I think my non-writer friends probably don’t know these truths! Do yours? From Aliventures. (And I love her little riff on that/which at the beginning of this post. I’ve had some fun with the that/which distinction myself!)
Category Archives: Learning to write
An Oldie but Goodie: 10 Things Writers Don’t Tell People
“That” or “Which”? What Would You Choose?
A New Yorker editor writing in the Times Literary Supplement debates a grammar textbook writer! Loads of fun. I personally think the “which” in the sentence under scrutiny should be “that.” It clearly refers to the “sourness” and “relentlessness,” and yes, these are appositives, and yes, the point following “which” is essential to the meaning of the sentence. Do you agree?
Aren’t words a hoot?
Parallelism in Writing for Voice and Style!
One of the hardest writing strategies to teach effectively is “parallel structure.” Yet it’s incredibly useful in all kinds of writing, argumentative and expository as well as literary.
In my last post, I used an example from a terrific education site on grammar to illustrate how sentences could be packed with detail using “absolutes.” This example powerfully illustrates, as well, how parallel structure works.
“Down the long concourse they came unsteadily, Enid favouring her damaged hip, Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet, both of them carrying Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags and concentrating on the floor in front of them, measuring out the hazardous distance three paces at a time.”
(Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001)
What makes this an example of parallelism?
Each descriptive phrase (in this case absolutes, which consist of a noun and its modifiers) precisely mirrors the grammatical form of the one that came before, with all the phrases ultimately connected to each other by an “coordinating conjunction,” in this case, “and.”
favouring
paddling
slapping
carrying
concentrating
measuring
In this example there’s also a parallelism of meaning: the first two phrases compare Enid’s and Alfred’s physical actions
favouring her damaged hip
paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet
But the heart of the parallel structure lies in the perfect repetition of the main verb forms.
Here’s another example, using participles (“-ing” forms) and nouns to create two parallel scaffolds:
“Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine.”
(Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm. Harper & Row, 1977)
Note the grammatical precision of the noun set: not just nouns preceded by “the” and adjectives but also each followed with a three-word prepositional phrase:
the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater
the green leaves of jewelweed by my side
the ragged red trunk of a pine
In literary writing, the use of parallelism, like the use of absolutes, can help you flow into your details so that they seem to be rhythmic extensions of your original clause, much like water flowing down a stream. In expository or argumentative writing, careful attention to parallelism can keep readers on track as you move through related ideas.
Here’s an example from one of my recent summaries on my other blog, College Composition Weekly (where I summarize recent research on the teaching of college writing). I’m presenting Steve Lamos’s argument in the March 2016 College English that job security for writing teachers not on the tenure track will remain elusive if the negative attitudes of college administrators and other powerful stakeholders are not addressed:
Although emotional labor is devalued across most educational contexts, Lamos writes, within more prestigious research universities it is especially “subject to a kind of gendered dismissal” based on a sense that it involves work that women find “inherently satisfying” and thus not in need of other compensation and that, by its nature, consists more of “pandering to difference” rather than enforcing academic standards (366).*
Use parallelism to eliminate tangles in your writing!
This sentence appears in the context of an academic discussion and is part of a “summary,” so it requires me to incorporate fairly complex information in a taut space. Parallelism holds the two points of this sentence together through the repetition of “that”:
on a sense
that it involves
and
that, by its nature, [it] consists
Readers of dense texts like this can benefit from knowing that as long as the long clauses are introduced by a repeated word and structure (“that + verb” in this case), they’re still in the same sentence, progressing through related points.
Writers surrender the power of parallelism when they forget that the last element of a list should echo the previous elements:
The lecture was accessible, helpful, and it gave me lots of good information.
He came in dripping sweat, panting for breath, and he was trembling with exhaustion.
Why not:
The lecture was accessible, helpful, and informative.
He came in dripping sweat, panting for breath, and trembling with exhaustion.
In both cases, parallelism has allowed you to cut empty words (in the second case, you could even cut “and”).
So for fiction and essay writers (as well as poets!), parallelism is a tool for adding detail, creating rhythm, and connecting ideas. For writers in other contexts, it can serve as a logical, connective tool.
