Category: Writing

Wadded paperAs a reader, I try to keep my TBR stack wide in its variety. At the moment, I’m reading the last Mark Twain book on my list, Short Stories and Tall Tales. On audio, I’m listening to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As an editor, I keep thinking, “I wouldn’t publish any of these. They break all the rules.”

Except…Those weren’t the rules in 1857 or during the Gilded Age when Twain wrote. Stowe wasn’t a conscious stylist. She simply wrote what she knew of and put it out there for the reader to judge. This book makes me angry, which is what Stowe was going for. Twain, on the other hand, brought a newspaper man’s sensibility to storytelling, coupled with an ear for dialog and dialect and a talent for letting us know what the speaker sounded like. But Twain broke the rules of his day.

He wrote short, declarative sentences, in dialect, and in a conversational style that make him easy to imitate even though most people have never heard him speak. Doesn’t hurt he died recently enough that even older Millennials might have met someone whose parents actually heard him speak. But…

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would not fly today, not in its current form. I don’t mean the embedded racism of society when Twain writes about. Newer versions have  omitted a certain slur in favor of the word “slave” without any damage to the meaning. If anything, it drives the point home. What I do mean is you have to read that one out loud to know what Huck and Jim are actually saying.  And therein lies the reason you did it back then and not now. Twain intended for his works to be read aloud or have them read aloud. In audio narration, you’d spend most of your time cringing at the characters attitudes (and realize Jim is waaaaay smarter than his vocabulary suggests), but the right reader would make you forget the dialect after about five minutes. Now? People sit and read in small sips, often on electronic devices. That use of apostrophes and well-placed malaprops that work so well out loud and on Audible suddenly become a barrier. It didn’t help Huck narrated the two later Tom Sawyer novels (which weren’t exactly classics.)

But Twain’s journalistic tendencies reshaped English literature. The heavy, ponderous, hard-to-read prose of the past (Looking at you, Henry James! You still owe me an apology.) gave way to crisp, visceral writing by a guy used to thinking in terms of column inches and above or below the fold on the front page. That brings us to Hemingway. And Raymond Chandler. Hemingway’s sentences were bullets. Very short. Get to the point. Sometimes fragments. On purpose. Chandler pioneered, then made cliche, the use of simile as a literary shorthand. Author Les Roberts, himself a decent crime writer whom I’ve had the pleasure of editing, sometimes parodies this in his own writing. One description of the month of April in Cleveland went on for a paragraph and ended with “was as urgent and persistent as the throbbing of an infected hangnail.” I almost stopped reading. Then laughed my ass off.

But Hemingway came up in the 1920s while Chandler began writing around 1930 (and shame on me if I missed any earlier short stories.) The world, roaring or in depression, moved quickly then and hasn’t slowed down since. The prose reflects that. Take the most famous American novel of all time, The Great Gatsby. I’ve read it. It packs a wallop. It’s less than 180 pages. Wow. Hemingway’s contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote that one. And his prose is even leaner than Hemingway’s.

And yet… I’d yank out most instances of “that.” I’m also aggressive about ripping out “very” and “just,” which have been overused to the point of near-uselessness. Gatsby has too much passive voice, too much description. Get to the point. Except Fitzgerald did get to the point. But he died before my mother was born, never mind me, and left behind one of the greatest American novels ever. Rules simply changed since.

Why? People still sat down and read books back then. They had radio, but no television. Most news came from newspapers. (I miss newspapers.) 

Since the 1990s, though, editors started getting more aggressive. Passive voice was the enemy. (And yet that last sentence would likely pass muster.) They would cut the word “that,” along with “very” and especially “suddenly” without mercy. I myself get angry when I have to put “suddenly” back into a manuscript. I love my clients, but that word is so useless I’d rather keep an F bomb in a Sunday school primer than “suddenly.” And the dreaded run-on? Forget it. Run-ons must die.

Some of this is good. Some of this is a fad. We don’t write in dialect much anymore (Walter Mosley a stubborn exception), or we do with the lightest touch. Some of this is good. It makes the writing clearer for an audience with declining attention spans. And therein lies the issue.

Today, books and articles are competing with video games and TikTok and the Twitter clones. There are a lot more types of content out there, and the content itself has exploded exponentially. I myself read books usually 15  pages at a sitting. I have to. Like everyone else, I’m pulled in a dozen directions. Will they change again?

I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with ChatGPT. Love it. Hate it. It will affect how we read and edit, too. (Also, it knows who Robert Fripp is. If this is Skynet, the apocalypse will have a killer soundtrack.)

 

Cold beerBack in the old days, when my dad would take us all out in his LaSalle to the five-and-dime for a grape Nehi while Rudy Vallee warbled “Whole Lotta Love”… Um… Wait. They didn’t make LaSalles when my dad was born, Rudy Vallee had given way to big bands, and my earliest memory of a new song was “Something” by the Beatles when I still had not known the horror of kindergarten. Let’s start again. Back in high school, before the age of word processors, cloud storage, and AI, we were taught to write in drafts. In fact, my favorite English teacher Mr. Murphy (still going strong at 90!) told us to write out the first draft by hand before sending it across the typewriter.  Subsequent drafts, after chopping up with a red pen*, were to fix flow, spelling, typing, etc. If the truth be known, I was 30 before I could type, and by then, word processors and computers were a thing. 

