Category: Writing

Wadded paperI’ve now been editing for the better part of a year. To say that I learned a lot is an understatement. Some of the work Down & Out has sent me could be intimidating. My first project came from a well-known author in crime fiction circles, one I read quite a bit of in the oughties. I might have been more rigid on that one simply wanting to do a good job when, as a writer, I actually turned to this guy for advice. But I’ve learned a lot since then. Like, the writer expects you to edit. So if there’s a glaring issue, it probably means he or she forgot it or wants suggestions. 

More recently, the publisher handed me a local author, which worked out well. His would be a difficult book simply for the story he told and the choices he made. Being local, I was able to meet up with him (in an indie bookstore, no less.) Which was cool. We’d met and interacted before, so it was old-home week. Plus, his book had some AC/DC references. I’d just read Brian Johnson’s The Lives of Brian, so invoking Mr. Johnson’s bff from beyond the grave added some fun to this project. It wasn’t easy, but it was a joy to work with.

Since I use ProWritingAid to edit, some things become obvious. Writers, including the two I happen to be, don’t always follow the rules. PWA hates passive voice, but most writers, including the two I happen to be, use it sparingly or in contexts where active would just sound silly. But I’ve often wondered how I was doing? I mentioned in an online forum how much fun I had doing a recent music-themed anthology (which are always fun to edit, write, or read.) The editor, who had his own story in the book, sent back a note and said, “Yeah, I fixed a couple things with mine because of your notes.”  Yeah. I like feedback like that. If they didn’t like it, I usually don’t hear about it.

Unfortunately, I’ve had a couple of bad experiences as a writer. One with an editor trying to backdoor their mad developmental editing skills and coming off as though they didn’t even read. I won’t recount the “I didn’t know this wasn’t Mars” story, but suffice it to say, a red dwarf sun and the line, “Unlike Mars, we have a magnetic field” line should have been huge hints. (As TS Hottle, I write scifi. I have expectations of the audience. I have higher ones of the betas or an editor.)

The other, also a beta, thought everything was an Easter egg because I’m an American. And Americans put Easter eggs into everything. Some of this paid off, and I had to thank him even though I didn’t take a particular suggestion. It wasn’t his objection to “tea bags.” It was sending me down a rabbit hole and asking a handful of UK friends and an exchange student from Japan how they drank their tea. As such, Suicide’s silent rant about the Interstellar Era’s equivalent of the Keurig expanded. But downside, he was finding Easter eggs where their were none. “Falcon? Do you think everyone knows all the names of Apollo lunar modules?” Space buff that I am, I had to go look that one up. And I had seen the command modules from 11 and 15 that same year. This one wasn’t so bad because it did help having a reader who wanted to know if I killed off that murderous  human pestilence, Jez Salamacis, yet. Spoiler alert: No. And not even in the upcoming Suicide Gambit.

Yet I always wondered how I was doing as an editor. Was I stepping on my writers’ toes? Was I being too loose and handing back my publisher a less-than-stellar product?

Then I ran into a couple of instances with other writers where the editors clearly did not know what they were doing. One came from, of all places, the introduction to a memoir of a woman my wife and I met up in Ohio’s Amish Country. The intro, written by the editor, had said editor telling on herself. She said she ripped out all the passive voice, all the adverbs, and all the offending “thats.” The author said that wasn’t what she’d written. Oops. What I actually bought had a much cleaner edit. Yes, there were adverbs and a stray passive voice phrase here and there, but not that many. And she still showed “that” no mercy.  That was the editor telling on herself. She was also a writer, this her first attempt editing a manuscript.

A friend of mine fared worse. He made friends with a couple of editors, one of whom would be a bit expensive. The other wanted to become what’s called a “story coach” (a glorified developmental editor.) Like the lady from Ohio, she, too, had never edited. 

My friend showed me a 1500-word scene he’d given her. Upset, he said there was no way he could do everything she asked. It was turning less and less into what he’d written. I gave him the same treatment I give Down & Out’s authors, that two of their copy editors gave me. It wasn’t bad. I trimmed the fat, took out two of three passive voice lines, and tightened up a few lines. It was a fight scene. I wrote more comments than usual so he could understand what I was doing, with an eye for him looking for these things himself. Then I looked at the offending edit.

Tempted as I am to say who it was, I won’t. I will say opening an edit with a flagged paragraph and a page-long rant is not professional, never mind helpful. I was angry when I saw that. He’s a new writer, and the rant was one of the most insulting (and in a lot of places, just flat-out WRONG) comments I’ve ever read. I told him to part ways with the editor. This after she locked him into a six-hour story consult. For reference, the two dev editors I know – Stacy Robinson and Kalene Williams – limit such Zoom meetings to about an hour. Will this person ever become a decent editor?

Hey, I did. My first attempt at editing left the writer in tears. I didn’t try it again for several years afterward. But, there’s a balance between sticking to the rules like politicians to bribes and keeping the writer’s voice. Yes, you have to take out the excessive crutch words, repetitions, adverbs, and passive voice. But all of them?

If you really do have to do a rewrite, the best person to do that is the writer. Rewriting is not your job.

