I just published my short story “A King in Exile” to Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Scribd, and Barnes & Noble. You can buy it for 99c or the local equivalent, or sign up for my newsletter and get it for free.

What follows is my afterword to the story, which is included in the e-book, directly following the story proper. One paragraph has been deleted to avoid spoilers. I hate spoilers.

Some time later, Algis Budrys would offer some advice he’d picked up watching the behavior of writers at workshops. He said to keep your story idea close to your chest unless you know the person you’re talking to won’t try to critique it. An idea can always be shot full of holes, he said. Once it’s written, peer critiques can be helpful. Until then, you risk letting someone convince you to kill what could have been a perfectly good story.

But I hadn’t yet heard that excellent advice, and so I took my friend’s criticism to heart and decided, with much regret, that however much I loved my idea, I didn’t have a viable story after all. I locked it away in the back of my mind for years.

My portrayal of Rex owes a lot to Predatory Dinosaurs of the World: A Complete Illustrated Guide by Gregory S. Paul, which was always at the top of a tall stack of reference books teetering near my desk as I wrote. I wanted my dinosaur character to live and breathe, unlike the stuffy, stodgy Victorian sculptures displayed on the grounds of the Crystal Palace that influenced popular and scientific thinking about dinosaurs for generations. I wanted to bring a living creature of the steamy, lush cretaceous to live in a time and place impossibly foreign to his kind, then watch what happened next.

What happened was a love story. The more I wrote, the more the story filled up and spilled over with love—love expressed and unexpressed, love that conquered millennia and love that prevailed over death itself. The love these characters bore one another wove in and out of their experiences and adventures together to become the heart and soul of “A King in Exile.”

“Then” is another over-used word that weakens sentences, especially in “and then” and “but then” combinations. Of 15 “then” uses in the first chapter, you combined it with “and” or “but” 13 times. That was 13 times too many.

Another quick search revealed a dozen instances of “began to,” and several each of “tried to,” “started to,” and “continued to.” These kinds of filler words weaken writing and distance readers from a direct sensory experience of what they're reading. When you want to show a character doing or saying something, just have them do it. Not “He began to wave the gun around,” but “He waved the gun around.” Involve your readers by showing them what’s actually happening in the story right now.

I know what I have to say here probably means little to a writer whose book sits high on the sales rankings and sports lots of enthusiastic 4- and 5-star reviews alongside those bemoaning the weakness of the writing and story. It’s obvious a lot of the people who bought your book don't care about those things, but how many potential readers never got past the first few pages? I think there’s a lot wrong with your level of writing skill besides the few things I pointed out here, but if you keep a learner’s mind you’ll improve as you do more of it. Oh, and I hope you find a better editor.

—Bridget McKenna
The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers
Pre-made bookcovers by Zone 1 Design

Dont miss:
Why I Didn't Keep Reading, Part 1

Dear Writer Who Shall be Anonymous,

Why, oh why couldn’t I get past the third page of your book? Your cover was frankly awesome. The price—on a special deal from Amazon—was quite reasonable. Your sell copy was engaging and well-written; I had no choice but to click the cover image and start reading, fully expecting to buy the book and its sequel within the next few minutes.

Some thought had gone into the interior design, a fact that tends to increase my confidence in a book. There were some odd choices, like scene-break graphics crowded right up against the text at top and bottom, but I was willing to chalk them up to the vagaries of the previewing tool. And as annoying as they are, formatting errors don’t necessarily mean anything about writing or storytelling. So I started to read.

The first verb in the first line was “was.” The main character “was” something or other. Points off, but I’ve read some good books whose authors didn’t start with an action verb, so I overlooked this particular peeve and went on.

In the second line, you told me what the viewpoint character was feeling. You went on to describe a setting that would have justified that emotion, so you could have let me deduce the character’s feelings from your description of the setting from her viewpoint, or by showing me her reaction to it. Instead, you told me. My friend, that was a rookie mistake that a good editor would have marked. Yours apparently did not. In the next sentence you did it again. The snowball had begun its downhill roll.

In the third paragraph you served up a weak verb/adverb combo where a good verb standing alone would have done a far better job for your narrative, only you didn’t take the time to find and use one. You did it again in the fourth paragraph and in the fifth. At this point I knew I wasn’t buying your book for any price. However good the story might be, my experience of it would have been ruined by constantly bumping up against writing too weak to carry it.

Still, curiosity kept me reading as you mashed up several years of the protagonist’s backstory into one indigestible six-paragraph narrative lump rather than letting me discover it over time, revealed as needed in narrative or dialogue as you moved the story forward. Even curiosity couldn’t get me past that. Amazon chose your book for one of their imprints, so clearly they had confidence in it, but it was confidence I no longer shared.

I can't say I'll never pick up another of your books. I closed that one so fast I don't remember its title or your name, so I very well might read another sample of yours someday, but unless your writing improves a great deal, I probably won't get any further than I did this time.

It's not personal, but my reading time is limited and life's way too short to wince my way through a book I'm not enjoying at any price, including free. If you want my money, my time, and my attention, you're going to have to bring a better game.

Sincerely,
Bridget McKenna
The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers
Pre-made bookcovers by Zone 1 Design

Don't miss:
Why I Didn't Keep Reading, Part 2

UPDATE: The revised and enlarged version of The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers is now available at amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores for US$4.99 or the local equivalent.

You don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle books—you can read ’em on your computer, tablet, or phone. Meanwhile, help yourself to a free Self-Editing Quick Reference, in .doc or .PDF.

Shout-out to the Science Fiction Writers' Workshop of the University of Kansas James Gunn Center for the study of Science Fiction. Thanks for linking to the Self-Editing for Everyone series.


Now back to our regularly-scheduled program.

Point of View
Like the director of a film, an author uses viewpoint to direct the reader’s attention. Viewpoint is how the reader experiences your story through the senses and thoughts of another person. When done well, it’s pretty nearly invisible.

It’s not within the scope of this article to discuss the myriad aspects of viewpoint in detail, but rather to discuss the ways in which you can recognize and fix those places where your handling of Point of View (POV) may have gone off the tracks.

Note:
My advice here is aimed at writers who like to write from a particular point of view and stay there until they switch to another, usually at a scene or chapter break. I realize that there are writers who like to switch from one viewpoint to another all through a scene or chapter, but most writing advice, including mine, recommends otherwise.

I’m of the school of writing that prefers to stay in one point of view until the reader needs information or insights that must come from another, then make the transition only at a clear break in the narrative, such as the end of a chapter. In my opinion this enables the reader to more closely identify with each character, and to know more of his goals and inner tensions. Each point of view also drives the narrative voice, and switching from one to another within a scene, in my opinion, dilutes the impact of that voice. 

A View of the Universe
Every fictional viewpoint is also a worldview. That’s one reason it’s wise, in my opinion, to remain in one character’s POV for the length of a chapter or at least a scene that’s clearly marked with a visible scene break from the next. This allows the reader to feel anchored in that character’s story, and avoids confusion between viewpoints.

Here’s an exchange which switches POV between one paragraph and the next.

Cody had his doubts about Mina’s intentions. “Are you sure? You’re not going to change your mind later?”

“Of course I’m not, dummy.” Mina said. She worried about that boy. Was he going to cause trouble?

“Just stay where I can see you,” Cody told her. He couldn’t risk letting her out of his sight.

“Aye-aye, Cap’n. I’ll go first.” There was a passageway up ahead where she was pretty sure she could lose him.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like a spectator at a tennis match. I’m not at all sure whose story I’m in. If the author remained in one viewpoint until the other was needed, I’d be able to identify more closely with the worldview of one character. And the author would be able to conceal the thoughts and motives of the non-viewpoint character a lot more effectively, because if Mina intends to ditch Cody and the author doesn’t reveal that while in her POV, the reader is going to feel more than a bit cheated. If the author does reveal it, as above, it cheats the reader of a great deal of suspense.

While you’re writing in a particular character’s POV, the reader experiences everything the character does, and nothing the character does not. When you’re not in a character’s POV, you can observe that character’s actions and hear his speech, but have no idea what he’s thinking, seeing, hearing, or feeling.

“What can you tell me about Esparza,” I asked Frank.

“Esparza?” he said, puzzled. “I don’t know anyone named Esparza.”

Since we’re not in Frank’s POV in the example above, the reader can’t know if Frank is puzzled. Fortunately, the writer has made puzzlement clear in Frank's speech, making the blatant mind-read unnecessary.

Viewpoint and Direct Experience
While you’re in a particular character’s POV, the character—and by extension the reader—can’t know what any other character sees, hears, or feels.  Be consistent in this.  If the POV character doesn't experience something, the reader doesn't either. If the character doesn’t have knowledge yet, the reader can’t have that knowledge.

When in a character’s viewpoint, the writer can conceal what the character experiences only in limited ways. Keeping secrets in a third-person point of view is usually considered to be deceiving the reader, but it’s possible to conceal things in a first-person point of view by not reporting every detail when it happens and allowing the unreported detail to come out later.

I knew a lot more when I hung up the phone than I had before I called.
-
The bartender told me what I needed to know. I left a generous tip.

As I've repeated often throughout this self-editing series, let direct sensory experience be your guide. Let your reader directly experience what your POV character does. Don’t tell them. And let them experience what the character is experiencing, not what they’re trying or failing to experience.

Seeing from Outside
Sometimes you may begin a story from no-one’s point of view, rather like an establishing shot in a film. Fairly quickly, however, you’ll focus in on your point-of-view character and stay there. There are other times you might find stylistic reasons to use this approach, and during those times you’re in an unknown narrator’s point of view, you’re seeing your POV character from the outside. If this happens while a character is being introduced, before you reveal their name, you may even use terms like “the young man,” “the surgeon,” “the dark-haired woman.”

Now listen carefully: those are the only times you should view a POV character from the outside, or refer to her in terms that she would not use for herself, though someone else might. Once you know your hero’s name is Lance, for as long as you’re in Lance’s point of view, looking at the world from inside his head, do not refer to him as “the young man,” “the tall man,” “the magician,” or “the cowpoke.” Why? Because those kinds of tags are in an outside point of view, and when you step outside Lance to refer to him, you’re leaving his point of view for one that doesn’t actually exist, and you're throwing the reader out of the reading experience, which is something you very much do not want to do.

Keep your point of view consistent and logical. Your reward will be coherent narration and increased dramatic tension and reader immersion.

TL;DR
Anchor your reader in the story by getting inside one character’s head and staying there until you need information or insight from another character’s viewpoint.

Change viewpoint at clearly marked chapter-or-scene breaks to avoid reader confusion.

The reader can only experience what the viewpoint character does, and nothing the viewpoint character does not.

This 11th and penultimate chapter of Self-Editing for Everyone is inspired by and expands upon The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, available for the price of a 20-oz. latte from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores worldwide.

Homophones: Sounds Like…
Just three days ago, I was eagerly reading a new book—a winner of no fewer than three literary awards, originally published by one of the world’s largest publishing companies. The writing engaged me, and the author was doing a bang-up job with his story and characters. Before I got to the end of the first chapter, however, a band arrived on the scene. They unpacked and began playing their instruments, including a drum and a pair of clashing symbols.  “How appropriate,” I thought as I bookmarked an error that had gotten past its author, an acquiring editor, a copyeditor, a proofreader, and the author again correcting page proofs, “that my next article will be about homophones.”