But I stuck with the draft concept, though I rarely wrote longhand. My wrists don’t like it. And starting with the original Mrs. Hottle’s Canon word processor, the concept of typing all drafts took off. I no longer had to worry about margins. You could set a default font. You just typed, then saved to disk. Then came the PC and Microsoft Works. Then Word Perfect. Then Word. Many took it a step further with Scrivener. I’ll talk more about the various tools later.

As I started getting into professional markets, I met a writer named Dave White, now a school teacher in New Jersey. At the time, Dave was a grad student and just getting started as a novelist. Dave decided to abandon the draft concept. Everything is stored electronically, so you’re not rewriting (except when you are. Then you’re overwriting the original or copying and pasting. Or cutting.) So why make multiple files?

It’s a fair point. He’s been a more successful novelist than I’ve been, and, most importantly, the system works for him. Yet I still do drafts despite working in IT for [mumble mumble] years. Why?

Versioning. As Jim Winter, I wrote Holland Bay over a 12-year period, starting with a 105,000-word first draft that did not have a minor character who just had to spin up their own subplot. I didn’t so much finish the draft as stopped when a couple of the main characters finished their arcs. Additionally, I make much of how this series was inspired by 87th Precinct and The Wire. Rereading it, I realized at least two scenes were inadvertently copied from The Wire. You will never read that draft unless my family does something stupid like file my drafts with Wilmington College or my old high school. (Please don’t do that.) The second draft, while still considerably different, looks more like what you would buy today. But not entirely. Some point-of-view characters had to be pared down, extraneous scenes cut. And then an agent looked at it. She asked for a rewrite. Then I tweaked it to run past a Big Five publisher. Then Down & Out Books had some changes. All these versions are different files. Why? 

I work in IT. In fact, I work in software. I’m of the mindset that every version of something should be backed up so it’s available if you scrap a new version. Believe me, in both software and writing, that’s a huge concern. Now, I may be splitting hairs. If you came up when PCs were a thing, you probably back everything up. In fact, you likely store it in the cloud. Is that drafts? Well, most of us who do actual drafts are a bit more systematic about it.

As an editor, I receive manuscripts that are labeled “v03,” which means Down & Out went back and forth with the author before sending it to me. Plus they send me partially formatted manuscripts. I always keep the original version, whether it’s from a publisher or a freelance client, and make a copy labeled “_edited.” That’s both a signal to the writer this has been worked on and gives me a fall back in case something goes horribly wrong.

It all goes back to the old adage “Don’t fall in love with your first draft.” Sometimes, someone turns in a clean draft, and people like me just move commas around. But normally, a rough draft looks just like that. Rough. Have a system for the revisions. And stick to it.

 

*A rather pretentious roommate a former spousal unit and I had protested it was a blue pen, and we were not aloud to argue because she edited. Badly. And every agent, editor, and writer I’ve spoken to since has said, “Red pen.” Blue was for making photocopies in an age when the copier couldn’t see blue.

The bulk of what I edit comes from a publisher. So it stands to reason each writer, regardless of flaws, knows how to write. Now, how well they write is up for some debate, and that includes your humble narrator. Self editing, of course, is a tricky skill to master. It’s why I’m a fan of Stephen King’s process, where in the rough draft gets shoved into a drawer or dark corner of the cloud for two or three or six months. That masterpiece you wrote in the heat of the moment suddenly looks like the literary equivalent of a Very Special Episode of Hoarders. 

 

But you should know how to write, even in that messy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink first version of the story you’re writing. I mentioned on my author Substack that I just started a short story I knew was already bloated because it takes too long to wade in. Of course, I’m GenX. Typewriters and dedicated word processing machines were still a thing when I began to work on my craft. I know one Gen Z writer who says he doesn’t do drafts. He just revises the existing original. He’s about fifteen years younger than me and started writing probably on Word Perfect or even the early Microsoft Word. Which means we’re both old enough to have owned cassettes for music and don’t cotton to these fancy, newfangled apps like Scrivener. (Scrivener has been around long enough to cultivate quite a few “Get off my lawn!” types among its fan base. Welcome to the geezers club, Scrivenites. The guys still using IBM Selectrics will be tending bar this evening.)

“Well, gee, Hottle. Are you going to get to your point?”

Now that the bush has been thoroughly beat around, yes.

This column, and dozens of others just like it, are about beating a manuscript into submission. (For submission, though no pun was intended.) Some time back in the 2010s, all the writing advice became about flogging books on Kindle, how to crank out 10,000 words while walking your dog, taking a shower, or getting a root canal. (Pro tip: Dragon Anywhere does not understand WTF you’re saying when a dentist is ripping bone out of your mouth.) None of it was about the joy of writing, why we do it, what drives us to sit at the keyboard and make stuff up.