Wadded paperWhen I was a kid, every teacher, from Mrs. Dunham in the fourth grade to English literature teacher Mrs. Snell in high school, pounded into us not to write phonetically. Especially in narrative. Nope, kiddies. Queen’s English was the rule. Joke’s on them. Now it’s the King’s English! 

Seriously, though, we also had to read Huckleberry Finn. I kind of get the point as Twain laced his first-person narrative with enough apostrophes and malaprops to warrant a magic decoder ring in places. Well, if Twain did it…

So did Chandler, now pointed at as a paragon of style, the master of simile. When you write like him, it’s as cliché as a Twitter bot hijacking a webcam girl’s images so you’ll follow it. (Spoiler alert: I usually block those.) But Chandler, despite not having much use for Hemingway, took Hemingway’s lean approach a step further. He rendered fiction in a way the average reader could grasp it. And he wrote his dialog to sound like the characters, not what Mrs. Peterson or Sister Mary Bruno wanted. 

Hmm…

Then we come to one of Chandler’s literary descendants, Walter Mosley, he of Easy Rawlins fame. Mosley did write a science fiction novel based in the days of slavery called 47. I’ve read it. Fortunately, he doesn’t write the title character’s dialog like Huck, though like Twain, he’s unflinching in his portrait of the Antebellum south. However, there’s that Easy Rawlins series, which unapologetically has swallowed letters and words and Texas idioms force-fit into Los Angeles from the late 1940s onward. I met Mosley once while he toured for 47. He said there was no way he would not write that accent Easy grew up with. Both he and Easy came of age in that part of the world, and he wanted it celebrated. A few months later, I read another novel by the late great Bill Crider, another Texas native, and found a lot of the same speech in his work. Crider, however, smoothed it out some for us ignorant Midwesterners, New Yorkers, and sundry West Coast folk. But then speech was there.

So, how does one edit for this?

Very carefully.

As I’ve written here before, I use ProWritingAid as my main tool, though PerfectIt is becoming a major part of my process. PerfectIt is better suited for writers who write with an accent while ProWritingAid has a fit if it thinks an American is using “leapt” instead of “leaped.” In the past two years, I’ve seen one non-UK writer use “leaped.” She’s from Canada. I write “leapt.” Blame Mrs. Snell.) My first challenge with accent and ProWritingAid came from a recent project by an Australian author. The publisher said they wanted to keep the Australian grammar and dialog. Since I can’t change the Word plugin to Australian English, esp. while revising my own American English work, I grabbed a PerfectIt trial. (BTW, I’m sold on the tool.) It does change dialect on the fly. I actually suggested putting back in the “-our” endings of words as opposed to America’s insistence on “-or.” (Flavour instead of flavor.) That was easy enough once I got into the flow.

However…

UK, America, Canada all have regional dialects. In North America, some places mix in French or Spanish without translation. Then there’s the rural Texas dialect used by Crider and Mosley, which both refuse to imply rather than spell out. That can get dicey. I know. I’m editing a Yinzer right now. What’s a Yinzer?

Yinzer is the dialect spoken by people living in Western Pennsylvania. To us Rust Belters, it’s as distinctive as the drawl of Kentucky or the twang of West Virginia. It draws from German and Italian, and thanks to an influx of West Virginians during the Depression, it’s taken on a but of a southern flavor. So why’s it so hard to edit?

Yinzers love sentence fragments. Not surprising. I grew up in Cleveland, which had those same West Virginians coming to the steel mills and auto plants there, but with more Slavic overtones mixed in. And it took me well into my twenties to ease up on the sentence fragments. But not only are the characters in this book Yinzers, so is the author, a Pittsburgh native. So his narrative has a lot of sentence fragments. Another author, or someone editing me, would find a manuscript awash in red tracked changes with lots of comment balloons. This particular author?

I find myself hitting ignore a lot. My job is to clear up the writing, not rewrite the novel. (And I strongly disagree an editor sometimes has to do that. Not unless they are doing a developmental edit, in which case, you’re going to call me after that part’s done. Dev edits leave a lot of copy editing to be done it their wakes.) Writers tend to write the way they talk. Or want to talk. And sometimes, they write like their characters. Military characters tend to speak in short, declarative sentences. Gossipy people prattle on incessantly. Introverts are prone to one-word responses. Those, of course, are stereotypes. I have met some rather verbose introverts and really quiet extroverts. That’s another topic for another blog. 

The point is to make it readable, but preserve the author’s voice. You can’t do that if you listen to Mrs. Snell nagging you in the back of your mind to zap every single one of those sentence fragments and make Easy Rawlins use the King’s English.  

In fact, I consider rewriting Mosley’s work along those lines blasphemy.Wadded paper

Wadded paperMy brother-in-law, who’s started writing in the past year, mentioned some notes he got back from an editor. “I didn’t know ‘suddenly’ was a crutch word.”

I hadn’t thought about that in a while. Suddenly, I realized I don’t use the word that much anymore.  Yet a lot of professional editors I know hate it more than adverbs. Oh, they might talk a good game about words ending in “-ly” (then liberally use them in their own prose), but nary a word about “suddenly.” But they’ll cut it without explanation. You might say it disappeared…

Suddenly.