*Bonus: many constructions other than lists joined with “and” benefit from—and usually actually require—parallelism. Here, the “more of/rather than” construction is cemented through the mirroring verbs “pandering”/”enforcing.” Other constructions requiring parallelism include “neither/nor”; “not only/but also”; and “both/and.”
Do you have favorite examples of parallelism as a literary device, from your own or others’ writing? Share!
Cut Back on “To Be” with “Absolutes”
We’re told all the time to cut back on the verb “to be”: you know, “was” and all its cousins, like “is” and “are” and “were.” Sometimes we get so paranoid about these ubiquitous little linkers (linking nouns and pronouns with other nouns, linking nouns and pronouns with adjectives) that we twist ourselves into pretzels trying to eliminate them:
Does
He is a good horseman
Improve if it turns into
“Good” characterizes his horsemanship
?
I doubt it.
But one use of “to be” that often can be easily eliminated is its use in the “progressive tenses”: the tenses that combine a form of “to be” with the “-ing” form of the main verb. (Btw, note how invisible “to be” can become: I used it twice above, once in a passive voice construction and once as a linking verb, as well as within this parenthesis).
For example, these use the progressive tense:
I am writing.
I was dreaming.
She was driving through her neighborhood on a beautiful spring day.
Sometimes you can easily substitute the simple past of your verb without consequence, eliminating the “to be” auxiliary:
She drove through her neighborhood on a beautiful spring day
may work just as well if you mainly need to place her on that sunny street.
But in other cases, the progressive verb tenses serve special purposes. Note the big difference between
He was taking a bath when I knocked on the door
and
He took a bath when I knocked on the door.
As this example illustrates, if you want to describe an ongoing action, especially one already taking place when another action commences, a progressive tense does essential work.
Still, there’s no doubt that “to be” can clutter your writing. “Is,” “was,” “were,” and their ilk don’t convey much action; they can bog down your prose. So if you can cut back on them without making the effort look like a strain, often you should. And sometimes eliminating them in a progressive tense construction is an easy call.
Look at this example:
He came to the door. His hair was dripping wet and he was wearing a towel around his waist.
I’ve written sentences like this. Nothing grammatically wrong, of course. But if you’re overbudget on your “to be” account, this kind of sentence offers an easy savings of two “to be” verbs.
He came to the door, his hair dripping wet, a towel around his waist.
This specific strategy involves the use of “absolutes,” which consist of a noun and whatever modifiers come attached to it. In this case, the nouns are “hair” and “towel”; in the first case, an “-ing” form, a participle, modifies “hair,” and a prepositional phrase modifies “towel.”
Ages ago (the 1960s, to be precise), a rhetoric and writing teacher named Frances Christiansen argued that “absolutes” were among the kinds of modifiers that enrich sentences by adding detail. Such sentence-building practices, he pointed out, show up regularly in the work of expert writers, particularly literary ones, and can be effectively taught to students as a way of avoiding choppy, boring sentences.
Above all, absolutes and similar modifiers allow you to move from a general description to tighter and tighter detail without having to figure out how to tack together independent sentences. Here’s an example from an excellent site with many other examples of how to use absolutes in your writing:
“Six boys came over the hill half an hour early that afternoon, running hard, their heads down, their forearms working, their breath whistling.”
(John Steinbeck, The Red Pony)
And as this example from the site illustrates, the absolute modifier can appear in the middle of a sentence (or at the beginning) as easily as at the end:
“The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick.”
(George Orwell, “A Hanging,” 1931)
Among the most enjoyable functions of absolutes is the rhythm they can create, one of those elements that imbue plain prose with that elusive thing called “voice.” Again from the site:
“Down the long concourse they came unsteadily, Enid favouring her damaged hip, Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet, both of them carrying Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags and concentrating on the floor in front of them, measuring out the hazardous distance three paces at a time.”
(Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001)
Note how these slow, complicated absolutes, with their parallel structure, make us feel the long, “unsteady” progress of the characters as they approach.
Do you use this tool? Share your examples.
http://grammar.about.com/od/ab/g/absoluteterm.htm
How Would You Solve These 4 Writing Challenges?
Writers who want to create a compelling story never stop looking for solutions to certain eternal problems. Sometimes, though, a particular story you want to tell runs you smack up against these problems. That’s the case in the book I’m working on right now.
