Category: Prose

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. 

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!

 

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Broken pencil while writing
1311784 by smengelsrud/pixabay.c
Copyright: CC0 Creative Commons

Ah, the lowly dash. And it’s many forms. We so love using them, especially Gen X and Millennial writers. We especially love our em dashes (— ). Nothing wrong with that, though I wish Cormac McCarthy had made peace with quotation marks before he died. Blood Meridian was brilliant but hard to read.

And yet, as I go through my latest editing project and look back on my previous one, I keep seeing a dash error that drives me to distraction. The previous project came from the pen of a guy who started doing this before I was born. (My first election was Reagan’s reelection bid, for perspective, when David Lee Roth sang for Van Halen on Ye Olde Victrola whilst we drove the ol’ La Salle to the Woolworth’s for a grape Nehi.*) Yet, I also received back the latest Jim Winter offering back from Dawn Barclay, my talented colleague at Down & Out Books. As I am Jim, I received a rude awakening. I do the same damn thing! What is this horrific atrocity in writing?

Grandpa Simpson yells at cloud.
Fox

Everyone, and I mean everyone, including your humble narrator, hyphenates adverbs. STOP THAT! (Pauses to go yell at both TS Hottle and Jim Winter and hopes wife doesn’t call the men with the butterfly nets and strait-jacket.)

What bugs me about Dawn’s horrific revelations is the next Winter book is a collection. Which means two-thirds of these stories were edited by someone else before I cleaned them up. Eek! That’s two editorial passes that missed that error. Strangely, I never get called out on em dashes. Once, when Second Wave was beta read, I did get a note on the difference between the em dash and the en dash and a hyphen.

  • Hyphens: Hyphens are used to join two words into the single idea. Most often, you see it in some last names, like Alec Walker-Jones. It also can join two adjectives, such as “music-obsessed.” Occasionally, it’s used with nouns, but not often. Technically, hyphens are not dashes. They are not to be used to join any word ending in –ly to another word. So, the phrase “criminally-wrong” is just “criminally wrong.”
  • En dashes: Sometimes used to join words the way hyphens sometimes do. Calling a hyphen an en dash in a number, time, or date range (200-300, 1939-1945, 3:00-3:45) is technically correct, which is often the best kind of correct. But never best-kind, because “best” is an adjective, which is like all those “-ly” words Stephen King tells you not to use yet frequently abuses.
  • Em dashes: Em dashes are the favorite punctuation mark of any writer born between 1964 and 1997. We love them! We use them in lieu of parentheses—though inside a sentence, they must be used in pairs—and to indicate someone’s speech has been interrup— Why the disdain for parentheses? Why not use ellipses(…)? Ellipses indicate trailing off. As for parentheses, believe me, when I first started writing, I was a serial parentheses abuser. Someone pointed out I wrote too many asides in my essays—which, by the way, can get annoying. (See what I did there?) As Microsoft Word improved, along with its alternatives and tools like Scrivener, grammar tools helpfully autocorrected the double hyphen (“–”) into an em dash. Em dashes may or may not be technically correct—still the best kind of correct, but not best-kind of correct, but they really do enhance readability. My tenth-grade English teacher may disagree, but my tenth-grade English teacher thought Led Zeppelin would give me a heart attack and Heinlein would rot my mind. (Jury’s out on the latter.) So, suck it, Clara.

So there you have it. Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.

*Do they still make Nehi?

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Once upon a time, I read Tom Clancy’s novels. They were brilliant adventure pieces, though Jack Ryan ultimately became a bit of a Mary Sue character. I was young and my imagination locked into The Hunt for Red October and Cardinal of the Kremlin (the Cold War still a thing back then.) But as I read more and read widely, I discovered something Clancy did that I absolutely cannot stand.

g4f01e49f6df40fa45f0c5abb227684dbfb67e64f386eb8a6345bcbd6440074b054b693ecbe30fce3a9de1212c8f89041_1280-108545.jpgTom Clancy head hops like nobody’s business.

