Month: October 2022

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.