Odd sentence edit

I wrote this sentence and it felt wrong for what I meant:

She stayed, but her reply was reluctant. 

What I meant was that -she stayed-.  She was reluctant, but still she stayed.  I know it's a little odd, but for xome reason, I felt the above made it sound like the reluctant reply was the most important thing, but in my head, what was important was that while she didn't really want to, she stayed.

Minor point, but it just felt wrong, and I realized it was because "but" makes these both independent clauses (each could be a sentence in its own right), and thus of equal syntactic "weight." One is not more important than another; neither is the primary thought.

But in my head, the important thing was... she stayed. And so I kind of let myself feel how that should be worded-- let instinct and sound-sense take over, and changed it to this:

She stayed, though her reply was reluctant. 

 So much of this, lol, is instinctual.  And when I stopped and analyzed why, I realized that "but" and "though" mean the same thing (presenting a contrast of some sort to the first clause), but "but" makes the second an independent (equal) clause, while "though" reduces it to a dependent (lesser) clause.  And that means the second is of lesser syntactic weight, so the reader will subconsciously understand it to be of lesser importance, and the "she stayed" is the important thing.


Now the question becomes, why do I put the main action/clause first in the sentence? When would I put the "though" first?"
Though her reply was reluctant, she stayed.

Hmm. Usually I think when "though" comes first, I say "although." (I don't know why. Sounds better.)

I think probably I'd put the dependent clause first when it sounded better (like if the rhythm was better when mixed with the adjacent sentences).  That is, I don't feel a great deal of difference in the change in sentence order, nothing like the change from "but" to "though."

I know, I know. Picky. But nuance matters in sentences. Readers can pick up consciously or subconsciously such subtle changes in meaning. How important is this to you as a writer? Is that sort of pinpoint meaning accuracy something you spend time on? And have you any examples of that sort of subtle shift in meaning I can borrow for a workshop I'm doing on sentences? :)

Alicia

Exploiting Orphans

Jenny and I got into a discussion once about how so many historical novels use "helping orphans" as a shorthand technique to supposedly make a jerky hero sympathetic. I always had a mental image of rakish looking hunks lining up outside an orphanage door,  checkbooks in hand. Anyway, I don't think that works!  I think that readers sympathize with interesting character confronted with interesting conflicts.  That is, "doing nice things to poor benighted orphans" isn't necessarily going to make him sympathetic. (And why is sympathy the reaction we want anyway? I do think "reader involvement" might more important, and allows for characters who are more or less than sympathetic.)

What I think I’m discovering is that character development sort of depends on these particular circumstances (the opening situation and then the plot events) causing a change in his behavior. If your hero already supports a dozen orphans because he's just such a doggone good guy, then his taking care of this new orphan is not only effortless (he’s got the whole system set up already), but also, in a way, nothing special. He always does that. All you’ll end up doing is showing that he’s a wonderful, charitable guy—and always has been.

Consider what would happen if he has no history of supporting orphans, and this kid shows up, claiming to be the orphan of the hero's former girlfriend. And... worst possible time... he's about to marry the beautiful and moralistic daughter of his wealthy boss, and she's righteous and jealous and boss is the Old Testament type. So the arrival of this orphan kid is a catastrophe, a conflict, not just the latest in a long line of orphans Hero has helped, but a problem he doesn’t know how to solve, but has to solve anyway. In other words, dealing with this orphan makes him grow, in compassion or empathy or generosity—doesn’t just display those virtues for all to see.

And if he’s embarrassed and mad at himself for doing the right thing, If he’s not sure it’s the right thing, and if doing it gets him into trouble, all the better.

What do you think? Maybe I’m misreading the attitude of the reading public, but I think a bit of curmudgeonly spirit, when coupled with eventually good actions, really does increase the sympathy factor.

Talking Heroic Characters at RU

Today at Romance University, we're talking about a technique to give a character flaws without undermining their heroic nature. We're talking about it from the romance perspective, but this technique applies to any type of heroic character. Come visit!