This is the second book in a three-part project, in which university professor Sarah Crockett must come to terms with the disappearance of her eleven-year-old daughter while finding herself entangled with other endangered children over the course of the books. The first book is out for beta reads right now; the new one resides in five notebooks, slowly evolving from a handwritten first draft to a word-processed second. Something about this second book has made me think hard about some of the conundrums writers face.
Do you face these problems in your writing? How do you solve them?
Writing SCENES, not streams of thought
It’s all too easy to simply let the characters spin out their thoughts and emotions in what just feels like the loveliest prose. After reading about a page of this stuff in my own writing, I recognize how deadly it is. Sarah presents a particular challenge: She has a professional life, and there’s a lot she can’t talk about with her colleagues. (Your conviction that your ex-husband murdered your child doesn’t make good conference-banquet banter.)
So how do you solve this? How do you insert the necessary backstory or information readers need without letting your characters blather away?
Writing scenes where things HAPPEN
I remember seeing commentaries on Breaking Bad episodes in which the writers and directors discussed their worry that long scenes of information-heavy dialogue would turn off viewers. They used movement within the setting as much as possible, and of course there was so much action in other scenes that the talky ones never felt static. (By the way, I much prefer commentaries that feature writing and staging problems and solutions, not how much all the cast members love each other!)
Dialogue can be quite dramatic—even violent, both in meaning and in the way it’s conveyed. But I’m faced with too many scenes that are mostly dialogue. My worry, though, is that too much effort to make a scene active can lead to contrived events.
So how do you solve this? If you’re not writing a Mad Max script where nobody can catch his breath long enough to talk, how do you keep dialogue-heavy stories lively?
Finding the PERFECT word
I’ve (mis)quoted Mark Twain on writing before: the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. How do you tap the lightning? The thesaurus helps, but often the word I’m looking for isn’t really a literal synonym. Just as often, it’s a metaphor, especially in a verb. Here’s one I like that popped up out of the blue, from the first chapter of the new book:
For Clauson, interrogation was a daily, a material, practice. His gaze was scissoring me apart even as I tried to decide how I felt.
No thesaurus is going to give me that.
What tricks do you use to chase down those lightning-bolt words?
And while we’re on the subject: Making metaphors WORK
Sometimes I wonder whether I’ve already picked the low-hanging fruit: the metaphors that take me beyond clichés but slip into my prose as easily as my cat into my lap. Recently they seem more prone to circle me warily, making me snatch at them, half the time scaring them away. Here’s one from the first chapter I’ve struggled with:
From the way Clauson seemed to sag as I stared back, I knew he felt what I did: the pull of our history, a chain weighted with an impenetrable anger, so dense and resistant to reason no acid could have dissolved it. I think he knew he had just added a link. He had said the wrong thing.
I don’t dislike it, but it lacks the perfected aptness of, say, Sarah Waters’s metaphors in The Paying Guests:
Frances felt a rush of the abandonment that had overwhelmed her a few nights before. The feeling was like a wailing infant suddenly thrust into her arms: she didn’t want it, couldn’t calm it, had nowhere to set it down.
How do you solve this? What strategies do you use when you’re looking for imagery that leaves cliché far behind, yet doesn’t tangle you up in illogic and improbable comparisons so bad they’re sometimes even funny?
Share your solutions! (Stealing from each other allowed!)
World-Buiding: Not Just for Fantasy or SciFi!
I recall being asked about my enthusiasm for Patrick O’Brian’s 20-novel series about British sea captain Jack Aubrey and his eccentric friend Stephen Maturin as they navigated the Napoleonic Wars. Why would I keep returning to these books, beginning with Master and Commander (in 2003 a movie starring Russell Crowe)? I’d answer, “What’s amazing about these books is that you enter such a complete world!”
This memory has come back recently as I’ve traveled through new reading experiences: sampling indie authors, returning to old favorites, and meeting new traditionally published and often best-selling authors. Like all readers, I’ve found books that work for me and books that don’t. A writer myself, I’m always interested in what makes a book spring into gear or stall out, even if only for me, since I want to sort out strong and weak strategies in my own work.