Suddenly, and its companion word, surprisingly are really crutch words. They’re also adverbs of the worst kind. Editing for a crime imprint, I don’t get much adverb abuse. The prose tends to be straightforward, gets to the point. The biggest issues I have (especially with a science fiction author named TS Hottle and his virtual crime fiction twin, Jim Winter) is with “that,” “very,” overuse of “so,” and “Well…” But “suddenly” comes up. A lot.

These are words you don’t think of much, but too many of them slow the prose down unnecessarily. (See? I used an adverb. Sparingly.) As with “very,” the writer is trying to manage stage direction. They don’t believe the reader will get the swiftness with which an event occurs or a person or thing appears. To the writer, this is a reasonable assumption.

To the reader, it comes off as, “It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, bad writing appeared! Someone screamed!”

(In some cases, someone screamed very loud. In a few cases, very, very loud. Which should be written “loudly.”)

Some of you will recognize that hideous passage as a send up of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is responsible for the old cliché, “It was a dark and stormy night…” Aside from starting in passive voice, it begins with a weather report. I can think only of one lengthy work that needed to start with a description of the weather, and Stephen King opted to write Storm of the Century as a screenplay. It also has two exclamation points in one line. So, not only does it offend David Morrell, the prophet of lean prose, it summons the angry ghost of Elmore Leonard, who famously said one exclamation point per hundred thousand words. And Elmore wrote short, so whole novels would pass without one. But “Suddenly” is the most offensive part of that line. OK, the second, but passive voice is not being spoken of here.

A really good editor would suggest depicting a flash of lightning revealing Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s writing. You can keep one exclamation point. I’m more of a one-per-page kind of guy. 

The real problem with “suddenly” is it shows instead of tells.  Now, “Show, don’t tell” can be a trite, overused bit of advice, like “Write what you know.” (Honestly, I don’t need bored single women writing about watching Hallmark or men farting while they play Call of Duty. Do some research. That’s the fun part.) I’m of the mindset that, since showing takes more words than telling, make sure you tell the write things. If Johnny is sick because he’s confronted with a stressful moment, simply say he’s sick, and get to why he’s stressed. By now, you’ve guessed he’s stressed out suddenly. As vaguely as I wrote this, you didn’t need that word.

Once in a while, I’ll use it in my writing. And if a manuscript I’m working on contains it, I may stop and do a crutch word check. Five times out of 85,000 words is not worth the extra effort for me or the writer. The reader is not going to care. If it’s every other page, expect a lot of red ink.

During the writing of this post, I started my latest editing project. Before diving in with ye olde editing tool, I checked for crutch words. “That” did not surprise me. We all abuse the word. “Very” almost didn’t show up at all. I did “suddenly.” Not a single instance. Not. One. So, often, a writer already knows it’s a word to avoid. Makes my job easier. It’ll make your readers’ jobs easier, too. 

Wadded paperI started editing for Down & Out Books in November, right after Thanksgiving. Prior to that, I edited for a friend who gets a deep friends and family discount. A couple of bucks for me, and she returns the favor with other services. Yes, writers do that.  I’m up to my fifth project now, and no two have been the same.

I’ve had a project that came from an author who’s been writing longer than I’ve been alive. And I’m old enough to remember (before kindergarten, mind you)  when Abbey Road was new and on the radio. That one was long, even for him, though I’m pleased he’s still working. I did an anthology. I did one set in New England at the same time as reading Gwendy’s Final Task. At least part of Gwendy took place on a space station. The last was a straightforward thriller. The current one is Australian, and Down & Out asked me to keep as much Australian English as possible.

So how’s it going?

Just based on my list of projects, plus my friend’s book, it’s really solidified my game as an editor. How?

  • Technique – Before I edited Jenn Nixon’s The Fixer, I revised one of my own scifi books in the can ahead of time. I’ve been using ProWritingAid, but without track changes. Up until next year’s Breaking Liberty, I’d simply accepted or rejected changes. Who would I be tracking changes for? Me? But when it came time to clean up Breaking Liberty ahead of sending it to First Reader, I needed a guinea pig to test how I’d do this for a paying client. Normally, I would read, then do PWA. But PWA has enough trouble with track changes and long manuscripts. So Jenn got both at the same time. She was pleased with the results. I applied this to my first Down & Out project, the aforementioned writer who started before I was born. PWA did get a bit wonky, and I’ll probably have to hit up some colleagues on how to better utilize it. Howevever, Down & Out sends me partially formatted files, so breaking it up into nice 50-page segments is not really an option.
  • Other writers make the same mistakes I do – Every so often, I’ll work on one of my own manuscripts and go, “Argh!” (Best heard in a Charlie Brown voice.) Then I noticed other writers do the same things in varying degrees. One story or book can be relatively clean while another becomes awash in red ink. Some writers love the word “that,” which is harder to purge than you think. Very is another crutch word that refuses to die. You plow through and leave comments or notes, so the writer doesn’t think you’re just some mean-spirited hermit stabbing people with a red pen.
  • Anthologies – I’ve often said, “Edit for the writer’s style, not yours.” This becomes more challenging with an anthology. For instance, are African-Americans Black or black? I recently had two writers, both black (I had a black editor flag me for using capitalization once.) who each did it differently. I skimmed the story with the word capitalized, flagged instances where it wasn’t but was used to indicate race, and moved on. The trick is consistency. If Joe is blue-eyed on page one, he’d better not be hazel-eyed on page 203, not without explanation. Plus, the red ink flowed in different amounts between stories. A journalist who writes for a major daily turned in an incredibly clean draft while another, very experienced writer had all sorts of “that” and “very.” They’re pros. You’re a pro. Do your job. If it looks wrong, they’ll ask. And one gent did. Most manuscripts I send back usually have a comment on something that says “Stet as needed.” Down & Out is a small press that gives its writers a decent amount of control. Lower down the food chain, you may want to have a couple more passes to catch missing words and quotation mark errors.
  • Non-US English: The first thing that jumps out at you is the reversal of quotes.  But also “-our” vs. “-or,” “metre,” not “meter.” And who knew there was a difference between UK and Australian English. PWA wasn’t going to cut it. Fortunately, the oft-mentioned goddess of cutting, Ellen Campbell, turned me onto PerfectIt, which looks for these very differences. You just tell it what version of English you’re working in. I’m still doing a PWA pass, but now I’ve done PerfectIt, then a crutch word check. (By the way, I really hate the word “that” now. Everyone, including the idiot writing this blog post, abuses it.) But now I know what to ignore and will let it find the usual issues. Plus, that’s when I go looking for repeated words. Can’t get rid of all of them, but I can get most of them.
  • Editing tools – Sooner or later, I’m going to have to get PWA to play nice with track changes. Which means taking Down & Out’s nice, partially formatted manuscripts and carving them up into 50-page splices. The ProWritingAid passes will probably go faster. Once again, I’ll probably experiment on something of my own.