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray BradburyRay Bradbury wrote a book about it. He came up in the age of pulps. His best known science fiction novel, The Martian Chronicles, was welded together in outline form almost on a dare from his editor (who wrote him a check the next morning.) Bradbury knew he wanted to write from earliest childhood. I’ve heard tell of writers whose parents discouraged them. One gent I used to know took beatings over it. (He’s old enough to be my father, so put that into generational context. My dad transitioned from spanking to the time-out because the latter really pissed off my brother. I digress. Again.) No, Bradbury collected memories. He wrote down lists of nouns that triggered those memories. And he talks to his characters. He actually will chat with them, listen to them. It’s how he adapted Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes for stage and screen. And I’ve noticed movies based on Bradbury’s work tend to hew more closely to the original source than that of other writers. Stephen King comes close, even when a director “has their own vision” (Shut up, Stuart Baird!), though the director of The Outsider needs to apologize for trying to excise Holly Gibney from that story. 

Bradbury approaches life as one long journal entry. Something happens to him or around him, and he knows an idea from it won’t emerge for years, sometimes decades. It’s obvious to anyone who’s read Something Wicked This Way Comes. And if you read between the lines, you can see an homage to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in The Martian Chronicles. And, I suspect, shades of Stephen King’s Castle Rock, too.

There is actually no Zen in Zen in the Art of Writing. Well, not until the end, with the essay that gives the book the title. This is Ray Bradbury telling you he’s not a science fiction or literary god but just a kid from Waukegan, Illinois, who got to make stuff up for a living. One suspects he’d have done it whether he got published or not. Writing is, after all, an unstoppable madness for many. Including Bradbury.

Writers get a lot of inspiration from music. From other writers. From poetry. It’s only natural they would want to quote it.

But can you?

Short answer: No. Unless it’s public domain, you need the creator’s permission. (Looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg! Stole two of my books to train his crappy AI. That’s another rant.) 

Long answer: Sometimes. Let’s be honest. Creators should be paid for their work. So if you’re lifting lyrics from Led Zeppelin (a band that knows a thing or two about having to settle plagiarism lawsuits, both as defendant and as plaintiff), Mr. Plant is probably going to send his lawyer after you. Or maybe not. Half a line from “Stairway…” is probably not going to land you in court. On the other hand, if you base your epic fantasy on “Achilles Last Stand” or “Battle of Evermore” and quote whole snatches of the song, Messrs. Page, Plant, Jones, and the widow and son of John Bonham are going to want either a cut of your royalties or a licensing fee. Now, if you use those songs as jumping off points (“Achilles…” itself comes from The Iliad, public domain since the Roman Empire overran Greece), no harm, no foul.

Similarly, trademarks can get dicey. When does a pop culture reference turn into trademark infringement? Also depends. In No Marigolds in the Promised Land, I referred to a type of rolling drone as “daleks,” with the narrator wondering where that name came from. At the time, the BBC was the sole arbiter of the Doctor Who trademarks. Their tendency was to let it be as long as these were balky robots and not the encased aliens with a speech impediment. Also, without thinking, I overused a Star Wars reference that went from something that would give George Lucas a chuckle to bringing a giant mouse in dark glasses and his giant duck enforcer to my front porch armed with brass knuckles and a cease-and-desist order. That got purged. The daleks?

I was advised to curtail them by an editor I knew, though I’ve seen references to Tardises (Tardii?) that clearly were not the multidimensional phone booth David Tenant uses to commute to work. I left a few references in, but regularly call them trashcan drones because, well, canonical Daleks look like giant garbage cans. So it’s likely anything so shaped and earning a name from a centuries-old pop culture reference is likely to do also look like a trashcan.  And it’s obvious they’re not out to ex-terminate! Ex-TERMINATE!

Even Tolkien might come after you. Lord of the Rings, still copyrighted in 2025, has a lot of trademarks. I can name a mountain chain “Misty Mountains” on a distant planet because CS Lewis’s language-obsessed buddy wasn’t the first to use that name, but deciding a desert region earned the literary reference name “Mordor” would not have flown. (Yes, I thought about it. Then I decided I knew nothing about Amargosa’s deserts as they didn’t do anything for the story.)

A friend of mine, when he sold his first novel, quoted song lyrics all the way through, usually to start chapters like Stephen King occasionally does. He got a surprise from his publisher when he received marching orders to secure permission from each of the songwriters. Most of them agreed, some tickled an author remembered them. (Pro tip: NEVER assume this. ALWAYS ask. This is NOT fair use. Ever.) Then he got a call. “Why do you want to use the song?” “Huh? Who is this?” “Neil.” “Neil who?” “Young.” “Yeah, feck off, Martin. I don’t have time for your jokes. I got an early class tomorrow!” Neil called back. They actually had a good conversation.

On the other hand, that same writer edited an anthology he invited me to. I wanted a character to paraphrase the a line from U-2’s “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me.” Would they care? “Not if you give them $200,000.” My house at the time was worth less than half that. (Mid-2000s, so… Cheap.) That was a hard no.

