writing

Just get there already.

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Here’s an issue I’ve been dealing with lately: the minute description of trivial actions in fiction. I call it telescoping, stretching out something that can easily fit into a smaller space. The following is an example, entirely from my head and not from a manuscript I’ve been reading lately (certainly not yours).

I got up. I walked to the fridge. I opened the door, looked inside, and got a beer. Then I turned around and went over to the counter to find an opener.

This entire passage could be replaced by “I got myself a beer.” Even this abbreviated version, which conveys every nuance of the previous example, is unnecessary unless it relates to the plot in some way. Is the narrator an alcoholic? Is it 9:30 in the morning? Does the narrator, unable to locate a bottle opener, attempt to open said beer with a bread knife and sever a finger, requiring a trip to the ER, where he meets his love interest/nemesis/long-lost son? If the answer is no, cut the beer. Get yourself a beer (unless it’s 9:30 in the morning or you’re driving while writing, which I don’t recommend) and figure out what you want to make happen in this paragraph. Writing just to get words on the page is fine, but go back and cut the filler on your next revision day. Fiction is not third-grade arithmetic; you don’t need to show your work.

My point? Trust your readers to follow you. If your hero is watching TV in one room when the doorbell rings, the next line doesn’t have to tell us that she got up and walked to the door and opened it. “The doorbell rang. It was Eddie, the punk kid from downstairs.” We get it. If you’re afraid that readers will get lost or bored unless you take every little step with them, maybe you need to rethink your story. Anything that is tedious to write will be several orders of magnitude more so to read. An agent won’t bother, nor will any disinterested* shopper perusing your author site and considering dropping $8.99 on your self-published masterpiece.

Just get there; we’re right behind you.

*disinterested means unbiased, open to possibilities, as opposed to uninterested, which means “mind made up already, Do Not Want.” Today you get two for one.

writing

Notes from the Field, November 2013 Emergency Intervention Edition

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OK, this is serious. Like this guy, I don’t have pet peeves, I have…other feelings, and this usage issue is a major cause of them.

horn vs. antler—These are two different body parts found on entirely different species. The terms are not interchangeable.

  • A horn is a permanent growth on the skull of an animal. The horns of cows, goats, and sheep are made of an inner core of bone with an outer casing of keratinized skin. Keratin is the stuff that composes hooves, nails, and hair. Rhino horns are also made of keratin. Horns occur on the male and female of the species.

cow

  • Antlers are annual growths made of bone that occur, with one exception, on male deer, moose, and similar species (cervids). Female reindeer are that exception. They grow in the spring, covered by a thick, velvety skin of blood vessels. The velvet dries up and falls off, and the buck uses his antlers to show off and score mates. Cooler weather rolls around, and the antlers fall off. Some people collect them and turn them into furniture or knife handles.

220px-Red_deer_stag_2009_denmark

Bottom line: antlers are shed; horns are for life. Deer do not have horns, unless they are very special deer that have formed a brass quartet, and even in that case, those things on their heads are still antlers. Are we clear? Can I look forward to never seeing another sentence about deer horns, please?

writing

Notes from the Field, October 2013 Edition

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk?rel=0-A&w=320&h=240]

unique: This word means one thing, literally—it is an adjective meaning singular, that there is only one of its kind, anywhere, ever. As such, to add a qualifier to it, for example, very, or even worse, sort of, is logically absurd. A thing either is or isn’t unique. Most of the time it isn’t. Some words that really mean what you’re using unique for include:

  • rare
  • distinctive
  • innovative
  • novel
  • bizarre
  • idiosyncratic
  • particular

Use those instead.

conscious/conscience: I suspect that this is more often a misspelling than a usage error. Just in case, conscious is an adjective meaning aware. The noun form is consciousness, which is not the same as conscience. Conscience is a noun meaning your inner moral or ethical guide, the internal compass that directs (or should direct) your behavior. Consciousness and conscience both deal with awareness, but the latter specifically addresses your behavior. The former just means you’re awake. Do not let your conscious be your guide.

neither…nor: You can use nor in a couple of ways, but I’m seeing a combination of the two ways, which is sloppy and nonsensical.

  • Bad example: I didn’t want apples nor oranges for breakfast.
  • Good example: He drank neither beer nor wine, only whiskey. [Note: You can add a second nor in here for a three-item list.]
  • Good example: The meal was not served on time, nor was it prepared particularly well. [Note that this example can easily be reworded into the structure of the first good example, which is often preferred, but sometimes this second way is more emphatic.]

When in doubt, check a dictionary; you can’t always count on Inigo Montoya to tell you these things.