I know that “voice” can override glitches that try to pull me out of the story. I’ve enjoyed books with plot flaws because I enjoyed hearing the writer talking to me through characters, description, and style.
But there’s another important quality akin to voice: the writer’s ability to build a world.
In fact, I’ll take a big chance here: the ability to build a complete, believable world may make a difference if being traditionally published is ever a goal.
What builds such a world?
The quality that makes a book impossible to put down is our total immersion in its reality. That metaphor implies that when we enter a book’s world, we lose sight of our familiar world in which we have to clean house and go to work and wash the car. For that to happen, this new world must be divorced from the mundane. It has to provide us with a set of eyes that see differently, that notice things we would not have noticed until the author seized our gaze.
Writers of historical fiction may find monopolizing our imaginations easier to achieve; even touches of daily life illuminate corners of a universe that takes us out of our own. For example, in Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests, there’s the sound of shillings clunking into the gas meter, there’s the slog across the yard to the outdoor WC. But modern stories should also be flush with such mind-capturing details. In Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie takes me into a Trenton, New Jersey, hair-braiding salon, an atmosphere completely alien to me but starkly evocative in the world she invites me into. I had never seen this corner of a modern city. I walked with her, across the divide between our worlds.
But the trust that sustains that journey is fragile. It can be shaken in many ways. Somehow, above all, a creator of worlds must convince us that her world really could exist, really does exist, even if only in mind.
A sense of accuracy is essential. Creators of worlds in sci-fi and fantasy have more leeway than authors in other genres; details need mostly to be consistent. True, in historical novels we are at the mercy of an author’s research. Patrick O’Brian never sailed on one of the ships he wrote about; how can we trust his depictions of 1800s British naval life?
He seduces with details: How the ship’s company had to tap their biscuits to knock the weevils out before eating; how the men at the cannons had to arch their bodies to avoid being killed by the guns’ recoil. If he knows these things, surely he knows the rest. Again, we’re sucked out of our daily worlds into his by the precision and clarity of what he puts before us. We’re too busy absorbing all the surprising pieces of his universe to look away.
Accuracy is especially vital if you’re writing for a specific community that knows its own contours well. I felt kicked out of a horse book when, among other glitches, the writer had a teenage girl galloping up on one of her farm’s “yearling thoroughbreds.” Now, they do back late yearlings on Thoroughbred farms, since the young horses will all officially turn two on January 1, and these babies often run their first races before they actually turn two. But if this is a real farm, training real racehorses, no teenage girl will be galloping around pastures on a newly broken baby destined for the track. When just a few pages later, a character attached crossties to a bridle. . . !
But this need for convincing accuracy lies at the heart of the world-builder’s dilemma. Immersion depends on strangeness. The details that capture me cannot be details I could have supplied myself. Want me to stick with you on a spring morning in the countryside? Don’t tell me about the bright blue sky or the fluffy clouds or the green fields. I know about those without your help. No, tell me something I wouldn’t have noticed or cared about until you opened my eyes.
Yet if we are to believe, we must be able to connect these new worlds to landscapes where our usual compasses will work. The minute a reader says, “Oh, that would never happen!” or “People wouldn’t act that way!” or “I know that’s not true!”, the trust is gone.
So world-builders must construct double journeys: along a mysterious new road that keeps us gasping, yet one that parallels the world we do know. For example, Bev Pettersen’s Backstretch Baby showed me specifics of racetrack life I hadn’t witnessed myself, but the details that did match what I’d seen for myself prepared me for what she wanted me to accept. I felt I’d entered her version of a world I’d been in before, a version that was going to show me something I’d never have guessed.
In dialogue, this essential double journey shows clear.
Dialogue must be accurate to its time and place. Our characters need to “talk like real people.”
And yet nothing can be deadlier to our immersion in a story’s world than characters who talk like real people. All the little “hellos,” “how are yous,” “fine, thank yous,” with which we coat our exchanges have to be mercilessly expunged. Dialogue has to sound “natural” to the worlds we know while obsessively, ferociously, devoting itself to building the one we don’t.
