Laughter, The Best Therapy

Thanks to everyone who played along with our "respond to the nasty rejection" game. I think my friend enjoyed it, and I know I sure did. For the record, she did not respond to the nasty rejection because she knows better and, really, why bother? But here were the comments that brightened her day the most.

So, the winner of "Most Direct and Effective Comeback" goes to Ian, for the elegant (*cough*) and simple response:

Dear Editor,

Suck the shit out of my hole.

Love,

The Author


The winner of "Best Nasty Comeback Disguised as Sweet Solicitude" goes to Wen for:

Dear Editor,
I am so sorry to hear of your recent bout of brain-rash. I know this is annecdotal, but I have heard a good dose of e- publishing works as a cure.
I do hope your condition is neither fatal nor chronic.
All the best,
Experienced Author.
P.S. Can you recommend a healthy editor?


And the overall winner, for making us giggle every time we read it, goes to B.E. Sanderson for,

Dear Editor,

Thank you for providing me with an idea for the first person to die in my next novel.

Thanks to everyone who played our little game. I wish we could offer prizes for this one, but good karma and the satisfaction of knowing you helped a fellow author cope with a difficult moment will have to suffice.

Theresa

Word by word

I'm looking for examples of how you have changed or improved a scene with just a word or two. Reinforced a theme, made a real conclusion, redirected attention, hid a clue, something.

This comes up because a critiquer had set up a theme of "lady"-- that is, that in this time and place, there were strict rules of what constituted ladylike behavior. And I was thinking that maybe this theme could be subtly reinforced just by using the word "lady" in the last paragraph, so that "A good girl would never do that" might be revised to "a lady would never do that."

Wes, I remember in our class you were changing a line like "I never thought it would be this way" to "I never thought it would end this way," expressing more finality (he's about to die).

Any other examples of where you've changed a simple word or phrase and it made a big difference?

Alicia

Empathy and characterization..

A friend said to me today that she thought you needed empathy to be a good fiction-writer, because you need to get into your characters and feel what they feel, and if you're, say, a narcissist or very analytical and low on empathy, you probably can't feel for them

Of course, being a good fuzzy liberal, I agree, but I want to toss that out for consideration. What do you all think? Do you have to be able to "feel with your characters" to create good characters? 

Are there alternatives?  Like if you are basing a character on yourself or someone else, maybe you don't need empathy so much as an ability to deeply observe?

Also, there are really analytical people who can, I think, create characters without feeling them. I think Flaubert (Madame Bovary) might be one, not sure.  They're more like psychologists in that way. They analyze the situation and this character and what the traits might cause to happen, and how that might affect how the character behaves.

So... your thoughts?  Do we need empathy to create characters?  Or can we do that well if we're instead quite analytical? Is it likely that any of us are both?
Alicia

Ebil. Hiss.

I have just read an appalling note from an editor to an author. Appalling? Shockingly nasty, dripping with sarcasm, and loaded with vicious digs at the author. I've seen a lot of editor notes over the years, and written more than I can count, and I've never seen anything like that.

I can't reproduce it here because that would expose my author friend, and she doesn't deserve that even if the editor does. In fact, because of the highly personal nature of this note and it's eye-poppingly evil contents, I don't think we can reproduce even part of it here. To sum up and broadly paraphrase this steaming pile of satan's shit, it accused the author of unwillingness to work (not true -- this is a multi-published best-selling author with a solid reputation as a good worker), of being too arrogant to work with (laughably wrong, and even the editor indicates her impression is based on past publications rather than on, you know, actual arrogant behavior), and even  hints at the author's published works being out of fashion or outdated (even though her most recent book topped the charts).

So here's what I want you to do. Imagine you're a successful author with a long publication history and a good reputation. Imagine that you decided to write something new, something a bit outside your genre, and that you reached out to a new editor to discuss the project. Imagine that this editor basically flamed you in response. And now, you get to flame right back. Write a short anti-rejection note in the comments, and we'll front-page the best of them. Do it anonymously if you fear the consequences. But still do it, because my friend could use a little companionship and sympathy even if she can't go entirely public with this.

