writing tagged posts

Authors can and do go wrong with their word choices, or use words the wrong way. This isn’t just a case of not understanding Mark Twain’s definition of the difference between the right word and the almost-right word: the lightning versus the lightning bug. It is that, but it’s much more.

There are at least half a dozen ways an author can mess things up for herself and her readers when it comes to word choice. They are: using words that are wrong for

• The story, usually in narrative;
• The character, usually in dialogue; or
• The reader, in either one.

Authors can also simply use the wrong word when they don’t know the difference between two or more words or what a word actually means...

In the movie My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl turned high-society woman of charm and mystery, sings to her would-be boyfriend, “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words….”

For some writers, that’s not a problem. In fact, they’re too in love with words, and think the more of them there are on the page or screen, the better. Then there are the others who, Eliza-like, want no more of them. Or at least darn few of them.

The days of padding a piece with any and every extraneous available word, á la Henry James, are over. (Well, for new or getting-established writers, they’re over. For über-successful authors like Stephen King, Tom Clancy, or George R. R. Martin, padding may not be intentional, but it’s not edited out, either.)

At the othe...

In addition to taking care to develop your own skills as a critiquer, some of which I discussed in Part 1A, there’s one other person you need to always be mindful of: the person whose work you’re reviewing.

Think about how you react when your work is being critiqued. In 2012, Becky Levine wrote a blog post called Critique Comments: Remembering to Give Them Time. She advised letting a critique you receive sit and percolate, or ferment, or something (my words, her concept) before responding to it. Of course, there’s going to be the natural, defensive first response, even if the comments aren’t negative. Any suggestion to do things a different way is going to get that. That’s a reaction that needs to be put aside, taken off the hot stove and allowed to cool, as it were...

Writers’ tics—those sneaky, dastardly things that slip into our writing when we’re not looking and make it go CLANK! They’re insidious and terribly hard to recognize: our eyes glide right over them when we’re editing.

And it doesn’t matter how experienced we are, we’re still vulnerable to them.

What are they? Here’s a nowhere-near-complete list:

• Incessantly using unnecessarily intrusive adverbs excessively.
• Clichés we’ve read a million times before.
• The words or phrases we really like to use over and over because they really do a really great job of really capturing what we’re really trying to say.
• Those, like, popular, y’know, empty words or phrases that are nothing but noise. I know: seriously?
• R...

Ah, dialogue. It’s hard for many writers to do well. When it works, it crackles, sings, inspires, enrages, chills, thrills. But when it doesn’t, it might do that too, but for the wrong reasons! It may be stiff and stilted, choppy or verbose, confused or confusing, or have other problems. Any or all of those characteristics can be acceptable, even necessary, when they reflect the character of the speaker. When they don’t, there’s trouble.

Natural Dialogue vs. Written Dialogue

There are many reasons for this. First off, dialogue in writing—all writing: fiction, memoir, and non-fiction—is not natural, but has to sound natural when read, especially out loud...

Image by photostock, courtesy FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This post begins a series on narrative and dialog. Stated most simply, narrative and dialog are the tools writers use to tell their stories. They take different forms and serve complementary functions, but with plenty of overlap.

Writers use narrative to:

• Describe—to show—action (“Bob ran down the street after Alice’s car”) or emotion;
• Describe a person (“Alice’s hair was dyed souvenir-shop-coral red”), a place, or a thing;
• Make connections between people, places, actions, emotions, or things; and
• Provide the reader with whatever other information she might need.

It is the words not placed inside quotation marks or used for internal monolog (sometimes shown in italics).

While it’s true that dialog can do many of these...

If you look up “tangent” in the dictionary, it takes a while to get to a definition like this one from Webster’s Universal College Dictionary: “digressing suddenly from one course of action or thought and turning to another.”

Tangents share a characteristic with excessive backstory and flashbacks: they start from the current story moment and then shift in time, place, point of view, or topic. As with a flashback, the author may mean to provide some kind of amplifying information, but then he forgets to stop after providing it and wanders not only off the beaten path, but off any path at all.

Sometimes that can be intentional, for example if she’s trying to produce a piece of stream-of-consciousness writing...

Backstory and its kissing cousin flashback are techniques authors use to provide amplifying information about a situation, a location, or a character. Flashbacks and backstory differ from “front story” in that the author jumps away from the story’s current timeline to relate them, then returns to the story’s present to continue.

Jumping forward in time—a “flash forward”—can have the same purpose, and everything below also applies to it.

Good Backstory Technique

Flashing back is just a technique for relating backstory. A brief interruption of the story’s flow, it can be:

• Initiated by the narrator to provide information not available to the characters or which would be unnatural for the characters to provide;
• A chara...

This article begins a series on flashbacks, flash-forwards, and backstory: that ancillary material that fills out a story and its characters by introducing information that doesn’t fit into the piece’s main flow. As with so many of the other subjects I’ve discussed, this topic applies to non-fiction as well as fiction.

Before I get to flashbacks, etc., though, I need a transition: this post on transitions.

What Is A Transition?

A transition is a bridge, a connection between two pieces of a story, such as when the story changes:

• Time, that is, moves into the future or past relative to the current moment;
• Location;
• Point-of-view or focus character, in other words, whose perspective the story is being told through ...

We may not think of reading a work out loud as being a useful technique for critiquing a work, but it can be. Before a piece ever reaches a critiquer’s hands, though, authors can use the technique too. This article, then, is more for authors than critiquers, but both can benefit from it.

If you’ve been writing for any time at all, you’ve heard the advice that you should read your work out loud, or have it read to you. The reason is, you’ll hear things go bump or clank in the text that you might not have discovered otherwise. Your brain processes information through different channels when it comes in through your ears as opposed to when it comes in through your eyes. That can be truly eye- (or should that be “ear-”?) opening.

Like a lot of authors, I used to think I ...