  
             
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Rereading National Velvet recently showed me how dialogue contributed to the world of this stunningly realized plot. Here’s Mi Taylor (the Mickey Rooney character in the movie) to Velvet early on—he’s just given her money to put down on the raffle ticket for the Piebald:
“. . . And see this, Velvet, I’m a fool to do it. That piebald’s as big a perisher’s the fellow that tipped me the five. ‘M going up to look at him this afternoon and likely I’ll be sorry when I see his murdering white eye.”
“Can we come too, can we come too?”
“You got yer muslins to iron.”
“MUSLINS!” said Velvet, outraged.
“Yer ma’s just wrung ’em out of the suds. I seen ’em. For the Fair.”
“I’m not going to wear MUSLIN,” said Velvet with a voice of iron.
“You’ll wear what yer told,” said Mi placidly. “I’ll slip up after dinner. Nearer one. I got them sheep at twelve. . . .”
If you’ve read the book, you know that its world forms around families and dreams and how they play out or fail in the environment of a small English village in the 1930s. The detail of what the Brown girls will wear to the fair and the distinct voice in which Mi delivers that detail become, in this dialogue, a demonstration of how authority functions in this world, warning of the challenge to that authority from the magical horse with the “murdering white eye.”
World-building is a little like trying to catch skittish mice. We want to entice readers along the paths we’ve laid with tiny bits of carefully laid-out cheese. If the cheese is stale, they’ll turn up their noses. If the tidbits are too far apart, asking for too much empty wandering between offerings, they’ll venture off the path. If the cheese isn’t recognizable as cheese, if it’s too alien, they’ll be too wary to bite.
When I read your book, I want to follow that path without looking back or aside. I want to be captured. I want to find myself helplessly enclosed in your world. You have a double journey to accomplish; I want you to keep me pressing toward the vista straight ahead.
WHAT MAKES A WORLD COME ALIVE FOR YOU?
Commas Control Emphasis. Here’s How!
I have been thinking about the inordinate power of commas.
I intuitively understood this power from my own writing, but I credit Martha Kolln’s Rhetorical Grammar with making concrete what my instinctive ear told me: how such a simple little mark can help communicate precisely what we want readers to hear.
Grammar books and various grammar web sites, of course, lay down the kinds of apparently sacrosanct rules that drive real writers crazy. “You must, must, must put a comma there because the rules say so.”
On the one hand, not necessarily. On the other, it’s important to understand how certain principles governing things like punctuation have consequences for writing. I’ve worked hard not to be the natural Grammar Curmudgeon I am, one who smacks other people’s writing around for rule-breaking, but by golly, punctuation is a tool!
We’ve all seen those fun exercises where simply moving a few little marks around completely changes meaning. A simple example is “Woman without her man is nothing,” which, with just a few tweaks, comes to mean its opposite. (Can you do it? Give it a try!)
But punctuation also controls rhythm and emphasis, and commas are tough little drill sergeants, lining up every word in its place.
Take emphasis. Read this sentence aloud:
- There is in fact a reason for what happened.
Now, in my view, whether or not we should set off the “interrupter” (“in fact”) with commas, as the grammar books instruct, is a judgment call. Leaving out the commas is fine. But when you add them, something happens. Listen:
- There is, in fact, a reason for what happened.
To my ear, and Kolln substantiates this, the commas change the intonation and emphasis. In the first sentence, without the commas, I hear
- There is in fact a REASON for what happened.
In the second sentence, the commas do what Kolln and my ear say they do, shifting the emphasis onto the words before the commas. So the sentence now reads
- There IS, in FACT, a reason for what happened.
The meaning hasn’t particularly changed, but the way we hear it has. We shift our attention to the “facticity” of the claim. We get a beat on the FACT of this utterance.
But that’s not all that happens. The commas break up the flow of the sentence in ways that reinforce meter. In this case, it’s our old favorite, iambic pentameter, the most ubiquitous meter for English speakers (Shakespeare’s meter). And that change not only asks us to hit “is” and “fact” with extra emphasis, but also taps “REAson.” So that the sentence reads,
- There IS, in FACT, a REAson for what happened.
And as a bonus:
In addition to illustrating one of the functions of commas—to reposition emphasis—these examples also illustrate how breaking one of those apparently sacrosanct rules we all hear again and again can actually give you an additional tool to control emphasis. How many times has someone told you to strike out “there is” and “there are” every time they crop up? But if you try to get rid of the “there is’ in this sentence, the emphasis on “reason” that persists through all three versions withers. Compare
- I can tell you a reason for what happened.
