The Editor’s Corner

Ah, yes! The English language. So versatile. So adaptable.

Just read this snippet of Beowulf aloud and drink in the beauty.

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,

Stone Carving Free Stock Photo - Public Domain PicturesThis is the part where you go, “Huh?”

That is, in fact, English. Only it’s usually called “Anglo-Saxon.” If you hear it read out loud, you’ll hear something resembling Dutch. To those of you in the Netherlands or who speak Dutch, I said resembles it. Dutch didn’t even exist when this was written. Well, when it was spoken. The poem is actually a Danish epic, but you’ll find nary a word of Old Norse in it, never mind French, Latin, Celtic, or any of the dozens of languages English has ambushed in a back alley to steal words over the centuries. 

So how is this English? 

This is actually what linguists mean when they say Old English. Basically, as the Roman days in Britain waned, three Germanic tribes drifted in. The Saxons from Saxony (Duh.), the Angles from Angeln in modern-day Schleswig in Germany, and the Jutes, from Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. The Saxons settled in the south. The Angles took the Midlands and, after uniting their kingdoms, gave the country its name: Angleland, land of the Angles. Never mind England’s culture before the Vikings moved in permanently was largely Saxon. The Jutes went to Kent, which explains why that particular county still has its own unique culture and is yet quintessentially English. The Church of England is based there, and that’s where St. Patrick got his marching orders to go handle the snake problem in Ireland.* All these tribes spoke an early form of German, as did the Vikings to the north (who were not yet Vikings, but they were working on it.) They had to talk to each other and to their new neighbors, the Celts, and to the lingering Romans. Sprinkle in a few Latin constructions so the Romans and Celts could understand, and a new off-shoot of German emerged. 

(And you could still split infinitives and end sentences in prepositions. Remember, the empire that made those rules just collapsed, so why keep up that nonsense? Take that, Mrs. Chaucer. You ruined tenth grade for me!)

Things continued swimmingly for a few centuries. The Angles coalesced around York, their main kingdom being Mercia. The Saxons’ center of power became Wessex (as in West Saxons.) The Jutes become Kent Men and spent their time in the lab trying to invent the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. That would take a while, so they worked on the Anglican Church as a side project. I digress. The language remained more or less isolated. They also didn’t write a lot of things down. Hence, the Dark Ages. Not because civilization fell. Civilizations tend to give way to…Well…Civilizations. If there isn’t one in place already, people tend to build their own. Hence, Anglo-Saxon England, Old Norse Scandinavia. France. The Dark Ages are dark because such people don’t really have time to write things down. They’re busy building. 

So, the next wave are the Vikings, whose idea of a vacation was pillaging and ravishing England, Scotland, and Northern France. Contrary to popular belief, they weren’t really looking for spam. Eventually, though, looting makes a lousy business model. So the Vikings barged into the Angle kingdoms and set up what was called the Danelaw. Around this time, a Saxon king named Alfred the Great–amazing leader, but lousy baker–united the Saxons, Kent, and the remaining Angle kingdoms into one nation, adopting the name for the region for his new country: England. He subjugated the invading Norse, and their language began changing Anglo-Saxon. It was still English, but the Norse, contrary to popular belief, got rid of a lot of the sillier rules of the language. Gendered nouns and verbs began disappearing. Unlike most other European languages, those dealing with the Norse decided “the” was all the definite article they needed. English started to look like, well, English.

And then we have the Welsh. The Welsh do not have a happy history with the Anglo-Saxon and Norse kings of old, but they had an impact on the evolving language. Celtic words began creeping into the language, as a bunch of Saxon nobles carved off a slice of Wales known as the Marches for themselves. Well, live among a people, you start sounding like them.

So by 1066, the language is already morphing into something resembling…um…English. Or, at least, modern English. 

