Some Words

There is now a short story on the stories page. I know… actual content. I’m as amazed as you are. Hope you like it.

Mark found some odd wording in a New York Times article.

Over at Crooked Timber they’re exploring some delicate wording that people have been looking at from several different angles too.

And at Open University, Eric Rauchway looks at how writing effects perception of the writer

Well, if that isn’t a call for clear writing… I refuse to conclude my cliches. I think, and in this I am heavily biased right now, that teaching better editing skills would be a big help here. The first instinct in writing is often not the right one. In answering a multiple choice question, so I am told, it is, but not when writing.

When you are writing quickly, your first instincts (unless you do an awful lot of writing) are going to trend toward more conversational English. That’s not so good. This isn’t merely a formality issue. Writing relies on structure and punctuation a lot more than spoken word does. You can inflect things to create all kinds of nuanced meaning. When you don’t hear it, inferences can be made, and those inferences can tear your pretty sentence to shreds.

Here’s a little more information about that Oates story I was ranting about. It seems other people are fired up about it, though not for the reasons I was.

Lore has more advice about how to run your site and writing. I have no comment on this one. Self promotion is not one of my strong suits.

Lore, formerly of Brunching Shuttlecocks, fielded the old question, “how can I be a writer too?” He does as good a job of laying it out as anyone. In fact he may be a bit more honest about it than most. My one complaint is that I don’t think he stresses practice enough. He does tell people to write all the time, but it seems to be in the service of getting your name out. He may be right, he’s a lot more successful than I am right now.

Still, one part of practice is learning to edit your own work. Being able to look at a sentence you’ve written, and know if it is readable, is very important. Self editing is not an innate talent. It is something that can be learned. Every time you edit something and think, “Wow, that sounds horrible, I should change that,” you come out on the other end a better writer (provided, of course, that you’re not just being paranoid). Just make sure the new sentence is better.

At least that’s what I tell myself.

I’m sure Lore feels something similar, and he just didn’t touch on it in his post, but I figured I’d point it out myself, to both of my readers.

And just to sweeten the pot a little, have some inspiration, courtesy of Daily Dino Comics.

Setting aside the unfortunate fact that I just ryhmed…

I just subscribed to the Virginia Quarterly Review. The first issue I’m getting is the October 2nd one, but they have articles online. One that is currently available on the site is an article about how the novel is not dead. As the article points out, calling the novel dead is a regular Sunday topic for some people, and has been for some time. Sometimes, as I work on what I hope will one day be a novel, I worry that the nay sayers are right. Reading isn’t going to stop any time soon though. It’s still the best way to get most forms of information. As long as reading is faster than listening to a lecture, or watching the news, or a dozen other things, it will still be how many people experience stories. There will always be stories that need more than a two hour long movie to get across. For those stories there will always be things like the novel.

The New York Times does Dummies. The article reminds me of the time Mark and I saw Pregnancy for Dummies in the checkout line at the store. Mark was sorely tempted to write “don’t” on the inside cover. We didn’t have a pen.

Tonight I was editing some writing. I was reading a portion of a story that was a shift back to an earlier time in the main character’s life. Now, the whole story is in past tense. Something inside of me snapped though, and I decided that it must not be past tense enough, or something. I decided to put the whole thing in past perfect. I’m honestly not quite sure what was going on in my head. I started adding the word ‘had’ to sentences left and right. I think at one point there was a paragraph in which every sentence used the word ‘had’ at least once. I just finished removing the extra hads. I’m going to go to sleep soon.

Edit: Of course the passage begins with a past perfect, but I realize now that I have never really thought about how much past perfect must be used in order stay in the the past. Most narration takes place in the past tense anyway. In order to flash back from the point you’re narrating, you need to use past perfect. Say you’re at a point in time A, and talking about a story at point in time B. Now, you want to go for two paragraphs to just before B or B -1. If you use too much past perfect tense it’s going to sound off, but you need past perfect to go back a bit. It’s like tension and release in a piece of music.

No one ever make gramar examples of more than one sentence, so this balance is hard to find examples for. I should look into that. Or perhaps it is late, and I should got to bed. Perhaps I should not press the publish button, and yet…

I remember, I once read a writer who said that they knew a piece was done when they went through a draft and the only thing they changed was commas.

It’s a hard thing to figure out, when something you have written is really done. I’ve only called a few things done so far. Tonight I took one out, it’s something that I’ve sent out and gotten rejected for from a few publishers. I’d been feeling a little shaky about it. People I’d shown it to had liked it, but I couldn’t help feeling that it could use a polish.