Theresa

The fault, dear Brutus... personal issues manifest as writing issues

I did a guest blog at Denny's place, and Carlene asked if we ever manage to learn enough from our mistakes in drafting so that we don't keep making them in subsequent books. She identified as an example POV issues that might keep recurring in an author's first drafts. So I took this as an opportunity to go off on the dark confluence of deep psychological issues and writing issues:

I suspect there are two kinds of "opportunities for revision." The first we'll learn our way out of as we get more experienced. Like I've been working a lot on scene endings, and I think I've learned (forever maybe!) to end a scene on conflict and never (except at the end of the book, of course) on resolution, so that the story (and reader) are always propelled into the next scene.

But there are the other issues which are more intrinsically bound to who we are and what we are and what issues matter to us in life and art. And those, I think, we won't learn our way out of in our fiction until we learn our way out of them in life. We keep "making the same mistake" or encountering the same issue because we're subconsciously seeking to revisit it, to worry it, to debate it.

For example, I'm revising much of my backlist preparatory to offering it on Kindle and Smashwords. I'm editing a lot, partly because of course I want the stories to be the best they can be, but also because I want to make enough change that I can justify new copyrights. (Note to self, look up the rules on this.)

Anyway, here I am, confronted with the product of my 1992 self, you know? The one who felt helpless and overwhelmed (little kids, sudden career success, major decisions to make but no real power to make them with, all that young mother time trouble). And I realize that I have several incidents of heroine action where she acts impulsively and perhaps recklessly, for no real purpose.

Why? What does this say about ME? What issue would have had me-- the back-then me-- continually having a heroine who would behave without the sort of right-there immediate motivation that I would counsel other writers to show?

Well, I don't want to get too personal-- I'm still married to the same guy, still have the same kids, still even-- I am so boring-- teaching (again, actually, not still) at the same school, so I probably ought not to remind myself of all that stuff back then. But let me just say that back then, I never behaved heedlessly. I never did anything I thought maybe I'd regret later. I spent those years being really, really careful.

And it showed paradoxically in my creation of a few heroines who did behave recklessly, who acted spontaneously without regard for consequence, who jumped out of airplanes without a parachute (figuratively... these took place in like 1815 :). IOW, they could afford to be stupid when I couldn't.

This was an issue in my life that came out in my writing. And I wasn't going to resolve it in my writing without resolving it in my life in one way or another.

So here it is, jeez, 20 years later, and I've given up that need to control, or at least that dire suspicion that if I said the wrong word or opened the wrong door, terrible things would happen and It Would All Be My Fault and I Can't Let That Happen.

I also-- age does this to women, thank goodness-- gave up on any real aspiration to be so adorably cute and unexpected like a kitten and decided to be a grown-up at some point.

Anyway, for whatever reason, that issue seems to have mostly resolved in my life, and I can look at my earlier book and see not a heroine who is insufficiently adorable (so that I must up the madcap-heiress ratio, which is what I'd have done back then), but rather insufficiently motivated to act and thus I must give her a good reason to do that madcap-heiress cute thing. (That is, I'm keeping the cute action, just giving her more reason to commit it.)  Here's how I did it.

1992 heroine, too stupid to live, too adorable to resist, is with hero in enemy territory, at the market fair of a French coastal town, across the Channel from Dorset (where he lives).  They are trying to get past the big contingent of French soldiers who are patrolling the docks to slip onto the smuggling sloop which by arrangement is going to sneak them out of France and back home.  Heroine espies Cute Plot Trick (a hot air balloon) and takes off in that direction and adorably madcappedly ends up in the air over the Channel with hero. (Their passage is in contravention, btw, of the whole prevailing winds issue, but that I dealt with mainly by having the hero marvel that, given the usual prevailing winds, the gods had favored them and sent northerly winds.)

This gives the hero a chance to Sternly Chastise Her and her a chance to be Suitably Adorably "sulky" (I swear, I'm going to do a Control-F and find every "sulk" in there and excise it, and "pout" beside… really, there's a limit to how adorable a non-kitten should be). But it doesn't make much sense, because they're in great danger, she's not actually that stupid, and the sloop they'd arranged is captained by his very own brother, of whom they're both pretty fond, and I don't think they'd put him in graver danger if they could help it.  Here's how I resolved it—I gave her a reason to do what she does, a reason beyond "I am so cute I can get away with being an idiot! In fact, the bigger idiot I am, the more proof it is that I'm adorable!"  Once I'd identified the 'need,' (that is, for more immediate external motivation), I had the answer just like that:

Michael (hero) is cognizant above all that his duty is to protect this princess he's bringing to England to marry a prince and cement an alliance. (It's a Lancelot-Guinevere story, natch.) And he knows his bro and knows that John, ever resourceful, tends to find a way out of bad situations. So he's more trusting than Tatiana (heroine) that they just have to get over there to the sloop and all will be well. Tatiana is, in her adorable way, less trusting of fate and less aware of how John has always managed to squirm out of every dilemma ever. So… here's the big change. They get close to the sloop and the military commander isn't just hassling John. He's about to ARREST John now. And so Tatiana runs off to steal the balloon (set up as an attraction for the fair—okay, dumb, but it's not HER dumbness at least ) to act as a diversion so that the military is drawn away from the sloop.  Might not be Wellingtonesque in its strategic brilliance, but hey, effective—she gets on the balloon, Michael, cursing, follows her to try and get her off, she gets it to ascend in order to have everyone down there (including military people) turn to gaze up at the balloon.  John takes advantage of the distraction to heave the military commander into the harbor, and he raises anchor and scoots out into the Channel.

There! Her adorable action is now to some purpose! 

And this actually solves another issue, a coincidence (groan) I'd forgotten about.  This town actually is directly across the Channel from his own estate. This isn't the coincidence part.  He and John have arranged to meet here because as boys (before the war) they used to sail down here to pick up chicks, or whatever boys did back then (they probably still picked up chicks, or tried to), and know it well.  The coincidence is that the balloon is going to end up crashing into his own land 32 miles north, direct hit, no action needed. Well, now, duh, I have John escaping from custody and sailing out into the Channel, and above are Michael and Tatiana. So John could point the sloop in the right direction, kind of like an arrow, and Michael can follow that and figure out a bit how to maneuver the craft (he's an experienced sailor, so understands winds). And with John's example below, he doesn't just happen onto his own land, but aims for it because he knows he can land in an open field there and not on the brow of a cliff.

So much more purposeful and directed, but without that terrible fear and insecurity I had  when I first wrote it!

I really don't think I could have resolved that so quickly  back then. Oh, maybe I could have done it deliberately, like if the editor pointed it out and suggested how to fix it. But I really don't know if I would have identified it as an issue. And I certainly wouldn't effortlessly-- as I just did-- have come up with the right solution, or at least a workable one. I guess I'm saying I had to grow up. :)

So... armchair diagnosis here, or at least armchair speculation. If I were having POV issues that I couldn't learn my way out of, well, I probably wouldn't know what the problem is. But as an outsider, and if YOU were having that recurrent issue, I might ask if there was some identity issue going on-- POV is -usually- about identity. For example, and we're just using this and "you" as examples, okay? I'm not actually trying to delve into your personality . Do you think maybe you have a bit of trouble "escaping the surly bounds of self," maybe, and "becoming" someone else? (Due to, perhaps, too much encroachment by family, or too little regard earlier in life for your own feelings so now you are more careful to assert "what is me and what I value".) This could result in shallow POV, the inability to get too deep into a character.

Or is a recurrent POV issue more a problem with too quick identification with others, too much empathy almost? That can lead to headhopping, maybe, because everyone's opinion seems equally important in this scene.

Just a thought. This isn't therapy, but it might be interesting to look at the issues that keep arising in our stories and speculate about what IN US might cause them. That is... the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our plotting, but in ourselves. :)

What do you think?

Alicia

Um and Uh

This article discusses "disfluencies and discourse particles" (aka "uh and um") and posits the interesting notion that no one mentioned them as a problem until phonographs were invented and could record speech for playback later. That is, in "real time" we generally don't notice the little space-fillers that give the speaker a bit of a pause.

They mention the doubtlessly invaluable organization Toastmasters "fining" their speech-making members a nickel for each um. That actually solved a bit of a mystery for me. Hands-down, the greatest lecturer I've ever heard (and I went to a university with scads of great lecturers) was the writing seminar leader Robert McKee, who combines a hipster's insouciance with a cinephile's obsessive command of his material and a storyteller's sense of suspense. I've been to a couple of his all-weekend seminars, and really, he's so good that IN HOLLYWOOD, all these petulant Colin Farrell lookalikes and dead-eyed zombie gorgeous people TURN OFF THEIR CELL PHONES AT HIS COMMAND, then sit there in a college classroom for 20 hours or so listening to him and assiduously taking notes and then, at the end of the weekend, rise spontaneously to give him standing ovations. This guy really is great, and I say this as someone who has given many, many writing workshops myself. I wanna be him when I grow up, only I think we're both running out of time.