It’s been a great experience, and my wife likes having me around more now that I don’t Uber anymore. So, now I need to expand this to freelance clients.

“You have ‘that’ disease,” one of the firsWadded papert professional editors I’d met once told me. Back in the heady days of the 1990s when Autotune was a novelty Cher used only once, and everyone was going to get rich in big tech.

This came as a surprise to me. That? What was wrong with “that?”

Well, aside from being a crutch word, it raises a couple of red flags. First off, “that” serves mainly as a pronoun or a definite article.

“Look at that.” – Pronoun.

“That thing is strange.” – Article.

It goes into the weeds when it’s used in place of “which.” You might call it bad whichcraft. (And you might call that a really bad dad joke. You’d be right.) So, the wrong word gives us our first red flag. The second?

Even once you replace “that” with “which,” you now have to decide if that non-restrictive clause even belongs. For example…

“The Plymouth Fury, that Chrysler built in the 1950s, gave Christine a serious retro vibe on top of its obvious horror.”

OK, that’s not the best sentence I’ve ever written. It’s not even the best one in this post. But it gives us enough to work with. Our first red flag: I wrote “that” instead of “which” to offset the phrase “Chrysler built in the 1950s.” Already, I’ve used the wrong word. At least I used commas. The Chicago Manual of Style, not the only guide out there, but the Big Kahuna of style guides, is clear. Unrestrictive clauses begin with “which” and are offset by commas. So, I should have wrote “which Chrysler built in the 1950s.”

Or should I have?

I can see one of you now holding up your hand and squirming in your seat. Either you have to use the bathroom (Down the hall and on the left. Febreeze when you finish. Thank you.), or you want to know what the ever-lovin’ heck is an “unrestrictive clause?”

Unrestrictive is a nice way of saying “unnecessary.” More experienced editors than I will zap these clauses and say rude things in the comments. (And Ellen Campbell, if she senses you root for the wrong college football team, will say, “Roll Tide!”)* Does this clause add meaning to the sentence? Can it be removed? Let’s have a look-see. (And by the way, unless it’s dialog or first-person narrative, don’t use words like “look-see.” Seriously. I don’t know an editor who thinks that’s a good idea.)

“The Plymouth Fury gave Christine a serious retro vibe on top of its obvious horror.”

Yep. That clause is gone, baby, gone, and the sentence already looks better.

To the next person with their hand up: We have Coke Zero and iced tea in the fridge. Glasses are between the stove and the sink. Oh, you had a comment?

“But TS, what if I want to mention the Fury was a fifties model?”

Easy peasy. (Same as look-see. Leave it out of narrative. Dialog and first person only. Hmm… Next week’s blog post?)

You still don’t need the clause. If you saw the movie or read the book Christine, you know the titular car/monster was a 1958 Plymouth Fury with bad juju but a respectable taste for post-Elvis rockabilly. You still don’t need that “that” which should be “which.” 

The 1958 Plymouth Fury gave Christine a serious retro vibe on top of its obvious horror.

There you go. Why use a lengthy phrase when a short-and-sweet adjective will do?

Now, you may ask yourself, “When I do I use ‘that’ to separate a phrase? I’ve seen in before.”

You may also find yourself behind the wheel of a big automobile. Probably a 1958 Fury. That’d be fun to drive. As long as it wasn’t possessed.

“That” is properly used for restrictive clauses. If the sentence loses meaning without the clause, you need “that.” You can see it in this minor act of plagiarism on my part:**

“Pizza that’s less than an inch deep just isn’t Chicago-style pizza.”

They are so passionate about that in Chicago they included my least favorite crutch work “just.” Different topic.