And then came Billy the Bastard. Er, um, William the Conqueror. No, really, one of his epithets was “the Bastard.” LIke the kings from the Danelaw before him, Willy was a Viking. A French Viking. In fact, the Normans didn’t speak Old Norse. They spoke their own special brew of French. And William decreed all England would speak French. And then Willy’s granddaughter Mathilda married an actual Frenchman, Geoffrey Plantagenet. And her son Henry II assumed the throne in England. And so proper French joined Norman French. But those pesky English insisted on speaking Anglo-Saxon. By the time Henry IV took the throne, he decided the Wars of the Roses would be fought in English. And this version of English, Middle English, was almost readable.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

If you read that out loud, you can understand what Chaucer is writing. But this is also where the various pronunciations of “oo” came into being. Between Chaucer and Shakespeare (who actually wrote in Modern English, just the Elizabethan version. Sorry, Rev, but your favorite Bible is not in Old English.), something happened called “vowel drift.” The vowels sounded different in Chaucer’s time, why the rhymes don’t work in the modern ear. Populations migrated. People flocked to England to find work. The language changed.

And then we have Mr. Gutenberg. Gutenberg did a great service to the world: He made books available and newspapers possible. Unfortunately, even though German has some non-Latin letters, he opted to use the strict 26-letter Roman alphabet we all know and love. His rationale was the Pope was Pope over all (Henry VIII enters the chat, followed by his son Edward VI and daughter Elizabeth. They’d like to dispute that.) and so Latin ruled. When Tyndale imported his first printing press, it did not have the thong, the now-obsolete letter denoting the “th” sound in English. There also was a holdover rune from Anglo-Saxon that covered some of the “-ough” words. But Gutenberg didn’t do runes. Umlats, yes. Probably a Spinal Tap fan (Google umlat and Spinal Tap.) But no runes. Them’s pagan letters. And so you have to put tough, thorough thought into how “ough” is pronounced. And here I’d been blaming the French and the Welsh all these years. Turns out it’s a technical glitch, and we get to suffer from it.

And now you know why English has swollen not into a large language but a linguist gang of seven or eight languages that waits in back alleys to mug other unsuspecting languages for words and idioms.

*Yes. I know. That’s a myth. The snakes. Pat worked for the Archbishop of Canterbury, originally one of the guys who could easily become Pope. Work with me, people!

Wadded paperRegular readers of this space know I have a…complicated…history with my high school English teachers. As my college degrees are technical and business (and I was a non-traditional student), I can’t say the same for my college-level profs. One was a young, tatted-up lady who prompted me to rewrite Poe’s “A Cask of Amatillado” from the point-of-view of whoever the crazy old man was ranting to. I miss her.

What don’t I miss? Latin rules imposed on English. If you follow the YouTube channel RobWords, you know host Rob Watts is annoyed by Latin scholars in the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment showing off and trying to impose their rules on this Germanic language called English. There are two rules that really grate, not just on Mr. Watts, but your humble narrator, too. 

Never end a sentence in a preposition.

Never split an infinitive.

Let’s take the first. There is an old joke about a student of humble origins attending Harvard and needing to find the library. He stops a fellow student, probably with three last names like Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, and asks in all earnestness, “Where’s the library at?” Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, all offended and Thurston Howell III accent in place, sniffs, “This is Harvard, young man, and we do not end sentences in a preposition!” Undeterred, our hero rephrases his question as, “Where’s the library at, motherf–?”

The truth is Shakespeare ended sentences in prepositions. So did Mark Twain, and not just when he wrote from Huck Finn’s point-of-view. So did Hemingway. And… Stephen King? That last one’s a bad example. King famously derides adverbs, then uses them like Frank’s Red Hot, putting that sh– on everything! So why is this taught in schools?

Because… Latin. Having taken a few years of high school Spanish, most of which I’ve forgotten, I’ve seen the Latin rules in action. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and related languages are continuations of Latin, so the rules apply seamlessly. And in Spanish, you can’t end a sentence in a preposition. Structurally, it won’t work. It wouldn’t make sense. English?

A friend from Germany said when he learned English, he was stunned to learn you could “verb” a noun, or even noun a verb. In fact, our most potent obscenity (Rendered here as “eff”) is so versatile that the sentence, “This effing effer’s effed!” makes absolutely perfect sense. English, for all its inconsistencies and contradictions, is structured so any word can mean anything, and the listener can easily catch the meaning. Putting a preposition at the end of a sentence? The main objection is there’s no object following the word, but if I ask you if you know where the library’s at, unless you’re Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, your first response is likely to be, “Up on Galbraith Road, near the Walgreen’s.”