Homophones are words that sound alike but have different meanings. Unlike ordinary misspellings and mis-typings, homophones will walk right past the watchful eye of your spellchecker without even slowing down to show ID. They require careful reading and re-reading to pin down and destroy. The fact that some survive the editorial process to appear in published works means they have escaped the notice of any number of people, including but not limited to the author, a copyeditor, and—amazingly enough—a proofreader. Never assume someone else will find them for you.

Some homophones, like there, their, and they’re, or to, too, and two, pane and pain, sail and sale, ad and add, and even its and it’s are easy to mis-type and easy to miss on a casual editing pass, especially of your own work. Your mind can know the difference, but that won’t stop your fingers from tripping you up and your eyeballs from letting it happen. Be vigilant.

Homophone errors can also result from the writer’s or editor’s confusion over meaning. There are worlds of difference between affect and effect, peak, peek, and pique, born and borne, or discreet and discrete, but you’d be surprised how often they’re used incorrectly by authors and how often they remain uncorrected by any number of people who are being paid to correct them.

But of course YOU know the difference between a miner and a minor, naval and a navel. You know your sachet from a sashay, rain from reign, a taper from a tapir, and a tenner from a tenor. You know whether you’re wreaking or reeking. You do, don’t you? It’s important to know more about the nuances of the language you’re writing in than your spellchecker does, because if the word you need is altar and you use alter, advanced word-processing technology won’t save you. What might is putting extra eyeballs on the job in the form of an eagle-eyed beta reader, a pass by a copyeditor, and a final independent proofing before publication. If you’re hoping for the skills of a traditional publishing house to correct your homophone errors, you should know that the vast majority of the ones I and readers like me have encountered have been in the pages of books from traditional publishers—from professionals whose day job it was to produce clean copy for the finished product. Virtually no book is free of errors, but you can take responsibility for ensuring yours comes as near that elusive (not illusive) goal as your efforts will allow.

If you’re at all fuzzy on the definition of any word you’re using, look it up and confirm you have the right one, lest your hero travel to Cypress, cash his extra passport under the mattress, pour over the secret documents, auger the coming of his foes, fight a dual with several combat-trained Unix, take to the heir dodging flack, land his plain on the wield, be bitten by tics, escape upriver in a skull rowed by experienced semen, and give in to the temptations of vise while awaiting his true love with baited breath.

Here’s a short list of the most common homophones not mentioned in the article above. 

There are hundreds of homophones in English. Take a few minutes to peruse the lists at www.homophone.com. Some are nearly as far-fetched as the adventure above, but many lay avoidable traps for the unwary writer.

Self-Editing for Everyone Part 10: Passive Voice is brought to you by the letter Z, the number 3, and The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au and all Amazon stores worldwide. Said a kind reviewer: “It's the best writing advice I've ever gotten for the price of a cup of coffee.” The revised and expanded edition is closer to the price of a venti latte, but still....

Passive Voice
If you’ve been at this writing lark any time at all, you’ve probably heard that something called “passive voice” is a no-no. That’s almost entirely true. Passive voice should be eliminated wherever possible. (No! The passive—it burns!) Or I should say: strive to keep your sentences active.

The first step for a writer hoping to understand and thereby eliminate the problem of passive voice from her writing is to understand the difference between active and passive sentences.

In an active sentence, the subject is the person (or place or thing) who performs the action of the sentence. If the subject performs the action on someone (or someplace or something), that becomes the object.

The manager handed Maury his ass. 

Manager is the subject, Maury (and his ass) are objects.

Paris displayed all her autumn colors along the banks of the Seine.

Paris is the subject. Paris acts on colors, which are the object.

The stone struck Alvin between the eyes.

The stone is the subject. It acts on Alvin, who is the object.

In a sentence in the passive voice, the subject and object may trade places.

Maury got his ass handed to him by the manager. 

Maury has become the subject, but he’s not acting; he’s being acted upon by the manager.

All of Paris’s autumn colors were displayed along the banks of the Seine.

The colors have become the subject, but they aren’t doing anything but being displayed. They’ve become passive.

Alvin was struck between the eyes by a stone.

Alvin has taken on subject duty here, but he has nothing to do in this sentence but stand there and get smacked around by the stone.

First rule of active sentences: subjects act.

Sometime a passive voice construction has no actor—the object of the sentence is mysteriously acted upon by no-one at all. 

Mistakes were made.

Explanations were called for.

The body was moved.

The result, as in the previous examples, is a weak, flabby sentence.

Remember this: someone always has to move the body, and passive voice leeches life from your writing.

USMC Ethics Professor Rebecca Johnson famously devised a way to teach her students how to recognize passive voice. If you can add “by zombies” and the sentence still makes sense, it’s passive. Try it!

Mistakes were made by zombies.

Explanations were called for by zombies.

The body was moved by zombies.

I find this a fun way to discover my own passive voice boo-boos. Product warning: you will find yourself shouting “…by zombies!” a lot while watching television. Or maybe it’s just me.

Passive voice also occurs when the writer doesn’t put a real subject—one capable of performing an action—into the sentence. 

There was movement in the bushes.

Note the dread “was.” “There” is not a subject. If you attempt to force it into acting like one, it teams up with “to be” to remove forward motion from your sentence.

Something moved in the bushes.

This is an improvement. “Something,” when it’s not a form of “the word that wasn’t there,” can add a sense of mystery and foreboding when used with intention. Another option would be to show what the POV character experienced, and imply with which sense or senses she perceived it. A rule for all writing at all times: take every opportunity to involve the reader’s senses.

Light flittered through the bushes.

A shadow moved in the bushes.

Leaves fluttered in the bushes.

The bushes rustled.

Corporate communicators are among the front runners in the passive voice sweepstakes.

It still needs to be decided what our growth markets will be for the next year.

We understand what’s being conveyed by your marketing message.

Changes must be made in the way we deliver content.

This kind of communication is vague and equivocal. It says “Things must be done!” and not “We must do this thing.” Whatever needs doing is then somehow assumed to be done by some magical means that don't involve anyone actually doing them. This may explain why the other common place to find passive voice is in political writing.

We need to decide…

We understand what you’re conveying…

We must make changes…

The vague sentences now have subjects that act.

Writers sometimes use passive voice in an attempt to make a sentence sound particularly high-flown:

Our intentions must be matched by our actions, or we will do nothing.

The active subject “we” has been pushed almost out of the sentence here. Who must do something? We must. But in a passive construction, doing doesn’t appear to be anyone’s responsibility. It will somehow just…happen.

We must match our intentions to our actions…

Making the sentence active has transformed it into a call to action.

Leonard was killed.

Who killed Leonard? Apparently no-one. Or zombies. My money’s on zombies.

If passive voice is one of your bad writing habits, you’ll be relieved to know that there are times when it actually works. Use it when you want to show that a character is not an actor in some aspect of his own life, and then in moderation for effect: 

Claire would understand, of course—Marcus was certain she would when all was said and done. There were circumstances, after all. Things happened. Mistakes were made.

If you’ve kept passive construction out of your narrative, the reader will understand that this is somehow different and pay closer attention to what you intend by it.

Are there times when it doesn’t matter who the actor is, or when the actor is so generalized that to use the active voice would be to disturb the intention of the turn of phrase? If there is, you’re bound to encounter it someday. But when you think you’ve found it, first try giving the action to a tangible subject and see if that doesn’t clarify your intention. If it doesn’t, give your sentence wholeheartedly to the zombies.

The Passive Voice BLOG is a passive voice I can totally get behind. If you're an indie author-publisher, indie curious, or just interested in the new world of publishing, you really, really must read it. I can't emphasize loudly enough how important this blog is as a resource and information clearing house for all things 21st century publishing.

This article is brought to you by The Little book of Self-Editing for Writers, available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores.

Misplaced Modifiers and Dangling Participles
There’s a reason many writers don’t show their first drafts to anyone but trusted friends--our first-draft errors can be downright embarrassing. And perhaps nothing is more capable of producing unintended giggles than a dangling modifier. Heck, even the name is giggle-worthy. So how and where do modifiers dangle?

Sometimes writers put adjectives and adverbs  in places where they inadvertently change the meaning of sentences, often with humorous results.

The rule is: put the modifier immediately before the word you want it to modify.

The shiny soldier’s buttons caught and reflected the candlelight.

This sentence introduces us to the shiny soldier, whereas the adjective “shiny” here is supposed to be modifying “buttons.”

The soldier’s shiny buttons caught and reflected the candlelight.

I nearly ran six miles this morning before breakfast.

...but something came up and you stayed home? The adverb “nearly” in this sentence is supposed to be modifying “six,” but appears to modify “ran” instead.

I ran nearly six miles this morning before breakfast.

When Participles Dangle 
“What the bleedin’ ’eck is a participle?” you might be asking. Let’s get that out of the way first. A participle is a verb doing the work of an adjective.

An adjective is a word that modifies a noun.

A fast horse.

Adjective “fast” modifying noun “horse.”

A participle is a form of a verb that ends in “-ing” and also modifies a noun.

A galloping horse.

Participle “galloping” (from verb “gallop”) modifying noun “horse.”

Participial Phrases for the Rest of Us
A phrase that contains a participle is called—not surprisingly—a participial phrase.

Glancing at her lover

Seeking the shelter of the covered bridge

Buttering a scone

Of course by themselves, those participial phrases aren’t sentences. Their place in a sentence is to modify the subject noun by saying what the subject noun is doing.

Glancing at her lover, Lavinia trod upon the dance instructor’s foot.

Seeking the shelter of the covered bridge, Paul dodged another falling frog.

Buttering a scone, Chris pondered the legality of shooting people who run their lawnmowers at 6 A.M.

If you’ve put a phrase containing a verb at the beginning or end of a sentence, that phrase should modify the nearest noun. When you put something in the way of a participial phrase so that it can’t reach the noun it’s meant to modify, we say it’s dangling. When participles dangle, they do strange things to sentences.

When used correctly, the first phrase modifies the noun in the second phrase, and one flows into the other with no loss of meaning.

Believing herself to be in danger, Melanie notified the police.

Knowing sparks were likely to fly, James decided to avoid the whole discussion.

But when used incorrectly, modifying phrases create unlikely results.

Fleeing down the darkened alley, Sandra’s handbag fell to the pavement.

Sandra’s handbag was fleeing down the alley.

Fleeing down the darkened alley, Sandra dropped her handbag.

Now the phrase modifies Sandra, as it should. Or you could ditch the participle entirely and use another sort of modifying phrase:

As Sandra fled down the darkened alley, her handbag fell to the pavement.
--
Having been bitten by a Chihuahua, Rollo’s trust in dogs was practically nonexistent.

A dog bit Rollo’s trust. Neat trick, that.

Having been bitten by a Chihuahua, Rollo felt an extreme distrust of dogs.