 

books writing

My Cat Can Save Your Story

Updated on

For some reason, I can’t read books about writing books. I went to graduate school to learn how to get better at writing books, and do you know what we read there? Actual books, about silkworms or falling in love or dying in wars. That would be my recommendation to anyone else. One exception I’ve found is books about writing screenplays, maybe because most screenwriters are more transparent about why they write: it’s about getting paid, not so much about honing one’s craft or changing the world with the magic of prose. Also, screenplays have more rules than novels; they are defined by their form like a villanelle or a 12-bar blues progression (more about which later).

Anyway, I’ve found two excellent, intelligent, and above all short books about how to write a better screenplay that translate very well to novel writing. Neither of these books, singly or together, will turn you into a rich and famous author, but they will at least buy you a ticket in the lottery.

mystory

 

My Story Can Beat Up Your Story, by Jeffrey Alan Schechter

This book is invaluable when it comes to writing strong, identifiable characters and compelling situations. It’s amazing how easy it is when you reduce your story to the simplest possible terms, which you will need to do anyway if you want to write a successful pitch, more about which later.

 

savethecat

 

Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder

This is another quick and easy read that will make you want to smack yourself in the face and rhetoricate*,”It’s so obvious! How did I not think of that?” Seriously. Got a plot problem? This book will show you how to fix it.

If the usual how-to books and “writers on writing” monographs written by famous authors when they were strapped for cash or ideas work for you, great! Use them. If you find them as tiresome as I do and have limited patience and discretionary reading time, try these out and let me know what you think. If you love movies and have an encyclopedic knowledge of plot twists, so much the better.

*No, I did not make that word up. I thought I had, but it turns out someone else got there first.

science

Applied Poetry, Part H2O

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This batch of poetic terms comes from a particularly fishy technical report—enjoy!

Area of production foregone. A demographic model that calculates the area of spawning habitat required to offset the number of eggs and larvae lost as a result of intake operation. This is at the same time utterly practical and yet mindblowingly and heartbreakingly metaphysical, and that is what makes it poetry.

The following is a very short sample of bizarre common names for fish:

alewife

hogchoker

mummichog

cunner

I’d really like to know the etymology on these fish, but a cursory search turns up very little. If anybody knows more, please drop me a comment or an email. You know I love this stuff.

 

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Just checking in.

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I know, I know; I’ve neglected the blog, but it’s been busy around here. So I thought I’d post a quick bit of information for you all and a piece of antipodean trivia.

First, do you know the difference between abbreviations and acronyms? Don’t feel bad if you don’t; you’re in the majority. An abbreviation is any shortened form of a word or term. An acronym, from the Greek roots akron (end or tip) and onuma (name) is a special kind of abbreviation that you can pronounce like a word instead of spelling out the letters.

For example, EPA is an abbreviation because you say “Eee-pee-ay.” Examples of acronyms are NASA, WHO, laser, NAMBLA, TARDIS, and COYOTE. You can make an acronym out of the first letters of each word or by combining sections of words, like Benelux (Belgium + Netherlands + Luxembourg) or Groc Out, which is what my neighbors and I affectionately call the local Grocery Outlet.

The U.S. Department of Defense loves to create contrived acronyms like BATMAN and ROBIN (Biochronicity and Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature and Robustness of Biologically Inspired Networks). No, I did not make that up. If I could make up stuff like that, I’d be working for the DOD (which is not an acronym) and prohibited from blogging about it.

Second, so I’m working on this report written by Australians. We won’t get into the specifics of Commonwealth vs. Standard American English just now, or I’ll be here all day, but apparently Australia, or at least the state of Victoria, has a Department of Human Services. This of course has got me wondering if there is also a Department of Marsupial Services. You never know.

Australians, if you are reading, I am most certainly not mocking you. Just taking a break from some hard slogging. Go grab a can of Foster’s and relax.

By the way, the Australian Society for the Study of Obesity is known as ASSO for short, which is not funny at all. Unless you’re alive. Also, the Technological Institute of Textile & Sciences in India calls itself TITS, and I kind of admire the organization for using it, unlike those wusses who chose to call the Computer Literacy and Internet Technology qualification CLaIT.

 

writing

Notes from the Field, July 2013 Edition

Updated on

This post deals with common usage errors I’ve run across recently. If you’re a little unclear on any of these, don’t feel bad: many highly educated writers and professionals are blatantly misusing them. Now you don’t have to be one of them.

affect/effect—Affect as a verb means to change; as a noun it is most commonly used to describe a mental or emotional state, often one that is consciously put on to impress others (affected). You find that one frequently in psychology texts (lack of affect = showing no response to stimuli). Effect as a verb also means change in the sense of “to make something happen.” As a noun it describes the result of an action on something: a baseball affects a window, and the effects are broken glass and an insurance claim.