You might be able to get away with removing “that.” I omitted an obvious spot for it in my snarky comment about Chicagoans and their pizza. But the phrase itself cannot be removed. 

“Pizza just isn’t Chicago-style pizza.”

Huh? What pizza? Brooklyn-style pizza? Actual pizza from Sicily or Tuscany? (Oh, don’t get an Italian started on that topic!) Why is that “just” still in the sentence?

As I said, you can probably lose the “that.” In fiction, I’m likely to ignore it. It’s the proper way to use it. That said, I still zap about 80% of “that” when used to offset a clause if it still reads well without the word. But the clause itself has to be there. What kind of pizza just isn’t Chicago-style pizza? 

In editing, it’s hard sometimes to purge them all. One writer, who’s been at this longer than I’ve been alive (and my earliest memory is Armstrong coming down the ladder. Mind you, I was a toddler.), used every permutation of “that” in his manuscript. Did I get all of them or start replacing it with better words? Not completely. Keep in mind, it was my first gig with this publisher. Also, he was a guy I used to read frequently. At some point, I will have to become a cruel editor. I don’t care if you’re Neil Gaiman, that goddamned “just” is coming out!!! O-H!

(I almost said Jonathan Franzen. Somehow, I don’t think I could handle the stress. Gaiman, I’d probably be laughing too hard to catch everything. Gaiman is fun even if it’s his grocery list.)

 

Is this a case of “Do as I say, not as I do?” Boy, howdy!*** Name me a writer who doesn’t break their own editing rules. I don’t count Philip Roth because Roth used to rewrite every page until it was perfect.  Also, writers are too close to their work to see all the errors, which is really horrific when I go back through the old TS Hottle manuscripts for reissue. 

And that’s all I have to say about that.
O-H!

 

*She’s wrong. The correct phrase is “O-H!”

**The article also goes into much more detail than I do. For starters, it lacks a poorly written Stephen King reference. O-H!

***Frank Zappa used to say “Boy, howdy!” So I can, too. You get a say in the matter when you write your own Joe’s Garage. O-H!

Wadded paperI wrote a few weeks back about crutch words. I also said some lists tend to be long more because a particular editor gets sick of reading a group of words than a reader would even notice. My list I kept to a minimum, though there are some doozies on it. “Just,” “could,” etc. I should add “immediately” and “suddenly,” which, as a writer, I still abuse. You need to understand, though, I don’t write as an editor. I don’t read as a writer. And I don’t edit as a reader. Those are three completely separate tasks in my mind. It’s very important they stay that way.

Which leads me to a word I left out. I’m very concerned about its misuse. Very, very concerned. Of course, it’s an adverb. Very much so.

I speak, of course, of “very.”

The Washington Post ran a recent article (pay wall. Sorry, but worth a read) in which the writer advocated slashing it the way one might aggressively go after the giant hogweed.  (Google it. Then listen to Genesis’s “The Return of the Giant Hogweed” on streaming. You’ll thank me for the story prompt alone.) Unlike hogweed, it’s very unlikely you’ll have to, as Peter Gabriel warns, strike by night, for it does not need the sun to photosynthesize its venom. (And Tony Banks wins points for using the word “photosynthesize” in song lyrics. Top that, James Taylor.)

Very is one of the most common words in the English language. But it’s an adverb, and as a writer, I already have to restrain editors in use of the Loving Mallet of Adverb Annihilation. This is best mitigated by judicious adverb pruning. They’ll cut the ones you don’t want and leave the ones you can defend.  But very?

Very makes editors very, very annoyed. As a writer, I usually limit it to dialog because characters don’t give a rat’s ass what you’re editor thinks. (Unless they’re incoherent when they need to be clear. That’s another topic.) It’s a common verbal gambit to use “very” or its evil twin, “very, very,” in dialog. Done lightly, it works. But Elmore Leonard’s disdain for the exclamation point should really be focused on the word very. Only once every so many words. My view on crutch words is one or less per page. The exception is very. Once every hundred pages of manuscript.

And only in dialog! I am of the school that says very has no place in narrative. First person, you say?

Do you want someone to read your book? Again, only once every 100 pages of manuscript. That’s roughly once every 25,000 words double-spaced. 

Yes, very is a legitimate English word. It doesn’t have the stink of, say, irregardless, which should be printed out and stabbed mercilessly whenever spotted, irregardless of whether your editing client will see that or not. (For electronic copy, a nasty comment about irregardless will accomplish the same goal.) But very is so overused and so empty it really just bogs down a sentence. Even in dialog, unless the effect is obvious, it should always be flagged. In narrative? 

Drive it from the prose like St. Pat running snakes out of Ireland.*

Yea, verily.

*No pedantic screeds about snakes in Ireland being a myth. I shall be very rude to you if you do.

 

 

Wadded paperIf you’re of a certain age, that song is going to be stuck in your head the rest of today. Deal with it.

I wish today to speak of commas. Lately, there seems to be a trend to get rid of them. We can probably blame texting. After all, the keyboard keys are so small that even those with the thinnest fingers will fat thumb a key. Autocorrect doesn’t exactly help. And voice to text? I worked a little bit with Dragon Naturally Speaking before I used voice-to-text regularly. Plus, during lockdown, I dictated nine books of a story arc. So, saying “comma” and “period” are nothing for me. It’s likely a major pain for everyone else.