But paraphrasing is a way to get around quoting a song without stepping on the copyright holder’s toes. I’ve seen where AC/DC “thundered about a railroad track.” Most of you know what song that is. The rest can easily plug “AC/DC” and “railroad track” into Google and find out. Go ahead. You’ll be thunderstruck. 

A handful of bands and singers will allow snatches of lyrics to be quoted. You’ll need to get written permission, if only to cover your butt. And not every band will rush to your defense if they’ve sold off their catalog to an unscrupulous publisher. Yes, them that own the Beach Boys’ music managed to get Mike Love and Brian Wilson to team up, at least on Twitter, as they trolled them over a lawsuit against Katy Perry for her own “California Girls.” (If you sue over your own IP, and the creators flame you on social media, you can pretty much kiss your case goodbye.)

Now, what about character names? I get dragged by betas (who should know better by this point, having read the entire series) over a diminutive engineer named “Peter Lancaster,” with a rather familiar accent and libido. (Connor Duffy of Compact Universe fame constantly asks him how he hasn’t been court-martialed yet.) Again, this is suggestive of Tyrion Lannister and the brilliant actor who plays him, Peter Dinklage. However, it just made the character come together. But what if I named a character “James T. Kirk” or “Anakin Skywalker”?

Yeah, do that and you might start getting some rude letters from high-priced attorneys for Paramount or Disney. They get a bit worked up over that. (Lucas, however, still enforces the parodies-are-funny rule despite selling Star Wars to Disney. Suck it, Mickey.) You’ve probably met a James Kirk, so you might be able to shrug and say, “Well, I never watched Star Trek.” On the other hand, a world-weary detective named “Jim Bond” might get annoyed with all the Sean Connery imitations he has to put up with. (“Oh, wow. My girlfriend’s name is Moneypenny. I’ve never heard that before. Well, not counting the thousand times just last week.”) There, it’s a pop culture reference that likely will not ruffle the feathers of the Fleming or Broccoli families. (No one cares what Kevin McClory’s family thinks, since they sold Blofeld to Eon and, subsequently, Amazon.) But anything named Skywalker tramples on well-established trademarks. And we all know the Mouse is already displeased with Winnie the Pooh horror films now that their original copyright has expired. 

In the end, use common sense. You can get away with references to Twain, Shakespeare, or Dickens because they’re public domain. Your main concern should be how the reader will interpret it. On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes is also public domain as far as copyright is concerned, but the Doyle estate still owns the trademarks. That’s right.  They can still sue you if you still cross a line. You can bet they had a hand in the making of Robert Downey Jr’s turn as Holmes, Sherlock, Elementary, and most recently, Watson. 

And really, it’s someone else’s work. Orcs may not be original to Tolkien. Per Tolkien himself, it’s from Anglo-Saxon and appears in Beowulf.  Uruk Hai might earn you a nastygram from Christopher Tolkien’s solicitor. Similarly, Starfleet (Jimi Hendrix’s references notwithstanding), Jedi, and Brown Coats will get you in trouble. 

So, if you’re wondering if it’s fair use, if you’re describing something in someone else’s work or paraphrasing lyrics, yes. It is. If you’re lifting characters, prose, or lyrics wholesale from something where the creator hasn’t passed away in the last 75 years, you might want to rethink that.

My current project has em dashes in place of quotation mQuotation markarks, which is a challenge. Em dashes (or for the more pedantic, dialog dashes. Hate to burst your bubble, nitpickers, but the readers who pick up on this don’t care. Neither do I.) are generally used in Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, or French. I’m not sure why writers in English–any dialect of English–choose to do this, but then Cormac McCarthy dispensed with quotation punctuation altogether.

But having to adapt to a different style of quoting dialog underscores another issue: You still have to follow the rules of dialog. And to follow said rules, the reader has to know who’s talking and when. Even the great Lawrence Block, whose books taught me to write novels long before Stephen King graced us with On Writing, munged dialog once. If the greats do it, you need to watch out, too.

So, let’s review, shall we?

