Speaking So You Are Understood

Posted on February 20, 2012 by arwenbicknell

I feel a bit sorry for the writers of Downton Abbey.  They’re getting a lot of flak for language infractions, and I’m not sure they deserve the microscope for that particular shortcoming.

Frankly, I’m more in this guy’s camp.

Still, it’s a worthy topic of discussion.  Research for writing is imperative, even fiction worlds that exist only inside a writer’s head need to have guidelines and structure. If you’re going to defy the laws of physics, you need to set the laws you can’t defy. Know the rules before you break them, etc. etc.

So a realistic novel, in most cases, should not feature a woman who can teleport. Generally speaking, a story set in the 1940s probably should not have characters speaking exaggerated Valley Girl.

But if you’re writing a kid’s book that’s set in medieval times, is it really a requirement to write in medieval dialect? Fie.I think not.

In the movie interpretation of the Hunt for Red October, the Russians start out speaking Russian, then morph into English so the audience doesn’t miss the action trying to read the subtitles. I thought this was a clever and effective device. It was a kindness to the viewer, and an instance where religious adherence to accuracy was abandoned in favor of effective communication.God bless it.

It’s more important, I think, to maintain internal consistency.  If you’re going to write a story set in medieval times but make a character talk like a Valley Girl, she has to stay a Valley Girl throughout. And her character has to make clear why you’ve adopted that particular conceit for her.  Making Beth from Little Women talk like a Valley Girl is a bad choice.  Giving that vocal style to Amy, on the other hand, could be brilliant.

But maybe I’m dead wrong, and it’s much better to render Latin unto Caesar. What do you think?

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Onward, Ever Onward

Posted on February 15, 2012 by arwenbicknell

I have yet to hear back, good or bad, on any of the queries I’ve sent this month — not counting the one that rejected me inside of an hour.

In the meantime, I’ve been amusing myself by reading critiques of other queries. I’m relieved to say I’m pretty sure I’m not as bad as the worst,  although I’m certainly not as polished as the best.  That’s a good place for me to be, I reckon, given my relative experience and position in this adventure.

I’ve also been using those critiques as intended, to improve my own.  I think I’ve got it polished now to a point that it should take in anyone remotely interested in considering the actual book.

That is pretty satisfying, even if the email void is not.

 

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Overtaken by Events

Posted on February 10, 2012 by arwenbicknell

One of the things you learn working in news — especially online news — is the art of the update. It goes something like this:

A house catches fire.  A short story goes on the news website.

The firemen arrive. The same story goes up, but with new information at the top about the firemen and how long it took for them to show up and other newly gathered info. 

The fire is put out. Another update, with a new opening paragraph that replaces “Firemen responded to a blaze blablabla,” with  “It took 40 minutes for firemen to put out a blaze blablabla.”

  Then, at some point much later in the day compared with these rapid-fire updates, you will get what is called a write-through, which takes that last updated story and fleshes it out with quotes from neighbors, a check with the veterinarian on the cat’s smoke inhalation issues, what the cause might have been, etc. etc.

What you have here today is the write-through with none of the breaking news.  Since I wrote last I have:

— Queried seven editors on my novel.  For those of you with mad math skillz, you can see this means I’m off my goal by three query letters. I will either make that up this weekend or fall impossibly behind.

— Celebrated the fact my kid turned 9, pondered the fact that he could be a straight-A student but is at least still pulling all As and Bs, and lamented the fact that he’s still mouthing off at kids and getting in trouble for it.

— Sat in the process as my kid auditioned at the last minute for a community theater version of Fiddler on the Roof and was accepted for the chorus, considered auditioning myself for about 6 seconds, then realized that we would kill each other if we had to share a stage.

— Did a pretty good revision on the first third of my other novel.

— Oh, yeah, did that JOB thing.

So, here I am, and here you are, all caught up.  I will be back on track next week with more fun and exciting posts about things only I care about.

 

Posted in Excused Absence, Process | Leave a comment

Why Use One Word When Thirty Will Do?

Posted on January 31, 2012 by arwenbicknell

“I would have written a shorter letter but didn’t have time.” — attributed to Voltaire, Twain and Pascal, and probably a zillion other folks.

It’s a clever saying, but it is incredibly, sadly true of most people I know.  I’ve already talked about the issue of writing yourself a giant slab of kitchen-sink marble that you then have to revisit and chisel away at until it’s something more resembling a work of art.  That’s one thing.  Writing down everything you want to include and then going back to pare the stuff you realize you don’t need is a valuable, maybe even essential, part of the writing process.

