Tag: writing

It’s Different When It’s on Purpose

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In writing, there are some things you never want to get caught doing by accident.  These are three of them.

One: being funny.  Intentional humor is hard to do — humor, like horror and erotica, is a genre that works or doesn’t on the basis of the emotional effect it has on the reader, and if that effect is missing, no other virtues in the work will make up for its absence — and failed humor is flat and leaden, but accidental humor is downright embarrassing.

Two: being ambiguous.  Artfully handled ambiguity can add richness and texture and layers of meaning to your story.  All accidental ambiguity does is confuse your readers, who will not be happy with you any more.  And no, you can’t get away with claiming after the fact that you did it on purpose when you really didn’t, because your readers can always tell.

Three:  using internal rhyme and alliteration and other sound effects.  This one’s especially tricky, because the same things done well and on purpose can be wonderful.  What you don’t want is for your reader to think that those rhymes (or whatever) crept in while you weren’t watching, and that you didn’t notice them.

It’s the difference between looking in control of your medium and looking like it’s too much for you to handle.

At the Mountains of Madness

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I am so close to the end of this book that I can taste it. Only a handful of scenes to go. But I have to fit them together in just the right configuration, and right now that feels like playing a game of three-dimensional Tetris in my head.

A Point Well-Pointed

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Because the looming deadline grows ever loomier, today’s post is a pointer to the estimable John Scalzi, saying some very true things about why it’s never a good idea to ask a professional writer to write you something for free.

The comments are also worth reading, since they point out that the same sentiments apply to, e.g., knitters and other craftspersons; and also make it clear that the friends-and-family exception to the rule is just that, an exception, and one that’s made at the discretion of the one granting it.

Not that I think anyone reading this would be so tactless as to ask a professional of any sort to do their job for free; but I do think that apprentice and journeyman professionals need to take Scalzi’s words to heart. The time to start practicing your “I’m sorry, but I don’t work for free” speech is before somebody comes around and asks you to do it.

Causes of Reader Disgruntlement: #2 in a Series

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Readers get disgruntled when they feel like they’ve put more effort into reading your book than they got pleasure out of it.

(It’s always important to bear in mind, when you’re thinking about this, that there are all sorts of readers deriving all sorts of pleasure from what they read, and you have to be able to distinguish between genuinely disgruntled members of your own audience and readers who are disgruntled because your book wasn’t written for them.  The latter aren’t your problem, no matter how much they may sound like it sometimes; the former are your problem, because you’ve failed them somehow — and while you probably can’t fix it in the book they’re unhappy about, you can try to do better in the next one.)

Anyway.  A common source of the more-effort-than-pleasure problem is unsatisfying characters.  The need for satisfying characters sometimes gets mistranslated as a demand for likeable characters, or for admirable ones (the phrase “positive role model” comes into play a lot here), or for ones with which the reader can identify.  In fact, the reader will happily follow along after a character who is none of these things — an unlikeable scoundrel who has little or nothing in common with the reader — so long as that character is interesting.  An interesting villain will hold the reader’s attention better than a boring hero, any day of the week.

How do you make a character interesting?  That’s a bigger problem than a single post can handle, but here’s one idea for a start:  give your character important things to do, and have him or her actually do them.  A proactive character is an object in motion, and objects in motion draw interest.

Comma-tose

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Of all the punctuation marks in English, the comma is probably the one where usage varies the most.  The period, the exclamation point, and the question mark are simple and straightforward by comparison; dashes and parentheses only become controversial when used to excess; semicolons are respectable and well-behaved.  But every era has its own ideas about what constitutes the proper use of the comma, and every author has his or her own preferences as well.

Some writers deploy the comma with a light hand, and strictly according to textbook grammar.  Others regard the comma as a tool for controlling sentence rhythm and pacing, over and above its grammatical functions, and use it accordingly.

Determining which sort of writer you are is one of the steps toward recognizing and cultivating your own prose style.

(At some point in your journey, you’ll probably find yourself developing a strong opinion pro or con on the question of the serial comma.  No matter which side you choose, you will at some point end up in an argument about it with an editor whose house style calls for doing it the other way.  Think of it as a rite of passage.)

Crass Commercialism for the Win

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It’s that time of year again — the time when I remind all my faithful readers (and anybody else who happens to drop by) that in addition to nattering on about words and writing in this blog, I also offer freelance editorial services.

If you’ve got a NaNoWriMo first draft that you’d like help whipping into shape, or a finished novel that you want to spruce up for submission, or a self-publishing project in need of an editorial eye . . . I’m available.  I’ve still got some slots open at the moment in late December and in January; if you’re interested, best to grab them while they’re hot.

A Useful Rule

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(Well, all right.  It’s more like a guideline….)

Don’t violate natural chronology in your story without a really good reason.