That said, I had it flagged in a manuscript once. The editor said she hates that rule, too, but it’s so ingrained into our psyches that readers might stumble over a dangling preposition.

Split infinitives. To boldly impose Latin rules that make absolutely no sense in English. And you may thank Gene Roddenberry and William Shatner for debunking this one. “To boldly go where no one has gone before.” To go boldly sounds awful. But why is this  a rule? It’s not. Once again, Latin scholars had an annoying tendency to impose their rules on a Germanic language. Again, let’s look at the Latin-based Spanish. Infinitives, the base version (allegedly) of any verb, are always one word in Latin-based languages. You can’t split a Latin or Latin-based infinitives. They are always one world. English?

“To boldly go…” Right there, the myth is busted.

And yet, I’ve actually seen someone put this linguistic myth, up with which I will not put, to productive use. General Colin Powell talked about how he barred his staff from using split infinitives in all memos. Powell said he was well aware that was a stupid rule and even quoted Star Trek in explanation. His point was making his staff focus on details. In looking for the banned split infinitives, they found other errors. So it was about seeing details.

But understand something. Anglo-Saxon, which does have a handful of Latin constructions in its earliest forms, is not Latin. Most of the structure–good, bad, and ugly–came from that. There are Latin-based words in English. From Middle English onward, it’s lousy with French words and had already absorbed a fair amount of Viking and Celtic words. But it is not Latin. 

mandalorian but its just kuiil saying "i have spoken" - YouTube
Source: Disney

Wadded paper“We’re developing a situation where a whole group of young people is growing up having no real sense about how our system of justice works.” – Chief Justice John Roberts

That line’s been quoted in several news sources and is included in a lot of Facebook rants about the Supreme Court’s performance of late. Without getting into what I think of the current Court, I do want to point out this showed up in someone’s latest rant. Before launching into why the poster thought Roberts was out of line, he stated even the grammar is wrong.

This is an editing blog. Did you think I was going to waste space on the undeserving crooks in Washington? Specifically, he said it should have been “a whole group of young people are…” instead of “is.” Actually, the poster is wrong. But you can’t fault him. The sentence looks wrong. It has “people” and “is” next to each other in the sentence. But “people” is not the operative word. “Group” is. And group, by definition, is a singular object. The members of a group are plural. And “people,” in most cases, is plural. But the subject of the clause is “group.” Therefore, the correct verb is… Well, is.

Bill Clinton must feel vindicated. (Google it. I remember that incident, and I’m still scratching my head.)

Roberts is, before anything else, a lawyer. I learned to edit from a lawyer, and believe me, it’s a great way to learn how to clean up your prose. However, the law has its own quirks and sticks to rules even corporate writing no longer recognizes. Like capitalizing every other noun in a sentence and not using contractions outside of quotations. I’ve had one editor flag that in my manuscript and stetted the hell out of it. But the bottom line is lawyers almost always get their grammar correct. So while it took me a decade to shed the legal habits of editing, the core of what I learned remains.

So why bring this up? Well, first, I needed a topic this week. And odd noun-verb pairings seemed obvious when I read the chief justice’s quote. Yes, they slip by sometimes when I edit. One could make a case for AI taking over the job, but having had some recent experience with ChatGPT for a project, make sure you stamp your passport for the frying pan on your way to the fire. AI is worse at it. Go Google “Hallucinations” and “AI.” Some of the results are hilarious.

But why is this so hard? Your brain sees “people” right next to the word “is” and goes, “That ain’t right.” But before “people” in the above quote is “group.” The group is growing up, but the people aren’t. “People” is only a descriptive noun telling the reader what group this is. So do I ever let this slide knowing the right way will hurt some people’s heads? Yes, actually. 

A good editor can forgive a lot of rule-breaking in dialog and first-person. The person is talking, and I don’t give a damn what your English teacher told you (unless it was Mr. Murphy, whom I had in the 11th grade. He was cool!) People break rules speaking. They mismatch tenses. They swallow words and syllables. They use the wrong words. They even use the same word to start too many consecutive sentences. Your goal is to make it readable, not please Mrs. Chaucer (not her real name, but suck it, Clara.)  

