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.

 

Anglo-Saxon knightToday, we’re going to have a little bit of fun. We’re going to talk about English. What is it?

According to WIkipedia, “English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain.” That’s technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.* In reality, English is a linguistic mob led by a medieval form of Germanic that lurks in dark alleys waiting to mug other languages to steal words, phrases, and even sentence structures, leaving the victim language bewildered and afraid. (Sidenote: I don’t think Japanese is scared of any other language, but Klingon tends to keep the bat’letlh sheathed ‘cuz it don’t want no trouble.)

So why is English such a mishmash of rules, words, and idioms that have no relation to each other? Why is the “k” in “knife” silent? (Blame the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.) Why so much Latin and French in the language? (Blame the Normans.) And why does “-ough” have too many ways to pronounce it? (Blame Gutenerg and Tyndale.) And how in the hell did we end up with a Latin alphabet of 26 letters when English has a minimum of 42 sounds. (48 if you use the Shavian alphabet. I’m actually not opposed to that idea, except you’d have to learn to read all over again.)

First, where did English come from?  Well, as the quote above says, it’s a West Germanic language. It came from Germany shortly before the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain. Prior to that, the inhabitants spoke Latin, Celt, and a few other languages. But the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes didn’t so much invade Britain as they landed there over time and decided they liked the place. A few Romans stuck around, and so the new dominant culture, a mix of those same Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, began speaking their common tongue. In a foreshadowing of the future, this new language promptly raided Latin for a handful of constructions. (No, that does not prove the Latin nerds right about prepositions and split infinitives.) While the Jutes were basically ancestors of the Vikings (from Jutland in Denmark), they adopted the evolving Germanic of these Angles and Saxons, later dubbed “Anglo-Saxon.” We still speak a lot of Anglo-Saxon today, but the actual Anglo-Saxon would be unrecognizable both in writing and spoken aloud. It’s the basis of the modern English language, hence we call it “Old English.” Only, it sounds like Dutch.

Anglo-Saxon gave us Beowulf, an epic poem that actually came from the Vikings. Originally, they wrote in runes, but the conversion of the British Isles to Christianity prompted them to adopt the Roman alphabet, keeping some runes to denote certain sounds. For instance, the letter “y” has a slightly different counterpart to the voiced “th” sound that was still used up until Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare and the King James Bible are actually written in modern English. Parts of Yorkshire and Appalachia have kept a lot of this dialect, which falls under the “Elizabethan” banner. But if you want to know why your favorite Renaissance fair has a lot of shops that say “Ye Olde Smithy” or “Ye Olde Turkey Leg Shoppe,” the “Ye” is not the plural ye Jesus used with his pals in the KJV. It’s actually “the.” And that “y” looks different from the one in “yes.” (My favorite Thes album is Close to ye Edge, but I have a soft spot for Drama and 90125. See how silly that mistake sounds?)

Then came the Vikings. Like other languages (including the Old Norse of the Vikings), early English gendered and pluraled their definite articles. If you know Spanish or French, you’ve seen four definite articles–el, los, la, and las in Spanish, for instance. Like most Germanic languages, this got confusing once the Norse settled down and became rivals to the Saxons and overlords of the Angles. (Hence, “England.” Land of the Angles. Saxony was already taken.) They convinced their Anglish and Saxon in-laws to simplify things by just saying “the” without regard to gender or singular vs. plural. In fact, English no longer genders its nouns, not even neuter. They’re just nouns. 