And, of course, the days of 733t Speak are long over, where numbers and symbols made texting less of a chore when all you had to work with was a touchtone-style keyboard.  “r u serious?” is one of the more readable phrases.

That said, if you’re writing prose, word meant to be read on a website, on Kindle, on this wood-derived material called “paper,” you need to better punctuate.

But people seem to be making up their own rules about commas. Why? What are you going to do with that .4 seconds you saved by not hitting the comma key? You don’t even need to use shift!

It doesn’t help that editing has gotten sloppy lately. My news source of choice is the Associated Press, followed by Reuters. No agenda, no 24-hour news cycle to fill with professional blowhards for whom intentionally stupidity is part of their job description. (Wait. This isn’t the TS Hottle blog, is it? I digress.) And the venerable AP lets some whoppers slip by. And it’s not just news. Rolling Stone, espn.com, even ads for your favorite streaming service blow it. So, what’s a poor writer to do when those we count on as examples of good editing drop the ball?

I’m gonna help you out. Here are some simple rules (and a rant at the end) about commas.

  • Use commas to separate independent clauses. What’s an independent clause? Take a section of a sentence beginning with and, but, or, for, so, or yet. (Those are called conjunctions, kids.) Remove the conjunction. If the clause is a complete sentence on its own, you need a comma. If not, you don’t.
  • For an introductory clause, use a comma to set it off from the main part of the sentence.
  • Descriptive clauses, which occur in the middle of sentences, should begin and end with a comma. (Notice a pattern here?)
  • It is preferred you drop the word “that” from sentences when not using it as an article. It’s also important that you don’t replace “that” with a comma. 
    For example: 
    It’s preferred that you don’t use “that” in this sentence.
    It’s preferred you don’t use “that” in this sentence.
    You can use “that.” An editor will strike it if you do. But you must NEVER replace “that” with a comma. That would be bad. (See what I did there?)
  • Use commas to divide adjectives not logically joined together.
    The frequent, annoying misuse of commas drove TS to distraction.
  • Use commas to set off parts of a date or geographic units. 
    On October 10, 2022, TS published this blog post in Deer Park, Ohio, USA. (Note: The trailing comma is often ignored by editors, editing tools, and even Microsoft Word. However, you must offset the month and day from the year and the town from the state, province, or country. That part is ironclad.
  • The Oxford comma. It’s a given to use commas to set off a series of nouns (or phrases, but let’s go with nouns.) 
    One meme I saw said the Oxford comma is the difference between “I was attacked by two dogs, a shepherd and a boxer” and “I was attacked by two dogs, a shepherd, and a boxer.” The former is a bad day. The latter is a trip to the ER.

    I am militant about the Oxford comma. There is no legitimate reason not to use it, and I’m sorry, but Weird Al was wrong. (OTOH, that song was better than the original “Blurred Lines,” which set Marvin Gaye spinning in his grave.)
    That said, I will ask a client before beginning on a work. Some writers are anti-Oxford. They’re wrong, but I edit for the writer’s style, not mine. At the same time, let’s say you’re going to submit to, say, Aethon Books. Steve Beaulieu is going to get an IM before I even think about beginning. After all, he’s paying the writer, so, indirectly, he’d be paying me. Substitute any press in there outside the Big Four. They’re going to ignore whatever we do to a manuscript, anyway. 

Wadded paper“Never fall in love with your first draft.”

People credit multiple writers from Elmore Leonard to Hemingway to Stephen King for that aphorism. Quite likely, some of them are repeating advice they heard starting out (and maybe even did not heed until later.) Just as likely, they came up with it on their own.

Of course, we fall in love with our first drafts, especially that first novel. It’s…

…My baby!

Full disclosure: I’ve come to loathe my first novel. Most who’ve read it like it, but I know what went into it, where I tripped up, and why I published badly despite having ten rewrites. I guarantee you, though, I loved the draft I sent to St. Martin’s-Private Eye Writers of America First Novel contest. (Spoiler alert: I lost to Michael Koryta.)

The first draft is always going to suck. I’m generally a four-draft kinda guy. I do my own revisions first, which are probably as close to a developmental edit as I’m going to get. I have a primary reader for the third draft. And multiple betas for the fourth, usually three, though the scifi novel out right now is only with two. (And I talk about what entails a beta here. Which is pretty much anything from a general critique to a full-blown copy edit.)

You could say the final copy edit is the fifth draft, but that’s production when a publisher is involved. (And I’ve heard of manuscripts getting a few more rounds.)

No one ever reads my first drafts. My brother-in-law, who recently dived into the madness, is always bugging me to read my first drafts. I have to firmly say no because first drafts are, as King insists, to be written with the door closed. Missing words or even phrases. Changing character names. Excessive sentence fragments.

I once heard Laura Lippman describe her first drafts as caveman speak. I used to know Laura. She might have, at one point, let me look at something about to go out to the publisher. (She never did.) I would never read the caveman draft. I doubt her husband gets to read them, and he created The Wire. (I have no idea what David Simon’s approach to drafts is, but he works in television, which is a whole ‘nuther beast.)