Now the phrase modifies Rollo, as is right and proper. Ditching the participle:

Ever since a Chihuahua had bitten him, Rollo had been suspicious of dogs.

Keep your modifying words and phrases with the words they modify, and no-one will ever be able to accuse you of illegal dangling.

TL;DR
Dangling modifiers don’t modify what their authors think they do.

To avoid unintentional hilarity, put your adjectives, adverbs, or participles immediately before the words you want them to modify.

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

The information you're about to read is based on my book, The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, which you can buy, if you wish, at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores on the planet. Now on to this week's article.

Dialogue Tags
Long, long ago, in another century, some bored or desperate soul wrote a book of dialogue tags that could be used in preference to “said.” That writer is lost to well-deserved obscurity, but the term “said-bookism” remains to describe the labored alternatives some writers resort to for tagging dialogue.

A few said-book sorts of tags are justly famous for their unlikeliness. Among them: 

Smile
“I really enjoyed the play,” Imelda smiled. ...as opposed to...
Imelda smiled. “I really enjoyed the play.”

Imelda can’t smile a speech. But she can say something, and she can smile, adding action to the speech.

Gape
“You can’t be serious,” Robert gaped.

Much like Imelda, Robert can’t gape his words. He can say them and then gape, but why should he? His incredulity is evident from his speech. To repeat it is to court Superfluous Redundancy.

Ejaculate
Yes, “an abrupt, exclamatory utterance” can be defined as an ejaculation, but do yourself a favor; don’t go there. Don’t even look at the price of tickets.

To Say or Not to Say
Of course on widely spaced occasions, fictional characters might remark, comment, shout, shriek, whisper, rasp, hiss, mutter, or growl. For the most part, though, and unless there’s a solid reason to have them do otherwise, they just say stuff. Sometimes they ask stuff, and when they do, someone might reply. The word “said” is the best candidate for readers’ eyes to pass over it if it’s not repeated too often, so it’s a good way to tag dialogue while maintaining immersion. The occasional “told,” “asked,” and “replied” or “answered” are likewise nearly invisible when used with restraint.

To lay a bit of popular internet writing advice to rest, a said-bookism is not “…any word used in place of ‘said.’”  “Said” has its own pitfalls and is not the only acceptable dialogue tag. I have nailed my colors to the mast on this one, and will take as many boarders as possible down with me.

“Said”—to get up in the grille of a similar bit of oft-repeated guidance—is not really an invisible word that readers never notice. Too many saids are as annoying as overly-dramatic tags, and readers will notice if you use it too often. How often is too often? You’ll have to play that by ear, and one way to do that is to read some dialogue-heavy portion of your writing out loud. If you feel self-conscious about reading aloud to an empty room (I certainly do, and I figure it’s probably not entirely idiosyncratic), ask your friend, spouse, or dog to listen. Your cat will probably fall asleep, which may affect your confidence.

Another ear-friendly method is to record yourself reading a scene or chapter, then wait a day—or at least overnight—and play back the recording. Excess saids and other awkward items will cry piteously for you to release them from their miserable existence.

Not every line of dialogue needs to be tagged. A well-written fictional conversation can go on for quite a few exchanges without the reader losing his way, especially if the characters have different ways of speaking and/or different goals for the conversation. See Part 6 of this series for an example of a conversation with very few dialogue tags spoken by three characters with three different goals for that scene. Well-written characters with strong intentions put their own stamp on their speeches, much like real people.

Be sparing with dialogue tags. Miserly, even. Use them mainly to avoid confusion as to who’s speaking, and/or to improve the rhythm of a line.

To get extra mileage from a dialogue tag, use it to get in a bit of stage business that either helps reveal character or moves the story forward.

“I’d help you look for him if I could,” Trey said, peering over Haldane’s shoulder for a better look at the paper. “I can’t leave town right now without bringing half the police force behind me.”
--
“He hasn’t been here in days,” Lexie said, letting her eyes slide off to her left, to the darkened hallway. “I’ll tell him you came by.”

Well-written dialogue spoken by well-drawn characters is the heart of any scene, and scenes are the building blocks of your fiction. A vital part of writing good, believable dialogue is knowing how to handle tags with skill and confidence.

TL;DR

Inspect your dialogue for labored tagging that tends to make it over-dramatic. 

If every character in your scene is well-defined with a clear intention, you won't need many dialogue tags. 

Use dialogue tags—sparingly—to improve rhythm, avoid confusion, include stage business. 

Avoid tags like shrieked, sobbed, rasped, hissed, spat, commanded, and intoned. Really. 

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

Be sure to read the earlier Self-Editing for Everyone articles.
Part 1: The Most-Hated Writing Advice Ever
Part 2: Vampire Verbs, Zombie Verbs, and Verbs that Kick Ass
Part 3: Attack of the Adverbs!
Part 4: The Weakeners
Part 5: When Words Get in the Way
Part 6: Secrets of Relative Velocity
Part 7: Two Languages
Part 9: Dangling Modifiers
Part 10: Passive Voice
Part 11: Homophones
Part 12: Point of View Violations

Before we get to the real reason you're here, give me a moment to remind you that the information in this article is based on my book, The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers. If you're so inclined, you can  buy it at Amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores for the paltry sum of $4.99. 

Two Languages
Writers of English  have extra linguistic resources, owing to that fact that English is two utterly distinct languages more or less happily married into one language of incredible richness. When a word from one branch won’t do, we can always go looking for one belonging to the other. The trick is to know which language to employ in which circumstances.

Linguists everywhere consider English to be a Germanic language, but less than a third of today’s language actually derives from Anglo-Saxon roots, most of the rest having come to us from Latin, either directly from Roman influence or from Romantic languages such as French, a bit from Greek, even less from the Celtic language of the Britons who were running England when the Romans arrived. In a language race, the conquerors always win.

English speakers borrowed (and did not return) Latinate language from four centuries of Roman rule, a passel of early Christian missionaries, and generations of Norman French rulers. More than 10,000 additional Latin words entered the language during the Renaissance alone. In fact, Latin words continued to enter English right up through the 18th century. Any time an Anglo-Saxon word wasn’t equal to describing a new concept or thing, someone constructed a new one from Latin.

So that’s how we got here. The question for our purposes seems to be “How does having a dual language affect us as writers?”

Thanks for asking.

A Linguistic Discrepancy, or Weight Against Reach
For all that Anglo-Saxon doesn’t measure up in terms of actual numbers, most of the words it does provide are the most common in the language. Most everyday words for the common things and actions of everyday life are still based in English’s Germanic roots. One does not generally perambulate with one’s canine as often as one walks the dog. In a normal day, we are more likely to eat food than to consume or devour victuals, sustenance, or comestibles. Our language is two-thirds Latin, but our common usage is overwhelmingly rumpled old Anglo-Saxon, dressed in faded jeans and moccasins (no socks). When Latin comes out to play, it does so wearing its best clothes.

Keep it Simple
For the purposes of ordinary, everyday fiction writing, and even most nonfiction writing, the plainest flavor of English is almost always the most unnoticeable and unnoticed, and writing that doesn’t call attention to itself for its own sake is writing that communicates its intentions clearly. When it’s time to make a reader see, hear, taste, smell, or feel something, the language needs to get out of its own way, and that happens when you keep it simple.

It’s usually better to say

• Used than Utilized
  
• Started than Initiated
  
• Before than Prior to
  
• So far than As of yet
  
• But than However
  
• Rest than Remainder
  
• Found than Discovered
  
• Happened than Occurred 

Not all of those pairs involve Latinate English vs. Anglo-Saxon, but they do concern wordy and elaborate vs. clear and unadorned language. The  more decorative word or phrase will be needed far more rarely and usually when you’re looking for a more formal style, deliberately distancing the reader from the narrative, or making your language sound educated, self-important, unemotional, or wordy. That’s what Latin-based English does best.

Language and Pacing
The type of language you use helps to set the pace of your writing. Longer words, which are most often of Latin origin, help slow pace down by removing the reader from the immediacy afforded by more direct language. Shorter words, most often Anglo-Saxon derived, help speed it up. This is also true of dialog; when their feet are to the fire, characters tend to use the shortest, punchiest way to say anything. If you choose to have them do otherwise, do so deliberately and for good reasons.

Choose and Use
Speaking very generally, Latinate English is cool, erudite, perceived as higher in status and educational level, emotionally muted, and detached. Anglo-Saxon English is warm, down-to-earth, perceived as lower in status and educational level, and emotionally present. In real life, we tend to switch to Latinate English when we want to distance ourselves from the listener or establish higher status, and to shade over into Anglo-Saxon vocabulary when we’re going for closeness or establishing ourselves as "just one of the folks."

Most English speakers know unconsciously how to modulate their usage of Latin-based vs. Anglo-Saxon words depending on situation and context. We go back and forth between one and the other dozens of times every day, but most of us have never given the distinction a lot of conscious thought. Knowing about our two languages gives us a powerful tool for flexible and effective writing.

TL;DR
Rule of thumb: Anglo-Saxon English is informal, direct, close. Latinate words are the opposite.

Prefer use over utilize, start over initiate, happened over occurred, before over prior to. 

Keep it simple except when you don't. And when you don’t, know why you didn’t.

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazingPulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

The information in this article is based on my book, The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, which you can  buy at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores for the paltry sum of $4.99. You know you want to....

Pacing
No story is all action or all leisurely contemplation—or at least none worth reading. It’s vital to keep your story moving forward, but not relentlessly and not always at speed. Likewise, you must allow your characters to stop and think, but not to the point of putting your reader to sleep. A book that consisted of nothing but gunfights and car chases might be fast-paced but would soon become as boring to read as one where characters sipped tea and chatted about literature for 300 pages. People in fiction, like people in the real world, don’t always live life at the same speed, and readers need a break from both too much laid-back navel gazing and too much break-neck action.

There are two easy ways to check up on your pacing as you edit yourself.

Sentence Length
Count the words in a few dozen sentences from different parts of your work. Do they vary in length? Sentence length variety does at least two good things: it changes up the rhythm of your writing, and it helps control the pace.

Count the words in the sentences of an action or dialogue sequence, and do the same for a more leisurely part of your story. Which part had shorter sentences overall, and which longer? If there wasn’t much difference, you might need to work on tightening up the pace of your faster-moving scenes.

Long sentences tend to slow the pace of a story. There are times when you want to do this, particularly just before or just after a sequence of fast-paced action. In a slow-paced scene, sentences can lengthen out just a bit. Think of it like a heartbeat. When everything’s peaceful, the story’s heart rate can be slow and easy until the next action moment.

   Thomas watched the gulls wheel in the gray sky above the gray water, always seeming to be on the lookout for whatever might be down there just below the surface. He threw the last of his stones into an incoming wave and walked back up the shore toward Lena’s place, more than half hoping no-one would be home yet.

Average length of a sentence: 29.5 words.

When the action picks up, so does the heartbeat. Pick up the pace of narrative with shorter, punchier sentences that contain less observation and reflection and more action and/or dialog. 

   Two figures resolved out of the mist. Thomas dropped behind a sandbar, heart hammering. It was Dexter and Clarke. Lena’s mother must have told them where he’d be.