Where things get hairy is the Norman Conquest. After bending French to their will by creating their own dialect, these Viking-descended French proceeded to remake the English language in its own image. So half our words come from French. Not content with that, Willy the C’s grandson, Henry II, had a father named Geoffrey Plantagenet, who was a traditional Frank. So now another version of French came ashore, further muddying the waters. Then King John lost all of Normandy except for two islands (the Channel Islands), English began to drift back into mainstream. But it wasn’t the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred the Great or Canute. This was Middle English. The best example of this version of English is The Canterbury Tales, by John LeGaunt’s (progenitor of the current royal family) BFF, Geoffrey Chaucer. If you read Canterbury Tales in its original form (with modern letters used), you can make some sense of it, or get a bad headache trying. Spoken, it sounds like heavily accented modern English. By this point, English had inherited the pillaging ways of the Vikings, who added to Anglo-Saxon and began raiding Latin, the neighboring Celt languages, and even Dutch and German for words. Another funny thing happened on the way to Shakespeare: Vowel drift.  

It was around this time that -ough started to take on as many pronunciations as possible. In Chaucer’s time, it was pronounced like “cough,” only with a soft K sound at the end instead of an H or silent. So you would plugh your field, but if you did it in the rain without a coat, you would catch a cogh, and that might be rogh. According to language nerd Rob Watts, whose RobWords YouTube channel I’m now addicted to, the ough sound, represented by a letter that looked something like a stylized 3, began to change when the Black Death abated in London. (Ironically, so did the Wars of the Roses and the Hundred Years War.) People speaking different dialects drifted toward the major cities like York and London seeking higher wages because, well, death creates labor shortages.  Also, people from other countries came to England seeking higher wages because, well, death creates labor shortages. But that letter might have preserved a uniform -ough sound. Then Gutenberg had to create his printing press with a Roman-only alphabet.

Mind you, Gutenberg was German and only had to replace one letter and maybe slip in an umlaut or two. IT workers (like me) of a certain age can remember a similar problem when computers did not all run ANSI or, later, Unicode, which have robust symbol libraries. No, we had ASCII, which made for some interesting text-based artwork, but made formatting a pain in the broc. (Anglo-Saxon for ass.) 

By the time of Shakespeare, English had evolved into modern English, what we speak today. 

“Wait a minute. What about ‘How now?’ and ‘Thee’ and ‘Thou'”? 

I said it was modern English. I also said the dialect, commonly called Elizabethan, is only spoken in a few places now. The rules we know were pretty much solidified in this era. You can thank William Shakespeare. And John Milton (a Shakespeare uber-nerd.) And King James I of England (or King James VI of Scotland. They wouldn’t unite the thrones for another 2 centuries, just in time to import kings from Germany.) People notice the second-person pronouns more than anything else. This is because English still had formal and informal “you.” Your friends and neighbors are thee/thou, using thy or thine to show possession. The formal “you” also had “ye” (not to be confused with Anglo-Saxon “the” because… Reasons.)  As Britain, and subsequently America and Canada, moved away from the Catholic Church and even the Church of England, it also moved away from formality in the language. It just became easier to say you and yours. If you live in the American South, “y’all” is acceptable (as are the Yinzer “youins” and East Coast “youse”) for a plural of you. Some people even believe thee and thou are formal. Why? Well, the only place they see it is in the Bible. Just not in any translation since 1700.

The language is still evolving. Technology has accelerated verbing a brand name. We Xerox, even though Xerox is not the most common copier or printer anymore. Even in Bing and Duck Duck Go, we Google. And try as we might, those of us who have fled X, and quite a few who stayed behind, still “tweet.” Additionally, before it become a political hot potato, the language already began to accept “they” as gender neutral third person. Why? Calling someone “it” just makes you sound like a douchenozzle. (That is actually in at least one dictionary, and as both a hygiene device and an unlikeable person.) I ignore the political rancor over singular “they” because it lets me spike the football on my tenth-grade English teacher’s grave. That’s right. Suck it, Clara!

Ahem! I mean, sorry, Mrs. S.

*No, it’s not.

Grim ReaperI once read an email to another writer from a zine editor about how he handled manuscripts. “The first thing we do is cut. We cut and cut and cut.”