But once in a while, the right way is going to sound wrong. Leave that to third person narrative. (Send me second person, and I’ll print it out, shred it, and send back the shreds. I am not an avant-garde editor.)

Sentence fragments. Annoy some people. Found in Dickens, though. Bad writing? Or stylistic choice?

Why not both? Girl meme social reaction | StareCat.com

It’s both. My current assignment comes from a writer who breaks a lot of rules. And it’s clearly done on purpose. He writes present tense, which drives a lot of readers batty. And he writes almost completely in sentence fragments, especially when his story gets going.

“Wow, TS. It must take you an hour just to get through one page!”

Not really. The point of editing is to make sure the writer not only gets their point across but also doesn’t get in their own way. In other words, cutting out all the writing for the sake of writing. Mind you, I edit mostly fiction. Non-fiction requires a different set of rules, and let’s not get started on corporate editing, which means the Chicago Manual of Style is a polite suggestion when the company has a style manual to be treated like the Bible. (Which most translations probably violate. ‘Cuz, yanno, God never went through the mandatory employee orientation.) 

So occasionally, you get people who break rules on purpose. Is this bad writing? Well, it depends. Your ultimate audience is your reader. However, reviewers may or may not get to your work first. So guess what? The lady on the beach might think you’re just swell, but the reviewer will be leaving a two-star review because you insist on ending every sentence with a preposition. While I think that’s a fake rule, it is annoying when writers do that too often. They should check out the Elements of  Style from the library, assuming they know where the library’s at.

Where were we? Sentence fragments.

Much of what a writer puts down is dictated by rhythm and cadence. Most of us who write hear the words in our heads. That’s why that last sentence occasionally gets out in the wild as “Most of us who write here the words…” Sometimes, the brain just picks a spelling and runs with it. So, as in the case with my current author, you sometimes get long blocks of prose written in punchy, short phrases. And yet in context, it works. It might not get over the transom, but it works. (This one, by the way, did get over the transom, or it wouldn’t be on my desk.) Now, if this person wrote bestsellers, one of two things would happen: hundreds of acquisitions editors would be flooded with similarly written stories (most of which would be badly written) or publishers, smelling a buck, would insist their writers adopt the style (also resulting in a flood of bad imitations.)

Fragments are the more readable version of the run-on sentence. The difference is, writing in an age of declining attention spans, where it’s hard enough to get people to cue up a book on a Kindle, never mind a print book, run-ons are an abomination that should be weeded out. An argument could be made for chopping up that last sentence, though technically, it’s not a run-on.

 

Exclamation pointElmore Leonard once said of exclamation points, “You are allowed no more than three per 100,000 words.”

I shrugged that one off when I read it, because that was Elmore Leonard‘s rules for writing.  But it was always in the back of my mind. If I saw a “!” in my own writing, it’s life expectancy would be very short. (“Very” is another writing tic I’ve talked about before. Like everything else, it’s here because it works.) If I see it in editing, with one exception, I usually will flag it and tell the writer to take it down a notch. 

But while Elmore disdained the !, one must remember it was how he wrote. He also had a Stephen King-like disdain for adverbs. Unlike Steve, Elmore actually stuck to it. I’m getting King’s Never Flinch when it comes out, so I may do an adverb count. But while I don’t share Elmore’s contempt for the !, I do get it. 

For starters, with one very notable exception (Hi, Nathan!), I will mercilessly zap all instances of “!!” or “!?” Also, unless it’s for effect, it should be clear a character is shouting without putting an exclamation point at the end of every line of dialog the character speaks. Remember, someone has to read this, and as always, if it annoys the reader, your book is a DNF, a cute little abbreviation for “Did not finish.” (StoryGraph, an alternative for Goodreads, even has a status for this in addition to Want to Read, Reading, and Read. Bezos, you own Goodreads. Take note.)