Average length of a sentence: 7 words.

Dialogue is a form of action, and one that can move a story forward rapidly.

   “Those two could have killed me. If they’d seen me, they would have.”
   Mrs. Flores wrung her hands in the dish towel. “I didn’t tell them anything!”
   “You’re the only one who could have!”
   “No, Thomas, I never talked to them. I swear!”
   “Leave her alone, Thomas,” Lena said. “She didn’t tell Dexter and Clarke where to find you.”
   “Then who?”
   “I did.”

Average length of a sentence: 5 words.

Let the length of your sentences help create the pace of your narrative and signal the reader how much forward movement to expect as soon as they see the page.

Paragraph Length
Alternating the length and action content of your paragraphs is a good way to slow down and speed up pacing. Long paragraphs slow the pace. This can be a good thing in moderation, but when a reader sees lots of lengthy paragraphs ahead, she may begin to skim. This is a slippery slope that might end with her putting down your book and forgetting to pick it up again. 

Conversely, short paragraphs, including dialog, tell the reader that the pace is picking up, along with the information-to-words ratio. 

When reading drags, break up long paragraphs into two or more. Use dialog and other short action paragraphs to slow down reading speed and perk up reader attention.

Masterful Pacing
Pace is also determined by content, so if your sentence and paragraph length matches the pace you’re hoping to set with your words, you won’t be working against yourself in that regard. It can be useful, however, to go against the reader’s expectations for pace. Let me give you an example of how a master does it.

Near the end of Everybody Dies, one of the Matt Scudder novels, Lawrence Block puts two well-loved characters in an unbearably tense situation. As they walk across the countryside into what they know is a trap to face an unknown number of well-armed men, the reader knows that one man is here out of loyalty to the other, who has foreseen his own death. In point of fact, both are far more likely to die violently and soon than to live past the next few minutes. Many authors would have made sure to speed up the pacing to keep the reader glued to the page, but Block has another way of snagging hearts and minds; he uses the time it takes them to walk to their fatal rendezvous to have one of the characters talk about life, his past, his philosophy, his beliefs. With every paragraph that delays the coming shoot-out, the reader is gripped by apprehension and anticipated grief. When the deadly shoot-out finally happens, it’s almost a relief to have the waiting over with.

Where Block could have sped the reader on to the final confrontation by upping the pace, he made the tension unbearable by slowing it. Where he could have written a perfectly fine chapter, he wrote a masterful one. Pace is but another of the little toys excellent writers like Lawrence Block use to keep readers buying and reading and anticipating books.

Chances are you'll fall naturally into keeping sentences and paragraphs at the proper length for the pace of your scenes, but if a scene isn't working, it may be worth reading to see whether or not the pace you need matches the pace you've written. I'll talk about how language choices affect pacing and other aspects of your writing in next week's article, "Two Languages."

TL;DR
Sentence and paragraph length directly affect story pacing. In general, they get shorter as the action speeds up, longer as it slows down.

Reading pace is to some degree the opposite. As pace picks up, reading rate slows down. As pace drops, reading speeds up.

Vary the length of paragraphs in slower-paced sections to keep readers’ eyes from glazing over.

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

Welcome to Part 5 of Self-Editing for Everyone, based on all that editorial advice you can't live without but can find in the pages of The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers. For $4.99 or the local equivalent, you can buy the e-book at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores on planet Earth. Now back to today's regularly scheduled program.


Superfluous Redundancy
A lot of editorial red ink goes into the task of showing new writers what they’re saying that they don’t need to say. I call this problem “superfluous redundancy.” Don't bother to write me; it's a joke. But the problem is not. When a writer is hesitant and unsure how to proceed, he will almost always err on the side of too much explanation, too much justification, too many words. And those words get in the way of the story.

This might be a good place to bring up what a beloved writing teacher, Algis Budrys, told me one day almost 30 years ago:

“The manuscript is not the story.”

It took me a minute to get that the first time I heard it, so I’m gonna say it again: The manuscript is not the story. The manuscript is where we put down the words we’re using to tell the story; it is not the story itself. Often, Algis told me, we say “I’m working on my story” when what we mean is “I’m making changes to my manuscript.” Sometimes the manuscript gets in the way of the story, and if you know the difference between the two it’s easier to remove words that aren’t pulling their weight to allow your story to emerge from your manuscript. Making that distinction allows writers to understand what a good editor does for them, and why making suggestions for revisions to the manuscript does not necessarily threaten the story.

Why I Cut Stuff
There are a lot of reasons an editor might suggest text cuts, but you’d be surprised how much of the reasoning boils down to cutting repetition, and repetition usually takes one or more of the following forms:

The information in the cut portion has been stated before or after the cut, and the deleted words are the weakest or otherwise unnecessary version of the two. Cut portions will appear in red.

A spray of bullets erupted from the wall of smoke. They spat out from the middle of the cloud.

The information is strongly implied by something you’ve written before or after the cut, and it’s not necessary to state it outright.

Curtains moved aside in one of the top-floor windows.  Someone was watching.

The information is obvious from context.

“Do it now!” he commanded.

The information is obvious because of point of view.

Kelly watched as tThe dog turned and trotted away.

There’s a shorter, clearer, and/or more impactful way of saying it.

(Insert any long-winded, filler-heavy sentence from your own early draft here.)

The Cranky Editor 
Below are excerpts from editing comments I’ve made to authors I’ve worked with in the past. In every case, I’ve changed the wording to avoid identification, while leaving the problems intact. My comments appear in green.

She did not respond.

The reader is watching this happen, so if she doesn’t speak, we don’t have to be told she didn’t. 

“I’ll be back in an hour.” With that, he left.

Ten points from Hufflepuff for the fish head (See Part 4: The Weakeners) “With that.” Another ten for telling us he left instead of showing him leaving, or just letting his words speak for him and transitioning to what happens next.

Martin brushed past without acknowledging the man or his outstretched hand.

If Martin walked on and nowhere in the narrative did he acknowledge the man, that fact is evident to the reader. The reader doesn’t need to be told that he didn’t.

He had no idea where he was, or even who he was. He had no memory of his past.

You said it, then you said it again.  The second telling weakens the first one. “…who he was” is the strongest place you can exit this sentence. If you like, you can then show him going for a memory and coming up dry rather than telling the reader he can’t remember.

Then she asked a question: “Why would you do that to me?”

Since you show her asking the question, you don’t need to tell the reader that she asked it.

“The car stopped and turned around in the road, spinning its tires. He suddenly realized that i It was coming back this way.”

He realized it because he saw what happened. So did the reader.

His attention was drawn to the wolf. The wolf lowered its head and snarled.

We saw the wolf as soon as the POV character did. We don’t need to be reminded that it’s there. The second sentence shows the wolf in action. That's what you want.

He almost asked her if she’d lied to him, but then he decided she’d only clam up.

We’re reading his thoughts; we don’t need to be told that he decided it.

Jase looked at both of them.

If there are two other people in the room, and Jase looked at them, he looked at them both.

He sank back against the wall, then slid down to sit against it, head down, breathing shallowly. He did not struggle.

Not only is that evident from the description of his actions that the character wasn’t struggling, but you're telling the reader what didn’t happen. 

Never waste your reader’s time describing what doesn’t happen.

“As you know…”
There are few rules in writing that are absolute. Here’s one that just might be: never, ever say “as you know.” Never say anything that even smacks of it, like “as I told you already,” “as you heard from Joe,” or “as we’ve already covered in a previous discussion.” This is a type of info dump also called an “As you know, Bob…” (AYKB)—a weak method of using dialogue to cover ground that you suspect should have already been covered offstage, or in a previous scene you decided not to write. 

Characters do have conversations while readers aren’t listening, so they sometimes refer to things in the context of previous knowledge, just as flesh-and-blood people do. But the difference is that the fictional ones never say “as you know.”

There are ways to show information was received previously:

• “I warned you that might happen…”
  


• His mother had warned him about Sasha more than once, but as usual he hadn’t listened.
  


•  “You always used to tell me he couldn’t be trusted.”
  

Spare Parts
Your reader probably has a pretty good idea which body parts are involved in which sensory experiences, so you don’t need to say:

She tasted ___ in her mouth.

That’s where she’d taste anything.


The same goes for all activity and body part pairs:

He punched the guy with his fist.

I kicked the tire with my foot.

By the same token:

He remembered hearing about Lorna in the past.

If a character remembers something, the reader already knows it’s in the past. Even more direct:

He’d heard about Lorna.

Hesitant, unsure writing leads to the desire to spell out things that your reader can understand from context.  It puffs up your manuscript with useless words that don’t serve the purposes of your story. Learning your own hesitant writing habits will help you to correct early-draft repetition and avoid the curse of superfluous redundancy.

TL;DR

Overexplaining causes repetition that bloats your sentences and blunts your writing. 

Eliminate repetitive information to give your reader a clear and direct experience of your story. 

Never use any form of “As you know,” “As I already explained,” “As you heard from that other character,” not even if threatened with lethal weapons.

Have you avoided saying what was evident, obvious, or actually stated elsewhere in a different way? 

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

“Vigorous writing is precise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
—William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style

Filler Words, Fish Heads, and More 
I don’t carry a copy of The Elements of Style close to my heart, and I haven’t thought it was the definitive usage manual for nearly half my life, but old Professor Strunk really hit the nail on the head for me with the statement above. If those words could be tattooed on the living brain of every writer, editors would have a lot less work to do. That’s why I chose it as the opening quote in The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers. Since I haven't mentioned it in a whole week, I'd just like to point out that for the negligible price of $4.99, you can buy the e-book at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores. Thank you.

Writers love words, and they often use too many of them when fewer would serve their writing better. The earlier in her writing career, the more likely a writer is to add words to explain things that don’t need explaining, to add adverbs when no adverb is called for, to add pet words that are so close to her heart that she doesn’t see them in her manuscript, and to add words that not only don’t move her sentences and paragraphs along, but tie them up and stake them out in the sun. We’re all prone to these same errors from time to time, but once we’ve learned what they are and why we make them, we can use that learning to grow as writers.

I’ll cover some of these errors—in particular those related to over-explaining and other forms of repetition—in Part 5: When Words Get in the Way. For this article I’ll focus on filler words, fish heads (and tails), nominalizations, and a common word that may be making your writing sound common.

Fish Heads
Have you ever used “suddenly” or “just then” to convey a feeling of urgency to the beginning of a sentence? It doesn’t. Adding unnecessary words before the action of a sentence begins slows it down, and your writing along with it.

For instance, which version of each sentence below seems more immediate (or “sudden”)?

A car screamed around the corner and fishtailed toward her.

Suddenly, a car screamed around the corner and fishtailed toward her.
--
Bobby dove for the gun.

Just then, Bobby dove for the gun.

It’s the first example every time; it gets right to what’s happening and engages the reader without author interference.

In addition to “just then” and “suddenly,” a lot of other unnecessary words and phrases like to cluster at the beginning of a sentence, as though trying to get it up to speed before it leaves the ground, and weighing it down instead. These are fish heads—the part you cut off.