Defend my friend. Bonus points for making her laugh about it.

Theresa

Dialect

I'm not a fan of non-standard spelling to convey dialect (that's SO 19th Century). It's confusing, and often discriminatory (why spell certain speakers' words phonetically and not others, when English spelling is not phonetic?).

But how then do we convey when a speaker or a POV character have a distinctive way of speaking? Let's say she's Irish, or from Chicago, or he's a 2nd Century Roman warrior?

First, I think, we have to do our research. We have to get enough experience with the rhythm of this speaking culture's sentences and the lingo to convey it accurately. But then, we should cut back (usually). Even without spelling irregularities, "authentic" dialect can put off readers. After all, that Roman warrior spoke Latin. We're already "translating" his speech into English, so we want to give a flavor without choking the reader.

I've been thinking of what constitutes a flavor. First, the rhythm of the sentences can give a flavor of the speaker's culture. There's an old book called English as We Speak It in Ireland which gives examples of sentences only an Irishperson would say:
I went to town yesterday in all of the rain, and if I didn't get a wetting, there's no cottoner in Cork. (That is, he got wet.)
An illigent song he sang, I'll go bail.

The author (PW Joyce) remarks that Irish English uses negation (if I didn't), stock phrases (I'll go bail), and reverse order (putting the object first -- An illigent song he sang) for emphasis. This is not a dialect that honors Struck and White's edict to "use no unnecessary words," or rather, the Irish don't think there are unnecessary words!

Read in the vernacular to pick up the sentence rhythm.  Watch films and TV shows =made= (not just set) in the culture. For historical settings, read books written then (you might have to read in translation, of course) or plays that would have been performed then.

(The British filmmakers, you know, are famous for making everyone else, especially Romans, sound English. Not just speak English, but sound it. All the rich Romans sound like Lord Olivier, and all the poor ones sound Cockney, like the Artful Dodger.)

But also, there are certain words or types of words that can be used without confusing the reader or making the character opaque. Here are some I've thought of, but please add!

Variations of "you". This, far more than "I", for some reason, marks a dialect quite precisely. Any linguist who hears "youse" knows the speaker is from the Great Lakes-Midwest (probably Chicago). "You-uns" is Pennsylvanian.
Ye
Thou
You all
Y'all
Ya

What others have you heard? When would you use them? What about our Roman warrior, who doesn't speak English, but must be presented as speaking English?

Curses and other angry expletives: Even if the reader doesn't know what the word means, the placement and the context will make it clear that "glupak!" is a curse word.  Spelling can distinguish dialects when you're dealing with English speakers:
Shee-it!
Shite!

Wonder words: These are words that seem to erupt spontaneously, and because they're spontaneous, they're going to give a sense of the character's background. You can do this is the actual language if the character is foreign. Examples:
Blimey!
Mon Dieu!
Wow!

Other thoughts?

Alicia

Administrative Note

I'm extending the sign-up deadline for the Power Proposals workshop until Tuesday, mainly because I foolishly forgot to send around notices to the usual e-mail loops, and so people aren't getting word about it in a timely fashion. I blame the construction at my house, which turned my brain to cheese soup for a good part of April and May. Sorry! Mea culpa! In any case, the class isn't full. In fact, it looks as though it will be quite an intimate group, which is great if you want a lot of feedback on your proposal. As it stands, I'll have ample time to look at everyone's pages and offer comments after we go through the examples and exercises. So if you want to sign up but didn't get word until late, just know that it's not too late. You can still get in.

It looks like we might take off for at least two months and not do any workshops this summer. We will each be busy with personal projects and other commitments, so a hiatus is in order. The blog won't close, though. Just the workshops, and just for the summer.

