Tag Archives: writing

The Joys of English and the Psuedo Loss of the Oxford Comma

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I’m always amused by the English language. There is a joke (button/Tshirt) that says the English language leads nice languages down back alleys, then beats them and steals words and grammar from it, leaving the language to die. We have nothing on the Japanese, who has a whole alphabet (syllabry if you’re nasty) dedicated to stuff they’ve taken from other languages not counting the apprehension of an entire system of pictographs from another language.

That being said, English is a living language. It’s used around the world and can vary night and day by region. Think about it this way. I took seven years of Spanish between middle and high school. Yet, I was ill prepared to be an exchange student in Mexico. How you may be asking? Well the way you ask for the check in Spain will get you beaten up in Mexico, mainly because it’s not nice to ask the waiter to masturbate for you.

The point is, what you learn in school doesn’t apply in real life. That goes for English too.

I’m sure you heard the news today that Oxford is dropping the serial comma from their style book. This has been a trend in writing for a while. Both AP and Chicago Style allow for no comma before ‘and’. In fiction writing style guides may or may not be used but I know, I’ve confused a few of my fellow critiquers by using AP style in my novel and short story. (Hey, it confused me too. Taught me to be clear about what I was doing when I ask for line edits.)

The shock and aw over what goes where in a sentence (is there punctuation rules in any other language as complicated as those in the English language?) depends on what you were taught in school, what you had to use to work and what the folks around you use. As a living language, words and punctuation change all the time, despite dictionaries and style guides.

Word usage is what really gets me though. I’m sure you heard in school that contractions are not really words and should never be used, only to have them appear on spelling tests the next year? There have been screaming matches at the use of a lot. Or in my own manuscripts I’ve had editors and critiques tell me to use all right instead of alright. Then the next batch will tell me that alright is correct. Hell, in Word, which I have set in AP Style finds alright correct in the former sentence and incorrect in the latter.

The key is to be consistent. Once you decide how to present your prose stick to that. If your publisher has a style guide they want used they’ll tell you (or put it in the submission guidelines. I have seven versions of ‘Get’em While You Can’ because of grammar requests differ depending on market.) It’s not going to kill you to remove the comma before ‘and’.

I’d say goodbye to the serial comma but I haven’t used it in years.

Landmarks

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It’s been an interesting year in my writing career for me.

I’ve had my first print publication from Cutting Block Press, to be released in August in their new anthology, Tattered Souls 2.

I’ve been to my first convention as an author with something being sold and celebrated at the convention. There, I signed my first autograph for a complete stranger.

And now I’m taking on my first novel editing commission as a freelance editor from someone I didn’t personally know.

It’s been pretty amazing. I’d like to describe all these processes, so you can see what they’re like from the inside.

I submitted ‘Becka’, my horror novella, to a few places before Cutting Block Press. I approached the submission process with a strong amount of confidence in the work. I’ve submitted short stories before, to lots of places. Following standard advice at the time, I usually submitted with the philosophy that if you start at the top (in pay terms) and go by what genre and general type of story the magazine likes, you’ll eventually get there. That didn’t really happen.

With ‘Becka’, I had a much smaller field to go through – it’s not easy getting novella length work into print. But I knew it was a fantastic story (no false modesty here). And so I approached it with the attitude of finding a worthy home for it – somewhere that it would fit in to the attitude and desires and body of work of the press in question. The second place I looked happened to be Cutting Block, and I sent it off really hoping they would accept it, because they were right for the story. And it got accepted.

Later I found out they were having a release party for it at the World Horror Convention in Austin, which happens to be a place where I have relatives. I also had a friend who wanted to take me to Florida and could sort of fold a trip to the convention into the general vacation. Now, let’s be clear: that meant I didn’t have to pay anything in particular for this trip. Travel costs, convention entry, all covered. As an ENTRY LEVEL published writer, I would strongly recommend not spending much to go to conventions where your stuff is published – it’s fun and exciting, but makes zero financial sense and there’s not that big a boost to your career. Go to your local ones, because they offer so many benefits that it’s worth the entry costs. But when you factor in hotels and flights, better wait till your career demands it.

That said, I learned a lot. I mostly learned about the horror community. Now, be aware that I’m comparing it to the SF/Fantasy community, which is mostly where I spend my time. In comparison, I found that the horror convention was much smaller. Smaller even than my local Denver SF convention, Mile Hi Con. And this was the WORLD Horror Convention.

Everyone I met at the convention was wonderful. Nice people, friendly and interested (and interesting). Interestingly, everyone I met was a writer, or an artist, or a publisher, or an editor, or attending with one of the above. I do mean everyone. At Mile Hi Con you have a large surrounding flood of readers, appreciators and people who come to meet the writers/editors. Yes, nearly every SF fan is an aspiring writer somewhere in the closet of his soul, just like me. But at the horror convention, the attendees were almost universally in the biz. These people were primarily selling to one another.