The words in the list below, and words like them, may be bloating your writing. You can make a case for any of them having its place, but that place is almost never at the beginning of a sentence that can get off the dime more effectively without their added weight. When not occurring at the beginning as fish heads, you may find words like these in the middle as filler words and at the end as fish tails. In all cases, consider carefully whether they're useful to conveying a direct sensory experience to your reader, or whether they're just excess baggage.

Fish Tails
Many of the items in the above lists can also flop around on the ends of sentences. When you find a word or phrase that might be a fish tail, follow back to the word or phrase that precedes it, and see if the sentence wouldn’t be better ended there. Whenever possible, a sentence should end on the strongest idea, the strongest word—the place you want to make an effect on the reader. If any of yours do not, either rearrange the words or chop off any fish tails that follow a strong natural ending.

The most egregious fish tails of all occur when the writer feels uncertain about how well he’s shown a thing and adds unnecessary words to explain it. The examples below may seem exaggerated, but they’re taken from manuscripts and published books. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

“No way,” Larry said in denial.

“I’d love to!” Beth told him, showing her joy.

“Do it now!” Franz shouted in a yelling voice.

Filler Words
In addition to fish heads and tails, we may unconsciously add other fillers to our writing. “Just,” “that” and “then” are prime examples; they’re good words in moderation, but we can become habituated to them.

This is by no means a complete list, and you’ll probably find more examples to add from your own first drafts, as I have. I’m not saying every instance of all of these words and phrases will be unnecessary, but if you take the time to search for each of them and notice where and how you use them, I think you’ll find lots of places where they crept in unneeded. If you ask your word-processing program to count them for you, you might just be horrified.

Nominalizations
“Nominalization” is a nominalization – a verb made into a pseudo-noun, such as “rectification” or “organization” as opposed to a concrete noun—an actual person, place, or thing. Nominalizations convey little meaning while sounding utterly important, which is why they crop up so often in political speeches: they suggest a wide range of different things to different people and give a general feeling of usefulness (and extra syllables) without actually doing much of anything. Using them in place of concrete nouns or real verbs can make your writing sound like a corporate memo. You can’t avoid them altogether, but keep your eye out for them and try to rephrase where possible.

Helen Sword, in her excellent New York Times article on the subject, calls nominalizations “zombie nouns” ‘...because they cannibalize active verbs’ and ‘suck the lifeblood from adjectives.’ A woman after my own heart.

Not all nominalizations end with –tion, but that’s a place to start looking for them, and is easily searched. Words ending in –ship and -ence also sound solid and meaningful, but may freeze-dry otherwise free-flowing prose. 

Of course if you want to make a character sound like a corporate memo, then nominalization becomes a potent tool. But watch for it creeping into other characters’ dialogue, or into the narrative. Use a concrete noun, or change the sentence to accommodate a dynamic verb. Keep your prose moving.

The “ongoing” test: a word is probably a nominalization if you can put the word “ongoing” in front of it and make sense. If you can’t, it probably isn’t. You’ll never see an “ongoing fruit fly,” but you might be part of an “ongoing investigation.” “Ongoing urbanization” might disturb you, but you needn’t lose any sleep over “ongoing armchairs.”

The “wheelbarrow” test: If you can put it in a wheelbarrow, however large, it’s a concrete noun. You can put cats in a wheelbarrow—carefully—but not “classification” or “relationships.”

Consider the following examples of commonly used nominalizations followed by the same idea rewritten to return them to their verb state. 

Willy gave the matter further consideration.

Willy considered the matter further.
--
Miller made an accusation of slander against Norden.

Miller accused Norden of slander.
--
It only served as an illustration of my problem.

It only served to illustrate my problem.

Replace nominalizations and put the wheels back on your writing.

The Word That Wasn’t There
We tend to use the word “some” when the quantity or other specifics about a thing are unknown.

Lester expected to come away from the chicken coop with some eggs.

Ehrdrich would be bringing some muscle with him.

As such, it’s not incorrect as much as unnecessary; the sentences below convey the same information.

Lester expected to come away from the chicken coop with eggs.

Ehrdrich would be bringing muscle with him.

So whether or not to use “some” in a case like this is largely down to how you feel about what it’s contributing—or not—to the meaning and the sentence’s rhythm.

Sometimes the quantity in “some” is knowable but not important.

Louise brought some chicken to the picnic.

I added some sugar to my coffee.

…but it still has that “filler” quality. The sentences read a little cleaner without it.

Louise brought chicken to the picnic.

I added sugar to my coffee.

“Some” performs a useful job when a sense of mystery is required, and we’re not quite ready to reveal our specifics…

Something skittered in the underbrush.

Something nibbled at the back of her mind.

Someone was coming.

…but not so much when we need to paint the reader a picture.

Giannino arrived with some soldiers.

(And along the same lines:)

Giannino arrived with a group of soldiers. 

Some? How many? What does “some” or “a group” look like in a reader’s mind?

Giannino arrived with a platoon of soldiers.

…with a company of soldiers.

… with a battalion of soldiers.

… with three soldiers.

Specifics paint a picture. “Some” does not.  In sighted people, more than 2/3 of brain real estate is given over to aspects of the visual, including imagining pictures. Painting a picture for the reader is good.

Go looking for weakeners in your manuscripts. Find them, then kill them. The cranky editor does not advise showing mercy to the enemies of your writing.

You can download a copy of the Self-Editing Quick Reference, an excerpt from The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, at the Ravenscourt Press website.

TL;DR
Are you slowing down your sentences with unnecessary words at the beginning? Fish heads. Chop ‘em.

Are your sentences trailing on after they've done their work? Fish tails. Bin ‘em.

Is your writing free of superfluous filler phrases: as you know, looked like, ended up being, etc? See above.

Be sure to tune in next week for Self-Editing for Everyone Part 5: When Words Get in the Way, where I'll offer up more about what weakens your writing.

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

Welcome to Part 3 of Self-Editing for Everyone, based on all that super-useful stuff in The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers. This time we'll be focusing on the dreaded adverb, but if you want to cut to the chase you can buy the e-book at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores.

Attack of the Adverbs!
My former students and editing clients probably won’t believe I said this, but an adverb is a useful and necessary part of speech. It does a job. It just doesn’t do the job a lot of writers seem to think it does—that of somehow making up for having chosen a flabby verb.

Adverbs modify verbs or adjectives. That's their job. When used wisely and in moderation, they help convey meaning, and they can improve a non-specific sort of verb by giving the reader more information.
  
Adverbs modifying verbs
Bob read voraciously in all genres.
Jax placed the eggs carefully into the basket.

Adverbs modifying adjectives
Merkel’s frostily pale eyes scanned the restaurant.
“Lightly sautéed works best for mushrooms,” Bashir assured her.

That said, when a strong, specific verb is called for, an adverb is not.

My position may sound extreme to you, but I believe you can delete, without tears, most examples of adverbs modifying verbs; a robust verb standing alone is always stronger than a weak verb leaning on an adverb. Inexperienced writers tend think adverbs will shore up weak verbs and make their meaning clearer. In fact, adverbs only trick you into thinking they’re supporting a weak verb; what they’re actually doing is kicking its skinny little legs out from under it.

“Sprinted” is stronger than “ran quickly,” “smashed” tells us more than “hit hard,” “shrieked” is more evocative than “cried loudly.” You get the idea. A good verb shows rather than tells, strengthening—and tightening—the sentence while conveying maximum information and emotion to the reader.

Adverbs modifying adjectives are usually far less of a problem in writing. If you have a tendency to overuse them, you’ll soon figure it out when you search your manuscript for “ly.” While you’re at it, you’ll probably find a lot of verb-modifying adverbs that wormed their way into your sentences without you having been aware of them. Kill them and rewrite to favor good healthy verbs.

Not all adverbs end in “-ly,” but many do. It’s a good place to start when searching your manuscript.

“Very” is a very sneaky adverb—one that tries to fool you into thinking it improves an adjective. For instance, the second “very” in the preceding sentence could be eliminated without losing meaning. And it should be. It makes me itch just looking at it.

A good adjective can walk on its own two legs most of the time, or it can partner with another adjective or a more meaningful adverb to further describe the noun in question. Or you can just back up and re-describe the noun in other terms.

“Very” can almost always be cut from narrative as well as most dialogue. See also “absolutely, definitely, mostly, simply, really, totally, terribly, utterly,” and any word, really, that stands in the way of a simple, well-chosen modifier trying to do its job.

“A very tall man” is rarely as good as... 

...a tall, slender man (two adjectives doing their job without the intervention of an adverb).
...a freakishly tall man (an adverb doing yeoman duty. Well done, adverb!).
...a man so tall his head threatened the door lintel (bringing the POV character’s reaction into play).

Or just make the man’s height part of the action:

She looked up and up and up, and the man just kept on going.

“Very” is not only sneaky, it’s lazy. There’s almost always another word that will do more work for the same pay.

TL;DR
How many of your verbs are weaklings hoping in vain for help from an adverb? How many are already perfectly good verbs that can stand on their own without an adverb?

How many times have you used these and similar words?

Very, Absolutely, Definitely, Mostly, Simply, Really, Totally, Terribly, Completely, Utterly... 

• Search for “ly.”
  
• Eliminate unnecessary adverbs.
  
• Replace weak verbs with strong, specific ones that convey more meaning.
  

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

Welcome to Part 2 of my self-editing series based on all that super-useful stuff in The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores.

In case you missed it, here's where to find Part 1: The Most-Hated Writing Advice Ever.

This week I'm focusing on verbs. You remember fourth grade, right? That was probably around the first time you heard a teacher say “Verbs are action words.” But not all verbs are created equal in the action department, and in this self-editing article I'll be explaining why. Along the way you may learn why certain passages in your prose don't move quite the way you had hoped they would.

The Vampire Verb: To Be
“To be”—usually encountered in writing as “was” and “were”*—is the weakest verb in the language, the most common, and the most unnecessary in narrative. 

Additionally, for nearly any sentence you can compose in English, “There was” is going to be the weakest possible beginning. For instance:

Weak: “There were two tigers standing near the road.” 
Strong: “Two tigers stood near the road.”

Weak: “There was a limousine at the curb.”
Strong:“A limousine idled at the curb.”

In both cases, the first example is flabby by comparison to the second. The top sentence reports something that can be seen, but that’s all it does. It contains neither action nor  tension. The second sentence in both examples invites the reader’s mind to ask “...and then what?”

“To be” in descriptions should ring your “show, don’t tell” alarms. “Melissa was a respected mathematician” or “Taylor was tall” cry out for an editorial rap on the knuckles.

Used as an auxiliary with even the strongest verb, “was” is a vampire that sucks all the life out of its attendant action verb. “Was screaming” for “screamed,” “were fighting” for “fought,” “was running” for “ran,” etc.—in every case it's weaker than the action verb on its own. In word superhero terms, “to be” is verbal kryptonite.

*If you’re writing in the present tense, “is” and “are” are your culprits.

The Zombie Verb: To Have
“Had” is perhaps not quite as weak as “was,” but it’s in the ballpark. It shambles where it ought to shine. It drags your writing down to the ground and rips a bite out of its...okay. I'll stop.