I’m not going to say you should never do it, because sometimes there’s just no other way to get necessary information across to the reader, and because sometimes the violation or alteration of natural chronology is the main effect or whole point of the tale.  But before you send your plot into a temporal zigzag, think long and hard about whether or not those conditions apply, because the failure modes can get ugly.

Possible failure mode number one:  Your reader may get lost and confused by all the flashing back and forth, and give up on finishing the story.  If you’re going to use the flashback technique to deal with important events in the story’s past that deserve a full and direct presentation, be extra-careful to provide your reader with markers and signposts.  Give them details (verb tense changes, time and place references in the narrative, even explicit chapter or section headers if you think you need them) to let them know they’re heading into the past, and more details on the other side to let them know they’re coming back out of it.  No, it’s not mollycoddling your readers to do this; and you aren’t building a mental obstacle course for them so they can get a gold medal for running it, either.

Possible failure mode number two:  your readers may get more interested in the past of your story than in its present.  This happens a lot with the sort of books where the main plot arc involves finding out the deeply buried family secret, or the suffering hero’s secret trauma, or the dreadful thing that the students of Professor Thingummy’s Early Western Drama class did during the summer of 1995.  If you’ve got something portentous and dramatic like that lurking in the backstory for the hero or heroine to find out, you need to make sure you’ve got something even more portentous and dramatic going on in the front story, just to make certain that your reader cares enough about the story’s present to want to keep on reading about it.  Otherwise, your readers are likely to read the interesting backstory bits and skip the boring front story bits, which will leave them with only half the book that you meant them to read.

(Yes, I admit it.  I once co-wrote a book where a good portion of the plot involved a bunch of interpolated backstory bits.  In my defense, I set them off from the main text in separate chapters and labelled them and timestamped them clearly, and ran them in their own proper chronological order.  I thought it was necessary.  And I hope it worked.)

Peeve of the Day

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If you’re writing a story in the past tense — as most of us do — then events and actions that took place in the past of the story go into the past perfect tense.  You know, the one with all the “haves” and “hads” in it.

If you’re writing a story in the present tense — not so common, but it happens sometimes — then you can put past events and actions into the simple past tense.

(What about all the verbs with all the “mights” and “shoulds” and “oughts” and stuff in them?  Those are the so-called modal verbs, the ones that are principally responsible for the observation that looked at one way, English only has two verb tenses, but looked at another way, it has roughly thirty-odd.  If you feel uncertain about dealing with them, your best bet is probably to find yourself a beta reader with a really good feel for language and prose style and run everything past him or her.)

Looking Forward

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Soon — a matter of days, now — I will have the novel finished.  And then I can begin the fun part:  revision.

No, I’m not being ironic.  I’m just one of those writers for whom generating the first-draft text is the tough part.  Revision, on the other hand, is a pleasure, because that’s when I can take the rough lump of undistinguished prose and work on it until it sings.  (Or shrieks, if that’s what I want it to do.)  At times like that, I’m convinced that the proof of God’s love for writers is that he gave us the opportunity to make a second draft.

Other writers don’t see it that way, of course.  They’re the ones for whom writing the first draft is the pure joy of creation, like God on the first day, and revision is hard, brain-breaking work.

If you’re reading this, you probably know already which kind of writer you are.  But a couple of diagnostics, just in case:

Do you keep on tinkering with your finished story or novel, rather than biting the bullet and sending it out?  Do you tell yourself, “I have to follow up one more bit of research” or “I need to tweak the last paragraph just a little bit to make it perfect”?

You’re a reviser.  Because that’s the reviser’s way of shooting him-or-herself in the foot.  Perfection is always one more iteration away, and until the work is perfect, it can’t be turned loose into the world.

Do you finish your story in a blaze of energy, then put it aside “just for a little while, to get some perspective” — only to have your attention caught by the idea for a new story instead?  Is your desk drawer or your hard drive full of completed one-draft stories, languishing untouched while you pursue the latest and brightest butterfly?

You’re a first-draft wizard.  Your problem isn’t with getting ideas and giving them form, it’s with neglecting them afterwards instead of making them wash behind their ears and put on clean clothes and show prospective readers their company manners.

Either way, there’s only one cure:  You have to learn how to do the part of the job you think is hard work, in order to do the part of the job you think is fun.

Deadline Cookery Redux

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The looming deadline looms ever nearer, and tonight’s dinner is therefore dazzling in its simplicity:  Crockpot Kielbasa and Cabbage.

For which you need only a crockpot, a head of cabbage, and about one pound of kielbasa.  You cut up the cabbage into small enough pieces that it’ll fit into your crockpot, you cut up the kielbasa into half-rounds, and you slow-cook them together on low until dinnertime.  Some people put caraway seeds into the pot with the cabbage, but we’ve got at least one anti-caraway person in this household, so I don’t.

It’s hard to get much simpler than this.