It may be as a direct consequence of that, but I also felt that there was a strong uniformity to cover design, art and clothing of choice – all of which were black, with a strong iconic image and/or statement.

It was all very interesting and I enjoyed it greatly. There were some fascinating panels. As usual, the combat panel, staffed by ordinary looking people who could tear you into small pieces if necessary, dissolved into anecdotes – they do that at the SF conventions too and it’s always a blast. I had a great time manning the booth for Cutting Block, quizzing anybody who sat with me about aspects of the business that I wasn’t fully familiar with yet. Learned a lot there, too, especially about when it is and isn’t useful to sell your own books. And I signed an autograph or two for people I’d never met, which I count as a landmark too.

Good stuff, and I had a great time. Conclusions: there’s lots of room for innovative new writers in the horror field, and make sure you spend your money wisely when considering conventions.

And finally, the freelance editing section of my website garnered a customer for the first time. As you know if you’ve been reading this site or following me on Twitter, the marvelous Jeff Kirvin got me into the whole editing thing, flooring me a year ago or so by asking me to do this job I’d never considered at all. Like Miles Vorkosigan, I never thought this was a job that had any reference to me, but I took to it like a bat to warm blood. The term addiction may be useful here.

So these are the landmarks of my career recently. It’s not all been roses – I seem to be rather stuck in terms of getting any writing of my own done recently, for example. I’ve been through patches like that before, however. And health issues have really interfered with things in the last months. But that’s hopefully going to turn around.

The future looks interesting. Thanks so much for being part of it. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do…

Are you a fishist?

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You started out a good writer, and your critique partners are part of a process that made you even better. You’ve worked hard, and listened to what that phenomenal group of readers and commenters has to say, and you can really see a difference between the stuff you wrote pre-group and the stuff you write now. This is working. It really is. You’re getting better.

In fact, you just might be the best one in the group. Secretly, you’ve always harbored the belief that you could be. That sneaking suspicion has grown into the belief that you ARE. You’re the best in the group. Oh, you’re not going to gloat or be smug, and you’re still giving 110% when it’s your turn to write a critique. So it’s not like that.

That’s a good thing, right? You’re the most likely to get published. The one who can give the best advice – delivered tactfully, of course – to the others. You get respect and approval, and everybody loves your work, and critique after critique says “I can’t find much to complain about here.” You’re the biggest fish in that pond.

Careful.

It FEELS like a good thing to be the biggest fish in your pond. It’s something you could get used to. It’s comforting, and comfortable, and the accolades are nice. That feeling of being helpful, and of teaching others, and of genuinely assisting up and coming writers to become better… those feelings are pretty great.

But it’s not good news.

That process of improvement, of fresh air let into your work through the puncture holes, of critiques that make you gnash your teeth a few times before you pay attention – that uncomfortable, damnable feeling of having things to learn – remember? That process has just stopped.

Once you’re the big fish, it’s dangerously easy to be seduced into thinking that you’ve stopped growing because there’s no more room to grow. A writer can’t afford to become complacent and self-important. We have enough ego already – yes, expressed just as often in breast-beating and despair as it is in self-congratulation and smug assistance to others, but it’s still ego.

In my critique group, I’m far from the biggest fish. I’m blessed with several other writers who knock my socks off. I’m further blessed with writers who are better than I am at different things – I can learn about plotting from one person, story structure from another, method from another.

Best of all, I’m blessed with wonderful writers who frequently disagree with me. Often I have to go home and sleep on their words before I can shut my ego up enough to listen, but whether I end up changing my ways or not, their viewpoints are always valuable. I couldn’t ask for a better group of readers.

If you’ve become the victim of fishism – if you’re splashing in a pond that doesn’t have any room left for growing – consider flooding yourself with new ideas, new disagreements, new discomforts, and new critique partners. Start that painful learning process again. It’s a big ocean.

Fiction Writers – You Need to Read!

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Would you take seriously the ambitions of a competitive swimmer who didn’t like to get in the water? Or a person who wanted to direct movies, but proudly stated they have only seen two movies in the last year? How about someone who wanted to be a great orchestral composer, but didn’t take the time to listen to music?

Yet in the last several months, I’ve run into an increasing number of aspiring fiction writers who didn’t read fiction for pleasure – who seemed proud of that, or felt it was a good thing for their writing. This boggles my mind.

Now, I’m not talking about people keeping dream journals, or writing only for themselves. I’m talking about people who want to write commercial fiction, believe they have a career ahead of them in doing so, and intend to get published in one way or another.

