Category Archives: style for writers

Some finer points about making your writing sing

March 21, 2016 · 10:34 am

How Would You Solve These 4 Writing Challenges?

Buble quote speech on cloud space for text

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?

Confused business man, short term memory loss

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

Blue computerI 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

Lightning, green field

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?

Frustrated man at typewriter

Share your solutions! (Stealing from each other allowed!)

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February 28, 2016 · 11:42 am

Commas Control Emphasis. Here’s How!

I have been thinking about the inordinate power of commas.Comma 1I 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.”

Comma 2On 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.

Comma 3Now, 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.

Comma 4

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.

Comma 5And 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.Comma 6

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.”

Buble quote speech on cloud space for text

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?

 

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February 21, 2016 · 1:12 pm

Is the Hypercorrectness Troll Gobbling Up Your Grammar?

Writer with questions 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. Books and ladder

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.

Free runners sport concept illustration

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?Explosive set

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.

Sad Editing!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.

cartoonguns

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.

emoticon face

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.

Confused business man, short term memory loss

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!

Magic book

 

 

 

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February 10, 2016 · 5:03 pm

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!

Explosive set

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?

Novel!

 

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January 30, 2016 · 12:28 pm

Why I Quit Reading Your Book

Sad Editing!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?

Writer with questions

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.Eyeglasses and pen

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.

Typewriter with questions marks

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. Typewriter and flowers

 

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. Book with heart for writers

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?

Woman writing

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.

Lightning, green field

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.

What have I left out? What is voice to you? Send along examples of writers whose voice you admire.

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January 28, 2016 · 10:52 am

8 Words to Seek & Destroy in Your Writing

A great reminder post1 So important to double-check these words to make sure they actually do work in our sentences before letting them stand. I echo Orwell’s advice, though, especially about the various forms of the verb “to be” (was, is, am, are, etc.). I always ask myself whether I can find a strong action verb rather than a being verb when I’m tempted to fall back on one. Yet I’ve also seen sentences where writers twisted themselves into knots trying to avoid “to be.” Once in a while, the shortest distance between two points is a nice little linking verb!

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January 17, 2016 · 11:19 am

6 qualities of Bad Writing via Marcy Kennedy

Found on Chris The Story Reading Ape this morning: What do you think? Are these YOUR fatal flaws? Which ones have you recently forgiven, and which ones have caused you to stop reading?

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Source: 6 qualities of Bad Writing via Marcy Kennedy

Typewriter with questions marks

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January 14, 2016 · 10:41 am

10 things that red-flag a newbie novelist.

This is one of the best compendia of guidelines for troubleshooting a novel-in-progress that I’ve recently come across. My own constant struggle is the interior monologue, wherein my character thinks through her motives. Some of this is necessary, but in my current very rough draft I’m noting again and again, “Too long! Cut!” Fortunately, I have an excellent writing group that will call me out on this sin.
I’m working on a post about what has stopped me from finishing some of the books I’ve been reading in my quest to understand the indie landscape. Hamilton’s list captures many of the problems that I’ve encountered (and fight like crazy not to commit): 1) Lack of a story arc–in a couple of cases, everything seemed to be resolved mid-novel; why keep reading? 2) Detail-heavy, clunky prose I had to wade through. 3) Pages and pages of setting and character-building before anything happens. I love the comment that we all should wish to see ourselves as others see us! Hooray for honest readers. May they long thrive!

Kawanee Hamilton's avatar

THE PUBLISHING BUSINESS, WRITING CRAFT

10 THINGS THAT RED-FLAG A NEWBIE NOVELIST

Red_flag_waving.svg

by Anne R. Allen

Beginning novelists are like Tolstoy’s happy families. They tend to be remarkably alike. Certain mistakes are common to almost all beginners. These things aren’t necessarily wrong, but they are difficult to do well—and get in the way of smooth storytelling

They also make it easy for professionals—and a lot of readers—to spot the unseasoned newbie.

When I worked as an editor, I ran into the same problems in nearly every new novelist’s work—the very things I did when I was starting out.

I think some of the patterns come from imitating the classics. In the days of Dickens and Tolstoy, novels were written to be savored on long winter nights or languid summer days when there was a lot of time to be filled. Detailed descriptions took readers out of their mundane lives…

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December 4, 2015 · 10:31 am

Battle is Lost!

A sad day for grammar purists: The Washington Post will allow “singular they”!

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November 12, 2015 · 11:21 am

How to Build Beats and Style in Your Writing!

Found this terrific piece on cadence and beats at the sentence level on Writers in the Storm. I especially like the rhetorical devicesTypewriter and flowers guest blogger Margie Lawson provides. As a rhetorician, I’ve encountered many of these in my research, and I’ve used many, even if only intuitively, in my writing.

I’ve written about some of these in my Novel First Lines series, and in my post on the effects of commas on cadence. Meter and rhythm are powerful lures in the first lines of a book or story. For a wonderful discussion of rhythm and cadence as persuasive devices, check out Martha Kolln’s textbook (find used copies), Rhetorical Grammar.

See if you use any already—and what you can learn to use.

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