I’m finding even subsequent drafts have cringey moments. I just re-edited the Amargosa novels. Children went well, but that had a professional edit done and really needed a proofread. That was it. So, you get a cleaner version in 11 days from this posting. Storming was brutally dev edited, so errors abounded even after a few passes to iron out the kinks. You’ll get a cleaner version of that in December.

Second Wave….

Ugh. I can’t believe I let that one go out the door. It took the longest of the three to revise and had the most embarrassing errors. 

But the first drafts? Never let anyone see your first draft. Not your spouse. Not your best friend. Not that annoying fellow writer who knows everything, at least until they fling their own work at you. Think of it this way. You’re sculpting. The first draft is you figuring out how to turn a slab of marble into a dude. The intermediate drafts are you making it clear it’s a naked dude, most likely in need of a fig leaf. 

The published draft is King David or Zeus or, hey, let’s go off the beaten path, Thor. (My wife would want me to sculpt Jason Momoa, but that’s between us.) No one’s going to put the vague shape of a man carved from marble in the Sistine Chapel. The Pope will want the room for Dogs Playing Poker at the Last Supper with Elvis. 

I can neither confirm nor deny that either Pope Francis or Pope Emeritus Benedict go off in private to read David Sedaris. 

Wadded paperIn the mid-2010s, independent writers bandied the term “authorpreneur” constantly. Most of those making it their catchword sold more books about writing than the fiction or nonfiction books they tried to sell. They all hammered on one method to get production up: Dictation.

It took me about five years and the worst pandemic in a century to find the mindset to dictate. During lockdown, Uber was not an option as a side hustle. I did Door Dash instead. Bop into the restaurant to get the food, then leave it on the customer’s doorstep. When this began, I hit on an idea. I’m the only one in the car. On the way to the restaurant, I could dictate a story by speaking into Google Docs on my phone. On the way to the customer, as I needed GPS to navigate, I listened to audiobooks. This resulted in some highly productive weekends and allowed me write nine Suicide Arc novels in fourteen months. However…

Friday and Saturday nights, when I normally wind down from an Uber shift talking to my wife and just relaxing before bed, I spent correcting Google Docs’ interpretation of I spoke. There were a lot of errors.

A LOT of errors.

And I’m still finding them. Thanks to ProWritingAid, sharp-eyed beta readers, and resigning myself to spending vast amounts of time adding quotation marks, finding every variation Google had on the name “Mitsuko” ( a former coworker would be infuriated at the misspellings), and filling in missed words, I got most of them. But not all.

Occasionally, even after Sarah Davis, my current scifi publisher, goes through them, I’ll spot one or two in the finished product. Not enough to recall the book, but enough to make me cringe. Mind you, I’ve seen worse come out of the Big Four in New York. Big Famous PI Writer (TM) once flipped speakers in a block of untagged dialog. And this novel is considered a classic.

There are several ways to mitigate this. You probably will never get 100%. If Ellen “the Cutter” Campbell says she never gets all the errors, who can? But you can mitigate it to where it’s unnoticeable to the average reader.

  • Eyeball it – If you dictate, you’re going to have to reread what you wrote. For me, that has to be almost immediately. What comes out of a dictating session is usually unreadable as prose, so if you intend to use this method of writing, suck it up.
  • Word/Scrivener – Most word processing and writing apps have built-in editing tools. Scrivener is designed specifically for writers, and Word’s editor has improved to the point of useful. (Sometimes. It occasionally suggests something that would give my high school and college teachers screaming fits.) This also lets you build your dictionary for a given work.
  • Read back – Word, among others, has a function that allows you to listen to what you wrote. It almost sounds natural, but if your character is pounding the steering wheel in heavy traffic, that repeated obscenity doesn’t come back as shouting. It comes back as a pleasant female voice offering excrement as though you asked it for tea. Still, a lot of writers say to read a work aloud. This is another way to hear your own words and make sure they don’t sound like writing.
  • Editing tools – ProWritingAid is, of course, my tool of choice. I pay for the premium addition. A lifetime subscription gets you a plagiarism check as well. It’s great for catching missing words and minding your quotation marks. Plus, you can plug it into Word. (Someone can comment on whether it works for Scrivener.)
  • Betas/Editor – Other people aren’t as close to your work. Other people don’t care about your ego. Other people will say, “What the hell is that?” Usually, I find more dictation errors that way than anything else. There’s an editing conundrum that affects us all. As you’re flagging points to edit, you miss the next one just as often as not. If you reduce the amount of work for someone else to do (and I will do this for you for reasonable rates. Contact me!), the easier it is to find what remains. I’ve rarely seen a perfect manuscript, even off the shelves at Barnes & Noble. They exist, but like albino rhinos, they’re hard to find.

“DoWadded papern’t use any dialog except ‘said,'” he declared ominously.

Oooh. Ouch. I’m not the most adverb-averse editor, and that one made me cringe.

Today, though, we talk about dialog and how to handle it. I could write an entire book about it. If I quote the various editors I know, I could write an encyclopedia about it. Since I’m already doing a wiki for my scifi series, I’ll pass. 