  • “Said” is an invisible word. It takes less than second for the reader to blow by a “said” phrase to pick up on whose talking.
  • That said, the old chestnut of not using any word but “said” (except maybe “asked”) needs to be put down like Old Yeller. (Um… Spoiler alert?) In an age of audio books, it is absolutely nerve-grating to hear “said” twenty-six times in a thirty-second passage. Yes, you can use mild alternatives like “shouted,” “mumbled,” even “intoned.” Just don’t get fancy with it. There’s a reason more old-school editors insist on “said/asked.” “‘Well,’ he queried” is still bad writing no matter how much you’re bored with “said.” </rant>
  • Action beats are your friend. You don’t have to tag every line of dialog. In fact, don’t. Dialog-heavy scenes have the disadvantage of encouraging “white rooms.” Two characters are talking. Where are they talking? What’s going on? Half the time, it’s just exposition, and exposition is death in our era of short attention spans. Sorry, but that’s the reality we’re working in today. Have your characters eat a salad or lift weights or knit a sweater. Anything to convey where the conversation takes place.
  • When exposition is unavoidable, put the Pope in a pool. This is one of my favorite storytelling tools from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. He talks about a movie where a bunch of cardinals have to set up the movie and can only do it through rambling dialog. So the screenwriter put an old man in a swimming pool listening to the cardinals. It takes the viewers a minute or two to figure out the guy swimming is the Pope. They get an infodump, but their attention is held because they’re forced to figure out who’s in the pool. (I loved that so much, I put a character named “Mr. Pope” in a swimming pool in one story. Then I killed him in that same pool in another story. Yes. As an author, I’m mean to my characters.)
  • Untagged dialog: No more than five lines before you insert a “said/asked/pontificated” (Don’t use that last one. The reader will throw your book in the trash, and for good reason) or an action beat. The reader needs to keep track of who’s talking. And so do you.
  • Tagging or adding beats: If two people are in the conversation, unless they are the same gender, get their names out quickly and stick with he/she/they*. Once you’ve established who and what they are, the reader can pretty much follow along. More than one person? Or two of the same gender? You’re going to need to drop names a little more often. 

*The common use of singular they today is not political. It’s the means by which I get to spike the football on a pedantic English teacher’s grave. My favorite English teacher, who just turned 90, would heartily approve.

I’ve talked about the software tools I use to edit. ProWritingAid and PerfectIt are my go-to suites for copy editing. Story analysis and developmental editing, despite what OpenAI would have you believe, is very much a human art and has to be learned. By humans. Sorry, Sam. Good luck buying Twitter. (Like Sam Altman, I’m not holding my breath on that one.)

But software is not the only tool in the box. As I edit primarily books, it may surprise you to know some of my tools are… Well… Books. And the odd website, usually Wikipedia. More on that in a moment.

So what books do I recommend?

Chicago Manual of StyleThe Chicago Manual of Style – For US writers, this is the mack daddy. A fellow editor, newly minted, assumed I read the thing like you’d read any textbook. But we don’t read the dictionary or even peruse Wikipedia to absorb it. (The latter is constantly in flux, so that’s a fool’s errand.) No, CMOS, as it’s sometimes called, is a reference book. This is the baseline for writing in American English. There are UK and Canadian equivalents, so look for those. But you have the manual to look things up, it’s indispensable.

The Elements of StyleThe Elements of Style -Strunk & White’s treatise on the English language. Most of it is universal. It’s less a grammar book than a style book. Chicago is an encyclopedia. Elements is the quick-and-dirty. It’ll even tell you if you should hyphenate “quick-and-dirty” and when.

 

Actually, the Comma Goes HereActually, the Comma Goes Here by Lucy Cripps – This is a new addition. Like Elements, it’s a short, sweet guide to grammar I’ve started keeping handy as I work.

 

 

Self-Editing for Fiction WritersSelf Editing for Fiction Writers by Rennie Brown and Dave King – Out of print now, but you can find used copies pretty much anywhere online. (My plug for bookshop.org, the indie bookstore’s friend.) I got a copy years ago, and most of the writers I started out with still have their copy.

 

 

Websites

Wikipedia – When it first debuted, it was largely a copy of the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Wiki vandalism,” which I gleefully admit to provoking (Yes, I’m one of those who added “Born in Babylonia, moved to Arizona” to the Tutankhamun article. Wasn’t the first and definitely not the last), was a huge issue in the beginning. However, this non-profit operation has evolved. It’s well-policed and has become much more nuanced in its restrictions on how information is sourced. It’s great for fact checking and spellchecking brand names. And like you’re not supposed to city Britannica as a source, Wikipedia provides you the actual source for much of its information.

Duck Duck Go – Until recently, I swore by Google. And why not? For years, it was the gold standard of search. But like anything else, great brands and great products decline. Duck Duck Go is not only a secure, privacy focused search engine, it’s a great web browser to boot. Duck Duck Go’s search engine is as robust as Google’s and Microsoft’s Bing. I keep Chrome and Edge in case Duck Duck Go blocks or can’t reach something that’s needed, but that’s seldom a problem. 

Writing:

Writing the Novel (Updated version)Writing the Novel  by Lawrence Block – This is the book that taught me how to write a novel. A reread years later convinced me to switch from pantsing to plotting, but that’s a personal preference. Block even mentions the difference while describing a historical novel whose author basically shuffled his research cards into a certain order to make them a novel. That sounded to me, as it did to the great Block, a bit clumsy. His point was it worked for that writer. The book was a best seller. (It sounds like Michener. He was a researching fool, eventually employing teams of researchers to build his stories.) Block gives it to you straight, and from an age when word processors were not yet a thing.

 

On Writing by Stephen KingOn Writing by Stephen King – Not so much a how-to as  a how-I-do-it. King is an unrepentant pantser, but you can see that in how he structures stories. It’s also a memoir and, in the final section an editing guide. Like every writer and every editor, he has his pet peeve. His is adverbs, and he cheerfully admits he’s the worst offender. So noted. But not only should every writer read this, but it’s like spending time with a favorite uncle recounting his past.