This is not true, however, of roundabout writing.  Often, I bump into copy that is a feeble attempt at obfuscation.  It has been my general experience that a writer’s word count on conveying a simple thought is inversely proportional to his confidence in that thought.  If he’s absolutely certain that the cat climbed a tree, he will say, “the cat climbed a tree.”  He won’t say, “The animal with feline qualities was purported to ascend the woody matter by means of self-propulsion.” (Well, some writers might do this on purpose.  But I would maintain they are bad writers trying to sound erudite.)

Worse are the writers who pad their copy.  You saw these guys in school — the ones who wrote a three page book report that said “I really, really, really …. really, really liked this book.”  Argh.   You don’t need ANY “really” modifiers — in fact, you probably don’t even need to say you liked the book.  You can say  “this book has a riveting plot and well-developed characters,”  and I will infer your overall opinion.

You also don’t need a lot of helping verbs.  If you find yourself winding around an idea, stop. Say it in three words, like Tonto.  “Man presents invention.”  Then add in some articles, and you’re good to go.   You don’t need to say, (like a piece I saw recently,) that “the man announced the introduction of his invention.”  You don’t need to say “the man’s proposal would establish a program that would help the homeless.”  You can, but it’s far more elegant to say “The man proposed a homeless assistance program.”  Right?

I’m not sure what most writers call this, but I had a composition teacher in college who referred to this as “trimming the fat” and that’s the only way I’ve ever been able to think of the process, disgusting a mental image as it is.

Other fat phrases: “draw a conclusion” (conclude!); “it is essential that you do X” (You must do X!);”despite the fact” (despite! although! maybe you don’t need to mention the fact at all!)

One I struggle with is “to try to do X.”  (Please note, it is not “try AND do X.” You are trying to do it. You aren’t trying and doing it.) I realize there’s a difference between “I will continue to try to improve my writing” and “I will continue to improve my writing.”  But there’s almost always a better way to say it. “I’ll keep trying to improve my writing.” “I will try to write better copy.” “I’m still busting my ass learning to write well.”

Posted in Editing, Language, Mechanics | 1 Comment

A Matter of Perspective

Posted on January 25, 2012 by arwenbicknell

The last couple of mornings, I have been driving to work in a dense fog.

Not a mental fog. A real one, where mist swirls around the car and landmarks are turned into light and dark fuzzy outlines and the sky is orange from the streetlights.

(I am not a fan of the sodium vapor lights. I miss the silvery-white mercury vapor lights; they were much more soothing. Although I read somewhere a while back that metal halide is now de rigueur, so maybe if I wait another 40 years I’ll receive satisfaction.)

Anyway, I was wondering how society would change if humans were forced to muddle around in such fog all the time.  You’d never see stars. You’d have no use for high-beams. You’d have to be right on top of something to recognize it. How would that change your attitude? Your outlook? Your philosophy? Would it affect the number of dreamers in a given group vs. the number of pragmatists? Would you be content not knowing what was out there? Would it even occur to you that something might be out there? Would you be more driven to go find out?

How you see the world definitely affects how you write.  Compare The Night Cirus (written by a painter,)  to Harry Potter (much more language artsy.) If you see a spade, you might write “spade”  or “a digging implement with a squared-off bottom,” or “a garden tool with a grip worn shiny with use, a weathered wooden handle and a rusting square blade.”  None of these are wrong.  Any of them can be appropriate or inappropriate based on context.  But how you write it depends on how you see it.

How do you choose to see your world? Is it full of color and texture? Or are things more functionally driven?

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Know the Lingo, But Don’t Let It Own You

Posted on January 20, 2012 by arwenbicknell

I recently heard a story about a journalist who worked in a newsroom for more than two years before learning what the word “lede” meant, laboring under the assumption it referred to a headline.

(Aside for you non-journos: the lede is the first paragraph of a story, and a journalist not knowing that is akin to a waitress thinking all eggs are fried the same way and bringing you scrambled when you asked for over easy.)

(Second aside: “Lede” is correct. It’s to distinguish the word referring to that first paragraph  from the word “lead” — which is pronounced “led” and refers to the amount of space between lines of type. OK, moving on.)

I don’t really know how it’s possible to spend that much time in a newsroom and not pick up such a fundamental term by osmosis, if nothing else. Knowing the lingo is crucial to getting a job done.  You can’t be a car mechanic and think the only wheel on the car is the one you steer with.