Anyway, I was talking to another writer after we saw McKee in another venue (at another organization's conference). He was typically awesome, mingling casual anecdotes about his golf buddy Paul Newman ("Yes, ladies, he really was what the rest of us guys call 'unfairly handsome'") with tossed-off brilliant analysis of scene design (one I always use now: "The end moment in a turning point scene should reflect the type of story it is, so the first scene in a romantic comedy should have a romantic comic ending event"-- sounds simple? Well, try it if you've ever been told that your romantic comedy just doesn't feel like a romantic comedy, try making sure that the very last bit of the first scene is romantic and comic).  So when I marvelled at the insightfulness, this writer said bitterly, and, to my mind, obscurely and oddly, "Can we say 'um' and 'uh'? I wish I had a nickel for every time he said one of those!" Later she told me she'd been president of her local Toastmasters chapter. Anyway, this article mentions that Toastmasters used to fine members -- you got it-- a nickel for every "disfluency".  (Way to miss the point, huh? :)

Anyway, linguist John McWhorter points out that these show up in most every language, and the  "tone" determines whether "un-uh" and "uh-huh" are negatives or positives. And they're mostly vocalisms (though there are some equivalents in written language, n'est-ce pas?).  And they are actually more "fluencies" (easing discourse) than "dis"fluencies. But interesting anyway, and if Robert McKee does it, that means it's cool. :)

Alicia

Groovy article about slang

Groovy article about why "cool" is always cool, and groovy isn't.
A

Flotsam and jetsam

Here's a newsletter about words, the origin of them, I mean.  I'm enjoying the current issue, which explains how "flotsam and jetsam" are actually legal terms for material lost off cargo ships, and there are two other categories, and they indicate whether you can legally scavenge them, which would be useful, no?

  INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS

This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .

Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ .

None of this is a moral issue....

Been accosted the other day by a couple questioners who made me think about morality and writing. That is, I don't think most writing issues are moral issues.  It's not a moral failing, goodness knows, to use adverbs, or not to use adverbs.  You don't need my permission or a saint's benediction to use omniscient POV, and headhopping is not a "sin". 

None of this is a moral issue.  How you choose to write your story is personal and practical, but not moral, as long as (here I get moralistic :) you do your best and never forget the reader.

That said, just about anything can be done well or done badly. I am continually perplexed by the notion so many writers have that someone else doing something well gives them permission to do it badly.  You know: Tolstoy headhops! Why can't I?  (Well, maybe, just maybe, Tolstoy does it better? Just a thought.)

All that counts is results. If you do headhopping in a way that adds to the quality of the story, zoom! There goes my bias against headhopping!  But if, as most writers find, headhopping detracts from the quality of the story, then all you've done is give me more reason to mutter darkly about how dangerous such weapons are in unskilled hands. (You seriously don't want me muttering darkly. Maria Callas, I ain't.)

We are both of us analytical, and we've seen about everything in submissions and contest entries. We've seen all sorts of writing choices done well, and done badly,  We try to warn off writers from the choices that tend to be done poorly, and/or suggest ways that some writers have done this exact thing well, or that we think might work around the icebergs and sandbars. But always, always, the trick here is to do something well, and you know what? The reader is the one that gets to judge that. Not you. Not me. Not Tolstoy.

But just remember this: That Tolstoy could do (whatever) well doesn't grant you absolution to do it badly. Serve the story, not some weird writing commandment or mutiny.  This truly isn't about you. I am not your reader, not your editor, not, heaven forfend, your boss. Do what you want. But never forget the whole purpose of this enterprise is to give the reader a good experience. Ignoring that commandment is the only sin we've got in this free-wheeling art of ours.
Alicia

Good Article About Writing Productivity

This is a good article that looks more closely at the old rule of thumb that we must write ten thousand hours before we achieve anything approaching mastery. Worth a read.

Theresa