 

 

Save the Cat – Blake Snyder – Take the Hero’s Journey and boil it down for screenwriters. Also useful for novelists. Save the cat is one of the goals of any story. How do you get to saving the cat in the end? Snyder, who sadly is no longer with us, also gave me one of my favorite tools for handling expository scenes that cannot be avoided: The Pope in the Pool. If you have a scene where people are talking about the story, but not much is happening, through something interesting into the scene. In one movie, an old man is swimming as a bunch of cardinals outline what’s happening. Gradually, you realize the guy in the pool is the Pope himself. I loved that passage of the book so much that, in one story, I named a character Pope, who forces business visitors to talk to him while he swims in his company-supplied pool. (He also dies there in another story, but that’s for the TS Substack.) 

Man runningApologies to Steve Perry

As a writer, I have a problem. And it’s one of my pet peeves as a writer.

Ever read a sentence that seems to go on forever? To the point where you forgot what the author was saying in the beginning? You’ve seen them, especially in first-person novels. The author starts out with one thought, then, through the magic of “and” or “but,” adds a related thought. Okay, all good so far. Then there’s another and/but or even just a comma. In most European languages, we are hard-wired to look for a period. The brain wants to move this out of short-term memory and into the neurological databanks. The longer it has to wait, the harder that gets.

Especially with today’s short attention spans. 

As writers, particularly newer writers, people tend to throw in as much detail as they can. In a rough draft, this is good. I know a few writers who’ve abandoned the idea of “drafts,” since 99% of everything is now electronic. The principle still holds. When you make revisions, you tend to cut more than add. Most of the early cutting comes from too much detail. Sometimes, this results in a run-on sentence. If anything prompts me, as a reader, to put down the book, it’s run-on sentences. As an editor?

Well, I’m gonna chop up that lengthy epic within a paragraph brutally. A lot of times, you’re trying to put in everything you think the reader needs. Or you go off on tangents, particularly if you’re pantsing. Or it’s all one big sentence in your head. A lot of run-ons could be broken up into paragraphs unto themselves. On occasion, I’ve been known to simply toss out a long one. That, of course, requires a comment explaining why I just tossed the author’s hard work into the recycle bin. It’s drifting into rewriting, and I will not do rewriting if I can avoid it. It’s seldom been done to me as a writer, and I think I owe my clients the same courtesy. Hence my rant a while back about editors bragging about cutting. It ain’t about you, Seamus.* 

Short stories provide the biggest challenge. You have a limited amount of space to convey information. Short stories are generally 1000-5000 words, with some longer but not by much. The temptation is to cram in as much information as you can, hoping the reader gets everything. It’s also where the most cutting occurs. In a short story, the fewer POVs, the less backstory, the fewer characters, the better. In a novel, you can wade in, take side trips, be as detailed as you want (within reason). The average novel these days in 90,000 words. Scifi novels regularly check in between 100K and 120K.  But a 5000 word short? There’s not only not much room for world building but none for run-ons.

But I’ve run on enough about that.

*Not an actual editor. The only Seamus I’ve ever known was my brother’s dog, who loved Pink Floyd for some reason.

Comic book swear wordIt’s no secret I have a love-hate relationship with my first novel. Published as James R. Winter (later shortened to “Jim Winter” because the former sounded pretentious), Northcoast Shakedown was published by a small press in 2005. Part of my ambivalence toward it comes from the press’s implosion. It cost me an agent (I should have waited three weeks), and pretty much pegged me as… Well, it didn’t do me any favors. But another problem: I did readings on the air a couple of times, and it was a pain in the ass to find a passage I could read without violating FCC regulations. 

That’s right. I wanted my writing to sound tough, and so 90% of the pages had the ever-dreaded, ever-popular F bomb on it. The follow-up, Second Hand Goods, had no such problem. Bad Religion would have been right at home in today’s thriller environment. And Road Rules, my Elmore Leonardesqe caper, suffered only from being too short. But NCS, as I’ve shorthanded it over the years?

Yeah, try standing up in front of a bookstore crowd and reading that when you’re parked next to the kids’ section. Not happening.

But how do we handle language? And as an editor, how do I deal with swearing?

Well, first of all, the author needs to deal with that at the developmental stage. If they do it themselves, great. That means they put some thought in their story before tossing it over my transom for clean up. I’ve flagged spellings of swear words. Every editing tool I’ve seen wants “son of a bitch” written as one word if it’s not spread out as a phrase. However, while I seldom see it these days, “sumbitch” is also common, and I have to smack the tool’s hand for getting in my way. The oddest one, though I’ve seen it three or four times in projects, is “sunuvabitch,” or some variation on that. But you probably read that with no problem. There were a couple of authors who wrote it in such a way that I had to sound it out every time. Now you’ve crossed from giving your editor pause to giving your reader permission to put the book down and not finish. The reader is all, and thou wilt consider thy reader in all things, world without end. (Maybe I need to quit watching Shakespeare and RobWords. That’s another post.)