Theresa

Pronoun confusion again

From an actual published article in a major magazine:
"After clashing with S over his partisan journalistic agenda, G quit months later."

Okay, tell me WHOSE partisan agenda? S's or G's?

In fact, when the readers read quickly, they might get whatever meaning makes sense to them, whatever fits the pre-existing opinion created by the previous paragraphs, maybe. For example, I assumed that G quit, so probably S had the agenda. But maybe his boss S had rebuked G for G's agenda, and G quit in order to avoid being fired. That's just as plausible.

The reader is confused, and it's the writer's fault. When there are two people in the sentence who could be the pronoun, the writer simply has to find a way to make clear which. You have to be ruthless to root these out. They're perfectly grammatical sentences that make sense on the surface. But because there are two alternate interpretations, and both make sense, the readers will have to work to figure out which you mean.

Yes, the reader might occasionally benefit from working to understand. But make that because the concept or process of thought is complex, not because your writing is bad. Save the sentence ambiguity for ambiguous thoughts.

Alicia

From the Bad Advice Files

Someone sent me a link to a blog post about hyphenated compound adjectives in which the rules were completely mangled because the author didn't distinguish between adjectives and adverbs. (I'm not going to link to that original post because my purpose is not to embarrass or harass that author, but to state the correct rule.) This is one of those things that causes a crapton of confusion, so I thought it would make sense to review the rule. (Related posts: how to identify compound adjectives, squinting modifiers)

First, you have to know the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

Adjectives modify nouns in a way that describes an attribute of the noun.

Adverbs modify adjectives, verbs, or other adverbs in a way that describes a relation or degree of time, degree, manner, and similar qualities.

So:

inflated balloon
(inflated is an attribute of the noun balloon, so inflated is an adjective -- technically, a past participle functioning as an adjective)

partially inflated balloon
(partially is a degree of inflated, so partially is an adverb modifying an adjective)

If you were to hyphenate that,
partially-inflated balloon,
you would be wrong.

This is considered an "exception" to the rule regarding hyphenation of compound adjectives, but that's something of a misnomer. This could never be a compound adjective because it's half-adjective, half-adverb. A similar "exception" involves whether to hyphenate a preposition used as an adverb, such as:

Please check out at the check-out counter.

The first "out" is an adverb modifying the verb "check." The second "out" is part of a compound adjective modifying "counter."

One place where the rule is in flux regards the use of comparative or superlative compounds. The old rule is that you never hyphenate a comparative or superlative adverb modifying an adjective. This is probably easiest to see if we stick to good/well, better, best as our example because that will ignore the -ly comparatives and superlatives.

better built car
best dressed woman
well read man
a good, simple dinner (good is an adjective modifying a noun)
a well prepared dinner (well is an adverb modifying an adjective)
the best cooked dinner (best is a superlative modifying an adjectival past participle)

That's the old rule. Lately, we've seen people hyphenating these usages, but to my eye, it looks strange. Maybe this is because my eye knows the difference between adjectives and adverbs, and my eye knows that you don't hyphenate an adverb to an adjective, but whatever. Rules change.

What are compound adjectives? When two adjectives operate together as a unit to modify a noun. For example,

long-term solution

Solution is the noun. Long and term operate together to create a single unit of meaning. This isn't an arbitrary rule because it can have an impact on meaning. Compare:

The large appliance factory is closing.
The large-appliance factory is closing.

In the first, an appliance factory which is large is closing.
In the second, a factory which makes large appliances is closing.

Okay, so, that probably doesn't un-confuse anybody. As I said, this is not an easy concept to grasp, and even seasoned copy editors sometimes quibble over particulars, especially in the case of squinting modifiers (see link at the top of this post). But I thought it was worth at least trying to un-confuse things. :)

Theresa

Punctuation confrontation

No comment: The Case—Please Hear Me Out—Against the Em Dash