This was an early problem for me as a writer. Part of it came from inhaling movies in the 90s, back when an original idea still had cache. But then there were my authorial influences, the biggest of which was Stephen King. While I loathe head hopping, if done right, you either don’t notice it or realize it moves a scene along perfectly. As an editor, I will smack an author’s hand every time they do it. Why? It’s distracting.

To date, only four authors I’ve read pull off the in-scene head hop smoothly: Stephen King, George Pelecanos, SA Cosby, and Frank Herbert. And Herbert should have stopped doing it after The Children of Dune. (Some say he should have stopped writing Dune novels after Children, but I’ll save that discussion for another forum.) Everyone else, cut it out. Now.

Head hopping, if you haven’t picked up on it, is when you write what’s often called “close third person,” sometimes called “partially omniscient,” though I haven’t heard that term since Reagan’s first term. The character in focus is not the narrator, but the author gets into their head. Now, you can have multiple point-of-view characters in a novel, but only one character per scene. Meaning, if Sally is the point-of-view character in a scene, you may get into her head, have interior monologue, have reactions the other characters cannot see, and feel her emotions. But you can’t slip over to Jack’s head during the scene.

“Well, why not?”

Simple. It makes it harder for the reader to keep track. And especially now, in a time when attention spans are miniscule, you risk throwing the reader out of the story when they’re not sure who’s doing or saying what.

I’ve seen on some forums where fledgling authors puzzled why some famous authors have more than one POV per chapter? I scratched my head when I read this and realized they were listening to the flood of podcasts on writing put out by writers who make more money writing about writing and marketing than they do selling their own fiction. (Why I don’t do a writing book of my own.*) Of course, some of it, too, is the trend toward shorter chapters. Most writers I know do multiple scenes per chapter, so the head hopping between scenes is pretty much mandatory.

First person, of course, eliminates this. Second person should be avoided, though Mick Wall, in his Led Zeppelin bio, uses it to great effect. Probably because, while the book was unauthorized, received a lot of input from the various members of Zeppelin and Jason Bonham. Also, that was nonfiction about people Wall knows very well or had extensive contact with their various circles of friends, enemies, and associates.

“But what about omniscient point of view? Isn’t that in everyone’s head?”

You could argue that, but think about the great literature over the last three centuries. Prior to 1749, English had two great novels: Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, both written as travelogues and diaries. Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, proceeds to break multiple rules on writing we now take for granted (Authorial intrusion, lengthy asides that would make Stephen King blush, telling critics to get stuffed before the end of Chapter 1 and repeating it throughout the book), keeps the one-head-per-scene rule for the most part. In a couple of fight scenes, he head hops, usually when one character lands a blow on another, then we get to feel everything the combatant feels and hear every inappropriate thought. After that?

Well, there’s Dickens, but there’s also Washington Irving and Mark Twain, both of whom are very much “Get to the friggin’ point!” authors. Much of Twain’s fiction is first person, but most of his third person keeps to one head per scene, particularly later on, like his last novel published in his lifetime, A Horse’s Tale. Before Fielding and his two diarist colleagues? Shakespeare and Milton. One wrote plays (by nature, dramatic until you hit a soliloquy), the other epic poems. (Imagine if Milton teamed up with Pratchett. Hoo boy!) But while other writers (Looking at you, Dickens and Hawthorne!) head hopped in their novels, one head per scene, if not the entire book, had already become the rule before Jefferson crammed on the Declaration of Independence the night before it was read.

“But, gee, TS, I want to show what the other character’s thinking, too.”

Ah, easy enough. Have the character react. Show, don’t tell. (My least favorite writing rule, but it’s hammered into writers for a reason.) If an innocent remark by Mark makes Cindy angry, you don’t need to get into Mark’s head. Have him act hurt when she voices anger and let Cindy interpret it. Or…

Scene break and jump into Mark’s head. Elmore Leonard sometimes wrote entire chapters of very short scenes ping-ponging between POV characters.

Remember, it’s all about the reader. And if you catch yourself doing it in the first draft, remember, that’s what revisions and rewrites are for. And your editor. I’m here to help.

*I edit. Therefore, I blog about it.