DeepGenre

Sherwood Smith July 3rd, 2006

Because we are highly trained professionals, our revision terms must reflect our stern-browed, high-tech sophistication.  So the next bunch of my word-level revision stop signs I call The Muzzies.

 

These are various ways we accidentally smear the picture we’re trying to build, or blip the reader out of the story while she tries to figure out what we meant.

 

•  simultaneous actions–this oopsie I catch in my own stuff all the time.  You’d think after all these decades I learn, but noooo.  We’re trying to vary our sentence rhythms, right?  So we might put a subordinate clause up front, which is grammatically correct, but syntactically wrong.

 

Rubbing her eyes, she considered her options.

 

Now that is a legitimate simultaneous action–the character really is thinking at the same time as she’s rubbing her eyes.

 

Easing the door open, he raced up the stairs.  This one is like Nixon’s secretary way back during the Watergate days, trying to prove that she could perform two very different actions at once.  If the character is easing the door open, how can he at the same time be racing up the stairs?  That one should be given sequential wording:  He eased the door open then raced up the stairs.

 

How to tell if they are really simultaneous?  The quick’n’ easy method is to insert an invisible While up front.  While easing the door open, he raced up the stairs.  Oooops!  While rubbing her eyes, she considered her options  Yep Works.

 

•  muddy visions  Perfectly good phrases in our world become if not ridiculous in the story world, they muddle the picture for the reader who is very careful or very visual.

 

He fired an arrow.  Arrows are not fired, they are shot.  Unless you are setting fire to an arrow before shooting it.  Guns are fired–and artillery.  And by the way, the word ‘gun’ did not indicate a pistol in our early gunpowder days.  A gun was artillery, i.e. cannon, and pistols were pistols, until someone started saying ‘hand gun’ and that got shortened to ‘gun’.  So if you’re writing about rollicking pirates on the 17^th century high seas, don’t have your pirate carrying a gun unless he’s got super-powers.  (Also, his pistol has one shot,  ‘bullets’ weren’t around then either, and cannon-balls did not explode, they smashed.)

 

She tuned him out.  So they have radio in your world?  He struck out.  They play baseball?  .  Do they have horses that are controlled with reins?  (And by the way don’t make this mistake: She reigned in her enthusiasm.  Kings and queens (and pandemonium in sloppy writing) reign.  Horses have reins

Slang.  Some writers insist it’s okay to use okay for discourse in their epic fantasy world, or kids for young folks.   “We’re using English after all, even though it’s understood the characters are speaking Epic-ese.  So therefore it’s okay to say okay and children are kids.”  Well, if you want your characters to sound like modern Americans for just that length of time, go right ahead.  But do think about the tone of your story.  I don’t know about you, but I really winced when watching a blockbuster movie featuring a young lady of 1910 who said earnestly, “It’s not about me, it’s about winning!”  Ugh!  Inevitably commercial shorthand that’s dinned into our ears slips into the stream of daily language, and we all know what it means, but do you really want your characters sounding like TV ads?

 

Basically, try to keep your prose in their world, not in ours.

 

lard  These are the harmless phrases we don’t actually need, that slowly but inexorably bog our pacing down.  Most readers, and beginning writers, don’t even notice them–and cinematic writers like me who have zero talent but lots of visual imagination hate the sight of them . . . and continue to spackle them all over first drafts.

 

She proceeded to turn and walk[ed] down stairs.  He turned on his heel and left.  I stood there and watched as the cavalry charged.  He paused, and after thinking about it a long moment then agreed.

 

In every one of these situations, the italic phrase is grammatically correct, but it’s implied, it’s boring, it’s not needed.   It proceeds to a halt just for a moment  in the reader’s mind, which effectively  slows the pace.

 

• This  I was told, “NEVER use the word ‘this’ as an object!” If you can cut it, do. (”Has she heard this?” shortens better to “Had she heard?”) Cut after the verb–or give it a noun. That word diffuses every visual, or issue, it doesn’t define. Just about every time it’s used each this could either be replaced by ‘it’ or cut, or given a noun to strengthen the sentence, instead of leaving the reader saying, over and over, “This what?”

• Style