That said, once you can talk the talk, you don’t actually need to write in it. Sometimes it helps for effect, and sometimes it adds to your street cred, but mostly it will alienate those who aren’t part of the inner circle. At best, you’ll kick them out of the flow of your story and they’ll have to go look something up. At worst, they’ll decide you’re a  pretentious snot who can sod off, and they’ll find something else to read. That’s not your intention, right? Of course not.

Words have meaning. But meaning should be clearly communicated with appropriate words.

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Yes and No

Posted on January 18, 2012 by arwenbicknell

Things that help when writing:

  • Quiet.
  • Good lighting.
  • An ability to keep your mind focused on what you’re writing about.
  • At least one solid uninterrupted hour of sitting.
  • Mise en place — having drinks, laptop, phones, reference materials, whatever other stuff you want at the ready so you don’t have to get up.  (See “uninterrupted hour of sitting.”)

Things that definitely do not help when writing:

  • Clutter.
  • Clamor.
  • Allowing your mind to wander and discovering you’ve spent five minutes staring at the open living room door and wondering where the cat is and having to get up and find the damn cat because you know you can’t concentrate while wondering if she’s peeing on your bedroom rug.
  • Days that grammar school lets out early.

(This post brought to you by one hyper 8-year-old, one overly energetic dog, winter temperatures that make us all want to stay inside, and one half-day of school.)

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Kill Your Babies

Posted on January 13, 2012 by arwenbicknell

No, no, not a political screed.  I’m not allowed to do those until I find a job that doesn’t require me to be strictly nonpartisan.   I’m talking here about the editing process.

One of the things they teach you in Headline Writing 101 is that if you think something is good or clever, you’d best ask several other people if they agree before you throw it out into the world for everyone to see.  It’s worse when you’re starting out and less experienced — odds are something you find brilliant and hilarious is really trite and hackneyed.  Or offensive. Or just plain wrong. (Ask the features reporter who dedicated an entire paragraph about the absurdity of the Beach Boys’ song “Little Blue Scoop.” True story.)

The hard part isn’t in the asking, of course. Asking is just showing off. “Lookie what I did! Isn’t it wonderful?” The hard part is when you get an answer you don’t want. “Wellllll… it’s okaaaaay, I guesssss.”  Or worse, ‘Oh, my god, you can NOT run that.”

Killing Your Babies means being willing to accept that you’re going in a wrong direction, no matter how right it feels.  Sometimes that means you’re writing the wrong book and should just find a whole new idea. Other times it means you’ve got a good idea, but you’re writing it for the wrong audience.  In other cases, there might not be anything intrinsically wrong with your work — you just didn’t need to work so hard.  This might requires rewriting scenes, or it might require just ditching them altogether.

I’m a much better editor than I am a writer.  In reworking my 120,000 word novel, I’ve had absolutely no problem chopping out 13 percent of my copy. (I want to knock out another 4,000 words to get it under 100k, and that might take a bit more doing, but I suspect it will still be easier than writing the thing was in the first place.) There are parts that hurt, but I see the need. There are parts that were just badly written and needed tightening.  The ones I find interesting are the parts I had to write to figure out where I was going, or some aspect of a character’s personality, but when I went back and read it again, was completely extraneous.  Reams of dialogue that revealed a character’s values or opinions that weren’t intrinsic to the story, they just helped flesh out the character in tangential ways. Confrontations that created tension for later scenes — when the later scenes worked just fine on their own and needed no setup at all.    It was all useful for me to do, of course; it helped me get things straight in my own mind.  But I’m not doing a reader any favors by dragging them down my own self-indulgent rabbit holes, now am I? (This blog doesn’t count.) So I cut.

I don’t think I’m betraying any confidences when I share with you that my father is going through much the same thing.  He is writing a biography of an essentially forgotten character in the history of Egyptology, and I think it will be a lovely little jewelbox of a piece when it is finished.  But it started out as a gusty and overly involved chronology of a man who had lots of friends who had lots of other friends who never showed up again after one mention. It’s difficult: When you spend six weeks trying to track down someone’s name, you want that piece of info in your story, by god. You don’t want to think you wasted six weeks on something that really belongs on the cutting room floor. And unless you can look at the process as “I did this work because I needed to know it, not because anyone else needs to read it,” that can be a hard thing to overcome.

I hacked at the draft he sent me and made a few suggestions.  I knew he wanted to do a straight-ahead McCullough-style scholarly biography.  I also knew he had way too many kitchen sinks in there. He agreed and got rid of some. I suggested he needed a bit of sparkle in his prose, and he (a bit grudgingly, I think,) toddled off to ingest some Eric Larson.