But what was that other thing I just did? “!?” That, my friends, is the much maligned interrobang, which has long since been replaced by the acronym “WTF,” often spelled out or replaced with a similar phrase. There’s even a symbol for it with two html codes to render it. ‽ That might be hard to see with this font, so here’s an image from compart.com explaining the technical details:

The interrobang

If “WTF” were punctuation, this is what it would look like. But the interrobang never really caught on, mainly because it’s a comic book construction. Now, comics and graphic novels have their own rules, just like 73X7ing, lol. In prose, this really doesn’t quite cut it. But whoever came up with the interrobang deserves credit for trying. Still, readers find it distracting. The question mark (?) isn’t as scrutinized because we only use them to ask a question. In fact, they’re missed more than overused because some questions are not asked with the pitch of the voice going up. If, like me and a lot of other writers, you “hear” what you write, then a question (almost always in dialog) asked with a voice drop tells another part of your brain, “Hey, this is a period at the end.” I put in more question marks than I take out.

The !, or bang as it’s been called since the early days of computer programming, has a bad reputation because it gets abused. Like semicolons and em dashes*, they can get distracting. The former is because they’re so seldom used and often are more associated with computer code. Java and C# (and SQL, though I refuse to use them in SQL) use semicolons to end commands. Em dashes are a Gen X and Millennial tick, which has resulted in ChatGPT getting a migraine when users tell it to STOP USING SO MANY EM DASHES! I wont’ get into the ethics of how ChatGPT learns, but suffice it to say, we GenXrs and Millennials are baking our bad habits into cyberspace.

Normally, I have rules applied mainly to crutch words: One instance per page unless unavoidable. (“Just” is a nuisance word and hard to weed out as I end up putting back a third of what I cut.) For the exclamation point, I’ll restrict that even more. First, memorize Leonard’s rule: one bang per 100,000 words. And when you or your publisher send me your manuscript, understand, while I may be more lenient than Elmore Leonard, I still restrict it to one per chapter. Maybe one every three, since short chapters are the norm now.

*You can have my em dash when you pry it from my cold, dead–and lifeless–hand. 

"Beautiful Entertainments" italicized in three different fonts.
CC 4.0 2015 Blythwood

There’s one issue our modern computer-based writing and editing has raised. Italics.

When Word Perfect and the dedicated word processing devices surfaced in the mid-1990s, it solved the underlining problem typewriters could not consistently address. Some of the newer ones had underlining options, including the venerable IBM Selectric. A few die-hards will not give up their magic qwerty boxes until  you pry them from their cold, dead, and lifeless hands. But those of us who learned to type just as Steve and Bill were putting a PC on every desk hated typewriters. And I owned three of them over the years. I moved in with a girl who owned a Canon word processor, and I haven’t looked back since. And one of the things it let me do was italicize.

For the last 30 years, italics have been easy. Ctrl + I or Cmd + I makes all your letters slant. Simple. Maybe too simple. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Most people know the basic rules: Book titles, album titles, movies, TV series, magazines and newspapers, and works of art. Yes, I’ve been getting The Mona Lisa wrong longer than some countries have existed. Titles of short stories, chapters, TV episodes, songs, poems, and articles go inside quotation marks. (Double quotes in North America, single in UK and elsewhere in the English speaking world. Be consistent.)

That last line brings up another use. Italics can also emphasize a word or a phrase. I generally shy away from that as a writer, but that’s because I also shy away from stage direction. On the other hand, it can reduce use of that annoying punctuation mark, the exclamation point!

The list above comes from Actually, the Comma Goes Here by Lucy Cripps, a quick and dirty style guide for when you dropped your Chicago Manual of Style on your foot and can’t pick it up until the doctor removes the boot. One thing it left off is ship names. That’s right. Star Trek (for some reason, we don’t seem to italicize franchises, just the individual series and movies) is about the starships Enterprise. But that’s led to some bad editing.

I used to italicize class names for ships. Like the last aircraft carrier Enterprise was of the Nimitz class, named for the USS Nimitz. I stopped probably when I also noticed that Star Wars stopped showing up in italics, which was right around when the original movie was renamed A New Hope*. 

