun of writing science fiction is the opportunity to create a shiny bright all-new high-tech future (or a dark and grubby one, if that’s where your interest lies.)  A lot of the time, though, when we create our futures, we forget that the past doesn’t go away.  Bits and pieces of it stick around and stay in use.  If you look in the right places, you can still buy buggy whips, because there are still people who use them.  In my own small (very small — population about 2500) town, there are homes that get their energy from solar panels, and homes where the owners cut their own firewood from the trees in their wood lot and burn it in their cast-iron stoves.  The same world that has an international space station in orbit also still has sailing ships and horse-drawn plows.

Change doesn’t happen at the same rate all over the place.  And people don’t stop using old things when new things are invented:  some people can’t afford the new things, other people don’t like the new things, and some people make a hobby out of liking and using the old things even when they could easily afford the new.  Digital watches were rare and expensive, once upon a time; when they became cheap and ubiquitous, the people who cared about such things went back to wearing finely-crafted hands-on-a-dial watches instead.

Any future we think up has to be as technologically mixed-up and diverse as the present we’ve already got, or our imaginations have failed us.

This Sort of Thing Has Just Got to Stop

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 13 Comments

It’s one thing for companies to insist on ownership of patents for things developed in their labs on their time.  At least the inventors sometimes get internal recognition, not to mention resumé cred.

But now we have a school board in Prince George’s County, Maryland, that wants to assert ownership of the copyrights not just for things like lesson plans and computer apps created by teachers in the system using district-provided iPads and other tools, but also for material written or developed by students as part of a classroom assignment.

And that is just plain wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong with a side order of extremely bad and heinous.  And did I mention, just plain wrong?

Not that I feel strongly on the subject, or anything like that.

Son of Comma-tose

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As I’ve   mentioned before, a lot of comma usage is a matter of individual style and taste.  Writers and their editors (and later in the process, their copyeditors) have had many a wrangle about exactly which commas in a particular work need to stay, and which to go.  As far as who wins — well, it’s an ongoing struggle, and over time the honors are about even.

There are, however, a couple of places where the commas are not just a good idea, they’re mandatory.  (One caveat: I’m talking here about standard American English usage, because that is my native idiom.)  For example:

Standard dialogue punctuation.  If a sentence followed by an attribution to a speaker would have ended with a period if it wasn’t in dialogue, then in dialogue it has a comma followed by the closed quote followed by the attribution.

“This is how you do it,” the writer said.
“Do what?” the reader asked.
“Punctuate dialogue, dammit!” said the writer.

Nouns and phrases in apposition to other nouns. Here you have sentences with descriptive words or phrases stuffed into them, like this:

Bob’s uncle, a traveling salesman from Indiana, retired to Jacksonville, Florida, to raise alligators.

Note that the commas in this case always travel in pairs — unless the appositive falls at the end of the sentence, in which case you have sentences like these:

Bob introduced me to his uncle, a retired traveling salesman.  His uncle raised alligators on a farm near Jacksonville, Florida.

It’s not a difficult thing to learn, it’s just a pain to remember if you haven’t already gotten the patterns burned into your brain.  As with most things, practice helps.

What’s in a Name?

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New writers often ask, “Do I need a pen name?”

The answer, usually, is “No.  Unless, of course, you do.”

What do I mean by that?  Let me unpack a bit.

There are several reasons why a writer might have a true need for a pseudonym, of which security is the biggest.  A writer who is engaged in saying things about powerful people and entities to which those people and entities might take exception, for example, may choose to write under cover of a nom de plume, as Jonathan Swift did when he wrote a series of political pamphlets about English fiscal policy in 18th-century Ireland under the pseudonym of “M. B. Drapier.”

Similarly, a writer whose regular employment involves working with or for people who might look askance at one of their employees having a commitment to something other than the job might use a pen name to keep the two lives separate.  Writers who work for the government, or for the military, also fall into this general category.