- The facts reveal a reason for what happened.
Nothing wrong with these sentences. But their message—that what seemed random or accidental is actually the result of some cause that the speaker is about to explain—is flatter, more subtle. That’s fine. But if you want to be assertive, if you want to firmly refute the idea that the event is random, accidental, then “There IS, in FACT, a REAson” is your go-to choice.
And there is, in fact, a reason why.
Both the “there is/are” and “it is” force emphasis on the words that immediately follow them.
- There is NO POINT in not liking asparagus.
- It is TRUE that I liked asparagus when I was a child.
- It is SAD that I don’t like asparagus now.
This effect holds for the contraction forms of these constructions —”it’s” and “there’s”—as well.
The bottom line: Punctuation and sentence structure choices give you more control over how readers “hear” what you write. Don’t ignore the rules; just recognize how understanding the flexibility they offer can leverage the power of your writing. Don’t want to emphasize ‘FACT”? Leave the commas out. Want to hit hard on “REAson”? Hang on to that much-maligned “There is.”
Do you have examples of how commas and sentence structure control emphasis in your own writing? Decisions you’ve made about how to re-organize sentences to take advantage of this little power tool?
Filed under correct grammar for writers of fiction, ebooks publishing and selling, Editing your novel, grammar rules for writers, indie publishing, Learning to write, Myths and Truths for writers, punctuation for writers of novels, self editing for fiction writers, Self-publishing, style for writers, Writing
Is the Hypercorrectness Troll Gobbling Up Your Grammar?
 I remember one of the humorist Dave Barry’s satirical “Ask Mr. Language Person” columns years ago, in which the all-too-sure-of-himself Mr. Language Person opined that “‘me’ is always incorrect.” Barry was referring indirectly to an example of the phenomenon of “hypercorrectness,” which I’d argue leads to almost as many grammar slips as does its opposite, carelessness. I say “almost as many” because these slips are so common!
In a nutshell, a writer slips into hypercorrectness when he or she isn’t gut-sure about what is correct and inoculates him- or herself by making a grammatical choice that sounds just a teeny bit “fancy” and thus “must” be what an educated writer ought to opt for. 
As with all grammar choices, whether or not a hypercorrectness slip will hurt you with that editor or agent you hope to impress, or whether it will get your prose chewed up in red in your business report, depends on whether or not your particular audience knows the difference or, for that matter, cares. I’ve seen so many kinds of errors, including just plain careless ones, in so many “erudite” places that I know it can be a toss-up whether your slip costs you an acceptance or gets ignored.
But I argue that knowledge is the power to choose with confidence. The “correct” choice sounds funny to you, so you’d rather go with the “incorrect” one because it feels more natural? Go for it. But it’s really nice to make that choice because you know what you’re doing and why you want it that way.
The single most ubiquitous hypercorrectness error, as Barry recognized, may be the prejudice against poor little “me.” And the single most common example of that prejudice is “between you and I.”
What? That’s wrong? Well, if you’re a purist, yes—for the same reason it’s wrong to write “the zombies were chasing George and I.”
Why? Because, in both cases, the pronouns are “objects” and should be in the “objective case”: that is, “me.”
There’s really a simple test. Strip out or move the proper name or problematic pronoun and see what you have:
- Between I and you
- The zombies were chasing I
See?
Case two: Sometimes what sounds natural is better. E. g., the who/whom conundrum
I’ve suggested in a prior post that if choosing between these two options leaves you sweating, go with “who.” The situations in which “who” won’t work for almost all readers are rare: say, when you’re inverting the sentence or inserting the pronoun behind an actual preposition:
- To whom are you speaking?
- This is the person for whom I was waiting.
If you are writing Downton Abbey fan fiction, okay, you’ll have to master these forms. But in most cases
- Who are you talking to?
- That’s who I was waiting for.
will pass muster with almost everyone, even if they are technically incorrect. But as I wrote in my earlier post, the correct forms,
- Whom are you talking to?
- That’s whom I was waiting for.
can actually sound more jarring in many contexts than the errors.