The more I edit, the more annoyed I get with that comment because that’s how the editor led his message. Editing does involve cutting, but bragging about it is not the best way to instill confidence in a writer. It reminded me of a college professor I had who bragged he failed 80% of his students. If you’re a college instructor doing your program’s capstone course, and 80% of your students fail, maybe you should consider another line of work. I look at editing the same way. 

Now, I’ve known my share of great editors over the years. Ellen Campbell (who gleefully calls herself “the Cutter,” but I’ll get to that in a minute), Jim Thomsen, and Stacy Robinson, my first and still only developmental editor. All three of them make suggestions. And they have good instincts when the writer will have anxiety over a change. Ellen, in particular, wants to be challenged. To her, that’s an opportunity to both teach the writer and learn something. 

But going back to my early days writing, I can recall a rather well-respected freelance editor who admitted she felt she had to be openly hostile to a manuscript. Two years into this job, and I still ask myself, “Why?” 

Of course, anyone who writes begins with the attitude of red ink and red track changes are “a dagger to the soul.” I’m not making that up. A would-be writer from my days of cosplay (when it was just weird grown-ups in costumes) said that as we made a go of a Klingon-themed fanzine. It’s fine in the beginning. We all get precious about our work. It’s our passion. But there comes a time where, if you’re serious, even if you’re just throwing books up on Amazon, you have to start shedding your artistic pretensions. Everyone thinks it’s cute when you walk around the house clutching the manuscript to that first novel, muttering, “My baby! My baby!” I did that, and I have a rather…complicated attitude toward my first novel. You also have to quit being precious about the prose. Sure, Anne Rice once openly bragged about how “Every word is perfect!” No, it’s not, Anne–May you rest in peace. I’ve read a couple of your books.

 

In his classic writing book, On Writing, Stephen King outlines what I’ve modeled for novels. First, write with the door closed. King says this is so you can focus on the story. Now, having been the inspiration for a couple of other writers, I can honestly say it’s also so your friends, relatives, and coworkers won’t kill you. Too many writers want everyone else to read excerpts from whatever they wrote today. No one wants to read an unfinished story because you haven’t finished it yet. Trust me, I got burned in the fanfic days for not having a long-ass trilogy fleshed out ahead of time. (I was a notorious pantser until I got into original scifi.)

King suggests cutting 10% of your first draft. Why? You’re throwing in everything because you don’t know what you need. I describe what I do in a copy edit as trimming the fat. In a dev edit or a story analysis, I trim a LOT of fat. But those changes are structural. In a copy edit, I look at it this way: Was is not your friend. Run-on sentences are bad. Droning on and on about some side detail just bores the reader. King is emphatic about zapping anything ending in “-ly.” Some editors get livid about describing eyes moving, though I’ve always found that to be more annoying than helpful. 

My personal pet peeve are the walk-ups, first pointed out to me by television writer and producer Lee Goldberg. Lee got annoyed when the star (and executive producer) of a show he wrote for insisted on “walk-ups” or “drive-ups.” Since this actor started out in sports, memorizing dialog was more of a challenge than, say, Henry Winkler, who made up a Shakespeare soliloquy on the fly when he forgot his lines in an audition. It was more training than skill as I recall the guy being a fair actor in action roles (and a couple of turns in comedy.) The star wanted scenes where his character drove to the scene, got out of his car, walked up to the door, and knocked. Like this explanation, the walk-ups took up a lot of space.  I’ve noticed them in quite a few manuscripts. 

Cutting is trimming the fat. Bragging about cutting is just showing what a bad ass you think you are to the writer. Cutting and explaining why you cut is in service to the reader and helpful to the writer. That 10% King talks about can be trimmed organically and without rancor. All hostility does is instill fear or a strong urge to get away from a person. If it’s the editor, trust me, they’re not going to have a lot of work. If it’s the writer, well, having a few diva moments of my own on that front, I can attest to the backlash you get for it. 

Robot readingI have something to tell you. It may be hard for you to hear, but as a potential client–mine or someone else’s–you need to hear this. Are you ready?