Then there are the writers who, for whatever reason, don’t want their friends, or family, or co-workers to know that they write — or sometimes, to know what they write.  Schoolteachers, for example, are expected to be as above reproach as Caesar’s wife — if you’re teaching eighth-grade English as your day job and writing steamy romance novels on the side, you probably don’t want the school board to catch on.  (Not even if half of them are devoted readers of your other persona’s literary output.  They’ll just ask for your autograph out of one side of their mouths and decline to renew your contract with the other.)†

Sometimes the decision to use a pseudonym is driven by economic reasons.  An author whose previous output had a lackluster reception, or which fell prey to one or another of the assorted bad things that can happen to good books, may choose to start over under a pseudonym.   Opting for this course of action used to be a closely-guarded secret, rather like going into the Witness Protection Program, but readers are more savvy, usually, than publicists think, and the cats in those cases never stayed in the bag for long.  These days, the economy-driven pseudonyms are more about what the marketing types would call “establishing brand identity” — this is the pseudonym for the author’s YA work, and this is the sf/fantasy pseudonym, and that one over there is for mysteries and thrillers, but everybody knows that they’re all the same writer at the keyboard.

And finally, you get the writers who chose to write under a pseudonym because they don’t like the name their parents stuck them with, or they like their name just fine but know in their heart of hearts that nobody outside of their particular ethnic group is ever going to be able to pronounce it, let alone spell it right or shelve it correctly in the bookstore, or they prefer to draw a hard line between their writer-persona and their everyday-persona for some reason that is private and particular to them.

†My parents were teachers. It didn’t leave me with a high regard for school boards or school administrators in general.

Who Said What When How?

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I said I was going to talk about dialogue attribution.  Right, then.

By “dialogue attribution” I mean those “he said” and “said John Doe” and (less fortunately) “he commented/answered/stated/retorted/other-verbed” tags that get applied to lines of dialogue so that the reader can tell who’s speaking.  And I have a few points to make about them, in my peevish way.

First, you don’t need nearly as many of them as you think you do.  If your dialogue is doing its job properly, you aren’t going to need to identify the speaker every time the talking-stick gets handed over, because your speakers will sound like individuals and not all like each other.  If you’ve got an extended stretch of two-person back-and-forth, you can throw in an attribution every few lines just to keep things anchored; and if you’ve got a multi-person conference you’ll need to identify people as they jump into the discussion, and as often as necessary to keep your reader up to speed; but even in those cases, you don’t have to tag every single line of dialogue.

(How often is enough?  How often is too many?  Sadly, I have to tell you that you need to play it by ear — and if you haven’t got an ear for it yet, you’ll need to work on developing one.)

Second, you don’t need to get fancy with your verbs when you’re tagging dialogue.  When in doubt, remember that it’s hard to go wrong with a plain vanilla said.  Beyond that, you mostly want volume indicators — shouted, whispered, murmured, muttered.  (And for the love of Mike, don’t have your characters hiss things that don’t have an s– sound in them!)  Anything more than that comes perilously close to over-writing, and sometimes crosses the line.

And third, you don’t have to place the tag at the end of the line of dialogue every time.  You can put it in front:  Joe said, “It’s time.”  Or you can break up the block of dialogue and put the tag in the middle.  “It’s time,” Joe said.  “Let’s get going.”  In fact, if Joe doesn’t just have a couple of sentences of dialogue, but an entire paragraph’s worth of inspiring speechifying or careful instruction or closely-reasoned argument, don’t undercut its effect by slapping down a Joe said at the end of it with a dull and leaden thud.  Break up the block of dialogue early on to slip in the tag, then let the rest of the speech roll on to its effective climax.

“That’s it, then,” she said.  “We’re done for the night.”

One of Those Days

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Every so often, a day comes along when absolutely nothing gets done.  Today was a day like that.

Well, I did make a beef stew and push on with the current editing gig, but as accomplishments go that doesn’t count for much.

I blame the weather, because — well, why not?

And just one heartfelt plea:  before you send out your finished manuscript, take a minute to go over the rules for English dialogue punctuation and double-check to make certain that you’ve been following them.  Pretty please? With sugar on top?

Your beta readers, editors, and copyeditors will thank you.

Say It

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The simplest and best verb for dialogue attribution is said.  Plain and simple, and — as I think I’ve mentioned here before — effectively invisible.  Other verbs like replied, stated, mentioned, affirmed, and the like are also valid, but should be used sparingly and in proper context.  Replied only works when the speaker is responding directly to something somebody else has just said, for instance, and stated goes with declarative sentences in which a fact or opinion is being asserted.

And then there are the verbs which are not meant for dialogue attribution at all.  Smile, for example.  People don’t smile things, they say them.  They may say them smilingly, or say them, smiling, but smile does not equal say and shouldn’t be used as if it does.  The same goes for any other gesture or facial expression — no shrug or wink or grimace is the equivalent of speech.

I’m just sayin’.