As a writer painting a verbal picture for your readers, you want to tell them not just what someone or something “had,” but also give them an idea of what that means to the story, its action, and its characters.

Weak: “Stella had a new hat.”

Strong: “Stella wore her new hat raked low over one eye.”

Weak: “The church had a door that dated back to the 14th century.”

Strong: “The church door, dating back to the 14th century, showed its age in weather-bleached wood and pitted iron bindings.”

There’s almost never anything you can say with a verb like “had” that you couldn’t say more effectively with some creative rephrasing.

Note: “Had” is also used as an auxiliary verb necessary to establish past perfect tense, which is used in flashbacks or anytime you want to establish that a thing happened in the past and is being recalled in the present. In these cases it’s not a problem word.

"Harry knew now where he had seen her before: she was Carpenter’s ex-girlfriend."

"She had not been an athletic child, nor a graceful one, but had stumbled through those years with perpetually scraped elbows and skinned knees."

Verbs That Kick Ass
Action verbs, like action heroes, kick all the ass. 

Stories move best when writers not only use verbs that describe action, but strong, specific verbs that paint a moving picture in the reader's mind—the more specific the verb, the clearer the picture. A character doesn't just move down the street, he walks, stalks, strides, paces, prances, trots, meanders, skips, skulks, runs, dashes, sprints,or gallops. Each of these verbs paints a completely different picture for your reader.

Verbs should also—as often as possible—be unencumbered by adverbs, about which more next week in Attack of the Adverbs!

Use your verbs. Kick the ass.

TL;DR
The verbs "to be" and "to have" tend to weaken your prose. The more you can replace them with specific action verbs that convey your intention to the reader, the more you'll improve your writing.

How many times did you use “was ____ing?” instead of a stronger verb?

• Replace “was” with stronger verbs that convey more meaning.
  
• Replace “was ____ing” phrasing with stronger verb forms.
  

Have you used “had” instead of stronger verbs that convey more meaning?

• Replace "had" wherever possible with a stronger verb, except when establishing flashbacks. 
  

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

You may already know I wrote a book called The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores everywhere, and that I’ll love you forever if you buy a copy. Full disclosure: I wrote the book to make money. 

I also wrote the book to help writers. Most of the writers I know really like to help other writers, and the rest can be ignored for our present purposes. I’ve participated in writers’ workshops and created and taught my own workshops for the better part of 30 years. I’ve performed major and minor surgery on quite a few novels and stories in my career as an editor, and along the way I discovered the same mistakes and missteps in beginners’ manuscripts over and over again. I wrote up long, teachy (which is totally a word now) articles to give to my clients to demonstrate better ways—in my opinion—to create memorable characters, narrative, dialogue, plots, and storylines. 

I also wrote an article on the kinds of errors, hesitations, filler words, fish heads, and verbal crutches that were far too common in the manuscripts I was seeing from my clients (and sometimes in those of writers old enough and good enough to know better). I added such writerly faux pas as passive voice, point-of-view violations, pacing, and many other things that don’t begin with P, and eventually created the above-linked Little Book. I personally think that if you write—even if you don’t consider yourself a beginner—you should own a copy. But then I would. And even if you never shell out the $4.99, we can still talk. Can we talk? Okay.

In the interests of providing what I hope will be useful tips for writers, I’m going to be selecting advice from The Little Book of Self-Editing and expanding upon it here on my blog. And I’m getting this one out of the way first.

That’s right...it’s The Most Hated Writing Advice Ever.

Why, oh why, you may be asking yourself, do people keep saying “Show, don’t tell?” Is that even good advice? Didn’t you just read an interview with a famous author who said that was all bullshit anyway?*

What the holy frak does “Show, don’t tell” even mean?

I’m really glad you asked.

Remember Show and Tell? I rocked that class. I swear, if education had consisted of nothing else, I’d have sailed through with high honors and none of those embarrassing notes to my Mom. For the first few years of my early educational career, the night before Show and Tell day I’d be all over the house looking for some fascinating object with which to regale my classmates and earn their admiration. I was never the popular kid, and I was usually the new kid, and I was pretty nearly always the weird kid, but many of my earliest experiences of peer acceptance stemmed from successfully navigating the shoals of Show and Tell. 

I learned pretty quickly that standing up in front of the class and telling them what you did on your summer holidays was not going to fascinate the average seven year old, but that anything you could bring to your audience that could be seen or heard or touched or smelled (I brought my dog once, who covered all those bases nicely) commanded their attention far better than reciting secondhand accounts of an overnight trip to the lake. The kids at North Ninth Street School, or Carlsbad Elementary, or wherever I’d landed recently, didn’t want to listen to yet more blah-blah from the front of the room; they wanted to experience something via their own senses.

What does this mean to your writing? Well, imagine your reading audience has something in common with those bored second graders. Imagine they’ll lose interest in direct proportion to the amount of time you spend relating, reporting, or telling them rather than giving them a direct sensory experience of your story. And really? If you don’t want to read any further? I’ll understand. Just remember that anything that gets in the way of delivering a direct sensory experience is what your teacher or editor is marking up and commenting with “Show, don’t tell!”

A Direct Sensory Experience
This, by the way—that headline right above these words—is what it all boils down to. Give the readers the most direct experience possible. It really is that simple. The more you get in your own way with unnecessary words that distance the reader from that direct connection with the action of your story, the more you’re telling. Telling denies the reader the experience of story in favor of reporting something to them instead.

What follows are some ways that telling happens, often without us ever being aware it has. I didn’t make these examples up, but I did change enough words to protect the guilty.

What he saw, heard, observed, noticed, felt, etc.
If the reader can experience a character seeing, hearing, observing, noticing, feeling, or knowing something, don’t point it out. Get inside and write the experience as it happens. Moving one step back to report what happens is not only telling, it’s missing an opportunity to engage the reader's senses and emotions.

Telling: He saw a ray of sunlight piercing the clouds.
Showing: Sunlight pierced the clouds.

Telling: He knew Sharona was lying through her teeth.
Showing: Sharona was lying through her teeth.

• Don’t TELL the reader that the character saw, heard, felt, or noticed something. SHOW what they saw, etc. If the character experiences it directly, so will the reader.
  

What Happens vs What Doesn’t Happen
The reader can only see what happens, so don’t bother telling them what didn’t happen.

Telling: Pete didn’t hesitate, but jumped for the train.
Showing: Pete jumped for the train.

Telling: Carrie tried to right herself.
Showing: Carrie lifted herself to one knee, then collapsed back onto the carpet.

Telling: Ellen didn’t answer him, but continued to stare out the window.
Showing: Ellen continued to stare out the window.

• Don’t TELL what’s beginning, trying, or failing to happen. Forget what DIDN’T happen. SHOW what’s actually happening.
  

Reporting Emotions
One of the most egregious ways of telling is to report a character’s emotions. You want to talk about removing the reader from the experience? This is how you do it. Only don't do it.

Telling: Mercy looked sad.

What was Mercy was doing that led the POV character to conclude that she “looked sad?” What can you show the reader?

Showing: Mercy looked away and sighed. She put on a half-smile, then abandoned it.


Telling: Karl felt sad.

What does “feeling sad” feel like? What are the sensations? Where does Karl feel them?

Showing: Sorrow made an empty place in Karl’s chest. He ached. His eyes stung with tears he refused to cry.

• Don’t report emotions; get inside and write what emotions DO so that your reader can experience them.
  

TL;DR

Are you wasting words describing what isn’t happening instead of showing what is? 

• Rewrite to narrate what the character is actually experiencing. Keep the reader immersed in the action.
  

Are you letting your readers directly experience what the POV character sees, hears, or feels, or are you telling them that he’s having an experience?

• Rewrite with the intention of showing what’s happening to provide a direct and immediate experience for your readers. 
  

Are you reporting emotions instead of letting the reader discern them based on character action?

• Rewrite to show what is observable with the senses. Trust the reader to get it.
  

*You may indeed have read a recent mini-interview with Lee Child, in which he stated that "Show, don’t tell" was silly advice. Mr. Child—whom I consider an excellent writer and storyteller—apparently had the idea that showing meant something like a character looking at themselves in a mirror and describing themselves. That is, more often than not, pretty silly. A reading of the opening paragraphs of Mr. Child’s first novel illustrates that he has had a perfectly good grasp of the concept of showing for a great many years and writes some kick-ass narrative without having to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the terminology, so I’ll give him a pass on the mirror thing. 

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

If you’re a reader—especially one who dreams from whatever distance about writing, you may be curious about how writers do what they do. If you’re already a writer, you may still be curious about how other writers do what they do, and whether it bears any resemblance to your own methods. In fact, judging from my own experience, I’m willing to bet you are.

The Mystery
Non-writers’ questions for writers quite often focus on the mystery associated with the liar's art, such as “Where do you get your ideas?” And you know we can’t tell you that. Better if you don’t know too much when they come looking for you. Of course if I were to tell you, I’d have to admit that much of the time we don’t really know. One thing in and of itself is seldom an idea, and an idea on its lonesome is not a story. One of my early teachers told me that a story happens when enough partial ideas gather in a small enough space to create interesting combinations. Then something entirely different happens when the magic kicks in, but magic—like fortune—favors the prepared writer.

I'm inclined to think most of writing is not all that mysterious. I don't, for instance, believe in that mysterious quality sometimes labeled "inborn talent." I believe anyone can learn to write with a fair degree of competence if they care enough to practice it, and I think that caring enough comes of a love of storytelling and a love of language. These things may come in turn from a childhood spent among adults who read and tell stories, or as the result of a child finding the right teacher or mentor, or the right book that ignites the spark.

Some of the children who love language and stories decide at some point that they're writers. From there on, it's learning and practice and a lot of childish writing that gives way to better writing and eventually, if they keep at it, to good writing. And while there are courses and degree programs dedicated to turning out writers, and a bazillion words in print telling how someone else does it, every writer's journey from half-baked to good or beyond is as unique as the writer. As are the methods employed along the way.

The Method(s)
Writers’ conversations with other writers are usually unconcerned with mystery (we already know we don't know), but quite often touch on method: “How do you handle (this or that exact approach, aspect, problem, stumbling-block, disaster)?” On these matters any writer I know can speak until the end of time,  scarcely pausing for breath. Put two or more of us together anywhere and we’ll come back to those subjects again and again. And although there are commonalities among writers and their methods, the differences are—as with most things—far more instructive.

I know a writer who is so courageous and so virtuous that he writes his second draft of a novel completely independent of his first. By this I mean that he actually types the second draft into a blank screen. Blimey. That goes right into my jaw-dropping facts column. I have never had the courage (or the virtue, he would surely agree) to do it myself, but I can’t argue with the fact that he’s a crackerjack writer and storyteller with a far more successful writing career than mine. Recently I read an article he wrote wherein he allowed that his method is not necessarily for everyone. It’s certainly not, though no less courageous or virtuous for all that. Add to that the fact that he’s also a fast writer with multiple projects on the fire at any given time, and you have a candidate for literary sainthood, or at the very least, dazzling success.