Editors are human.

There. I said it.

Oh, we may use software tools to do our jobs. Some of us rely solely on The Chicago Manual of Style or The Elements of Style or even the more recent and user-friendly Actually, The Comma Goes Here (Hat tip to Michael Bracken for revealing that one to me.) Some of us even edit by memorized rules and years of experience, an elite few even turning off spell check and grammar check. Ooooh!

Actually, even in the days of typed manuscripts and few or no computers, those last editors were freaks of nature. I’m pretty sure Stephen King’s editors or the great Ruth Cavin at St. Martin’s Press kept at least The Elements of Style and/or The Chicago Manual of Style handy.

But editors are human. I’ve caught mistakes by the best. I’ve been called out by a couple of authors of mine, one of whom requested me again, the other who gave me a blurb. They want the best prose possible. Hey, have you ever told your mechanic you want your car done a certain way after they did a job for you? If there’s a little back and forth, that mechanic knows what you want, and you just gave them a new way to fix your car. (Maybe a bad example. Unless you’re customizing, cars are pretty rigid.)

Every author has, or should have, a stet privilege. I’ve had three editors at Down & Out. The first had some bizarre preferences for style, like “a-m” instead of “AM” (my preference, and I usually try to tell an editor that up front) or the standard “a.m.” The others have been Chris Rhatigan, whose presence is missed by those of us on Down & Out’s roster of authors, and Dawn Barclay, whom I’ve also edited. I probably stetted more suggestions on Chris than Dawn, but both of them, at least as editors, hew pretty close to my editing style. In Chris’s case, he had to deal with more made-up place names than Dawn did.

I’ve had others, including beta readers, who did full-on edits. I had one, whom I hope dug his heels in and started editing himself, who tended to treat the rules as iron-clad. No passive voice. Absolutely everything shown, even the most irrelevant details. Especially because that was an independently published book, I stetted. No harm, no foul, because I knew more coming out of that set of revisions than I knew going in. I’ve had some where I’d end up spotting glaring errors in the final copy. (“Dude, did you even read this?”) Most of those were zine editors who couldn’t be arsed, to use a quaint English phrase, as they had a huge stack of submissions to go through. Most have been good.

But a few things editors have to deal with which you may be blissfully unaware as we carve up your manuscript:

  • We can’t memorize every grammar rule out there. Oh, we have the style guides and ProWritingAid/PerfectIT/etc. to highlight errors. Or we may be whizzes at trimming up prose and making it as lean as possible. But in the end, we’re not perfect.
  • The more errors in a manuscript, the more get past us. Really, if you have a ton of misspellings or misplaced commas or even run-ons and excess passive voice, we’re going to miss some errors simply because we’re busy fixing the last one. It’s human nature, and even software tools either don’t catch everything or, as I’ve discovered, you spend a lot of time smacking the tool’s hand. (“No, stupid, that’s a made-up name! Stop correcting it!” Note to ProWritingAid’s developers: Entity name suggestions desperately need a Disable Rule function. 90% of them are a waste of time, and the other 10%, most of us can spot it without an assist.) Plus, any editor worth his salt is going to use Track Changes or equivalent, which results in a lot of red text and commented passages. So that oddball tense change you stuck in the third sentence of the paragraph where I chopped up your run-on? Well, all that red ink and highlighting just camouflaged it. Sorry.
  • You’re not the only writer on our dance card. If you’ve hired a freelance editor, keep in mind they have other clients. Sometimes, you get lucky and hire someone new to the biz, when they’re cheap and available. A lot of times, when you make an inquiry, we get excited as soon as we know the estimated cost (because, hey, new business!), but just the same, we sweat how we’re going to properly slot your work between the current project and the one booked after yours. It’s not just the fee, it’s the time. And if you’re publishing for a small press or hiring someone who edits for one, projects come pretty much on a conveyor belt. The publisher has a schedule to keep, which means we have to stay on top of the workload. But you need proper attention. Otherwise, you wouldn’t hire us.
  • Developmental editing is always expensive. I paid about a grand to a dev editor (who taught me developmental editing. Bless you, Stacy. Bless you.) That was cheap, mainly because she was new. I charge roughly $2500 depending on initial word count (payment plans negotiable.) I’ll do a story analysis, which is like a dev edit but with only a light copy edit and without the workshopping sessions over chat or phone, just copious notes and an outline, for a fraction of that. Copy edits are based on word count, but there’s more wiggle room to negotiate.
  • Having mentioned money, it should still always be about the reader. You know. The people you want to buy your books. I don’t work with clients who lecture me about their genius or how this is going to upend the literary world. I’ve not only been that writer (that lasted about five minutes before I got put in my place), I dealt with one, who tuned around and sent me three of the most abusive emails anyone’s ever sent me. Blocked on email, social media, and even Paypal. I also know editors who edit for the sake of editing. Uh-huh. Let’s say you get a project from Jim Fusilli, a Wall Street Journal columnist whom I’ve edited. Well, actually, Jim is so good, I basically proofread, moving the odd comma around and chopping maybe one run-on sentence. Are you telling me you’re going to cut anyway because you cut on principle? Now you’re editing to edit, not editing for the reader, not helping the writer.
  • Don’t take it personally. You paid for someone’s expertise. Flawed or not, you should know more once you have all that red ink back than when you sent in the clean manuscript. If you disagree with something, ask the editor why they flagged what they flagged. Most of us are also writers. In fact, if we edit, we get some good conversations going. Dawn Barclay and I had some really good conversations ahead of her edits on my Jim Winter collection, Winter of Discontent. (Sorry, no release date yet.) Helps that I edited one of Dawn’s anthologies, so we knew each other’s thinking already.
  • One editor will always change what another editor did. I’ve done it. Dawn did it to me, as about 75% of Winter of Discontent came from webzines over the last 25 years. Some of the previous editors I still know. And I once carved up a novel that was a bestseller a decade ago (even won awards*.) He was one of those who gave me a blurb (and some very useful pushback.) I have to purge a contemporary reference from No Marigolds in the Promised Land and am contemplating moving Bad Religion and Road Rules to a new publisher. Quite likely, as I did most of the editing on those myself, I will go through each of them and yell, “Hottle, what the hell were you thinking?!?!” (And I will edit the day after writing this and scold myself for using “?!?!” So far, only Nathan Singer has resisted purging that, and you have to read Nathan to understand why.)

We’re human. But we’re usually as objective as we can be. The best of us ask, “How’s the reader going to see this?” If we do that, we’ve given you a filter to look at your own work. That’s what you hired us to do.

*But not a major award. Sadly, that author doesn’t have a leg lamp in his living room. Unless he bought it on Amazon or eBay.

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. šŸ˜‰ ) 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

Atticus screenshot
Source: atticus.io

I recently added formatting to my list of services. I’ll talking pricing and why certain types of projects are more expensive down the page a bit. But for now, I’ll talk about how I format.

I use an app called Atticus, which is web-based but functions like a desktop app. In Windows and on Macs, it behaves more like a phone app, which is really a harness for web data from a specific source. Think about how you manage your mobile phone account. It’s like that. Atticus was created in response to another great formatting product, Vellum, which is strictly a Mac product. Unlike writing and editing tool Scrivener, which started out on the Mac OS X platform because its user base would be more receptive, Vellum prefers to stay inside the late Mr. Jobs’s walled garden.  So for some people, the 90s never ended despite the two largest computer companies in the world abandoning hacked versions of the Xerox GUI-based OS from the early 1980s. (Yes, that classic Mac and Windows 3.1 are the exact same thing. Jobs just had better aesthetics than Gates, who liked to use his customers as unwitting beta testers.) So, with a need for a Windows-compatible solution, they created Atticus. 