Damn. I started reading it. It was not good. The story was still worth telling, but the writing… ouch. I was suddenly seized by the desire to call the poor bastards who would have read it and apologize. I’ve tweaked sentences in the first twelve hundred words now. There were missing commas. There were odd word choices, flowery but worthless phrases, a whole host of sins. I had read over this story four times. Now, I think that I have developed as an editor of my own work, but that does not account for all of the problems. I think the key lesson here is that more than two weeks must pass before I return to a text to edit it. This might not hold for longer work, but with something that is only five thousand words, two weeks is simply not enough time to forget. I was still looking at it like it was my story. I think I have finally realized that that perspective is never good.

It’s a bit embarassing. I can only hope the places I sent this story don’t have a black list. That would be commical. I can see the letter already.

“Dear Mr. Macleod,

We liked your story. We liked it very much. Unfortunately a previous submission of yours contained improper uses of ‘which,’ when you should have used ‘that.’ Additionally there were commas in there that simply should not have been. We will be charging you for the therapy our reader had to go through after seeing those commas. They were very mean. He has never been quite the same.”

While floating around the net the other day I noticed that the alma mater had started listing faculty and alumni blogs. That lead to finding that Ruth Curry, who I had a class or two with has a blog. This post put a smile on my face. It reminded me of a story Neil Gaiman tells from time to time. In the story he’s getting a photo taken for a book cover and the photographer asks him how he’d like to look. I believe he says, “surprisingly fuckable for an author,” in the story.

And then there is this sendup of Deadwoo dthat I got via Boing Boing.

Very nice. You could probably do a speed Deadwood and cut an episode down to five or ten minutes. I love it anyway. Hell I love it because it uses language the way it does.

No matter how much I go over a text, I am convinced that there will be errors within it. Even blog posts have taken long enough to compose that I’m not going to tell you. The worst part of all of this, by far, is when I have sent a story out to a potential publisher, only to find an error two days later. I just got a wonderful email from a friend, who had liked a story I sent them, but they pointed out a redundant use of ‘still.’ It is embarassing how much this affected me. I opened up four documents and started proof reading them again. The other day I spent five minutes debating the use of a ‘the.’ I keep hoping I will get to the point where this won’t be an issue. Instead getting better just shows me more mistakes, which confirms that I’m getting better. It doesn’t keep me from wincing every time I submit a story though.

Mark and I just finished watching the Germany/Portugal match. It was, barring individual moments from Zidane, the most fun I’ve had watching the cup games so far. Germany won pretty handily on a couple of pretty goals by Schweinsteiger, and an accidental tip in by Petit on Portugal. Mark and I bickered a bit about whether Schweinsteiger’s goals, or the header for Portugal was prettier. The past few weeks have reminded me that I like soccer, which is a bad thing, as I waste too much time already following professional sports.

On a completely different subject I started writing a science fiction story the other day, just to see if I could, and it’s come along surprisingly quickly. It also doesn’t seem too bad right now, though it’s hardly amazing as a sci-fi story. However, having read so much sci-fi over the years, it feels very comfortable.

Today the last Professor Yeti came out. You can find it here. I haven’t read all the articles yet, but those I have read are good. Alex has a nice little wrap up in which he talks about his experience working on Yeti. Barker’s humor entry, which beat out one of mine on a similar topic, was better than the one I wrote. This is not surprising, as I generally think he’s better at bringing the funny. He’s got years on me at the game, and good instincts. It’s always been intimidating publishing in the same humor space as him. My bits tended to be bigger and more spastic, while his were more sure of themselves, confident that they were funny in a way my pieces were not.

Yeti was good. It was nice to work with a deadline, and I learned a lot from doing that. Not just the humor, but also the abortive reviews I tried a hand at. My thanks go out to Alex, Teague, and Doug for just letting me grow like a weed, but knowing when to reach for a bottle of Roundup.

The easiest thing in the world is dumping about three thousand words of storytelling into a file. This rule applies when the story needs to be at least five thousand to eight thousand words to be complete. After that it’s a dogfight. I plunged through about four stories a few weeks ago, and have been trying to wrap them up. One of them at least will be posted here. The plan is to wrap up these stories and do a little editing over the next week.

I also want to have at least the first ten chapters of the big one plotted. It’s getting pretty huge looking. New stuff just keeps falling into it, and I hope one day I will find myself cutting large swaths out because they aren’t needed. I’ll be honest. That thought really excites me. I don’t know that I’ve ever taken more than five hundred to a thousand contiguous words from something. More words and more plot means a freer hand in removing the chaff from the story.