This post at Writer Unboxed is among the best discussions of the distinction between “literary” and “commercial” that I’ve seen. Donald Maass’s comparison between excerpts from two books, one “commercial,” one “literary,” makes the difference visible. This discussion ties in well with my own attempts to define “voice” and effective “world building.” Let me know what you think! 
Category Archives: Myths and Truths for writers
What is “Literary” Fiction? Donald Maass has a definition!
5 Hard Truths About Being a Published Writer
Some truly HARD truths, and worth reading. I can also add that when you’ve published in the past, a fair number of agents want proof that your prior books were bestsellers before they’ll even consider your current one. “Did well for a first novel” doesn’t seem like enough.
Have you ever had experiences like these in your writing career? Share!
You’ve dreamed of being a writer, getting published, and finally – you’ve succeeded. Someone has paid money for your words, and they’re out in the world for people to read! Or, maybe you haven’t yet sold a story or novel, or you’re still writing for free on blogs and hoping that’s going to get you noticed. Either way, you aspire to greatness with your ability to turn a phrase. Here’s five things you definitely need to know, but probably no one has told you:
- You’re still going to be rejected. No matter how many sales or awards or accolades you have, you will still not have them all. You’ll submit work that won’t be purchased. You’ll write beautiful prose that doesn’t get nominated for an award, or doesn’t win even if you make it onto the ballot. You’ll be left out of articles talking about the books to read this summer…
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A Good Review on Basics: Avoiding Writing Scams
This piece from Just Publishing Advice
distills some important basic considerations to attend to for those of us trying to learn the book-publishing and marketing process. I get “requests” to submit manuscripts quite often and have usually wondered who it is that’s so desperate to see my work when traditional agents turn down hundreds of submissions each week. This article helps to put the situation in perspective.
A Serious Question about Goodreads Giveaways
While there seem to be many “advisors” out there telling me that Goodreads Giveaways is a path to selling books, I’ve been reading an awful lot of negatives from people who’ve actually run them. Has ANYBODY who has actually run one found it to be a route to selling books? If so, please share your real-life positive experiences and explain to us how you made the process work. Ideally, I’d like to know if this can be a good route to more sales from people who do NOT already have strong or established platforms. Thanks!
An Oldie but Goodie: 10 Things Writers Don’t Tell People
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!)
A Great Site on Increasing Blog Traffic. World, Look Out!
I enjoy creating new content, but I’m looking forward to widening my range and sharing more. This site, Torque, has great advice and tools for effective blogging.
COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT?
Follow up to the post below about book theft! Chris the Story Reading Ape supplies links and specific advice, as well as a DMCA form letter and a way to find the offending server. Keep this page!
VERY IMPORTANT!!! DO NOT SEND THE OFFENDING SITE A DIRECT NOTICE. They may be a click farm looking for you email and you will be infected with a virus. If they are on Facebook – Use Facebook’…
Source: COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT?
A Reassuring Post at The Book Designer on Piracy
David Kudler, at Joel Friedlander’s site, reassures us that book piracy may exist but it’s manageable—and who knows, maybe even a good thing once in a while. Have you been through this? How did you deal with it? Let us know!
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!
Just Can't Help Writing 