Vellum screensho
Source: vellum.pub

I’ve had the app for about two years now, and it gets better every time I run an indie-pubbed project of mine through it. There are differences between Vellum and Atticus, but the two compare rather nicely. Atticus wants to also be your writing software, though that piece is neither a priority nor really matured yet. Seems developers are aware those of us using Word to write and those in the Cult of Scrivener will simply rise with one voice and yell, “Get off my lawn!” To quote that fine, upstanding paragon of the flower child generation, Chuck Napier*, I reach, brother. I reach.

But since Atticus and Vellum are compatible products that have earned their loyal following, let me speak on behalf of both my fellow Atticus formatters and our Mac-based brethren using Vellum: For the love of all that is holy, profane, and even mundane, please stop sending us manuscripts setup like we’re going to the printer!

I’ve gotten better about asking editing clients not to do this. I make an exception for my primary client, Down & Out Books, since they like to partially format before they set me and my fellow editors loose on it. We’ve grown used to this. It also helps them spot formatting issues before they put the final product together.

But how, oh, pompous IT guy who apparently can write, edit, and format, are we to send you a manuscript?

Simple. Many newer writers (of which I was one once upona) assume they’re responsible for the page headers and numbers. That’s actually the last thing that should happen because… You’re either sending it to a formatter or running it through formatting software yourself. And those nifty packages I just told you about? They do that for you. Where do you want your page numbers? Do you want them or a header (Author name on one page, title on the other.) at the beginning of a chapter? Do you want all your chapters to start on the right-hand side? (My personal preference.) What font do you want to you use? Most of us who format will ignore the ebook formats, but print has a lot of work. In print is where headers, scene breaks, and chapter titles (even when it’s just Chapter 1, etc.) come into play.

A few things that will make your formatter’s (or yours if you DIY it) easier:

  • We don’t need the page numbers yet. We just need to know if your story begins on Page 1 or whatever page the prologue or Chapter 1 starts on. Every author and every publisher is different. Again, this only comes into play when you’re independent or a really small press. 
  • Make your chapter titles Headers (as in the paragraph styles, not an actual page header. Confusing, but different.) Atticus and Vellum look for those.
  • This is more for anthologies and collections. For most projects, I will charge a flat $75.  If you want the story title in the header and/or the author name for each story, that will cost you a little more. I can’t speak to Vellum’s capabilities (and any Vellum users, please chime in. This is useful information for potential clients, not just mine.)  Currently, Atticus does not do separate titles and writers throughout a single book. So that will have to be done in Word, requiring section breaks, really annoying header management, and trying to get the correct trim size in PDF. (Scrivener users, please chime in as Scrivener has awesome formatting capabilities as well.)
  • Ask if your formatter will do your cover. I send people to GetCovers.com after I have a print page count. That doesn’t happen until after formatting.
  • Scene breaks. The standard is all over the place, but both Atticus and Vellum give you the option to use an image for your scene breaks or even a blank line. However, it has to know where to break them. Your editor or publisher wants “#” centered  to break scenes. Your formatter wants “***”, also centered. Be consistent, because we can always search-and-replace.

*Not only did Chuck make a career playing hard-ass military types, but he famously was a space hippie in the original Star Trek. Chuck looks like he was having fun. Nimoy and Shatner look extremely annoyed in that episode. I reach.

CrutchesA while back, I wrote about crutch words and the approach I took to weeding them out. A working editor is a work in progress, and I am no exception. I developed a four-word approach to “Words That Must Be Scrutinized!!!” (Cue really loud gong.) The offending words are “suddenly,” “just,” “very,” and “that.” Yes, “that” can be a crutch word. The story analysis project I’m finishing up as I write this also abused “and.” Mind you, the author is an admitted first-time writer who does not speak US English trying to write in US English. English as a first language is weird enough. I get headaches rendering an alien language into Elizabethan English to convey excessive formality, so I get it.