And to that point, how do we handle swearing? There are multiple schools of thought on that. Some say swearing conveys a lack of intelligence. Others say those who swear tend to be smarter. Neither is true. It’s all preference. But tell that to the reader who wants all her romance novels to sound like Hallmark, where it’s Christmas all year long, and Lacey Chabert solves more crimes than the NYPD Homicide Unit. She wants no swearing in her stories. On the other hand, we have the gent who wants all his stories to feature six-foot-four manly men as protagonists as they rip aliens apart bare-handed and drink gallons of whiskey to shake off their exertions. Swearing is not optional. It’s a requirement. So, how to communicate that to a reader without slapping a trigger warning on it. (The fewer, the better. Look at movie ratings. Those of you who still go to movies.) 

I recommend putting your first swear word in the first two or three pages. As readers tend to skim, they look for things: White space, what is referenced, how graphic or genteel, and yes, language. It doesn’t have to be an F bomb. In fact, if my characters’ language is coarse, I, as a writer, do an F bomb check. Author Marcus Sakey once told me he took out one out of every three. I can see two out of three. When it’s seldom used, you have to think about it in the writing. When I wrote Second Wave, I abandoned the conceit this was a YA series. The character of JT and his companions have disobeyed orders and joined a mission to reach a fallen starship. The mission’s leader, Suicide, is angry and says, “Fuck your loss, little boy! We all lost people!” (I’m doing this from memory, so I may have added exclamation points. I use them, but I’m not a fan.) This was not only war, but JT was mere weeks beyond qualifying as a child soldier, and his companions were child soldiers. Politeness went right out the window. Plus, Suicide is a war veteran who lost one spouse in battle and another to a terrorist bombing. She’s not going to talk to him like an Asian Mr. Rogers.

In the scene where that occurs, context carries the meaning. Already, several of Suicide’s more questionable subordinates demonstrate why they were considered war criminals in the previous major conflict. By the time she loses her temper with JT, it doesn’t matter. But what about crime fiction?

Police and criminals can get pretty salty. I know crime authors who believe you can avoid it in dialog, but anyone who’s ever been in a tense situation knows that doesn’t really happen in real life. On the other hand, Law & Order avoids it while The Wire had one seen where the dialog consisted entirely of F Bombs. One is on broadcast, the other on HBO. As always, know thy reader, thy audience, and thy platform. And quit using “thy” like it makes you sound smarter. 

What about slurs? They exist, and people use them. They can convey a person’s prejudices. But they can also throw a reader out of a story. When I’ve had to write them, I’ve often cringed. It should be obvious this character either lived in a certain environment or was bigoted. Still, too many people conflate the author with their characters. Unfortunately, like singers, actors, and even artists, a writer is performing for an audience. If you want to keep an audience, you have to be aware of the consequences. People are under no obligation to like you, so give them a reason to like you.

 

Phil Collins singing "Turn It on Again"
“I… I… IIIIIII!!!!”
Source: Genesis official YouTube channel

One bane of every writer, including this one, is watching how you start sentences, particularly in first person. I don’t mean sentence fragments. A newer editor and writer complained about that, to which I said, “I not only use them all the time, I once edited a book written almost entirely in fragments.” He was horrified, but the book, a two-week copy edit, would have taken more like six weeks or had to have gone back to the author for another trip across the keyboard. But there is one error I flag because, as a writer, I know it’s invisible during the creation process but will drive readers batty.

That opening word on every sentence in a given paragraph. I mentioned first person up front because it’s also the hardest to avoid, hardest to edit, and hardest for the writer to fix if it goes beyond the limits of a copy edit. Unless we’re in a developmental edit, where we’re already killing darlings and moving scenes around, I don’t rewrite. That’s not my job. My job is to flag where the prose needs tightened up. Even in a developmental edit, I’d flag a troublesome paragraph with a comment. (Thank you, Word. Thank you, Scrivener. Thank you, Google Docs.)  In first person, it’s hard not to start every sentence with “I.”

“I” is the most common word in a first-person narrative. The narrator is telling you a story, and the narrator, more often than not, is the protagonist–or thinks they are. So, you can have two or three paragraphs where the narrator starts every single sentence with “I.” Also in first person, it’s the hardest to fix. If it’s too onerous, I highlight and comment that it needs reworded. I can just see the writer cringing as they read that note. I can also hear them going “D’oh!” As a writer, I can relate.

But “I” is not the only offending word. “You” (usually in dialog), “he/she/they,” and, to my surprise, “the” are frequent offenders. And this frequently gets through a couple rounds of revision before I even see it. Like I said, it’s invisible when you’re writing.

Two instances where I won’t flag anything. The first is across paragraphs. If you use editing tools like I do (because having a digital flashlight helps considerably) you notice apps like ProWritingAid don’t like multiple sentences starting with “I/You/The/etc.”  regardless of paragraphs and dialog. The trouble is the reader doesn’t care. Even with action beats and dialog tags, everything inside the quotation marks is a new thought. And everything in other paragraphs should be separate thoughts. This happens, then this happens, then someone says this. So I ignore it. If it bugs the writer, then the writer can fix it.