Then the man got an agent, and she told him straight-up bios don’t work unless you’ve got a string of letters after your name, which he does not. It might have been faster for him to just get the PhD and become a member of The Society, but I don’t think it would have benefited his writing much.  Instead, he got a directive from a consumer who knows the market, and that has helped him whip his unwieldy opus into mainstream saleable shape.  I can’t wait to read the latest iteration — which will doubtless hit the market long before I get an agent for any of the projects I’m fiddling around with.

Alas, I have a blog and he does not. Elsewise, I’d send you to him for pointers on how to actually reach the ultimate goal.

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Read, Read, Read

Posted on January 9, 2012 by arwenbicknell

There’s a certain literary voice I’m quite fond of.   I guess it’s the Humorous Memoir voice.  Think Jean Shepherd, or Clarence Day, or Patrick Dennis. (Well, Patrick Dennis’ tales of Mame were fictional, but you get my meaning.)

It’s the voice that makes the Gilbreths’ Cheaper by the Dozen so lovely, and it’s the absence of that voice that makes Steve Martin’s Cheaper by the Dozen so appalling. It’s a humor rooted in love and familiarity, not malice and contempt.

(John Waters does this in movies. Watch closely; his characters can be nauseating and vile, and what happens to them is hilarious in a sick and twisted way, but the humor therein isn’t really based on judgment or anger. It’s more a “love me, love my dress-wearing dog” observation of the absurd.)

I wish to God I could write in this style, but I can’t. Not yet, anyway. I’m not sure I ever will be able to.  Honestly, I don’t know if I can even share verbal anecdotes over wine in this voice.  I’m not half as funny, and my love, while unconditional,  is tempered by the recognition that others can’t possibly love the way I do.

I’ve got lots of stories from my family that I’d like to cast upon the waters as a book o’ vignettes. (Note: Jean Shepherd vignettes, not John Waters ones. My family is not that messed up.) My grandfather’s even done huge chunks of the work already, emailing me his recollections as he has energy/motivation/focus to do so.  They are lovely stories, quite charming, and I would love to do justice to them and see them reach a wider audience.

My family took Mame’s advice to Live, Live Live. There’s great story value in that. But to write them down properly, I think my self-help is to Read, Read, Read. I like to think that if I can get the voice in my head, I can get it on paper in legitimate fashion.  And it isn’t that I want to sound like those writers; or use their turns of phrase. I want to pick up the tenor and rhythm of it. I want to sound like a contemporary of Katharine Hepburn, not like Kristen Wigg or Martin Short doing Katharine Hepburn, you know? And it’s way too easy to fall into the latter.

Which writers do you admire enough to emulate?  And do you succeed? Or do you sound derivative?

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Measure Twice, Cut Once

Posted on January 5, 2012 by arwenbicknell

Someone asked me the other day how I manage to do all the stuff I have to and squeeze in any of the stuff I want to.  Well, it helps when work is slow.  And it helps when it’s winter, because yardwork drops to almost zero.

But more than anything, it helps to plan. I’m a strategizer and a list maker. I might change direction as new things arise midstream or I remember something else that needs doing, but I have a pretty good picture in my head of how my time and energy will be spent before I make my first move.

We’ll start with this: I have at least two hours a day where I commute. During that time, I map things out — the errands I have to run, the most efficient way to move from Task A to Task B, and so on.  Lately, I’ve been writing chapters in my head during my commute.  That means I have an hour or more to fiddle with the characters, the plot, the language.  By the time I get where I’m going, I can pretty much bang out the actual writing-it-down part pretty quickly.

I like to know where I’m going.  I don’t mind going offroad occasionally and in many cases I’m actually a big fan of getting lost and having an adventure and finding something new. But I prefer to do it with a full tank of gas and no external deadlines. In writing, that means I give myself space to wander, but only within certain enclosures.  “I know I want Chapter 12 to begin with this action and end with that plot point. The route I take is up for grabs. Ready, go.”

But I write long, y’all.  Even if I’m on point, I’m twice as wordy as I need to be. So for me, it’s much better to think and think and think before I type a single word.  I can go down all the rabbit holes and see which ones will take me somewhere useful. I can try on personalities and dialects without having to revisit them (until the editing phase, anyway.) If I stumble over something I really, really want to keep and use, I scribble a reminder on a post-it I keep in my change tray for that very reason — or, if traffic isn’t moving, I’ll put it in a memo on my phone. That makes it easier to cut-paste, yo.

What is your writing process?

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