I have known writers who agonized for hours over the next word in a paragraph, unable to go on until the exact shade of meaning had revealed itself via the offices of their muse. I once heard a writer confess he’d spent two weeks on one sentence. Writers to whom words come that hard will not likely be caught throwing them out and starting over. They will probably also never finish their first novel.

I am not much like either of those examples. I have never re-keyed a draft of anything longer than 7000 words or so, and when a shade of meaning hides itself between two words, I pretend not to notice and type a couple of square brackets for it to fit itself between when it’s ready. Words are like cats. Herding them is futile and results in wounds.

To Outline, or...
My virtuous friend and I once tried to collaborate. As the kind of writer I'm used to being, I wanted to ask questions and find answers about the story universe, so that understanding the rules, I could write within them, or at least know when and why I might color outside the lines. He wanted to start writing and discover the rules as he went, and to hell with the lines altogether. Sadly, neither of us could quite grasp the other’s way of approaching a story well enough to proceed. I’m still kind of sad about that—I would love to have created some fiction with him.

I outline. There. I said it. I always outline novel length fiction, and for nonfiction like The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers it's likewise essential to my writing process; I can't imagine being able to write that book or any other like it without a pretty thorough and detailed outline. But if “outline” conjures up images of letters and numbers and staggered indents, like your eighth-grade term papers, rest assured it's nothing much like that. For me it’s more like a list of points to remember as I write: Character, Context, Conflict, attempts to resolve the conflict, Resolution, and like that—a loose seven-point plot structure, just so I know I'm touching the bases. As I go along, I’ll expand each point a bit with a few words about what’s going on and how it ties in to the other elements. Eventually, I end up with a meandering document that ranges over and into and around my story, occasionally crossing its own trail. Most of it never winds up in the finished product, but producing it seems vital to the way I do things, particularly when writing at novel length.

My novel outlines become a conversation with myself about the project. I'll ask myself questions about characters and settings and story events and plot problems, then attempt to answer them. James Thurber, great American humorist and personal hero of mine, once said: ‘I’d rather know some of the questions than all of the answers.’ Questions are more powerful than most people realize. The ways in which you ask them determine what kinds of answers are even possible, so if I don't get a useful answer, I'll reframe the question to bring out the information I need. Later these answers might find a way into a slightly less rambling plot synopsis, to which I add timeline notes to keep the timing of events straight in my mind and on the page.

Lately I've been experimenting with drawing a mind map on a big sheet of paper with colored pens and the odd sticky note, which puts other parts of my brain to work. Multi-sensory encoding (speaking, hearing, writing, drawing, moving, touching, seeing—including the use of shape and image and color) is a good way to get things cooking together at a deep level. And the possible combinations of sensory input are nearly infinite—you could physically walk through a novel timeline, using a whole room to lay out your story, if that would help you visualize it better.

I’m certain that some writers who don’t like to either draw or write down their structure at the beginning have some other way of keeping all that information in front of them, or it isn’t important to them whether or not they do. To them I say, “Bravo” and “Brava.” But much as I've written stories off the top of my head without the ghost of an outline ("The Bard Effect" is one such that came right off the ends of my fingers in a day), it might behoove seat-of-the-pants writers to plan out a story in the spirit of experimentation and see what happens. The results might surprise. That's what happened to my friend R.K. MacPherson, a die-hard freeform novelist who had a come-to-Jesus moment recently when he learned the joys of outlining before you begin. He wrote his first published novel entirely by the seat of his pants, but I suspect he'll outline in some way from now on.

I’ve known writers to confess a sort of fear of outlines: that if they construct them they might be somehow compelled to follow them to the bitter end, thereby impeding the flow of creativity. That's never been my experience, and besides, sticking with an outline is neither required nor desired, 'cos you have to leave room for...

...The Magic
The magic can occasionally be laid to the workings of a mysterious cosmos. Any writer who's been at this a while has stories about requested answers and vital information and solutions that fell from a clear blue sky, wrapped in ribbon and bearing a card: "You're welcome. The Universe." Usually, however, the source is closer to home—the writer's unconscious mind.

As a hypnotist, I know a thing or two about unconscious minds, including the fact that they don't actually exist. That is to say you don't actually have two minds. Even your two brain hemispheres are not separate minds—they share most if not all tasks and functions between them. Likewise you don't have one mind that's conscious and one that's not, but the terminology is deeply rooted and convenient. I've found it useful to think of your one mind as having two kinds of processes going on simultaneously.

Unconscious thinking processes can be modeled as the thoughts that are occurring out of our awareness, in contrast to the thinking processes of the conscious mind—the thoughts we're aware of having at any particular time. Since we're only capable of holding something like five to nine thoughts in consciousness at any one time, everything else—everything out of consciousness—is being handled by the unconscious mind. It's the mind that intuits, the mind that responds, the mind that dreams. I believe stories are one of the ways our unconscious minds dream, and that makes writers very special dreamers whose waking dreams become the dreams—and nightmares—of people they will never meet.

The Madness
It's a peculiar thing, this art of telling lies that are true. It grips otherwise ordinary and respectable folks and transforms their lives utterly. I had been a writer since childhood, but came to consider it a childish fancy that needed to be put aside in order to live some other life. The moment the adult me knew that I was doomed to this life (had doomed myself), and that I was, had always been, would always be a writer, is burned into my memory as deeply as the birth of any of my children—as deeply as falling in love.

Writing is a sort of madness that causes the afflicted to see and hear and touch things others can't, then be gripped with a burning need to make others see and hear and feel those things. It starts with the natural human affinity for narrative, then demands not just to appreciate stories, but to create them ex nihilo—from air and shadows and bumps in the night. Once a person has contracted this madness and been turned into a writer, it invariably proves as fatal as birth itself.

So if you're on this journey too, welcome. We're okay, you and I, even if the others are a bit mad. And to any non-writing readers who may be feeling strange urges to tickle a keyboard with their own stories, I give you the sage advice of fiction master Lawrence Block: Take two aspirin and lie down for twenty minutes, and it may pass.

FREEBIE #1
Free on Amazon 29 October - 2 November 2012

Richie is a dealer, selling tickets on a steep drop to hopeless addiction. To music. His best friend Vince lives in poverty to support his craving for Mozart. Somewhere in L.A., a virtuoso chemist has targeted them for a brutal experiment. Can either of them survive it?

“Music and drugs have a connection that goes way back. In “A Little Night Music,” Bridget McKenna takes that connection and tightens it down until the words come to mean basically the same thing....” -Kim Mohan, Amazing Stories Magazine

“A Little Night Music” Originally appeared in Amazing Stories Magazine, edited by Kim Moha. This edition features an essay by the author: “Writing A Little Night Music.”

FREEBIE #2
Free on Amazon 29 October - 2 November 2012

Suppose you felt trapped in an unhappy marriage. Suppose you saw this ad in a newspaper...

"Have you ever wished your loved one could be kidnapped by aliens? Call 1-800-GOODBYE for more information. No salesmen will call."

If you're Guy Collier, well-meaning but luckless tech writer for a big Los Angeles software company, you might just pick up the phone and call. But that might only be the begining of your problems.

"Kidnapped by Aliens!" was originally published in June 1995 in Tomorrow SF, edited by Algis Budrys. It includes an essay by the authors, "Writing (and Rewriting) Kidnapped by Aliens!"

My good friend R.K. MacPherson tagged me in the Work in Progress Challenge. I will have my revenge in time. The idea is to answer the questions below, then pass the misery...er, privilege of responding along to three other writers.

I have a couple of works in progress, including The Little Book of Plot & Storyline for Writers, but the questions are designed for a fiction WIP.

1.  What is the title of your Work In Progress?
Right now I'm calling it The Books of Eden. 

2. Where did the idea for the WIP come from?
Traveling societies, royal progresses, reading A Pattern Language and lots and lots of Joseph Campbell.

3. What genre would your WIP fall under?
YA (-ish) Science Fiction.

4. Which actors would you choose to play characters in a movie rendition?
Molly Quinn, Tilda Swinton, Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Adrien Brody all feature prominently.

5. What is a one-sentence synopsis of your WIP?
Following a global geological disaster, a planetary AI takes humanity under its protective wing.

6. Is your WIP published or represented?
Neither.

7. How long did it take you to write?
I'll let you know when I finish it.

8. What other WIP’s in your genre would you compare it to?
Never gave it a thought. Someone else will have to tell me after I publish it.

9. Which authors inspired you to write this WIP?
Joseph Campbell, Christopher Alexander, et al, (see "idea," above) and all the writers who have helped make Young Adult the most exciting category in fiction.

10. Tell us anything else that might pique our interest about this WIP.
"Once in the world that was, there was a story about a wonderful place at the center of the world where a tree grew and a serpent and a woman waited for those who would come and take the gifts they offered, for the garden was within us, and the serpent was wisdom, and the woman was life. And the garden was our childhood, and the wisdom was the wisdom to grow into authenticity, and the life was the realized life, where we know that we are all things, and also that which created all things.

Then the people who told this story were conquered by others who revered neither serpents nor women—people who worshiped and feared and placated a creator who was not them, but a fearful Other, and the story changed. In the conqueror’s story the Other created life, and the garden, and a man. Later he created a woman for the man. And the serpent was not knowledge, but evil. And the woman was not life, but death. And the man and the woman were driven from the sight of their creator, and leaving the garden was not a natural movement of life, but a terrible punishment. They were cursed to live in the agony of separateness, and the snake was cursed to bite them.

No-one tells this story now."

11. Finally:  Tag three other Authors and ask them to complete the above interview.
Okay, Joseph Paul Haines, Patricia MacEwen, and Amy Sisson, you're up at bat.

Below are excerpts from a letter by writer Lafcadio Hearn to his editor. Hearn was born in Greece to a Greek mother and an Irish father. He was raised in Ireland, and lived for twenty years in the U.S. before visiting Japan on a journalistic assignment. He never left. He worked for newspapers, taught school, married a Japanese woman, Koizumi Setsu,  and had a son. He took the name Koizumi Yakumo when he became a Japanese Citizen. He remains famous for his books on Japanese life and his retellings of Japanese folktales and ghost stories.

His love of language and his unique perceptions are so eloquently expressed in this letter that I want to share it with everyone who loves words.

The letter is reprinted in full at Letters of Note.

June 5, 1893

Dear Chamberlain,--

...Recognizing the ugliness of words, however, you must also recognize their physiognomical beauty. I see you and the Editor of the "Atlantic" are at one, however, in condemning my use of Japanese words.... For me words have colour, form, character; they have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations; they have moods, humours, eccentricities;—they have tints, tones, personalities. That they are unintelligible makes no difference at all. Whether you are able to speak to a stranger or not, you can't help being impressed by his appearance sometimes—by his dress—by his air—by his exotic look. He is also unintelligible, but not a whit less interesting. Nay! he is interesting BECAUSE he is unintelligible. I won't cite other writers who have felt the same way about African, Chinese, Arabian, Hebrew, Tartar, Indian, and Basque words—I mean novelists and sketch writers.