Here are some of the reasons they give as to why they don’t read books, and my answers.

- “I don’t have time. I work a full job, have family commitments and can’t find enough time to do everything I’m supposed to, plus writing – how can I read?” If you cannot find time to read, how are you planning to find time to write? Writing takes effort, time, mental space, commitment and dedication. I suspect you might be listening to the ‘easy money’ myth that writers don’t work hard, and there’s lots of money in it. That is just not the case.

- “I don’t want my work to be influenced by other writers’ styles.” Then you will run into two problems. One, you will be unknowingly using cliches and done to death ideas that other writers have already used. And two, your style will be unreadable, because you have failed to absorb and internalize the flow of different styles. A writer’s unique voice is made up of their experience with lots of different styles – the reader has chosen and discarded what fit into their own style, then added something different of their own. That’s how you build a unique writing style. You can’t do it in a vacuum.

- “I don’t enjoy reading, in fact it’s boring. I’d rather watch the movie. Anyway, I don’t have to read other people’s work – it’s MY writing I’m interested in, after all.” This sounds arrogant, and it is. Its underlying assumption is that people are going to want to read your stuff, and you aren’t going to have to learn anything to make that happen. I’m sorry, but that is very rarely true. Also, with an attitude like that, your work is probably going to be somewhat on the arrogant side as well, which may not appeal to a lot of readers who are not you.

- “Reading hurts my eyes, confuses my mind, and I find it hard to follow.” There’s a little bit of justice in this one, but unless you’re afflicted with a major disorder, it’s usually about practice. Reading is a skill, and it’s hard to do anything for pleasure, even walking, if you don’t do it enough to be reasonably skilled at it. Out of practice? Start with flash fiction, work up to short stories and novellas before you start reading novels. If you look at a novel and it just looks TOO LONG, if it looks like work, then try something shorter.

Here’s why I think reading a great deal isn’t just fun, isn’t just important, but is crucial to the careers of fiction writers. In very basic, toolbox terms, reading increases your vocabulary, improves your understanding of workaday spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, paragraph length, dialogue tags. But that’s not all!

Nonreaders are doomed to write stories that come across like bad copies of ideas better writers have already published, because the nonreader doesn’t know it’s out there already. The nonreader’s work is riddled with cliche.

Writing takes time, effort and commitment. If you can’t find the time in your life to read, then where are you going to find the time to write… especially since you’ve made it harder on yourself by not reading?

Reading the work of other writers gives you a chance to have your style influenced. That’s a good thing. You cannot find your unique voice in a chorus of silence; you must hear other voices and discover how yours is different. Reading good fiction and bad fiction gives you the groundwork, the place to stand, to understand fiction at all, and to make your fiction understandable to others.

The nonreader cannot resonate to the rhythms, the functions, the unspoken rules of fiction unless they have absorbed a great deal of it, through reading it, in the past. The output of a nonreader is going to come across as disjointed, confusing and badly structured to those who have spent their lives reading a lot of fiction.

And, if you don’t believe me, here’s a challenge. I dare you… I DOUBLE DARE YOU to find me a published how-to book about writing good fiction that tells you there’s no need to read the work of others. If you find one, put it in the comments. If there’s even one that doesn’t advise you to read, I will be very, very surprised.

Chasing Details

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One of the most difficult things about revisions is dealing with what isn’t there. Finding the details that need to be changed if you’ve taken something out is often harder than changing things that result from putting something in.

Here’s an example. In my current work, Spark, a steampunk novel, one of my characters is being held captive by some island natives. In the original scene, the local shaman comes in holding a large basket. He sets it down to listen to some dialogue back and forth, then settles in to do a ritual in the cell, involving fire and knives. Then he picks up the basket and walks out again.

Well, I decided this ritual was both too important and too space-consuming to be done INSIDE the cell where our hero is being held. So I moved it outside. The part of the scene that remained in the cell was the conversation. So here’s how it ended up: shaman walks in, conversation, shaman walks out, THEN ritual. That makes sense, right?

But it took me three read-throughs to realize that my shaman put down the basket for the conversation, then picked it up again, for no apparent reason. This is not a heavy basket. Nor does anybody need both hands for the conversation – it’s just not that intimate. So my shaman, a muscled, tattooed fellow with glowy blue ink inscribed in his skin, sets down a perfectly ordinary basket like a jerk, only to pick it up again once the talking is done.

Sure, it’s a basket. That’s not a big deal, but it could have been a knife, in which case our hero would have had every opportunity to grab it and make a try for escape. If he didn’t do so, then my hero looks like the jerk. Could be big!

So whenever you take something out, or move something around, it can be difficult to find all the little details that were changed by the change. Today’s lesson – revisions are hard!