  • Verb examples: Education is the best tool to effect social change, and its benefits affect everyone in the community.
  • Noun examples: Her affect is world-weary and sophisticated, but its effect on people is anything but complimentary.

alright/all right—Alright is a throat-clearing term like OK, hey, look, or dude. It has no meaning except to draw attention to what follows. All right describes something that is not wrong. It may not be great either, but it will do. OK fits both of these meanings and can be used interchangeably. If in doubt, go with OK.

  • Examples: Alright, you guys, that game wasn’t the best you’ve ever played, but it was all right.

All right can also have its literal meaning of great, fantastic, couldn’t be better, and of course in a test-taking context if you answered no questions incorrectly, you got them all right. To stray into British usage for a moment, all right used as an interrogative takes on another connotation in conversation to mean anything from “Can we stop arguing now?” to “Have you got your head out of your arse yet?”

compose/comprise—Compose means to make up or put together. Think of composing music. Comprise means to embrace or contain. This is so simple, yet it’s easily the most common usage mistake I find. It is most frequently misused in the passive voice.

  • Examples: The city is composed of seven wards, each of which comprises a police department, fire station, public school district, and at least one park.

lie/lay—Lie is an intransitive verb, which means it has no object. Lay is a transitive verb and does require an object. Colloquial uses such as “Now I lay me down to sleep” and “Lay myself down” are no doubt adding to the confusion, but in fact this is a reflexive use of the verb, and the reflexive pronoun is an object.

  • Present-tense examples: Please lay the books on the table while I go lie down for a while.

More confusion arises because the past participle of lie is lay. The past participle of lay is laid.

  • Past-tense examples: I laid out the cards for solitaire after Mother lay down for a nap.

whether (or not)—Use whether when discussing two options, either of which is viable. Only add or not to indicate that the outcome of an event will remain unchanged regardless of the decision in question. If the meaning of a sentence stays the same if you remove the phrase or not, then leave it out: He can’t decide whether or not to get ice cream.

  •  Examples: I don’t know whether I should stay or go; Dan is leaving whether I go or not.

Questions? Suggestions for further discussion? Leave them in the comments section below.

books

Summer Vacation Book Report

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Hey! Hi! I’m back. I saw lots of these:

IMG_7299

And one of these:

IMG_7437

And I did a lot of reading for fun. The book I want to tell you about was originally written in the 1980s and reprinted in 2001. It’s called Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin. Now, you may read the description and decide that it’s just not your cup of tea, and that’s fine, but if you are a writer of fiction you owe it to yourself to at least locate a hard copy of this book and read the table of contents. It will show you that there is more than one way to structure a novel. Story aside, I love the way this book is presented. Some books don’t need a lot of exposition to get the tale across; for others, the back story is the story. If you’re struggling with ways to cram your rich history into bite-sized pieces of dialogue, stop now. Give the details the space and time they deserve.

Notes from the field coming soon!

writing

Drawing Down the Sun

Updated on

Sometimes unexpected things happen, like, for example, a key appliance in your household develops an alarming smell of burning plastic. You could complain loudly, and I recommend that, but then you have to move on to Stage 2, which is Doing Something About It. Stage 2.1 involves making a list of options. I like lists; they give you the illusion of progress.

A tolerable gas tumble dryer costs about what I earn from a booklength project. Instead of buying one, I decided to implement Holmgren’s Principles 5, 6, and 12 and hang my washing out on a clothesline in the sun and wind, which are both free and plentiful around here until late October. This is my first point, that sometimes the easiest and cheapest course of action is worth consideration, at least temporarily.

The second point is this, and it can be extrapolated to your writing process. Hanging laundry on a line is a meditative exercise. There’s sorting, and manual dexterity, and plenty of space and time for your mind to turn over other things. This is a new alternative to sitting in front of a screen getting stressed out, selecting long passages and then pressing delete, or just thinking about how you have no idea what you want to say. Another physical activity, another setting, can jar your mind out of the daily neural rat maze and show you a new solution, and how great is it if that new activity is generated by serendipitous failure?

So, yes, in fact, I am using solar and wind energy to dry my clothes and help me organize my thoughts. (My dryer could only do one of those things.) Harness change and put it to work instead of fighting against it. Got writer’s block? Do something else, preferably something you have to do anyway.

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Hey, look! I have a FAQ.

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You have questions? I have answers. Some of them are bound to match up, unless you have no idea how you got here or we’re completely out of phase (remind me to write about wave physics sometime, because that stuff is really cool).

Anyway, you can find the link at the bottom of the About page or just click here. Have an excellent question that languishes unanswered? Leave a comment or send me an email.