I’ve modified since then. I don’t do a “that” check anymore. That is used more often legitimately than as a crutch, so you could easily get a thousand instances of it in a long manuscript. ProWritingAid is pretty good at flagging it when it’s used to join a long sentence together. Never say “The fact that…” Just say “The fact…”

But I got so zealous about purging and replacing “that” with “who,” “how,” and “which,” that I got pushback from both author and publisher. (The author turned around and wrote a blurb for my editing work, so it’s a case of making good better.) So now, I look to see if “that” is unnecessary in context. 

I still go after “very” and “suddenly.” In fact, I get mad if I can’t delete “suddenly.” “Just” remains a sticking point. It’s the most abused of the three. One writer, who’s been around for decades, had seven instances on one page! It is a monumental pain in the ass to weed those out, and in a couple of instances, I had to leave two on the page. But it’s a crutch word.

Once upona, I used to go after “should” because Bestelling Authorā„¢, who had a writing courseĀ®, said it’s a bad word. Probably is. Too many “shoulds” on a page will annoy the reader without them realizing why. I quit doing that because it ended up giving me stilted prose in my own work and annoyed an editing client early on. This is also I don’t do writing books. I publish independently or small press, so until they start showing up on bestseller lists or I have a waiting list for my services, I’m not going to be a shill and pretend to know more than I do. Here, I’m sharing what I see on the job. 

So it’s “very,” “suddenly,” and “just.” I’ve added one more because I caught it in print in one of my own books: form. Why is “form” bad? It’s not as long as you are filling out a form, you’re admiring that other person’s cute form, or your mother-in-law, in her rage, assumes her demon form.* But every so often, in the heat of writing, we type “form” instead of “from.” It’s something that even an editor can miss. We’re not perfect, and two errors can hide a third in plain site. So I check all the instances of “form.” 99% of the time, they’re all correct. That remaining one percent usually sees a character bopping out to Sinatra singing “The Girl Form Ipamena.” So, yeah, the writer probably wants to know about that typo.

As I said before, different editors have different approaches. Some will zap anything with an “-ly” in it. Some have long lists of words they never want to see in a manuscript again. Others just read it in context and decide if it sticks out like a sore cliche.  

* Actually, my mother-in-law is a sweet 80-year-old lady. My ex-mother-in-law is a nice Mormon lady with a decidedly un-Mormon sense of humor who definitely gave it to her daughter. Who happens to be my favorite ex. I’ve married often. And well. Not many people can say that. 

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. 

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Was (Not Was)
Source: last.fm

No, not the well-regarded 80s band led by producer Don Was. Was (along with is, are, were) is a double-edged sword for writers. Why? Used in action verbs, it blunts to impact of a sentence. And used as the verb itself, it’s passive voice. If you listen to hundreds of writing experts and “experts,” passive voice is to be avoided like cliches. Or like the plague, which is also a cliche.

Not all passive voice is bad. But a writer should use it sparingly. A lot of times, I’ll end up flipping a sentence around to get rid of it. It’s best left to description. Action? That’s a little different. You have to read each and every instance of was/is/are/were followed by an -ing. Nine times out of ten, you can shorten it to the actual verb.

“He was walking toward the park…” Now, if he’s going to be interrupted in the act of walking to the park, this makes sense. Or if another character intercepts him while he’s walking to the park (like I just wrote here), the “was” and an “-ing” makes sense. If he’s getting from point A to point B and ends up in the park before anything happens, then “He walked toward the park…” is better.

Was takes the immediacy away. Do that, and you also take the reader interest away. A lot of editors brag about cutting. (And sometimes, a less-skilled editor cuts just to cut. That’s when it becomes about the editor. If you’re a freelance editor, stop that!) But a good rule of thumb is to look for any fat you can trim. “Was/Is” makes a great shorthand to get rid of a lot of fat and punch up the prose. And while passive voice will show up in everything we write, less is always more.

Next week, I will talk about a rule about prepositions up with which I will not put!