To such it has been justly observed: "The readers do not feel as you do about words. They can't be supposed to know that you think the letter A is blush-crimson, and the letter E pale sky-blue. They can't be supposed to know that you think KH wears a beard and a turban; that initial X is a mature Greek with wrinkles;—or that '—no—' has an innocent, lovable, and childlike aspect." All this is true from the critic's standpoint.

But from ours, the standpoint of— 
The dreamer of dreams 
To whom what is and what seems 
Is often one and the same—To us the idea is thus:

"Because people cannot see the colour of words, the tints of words, the secret ghostly motions of words:

"Because they cannot hear the whispering of words, the rustling of the procession of letters, the dream-flutes and dream-drums which are thinly and weirdly played by words:

"Because they cannot perceive the pouting of words, the frowning and fuming of words, the weeping, the raging and racketing and rioting of words:

"Because they are insensible to the phosphorescing of words, the fragrance of words, the noisomeness of words, the tenderness or hardness, the dryness or juiciness of words—the interchange of values in the gold, the silver, the brass and the copper of words:

"Is that any reason why we should not try to make them hear, to make them see, to make them feel? Surely one who has never heard Wagner, cannot appreciate Wagner without study! Why should the people not be forcibly introduced to foreign words, as they were introduced to tea and coffee and tobacco?"
...
All this is heresy. But a bad reason, you will grant, is better than—etc.

Faithfully, 

Lafcadio Hearn

Read the whole letter and hundreds more from hundreds of letter-writers at Shaun Usher's wonderful Letters of Note.

This is my newest baby, The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers. It’s the first in a series of five Little Books to help writers with various aspects of their craft.

As I point out on the opening page, this is not a book about why writers don't need editors. Writers need editors. This is a book about how to begin the editing process with the writer and produce a better book that needs less outside editing before you or someone else publishes it.

I've been writing professionally for 40 years, and editing professionally for 24. For a few years I worked as a book doctor, helping writers get books into shape for submission to agents and publishers.

One of the things I learned over those years is how few people who want to write—even those with English degrees and other impressive credentials—know what they need to know about the craft of writing and all the little crafts that go into it, including the craft of self-editing. I kept coming across the same errors again and again, in manuscripts that were pretty sure never to see print, and—more surprisingly—in those with a lot of promise. I wrote reports for my clients in which I showed how to avoid their common writing errors in the future, and eventually created a list to give to all clients with their marked-up manuscripts. That list became the basis of this book.

The first and foremost repeating error was redundancy, and most of my editorial red ink was devoted to eliminating it. Writers who are unsure of their writing, and therefore of their readers’ ability to “get it,” tend to over-explain characters and their actions, say something one way, then another way later in the same sentence without realizing they’ve done so, add unnecessary words and phrases to the beginnings or the ends (or both!) of their sentences, “tell” the reader what to think when they ought to “show” what's happening, and in general reveal their uncertainty and hesitation over and over again. Three sections in the book: Filler Words, Fish Heads (and Tails), and Superfluous Redundancy are devoted to educating writers away from overwriting. Other sections tell of the use and abuse of Adverbs, the verbs To Be and To Have, Point of View Violations, Pacing, and Misplaced Modifiers, among many other early-draft problems that can keep a good book from emerging from a troubled manuscript.

I’ve included a Self-Editing Checklist at the back of the book for quick reference, and also made a printable version available for download from Ravenscourt Press.

It's only $2.99 at amazon.com, and soon at other e-book stores. If you know someone who could benefit from it, you know what to do.

So, should independent author-publishers have their own publishing imprints? 
I wondered about this when I was first dippng my toes in the indie waters this time last year, so I asked a couple of experienced people I respected whether they thought it was necessary and beneficial, and they said absolutely yes. I created my publishing company, Ravenscourt Press, and got on with the business of publishing some books. It did not then occur to me that in the minds of many people I was doing something wrong.

A discussion elsewhere in the indie community a while back brought up the question of whether or not indie publishers should form their own publishing imprint. The blog author was not especially in favor of it and asked for opinions. As the commenters began to chime in, the idea of creating a publishing entity for self-published books was labeled “not right”, “criminal”, “fake”, “duping the reader”, “dishonest”, “deception”, and “morally questionable” just in the first handful of comments. I think I may have been the first commenter to say I favored the idea:

"I do put a publisher imprint on my books. I don’t personally perceive it as a deception simply because it’s me paying me what I earn [...] and I’m not certain where morals enter into the decision. Your mileage may, of course, vary. My books are a part of my business as an author, and my publisher name is the public-facing identity of that business." 

It's clear that not everyone in the independent publishing community sees it my way. A couple people commented that they didn't see anything wrong with having a business name, but letting readers think you were a publisher was another matter.

Here are some quotes from dissenting opinions:

"There’s just something not right—criminal, even—about making up a “business entity” for the sake of making one’s book look more professionally appealing. I’m sure real, actual presses out there take great pride in their work and for an indie author to just make one up is a little cheap and inconsiderate, I say. ...it’s just a matter of integrity and a respect for business ethics."

"Self-published authors, who thinks they’re a small press because of a label, are silly.... I believe folks do imprints, thinking readers will miraculously buy their works because of it."

"It doesn't seem right to get ahead (if one even does) by essentially duping the reader. It’s dishonest."

"Self-publishers pretending they’re presses make a bad name for legitimate small press operations that do have a selection process for choosing titles."

"...because it is deception. That’s not only morally questionable but it often backfires."

"I wouldn’t want to deceive the audience." 

"As a writer, I could never feel comfortable doing something like this."

"I believe those who are saying they’re just creating a press for business purposes are choosing to ignore the consequences, intended or not, of putting that business name in the publisher box on the KDP. It implies to the reader that a book was published by a true press with an editor (not the author) who runs a submissions process and serves as a gatekeeper, even if not so stringent a one as one gets with the big presses."

"Readers who wouldn’t try self-published authors because they fear low standards may be tricked into trying your book."

After my comment, other author-publishers chimed in on the pro side: 

"There is nothing wrong with creating your own business whether it’s books, dresses, or gift items. A product is a product no matter what it’s form is. And I don’t understand this concept of morality that comes into it. You’re either in business or you’re not."

"I’m just not understanding why being up front about approaching selling books as a business (separate from the craft of writing them) would be perceived as a lie. Your readers want a good book. If you’re giving them that, how many of them do you suppose are really invested in whether or not you have a publishing identity separate from your name?"

"It’s a one-person press, sure, but a press nonetheless. And frankly, anyone who’s willing to do all the work themselves (often many of us around family and day job obligations) should be proud to call themselves both an indie and a press."

So Here's My Opinion:
I publish my books under an imprint, and anyone who cares to do the research can pretty quickly discern that I'm the only author Ravenscourt Press publishes. I make no attempt to hide it. I'm proud of the books I publish or I wouldn't be doing this. 

I love my books, and I love my very, very small publishing company. I love making sure each new publication is as good as I can make it with the help of a good editor, and I love finding and being found by readers. I did it New York’s way; it was thrilling to have all the trappings of literary legitimacy as we defined it then. We have new definitions now, and a new world of publishing opportunity to explore.

In the interest of full disclosure, there was a time when I would have argued against what I'm doing with my publishing business for pretty much the same reasons other people object to it now. But the game has changed, and self-publishing, as well as an opportunity writers have never had before in quite this way, is a business. What business would you launch without its own presence? 

What do you think?

Yesterday I re-published one of my favorite short stories: “Evenings, Mornings, Afternoons.” This one originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in December 1990.

In my own tradition of offering the afterword to my short stories for free in a shameless effort to get you to shake loose of $1.49 for the whole thing, what follows is the story of how I came to write "Evenings, Mornings, Afternoons."

When I was a very small child, my sister took me to see Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, a poignant romance/comedy starring William Powell (star of The Thin Man films) as a man resisting his own middle age, and Ann Blyth—not quite out of her teens—as a mermaid whom he catches and takes home after he hears her singing late at night. Being at the age when absolutely everything is real, I watched the film entirely convinced of the reality of mermaids and the men they fascinate.

Later I would read Peter Pan, and a few years after that, the Odyssey. Sirens who lure sailors to their deaths on the rocks are even more fascinating than cute animated mermaids with cockle-shell bras, if a bit less cuddly, and the whole idea of the possibilities in the largely-unexplored alien landscape of the oceans was renewed every time I visited an aquarium. The sea, to me, is another planet—one on which we land-dwellers would perish immediately. But oh, what amazing aliens have evolved to flourish there, and how unlike us they are in every way. The idea of people who live in the sea might go back to seals seen from afar by ancient fishermen. Certainly no-one knows for sure, but I think we’re all agreed there’s no such thing as mermaids.

We are, aren’t we?

Re-reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot in 1991, I was struck by the similar theme to the film I so loved in my childhood. Certainly the producers of Mr. Peabody might deliberately have borrowed the idea from the closing stanzas of the poem: a man afraid of growing old and disappointed in his own ordinariness entertains the idea of making contact with the mysterious “other” that remains somehow immune to the burden of years. Mr. Prufrock feared he would not hear the mermaids’ song, while Mr. Peabody felt somehow chosen by his mermaid, and somehow entitled to try to keep her for himself.

But Jonathan, the hero of my story, is neither of those gentlemen, though he is both beyond middle age and a bit romantic. What if, the writer in me wondered, a man approaching the end of his life was able to break the veil between the “real” and the “unreal” and perceive the reality of mermaids? After asking myself this question, I proceeded to attempt to answer it with a story.

If you’ve ever been confused by discussions of theme in English classes, that about wraps up the whole subject. The author asks herself a question and proceeds to answer it as best she can by telling a story. When she then asks “And then what happens?” she begins to concoct a plot and storyline to hold the theme. And the context, or setting, of the story holds the plot. It’s a bit like matryoshka dolls. For a story about mermaids, I took the easy way out and set it by the ocean. And the ocean quite naturally informed every scene.

I loved Jonathan from the first moment I saw him gazing out to sea. I also knew he was dying, and I grieved for him. Yes, writers are a bit crazy; I’m your proof. I didn’t consciously know he was gay until I saw him sitting at his table in the hotel dining room, twisting the string around his teabag, but once I did know, it felt so right that I suspect my unconscious mind always had that knowledge.

Kostopoulos breezed into the dining room and into the story without my knowing anything about him until I typed his name. Then I knew everything. How the hell does that work? I wish I knew.

Anyhow, when I had the story where I wanted it, I sent it to Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s, and he bought it. Some months later I received proofs back from Sheila Williams—then the managing editor, now the editor of that fine publication. The typesetter, whose name I never knew, had removed any mention of mer-people of the male persuasion. I contacted Sheila, and she talked to the typesetter. Apparently that worthy was shocked at the implications. “But that would mean he’s…” “Yes,” Sheila informed him gently. “He’s gay. Now change it all back.”

As the inimitable Sir Ian McKellen has been known to say: “Some people are gay. Get over it.”

Twenty-one years later, with a bit of light rewriting and editorial tinkering by my lovely and talented daughter, Marti McKenna, “Evenings, Mornings, Afternoons” is again available to readers. I’m really thrilled to have this story back in publication. I hope you enjoy it.