But the troll of hypercorrectness comes charging out from under the bridge when a writer gets paranoid and decides that “whom” sounds like what a smart person would say. Then we end up with
- He didn’t say whom would be going to lunch.
- Don’t give money to whomever asks for it.
In both cases, the correct choice—and the more unobtrusive choice regardless of what’s correct—is “who.” (For those who enjoy these kinds of things, the rule is that the case of the pronoun is governed by its role in its own clause, not the clause in which it’s embedded.) You can actually apply the same test as for the “I/me” choice: you wouldn’t write, ” He didn’t say her would be going to lunch.” It’s clear you need the subject case.
Case 3:
I came across this usage (though not this exact sentence) in a self-published book just the other day:
- Our worries lied in the way he was behaving.
Obviously, I can’t know what prompted the writer to make this choice. But I suspect it’s another instance of hypercorrectness, based on the Mr.-Language-Person-type precept that, in this case, “‘lay’ is always incorrect.” We’ve heard and heard and heard that people don’t “lay,” chickens do. So it must follow that anywhere our uneducated ears order us to say “lay,” we must really need “lie.”
Uh, no.
There’s really no test or easy fix for this one. If you aren’t sure but really want to be, you have to look it up. I will say that the use of “lay” as in “I’m going to lay out in the sun for a while” has become so universal that many an otherwise persnickety person will read right past “lay” in this usage. They’ll probably read past “we laid out in the sun yesterday” (yes, “lay” is the correct past tense of “lie”). But I suspect that most readers would hiccup at “We lied out in the sun yesterday.”
Moral? Sometimes it’s better to be technically wrong than hypercorrect. If you really want to be correct, don’t guess. When in doubt, find out!
Terrific Post on Style for Writers!
Chuck Wendig responds to a reader who finds sentence fragments troublesome (they make writing “unreadable,” in the commenter’s view). If you haven’t met Chuck yet, you’re in for a ride, though you’d best leave your Sunday-go-to-meetin’ expectations at home. I envy his verbal energy!
What I love about this post is that it celebrates the incredible flexibility of language, all the ways that writers can whip it up and lay it down and make it their own (in the great tradition of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland!). Wendig illustrates the power of the dreaded fragment with examples from some of the greatest of writers. He reminds us that rules are the groundwork but imagination and a writer’s ear are the scaffolding that builds palaces on those placid rules.
My own caveat is that when I was teaching, so many of my students had a tough time recognizing things like fragments. Especially fragments! The lack of some kind of internal sense of what “a sentence” is may not have handicapped those with the drive and verve to become creative writers; imagination and ear may have been enough.
But I argue (and Wendig cautions) that it’s vital to learn such “basics” of language because if you don’t, you can’t make choices. You can’t switch your verbal code to fit it to different contexts, for example, to a business setting where a lively fragment-sequined style will simply be out of place. You probably can’t write that query letter we all sweat over. At least you can’t write it with confidence that you can decide when to explode on the page and when to hold back.
So many of my students hoped to be great novelists. I couldn’t help worrying that without the ability to choose the linguistic strategies they needed in a given context, they would be handicapped if the whole great-novelist thing didn’t come off. As it so often doesn’t . . . at least not as fast as we’d like it to.
Do you agree with Wendig? What is your fragment strategy? Do you have a favorite “fragment passage” to pass on?
Filed under correct grammar for writers of fiction, Editing your novel, grammar rules for writers, indie publishing, Learning to write, Myths and Truths for writers, punctuation for writers of novels, self editing for fiction writers, Self-publishing, style for writers, Teaching writing, Writing, Writing and teaching writing, writing novels
Why I Quit Reading Your Book
I just abandoned another indie book.
It always breaks my heart to do this (fortunately, I’ve only done it a very few times). The act sets me to thinking: Was I just being a persnickety grouch, or do I have legitimate things to say about what makes a book work? This question is particularly cogent when I bought this book—two by this author, in fact—on the strength of a glowing review.
Obviously, my reaction isn’t the only one that matters. So is there anything of worth in trying to lay out what went wrong for me?