Dialog is a gift to the reader. The character opens their mouth, and you learn quite a bit about them. Gender, politics, likes, dislikes, nervous ticks, etc. Tendency to talk in sentence fragments the way this paragraph is written. It also makes a page read faster. Well, it does when the writer doesn’t put one of Shakespeare’s soliloquys in the character’s mouth.

Handling it, though, is a thorny issue. To tag or not to tag? What kind of tag? Comma splices. Untagged dialog. And that dirty word, exposition!

Let’s take tagging first. Tagging is a quick way to let the reader know who’s speaking. However, lately, that old chestnut of use only “said” is under assault.

“Why?” you query.

“It’s invisible!” he ejaculated. (Yes, someone used this. In print. When the standards were stricter. I hope that editor died from the strain of a manuscript laced with you’re/your errors.)

Said/asked is, in fact, invisible, and should be your go-to for tagging dialog. The reader doesn’t really see it. They read the dialog and look for who spoke. 

Unless your reader is actually a listener. Books on Tape, its various CD successors, and especially Audible and the public library have made “said” what some in Toastmasters call “hear ache.” Now, that public speaking organization usually means verbal ticks likes excessive ands, ums, the so-called “snicks and smacks” we do without realizing it when speaking. No one cares if you’re doing it over lunch with a coworker. It’s annoying in a speech or while hosting an event. And the word “said” has fallen into this category when it comes to the audiobook.  When reading, your eye blows past the word with nary a thought. When Morgan Freeman reads it out loud, you think, “For the love of Joe Burrow, find another word already!”

At the same time, the threat of really distracting words like “queried” and “ejaculated” (never to be used outside sex scenes and clinical writing) still exists. Fortunately, you don’t have to go too far off the beaten path. It’s an opportunity to slip in some unobtrusive stage direction. He mumbled. She shouted. People can grumble, growl, breathe… There’s enough there to give the reader an impression of the character’s mood or demeanor, the perfect combination of showing and telling. Tell them something that shows it quickly and move on. 

Quotation marks.

The single quote vs. the double quote. If you read UK editions of books, you’ll notice all the dialog is in single quotes. In US or Canadian, it’s double. Reverse it for quotes within quotes. Since I’m writing this from a US perspective, I’ll go with double as the default. Why bring it up?

Because, regardless of how your version of English is written, you never use the same type of quotation marks inside a line of dialog as you use outside it. “Well, Bob said, ‘Johnny eats liver without onions.’ I think it’s gross.” In US English, whoever is speaking is quoting Bob directly as marked by double quotes. Bob’s quote also needs to be off-set, but we already used double quotes. So we use single to quote the speaker quoting Bob directly. (If he or she is just paraphrasing, no inner quotes are needed.) The inner quote should always be different from the outer quote, regardless of whether your dialect uses single or double to begin dialog. 

Untagged Dialog

Ever read swaths of text where two people talk? Yet you could follow the conversation? Sometimes, tagging and inserting a character action gets to be a bit much. If Joe is talking to Judy, and it’s clear from tagging or actions that Joe had the last line of dialog, you can do a few lines without tagging. The back-and-forth is enough to carry the narrative for maybe half a page. I generally don’t like to do five or six lines untagged without flagging who’s speaking. For starters, we all have short attention spans these days. Also, while “White Room” is an all-time classic song, it makes for a lousy setting.  What are these characters doing? Where are they? 

Now, you can do an entire story without dialog. I did one, and it was extremely difficult to pull off. On the other hand, Google “They’re Made of Meat,” about two aliens discussing these weird intelligences they found on Earth. You know enough to know they’re not human, but nothing else. Yet the conversation flows effortlessly.

Character Action

This arose from chaffing against using “said” constantly. Instead of tagging the dialog directly, indicate who’s speaking by having them do something. 

“I’m a bit concerned about Jim.” Joe poured another cup of coffee. “He’s just not up to his old game.”

Judy dunked her teabag. “What specifically do you see?”

You knew who said what in that passage. Yet there’s no “Joe said” or “Judy said.” As I mentioned before, “White Room” is a rock and roll classic. White room is not a very good narrative device.  Character action in place of dialog tagging is a great way to put the reader in the room with the characters. It also can break up an unavoidable info dump. In Save the Cat, Blake Snyder called this “the Pope in the pool.” It referred to a movie that began with the Pope meeting his cardinals. The scene had a lot of expository dialog, the sort of thing normally handled over coffee or in a meeting across a desk. However, this was an early scene in the movie. Instead of giving the action a break, it delayed it getting started. The screenwriter decided to give the audience a visual. Why are men in robes talking to some old dude in a swimming pool? Wait. That’s the Pope? Doing the dog paddle?

It also lets you weave dialog into the narrative. Gone are the days when you could have pages of description. Dialog is a way to engage an attention-challenged audience. By having one of the speakers look around at their surroundings or having the characters do something while they talk, you kill two birds with one stone.

Also, something I see a lot of newer writers do (and it goes back to when I started writing, even before.) Multiple people speaking in one paragraph. Um… Hey, I have to follow this! Can you break it up a bit? Having Joe talk at the beginning of the paragraph and Judy at the end makes me think Joe is still talking.  “But then my paragraphs are short.” So? Makes it more readable, doesn’t it?

Dialog doesn’t have to be hard. As to what your dialog sounds like? That’s a whole ‘nutter topic.