The other case is when it’s deliberate. Someone is hammering a point home. “You never pick up your laundry. You never take your dishes to the sink. You never put the toilet seat down. You are a slob.” (Scenes from my first apartment. I wonder how that girlfriend is doing these days? Also, I do put laundry away and take dishes to the sink. Um… Maybe I’ll save that story for the new TS Hottle Substack in a couple of weeks. 😉 ) There, it’s deliberate, almost poetic, and probably humorous. I know some editors who will flag it because they think it’s their job to apply rules instead of make the prose more readable. That’s editing for editing’s sake, and frankly, no one knows or remembers the editor. They do know the writer, who has the power of the almighty Stet when doing revisions. (Incidentally, I did precious few stets with Chris Rhatigan, my predecessor at Down & Out, and Dawn Barclay, now my colleague at that vaunted crime press. We all have similar approaches. And as a writer, they get me.)

A particularly aggressive editor might flag everything. This is not malicious, and if you think that red ink is a stab at the soul, think again. It’s to make you, the writer, think before you stet. I’ve only met one editor who got overly aggressive with applying rules (and his show-don’t-tell example was the most absurd abuse of that chestnut I’ve ever seen), but unless they are rookies, those editors are few. The right editor won’t care (much) about the writer’s feelings, but they damn well better think of the reader, who’s going to be buying your prose. And sometimes, that means breaking the rules for readability.

 

*With apologies to Adrian Belew

Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in concert.
Led Zeppelin

Following on last week’s column (or was it this week? I was late getting it out.), the word “was” and its close relatives bring to mind the core reason I wrote about it last week. It robs the prose of immediacy. Let’s face it. If you’re a writer in today’s world, especially a fiction writer, you can’t afford to lose immediacy. People have short attention spans. If someone has been sitting down to read your work, you’d better keep their attention before Netflix drops the final season of Stranger Things or the Kardashians do something they think is noteworthy.

First, let’s look at the three main verb tenses in English. And thanks to eslgrammar.org for the assist. They have a handy page to look this up.

Writers in rough drafts, including those two hacks TS Hottle and Jim Winter, tend to use what’s termed past continuous when writing action. Most prose is written in past tense. They often write past continuous to convey action. Only, to the reader, it just looks like passive voice. 

“He was walking into Clarksdale.”

Robert Plant gets a free pass on that line because he needed to keep time with Jimmy Page’s chords in that song. You, gentle reader, who hope to have gentle readers of your own, don’t get a pass. Unless our intrepid Clarksdale-bound hiker is interrupted as he’s coming into town, the line should be “He walked into Clarksdale.” Simple. Short. Declarative. Hemingway would be proud. And he would know. Even Hemingway’s passive voice reads like action. (That’s another post.)

So what are the tenses?

There are three main ones: Past, present, future. If you’re writing time travel, you’re on your own. Even Douglas Adams and the writers of Doctor Who make fun of those who try to invent tenses. 

Then we have the continuous tenses, indicating ongoing action by the subject. I was walking into Clarksdale. I am walking into Clarksdale. I will be walking into Clarksdale. In everyday speech, this is fine as long as you can be understood. In prose, I read it aloud and look at the sentences around the offending phrase. As I said in my last post, it’s fine if our intrepid walker does one thing and is either interrupted or does something else as well. If not, well then, he walked into Clarksdale. This assumes, of course, the main action will be happening in Clarksdale (and without that clunky future continuous phrase, which has damned few use cases.)

Then we have the perfect tenses. The first two almost always indicate past events. Past perfect (“I had walked into Clarksdale.”) and present perfect (“I have walked into Clarksdale.”), indicating the speaker or point-of-view character has walked into Clarksdale at least once. Future perfect means the speaker or POV character will walk into Clarksdale at least once before a future point in time in question.

But wait! There’s more!

Past/present/future perfect continuous!  “I had been walking into Clarksdale,” meaning this was at some point in the past a frequent occurrence. “I have been walking into Clarksdale,” meaning this is something ongoing. “I will have been walking into Clarksdale,” meaning this is something likely to occur regularly or repeatedly in the future.

Again, you need a good reason to go with this. A lot of writers use the continuous tenses (both basic and perfect) thinking it conveys action. Unfortunately, there’s that word “was” (or “is” or “are” or “will be.”) Any time the reader sees that, the brain fires up “Passive voice!” and passive voice is to be avoided. (Not always, but a future post will be written about that.) The best use case for continuous is when the phrase is followed by “when.” “I was walking into Clarksdale when…” Then the action is disrupted. Which basic past/present tense doesn’t convey very well.

The only other time you should really use it is when you need to line up your rhythm with Jimmy Page’s playing. Then you’re going to send your old pal Tom tickets as I’ve only seen two Yardbird guitarists live. One has passed on, and the other has turned out to be an idiot. Unfortunately, Pagey is largely retired, so a pass to see him live would be greatly appreciated.