I think so. After all, I’ve raised the question of whether we really serve each other if we don’t at least try to explain why a particular element of a book led not to a mild critique but to abandonment, even if we can do so only in generic terms lest we embarrass a fellow writer. And my thoughts here are not idiosyncratic; practicing writers have heard versions of them before.
So. . . .
It took three strikes to force me to turn off my Kindle this time around. Looking at these three strikes, I realize that I would have probably let two of them slide if the third had been in place.
The first of the two strikes I might have forgiven was a plot twist I didn’t buy into. But I’ve persevered, even if grumpily, past what seemed to me far-fetched plot devices before.
The other strike involved some bizarre inaccuracies in the author’s depiction of the setting, which I happen to know intimately. But I’ve hung in through (and enjoyed!) stories that present that setting in ways that don’t completely jibe with my experience.
In both cases, I could have been seduced into accepting or ignoring these slips. It was the seduction that wasn’t there.
Because the writer lacked voice.
In other words, had this book had voice, the pleasure of voice could have overridden my complaints.
But what in the world do I mean by “voice”?
Writing teachers talk about voice all the time. They know it when they see it. But ask them to give you a formula for acquiring it? They try. Oh, do they try.
Like most people, whether you know it or not, you already have many voices. You know how to sound different when writing a Facebook post and an office memo. No one has to teach you that.
But “literary voice” is a little different. You learn the voice of an office memo by writing the way people write office memos. Literary voice, on the other hand, isn’t something you copy outright. There’s learning involved, what rhetoricians call imitatio. But from this learning, it’s something you create.
Here, I’m offering three dimensions of what was missing in the book I abandoned. These do not constitute the ultimate definition of voice. They’re just my attempts to put into “voice” a few of the qualities that make prose come alive for me enough to carry me past plot glitches and other slips. 
Voice is what says you have moved beyond “the rules.”
In the book I’m discussing, I could see the author conscientiously and visibly filling in the various checklists for what a writer ought to do. BUT: The essence of voice is riding those rules down the road where you want to go.
In this book, the rule that ruled the writer was a common one: Bring readers into the scene! Lots of sensory details! Make it come alive! Think of creative ways to say what you want readers to know!
But in this book, too many details, piled up on top of each other, slowed the action to the point that I skimmed ahead in frustration. You don’t want to confuse readers, but you don’t have to race them through every doorway, show them every blow to your hero’s head. Choose the most necessary, the most telling details. Don’t just pile up information because the rules seem to say you should.
Voice serves the story, not the writer. 
In the books I’ve abandoned, writers often convolute their prose as if they must sound original—be a unique SOMEBODY—at all costs. But these choices may be robbing the English language of the power of its basic formula: Subject-verb-object. Someone doing something to someone. A basic sentence can have a modifying clause before it or an absolute phrase behind it, but English narrative dodges all sorts of pitfalls when it follows this basic pattern. For an excellent discussion of why this pattern works, try Joseph Williams’s classic Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Let people do things. Some of the most powerful prose in the world aspires to no more than this.
Still, voice means surprising the reader—just enough.
Your characters, your settings, your scenes, stand in a line-up with the characters, settings, and scenes from every other book ever written in your genre. When what you’ve put in your book could just as easily pop up in somebody else’s book, you probably lack voice. In the book(s) I’ve abandoned, I felt that I could predict every move, every sentence. I was looking at what we used to call “stock”—characters, settings, and prose off the shelf.
How can you move beyond stock?
What do you know about your character that no one would expect from a generic description of his age, ethnicity, occupation, etc.? What do you see in your setting that tells a whole story but that everyone else would overlook?
To create such vision, try these two steps: 1) Brainstorm. 2) Cull.
Exercises abound in books, workshops, blog posts, to help us generate details we might or might not actually use in our books. Here’s the place to go for the crazy stretch. Don’t censor. Outlandish is okay!
Then cull. Set aside your exercises as long as you can. Come back to them to see which ones jump off the page. Pick one. Maybe two. Be strict! Only the best. Only the ones that nail something readers really need to know but would never suspect.
And if you can, work toward honoring that famous dictum from Mark Twain (here tweaked because my version sounds better): The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Prose that captures lightning. not in every line but in carefully chosen moments of flash, has voice.
And I’ll forgive a lot if you give me voice.
Just Can't Help Writing 