But as a writer, I’ve had to smack a couple of editors’ hands. (I’ve had my hand smacked, too. Occupational hazard.) People start italicizing things which they had no business slanting the letters. Specifically, building names, business names, restaurants, theaters. That’s actually a big no-no. And this is not like the argument between people who require the Oxford comma and people who are wrong. You do not italicize restaurant names, theater names, and buildings and businesses!!! Now and forever, world without end. Amen. Shakespeare debuted Hamlet at the Globe Theater, but the Globe Theater does not exist. No. Don’t do that. Ever.

Italics are not as badly handled as apostrophes, commas, or capitals. But they do get abused. Overusing for emphasis is just as distracting as too many exclamation points or bad dialog tagging (“Get out,” she shrieked shriekily.) As with anything, stick to the basics and use in moderation.

*The proper way to watch A New Hope is to watch Rogue One, then immediate jump into A New Hope, and finishing on YouTube with Robot Chicken‘s “Go for Papa Palpatine” bit. Then, you shall know what the hell an Aluminum Falcon is.

An apostropheThanks to clickbait and social media, use of the apostrophe (or “sky comma”) is a lost art. The most common (and often ridiculed) error is, of course, your/you’re. When you’re typing at a million miles an hour and want the words down, it’s easy to “hear” a word and pick the wrong spelling. For all the jokes about your/you’re, it’s something a ninth grader doing a proofread of your manuscript can spot. Assuming that ninth grader doesn’t believe texting should be the basis of grammar. Spoiler alert: It shouldn’t. k thx bye!

For the most part, people get contractions right. “He’s,” “they’re,” and “can’t” are all common examples. Frequently, I do see the apostrophe left out of “can’t.” In a manuscript, I’ll flag it. That’s what I get paid to do, among other things. Reading it, it’s not the most egregious apostrophe error out there.

Where do we get it wrong? Possessives. People can’t seem to wrap their head around when an apostrophe should or should not use it to denote possession. After all, we use his/her/their for third person possession. Where’s the apostrophe? Pronouns, aside from being the most monumentally stupid thing for politicians to whine about, are their own thing with their own rules. No formal name or specific noun denotes the possessor. Except…

There’s that pesky pronoun “It.” “It’s” is not possessive but rather a contraction for “It is.” When, as a pronoun, “It” possesses something, then you write “its,” no apostrophe. The easiest way to remember it is pronouns don’t use apostrophes for possession: Mine, our, your, his, her, their, and its. 

Now, let’s talk about where people really grind my gears: Slapping an apostrophe in to indicate plural or omitting it to indicate possession. STOP DOING THAT!!!  You know I’m worked up about that if I use three exclamation points after a sentence. That, in and of itself, is extremely bad grammar. So hopefully, I made my point.

Every so often, I’ll see a sign as I’m driving along or even online where someone wrote something along the lines of “Drink’s and Sandwich’s.” One had it as “Johnnys Bar.”

If you needed more proof civilization is in decline, there it is. It’s “Johnny’s Bar” and “Drinks and Sandwiches.”

Worse, some people labor under the delusion that the apostrophe goes before every “s” at the end of a word, especially if it’s a plural. STOP DOING THAT!!!

Now, the question on everyone’s mind once they realize how easy apostrophes are: What if a name or noun ends in an “s”?

Well, as we say in SQL Server work, “It depends.” This is one where the style guides vary wildly. Are we going to Charles’ house or Charles’s house? The Chicago Manual of Style says “Charles’s house” while the AP and various British guides suggest “Charles’ house.” Even Jess Zafarris and Rob Watts of the Words Unraveled YouTube channel can’t agree. Rob himself, a former BBC reporter now living in Germany, says he’s been forced to change with every style guide his work requires. And if it’s “Charles’s,” do you pronounce that second “s”?

Here is TS’s guide to the sky comma when it comes to nouns ending in “s.” It’s possessive, so use “‘s” at the end. However, it’s an S, followed by an S. You don’t have to say it out loud. This is what I learned in school, what a potential agent told me to use (I laid down the law on the Oxford comma, but she was in agreement it’s mandatory. Get over it.), and ultimately, what the Chicago Manual uses.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But can you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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