how to write

Time Travel and the Problem of Paradoxes

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This post by Graham Storrs originally appeared on momentum on 10/21/14.

Graham Storrs joins us on the blog to discuss all things TIME TRAVEL.

“Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.” – Thomas Mann

What, you’re not a quietist? Never mind, we’ll come back to that.

As a writer of time travel novels, I spend a lot of time with paradox. It has become a friend. A shabby, disagreeable friend, I have to say, but one for whom I have an inordinate fondness. There are two ways of looking at paradox. Either it is a hideous monster of purest logic that prevents all possibility of time travel, or it is a sly creature of silken charm that whispers in the writer’s ear, urging creative trickery to make that story possible.

To be clear where I stand on the physics, let me just say that time doesn’t really work the way story-writers want it to. We don’t really travel in time. We travel in spacetime. Yes, you can describe space as a dimension something like the spatial dimensions to get a geometrical description of spacetime and, yes, it does seem as if you can move (in one direction) along that dimension at different rates. But consider this, if time is slowed in the vicinity of massive objects (which it is – ask Einstein), why does the Earth (a much smaller mass) not race ahead of the Sun in time, eventually leaving it far behind?

 

Read the full post on momentum.

 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Grammar

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This post by John E. McIntyre originally appeared on The Baltimore Sun on 10/3/14.

Online, discussions of grammar tend to display confusion about what the subject is, and the usual admixture of rubbish and emotion does not help.

There is, of course, the confusion between grammar as grammarians and linguists discuss it technically, and spelling and punctuation. But other, unstated meanings are often involved.

A post by Lucy Ferriss at Lingua Franca, “Grammar: The Movie,” identifies some of the additional meanings that surface in a new documentary.

 

Spelling errors: If you write it’s for its in your cover letter or resume, or confuse there/their/they’re, you’re probably not going to get the job. But these are merely spelling errors, as likely the result of carelessness as ignorance. Of course, they’re obvious, so easy to spot that even a manager can see them, but they are still trivial.

 

Bad writing: Lord knows there is plenty of slack, inexpert, and impenetrable writing to be found, but that is not a problem for grammarians to address. Academic writing, for example, is notoriously wordy and opaque, but it is usually grammatical.

 

Read the full post on The Baltimore Sun.

 

Five Reasons Great Horror Stories Work

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This post by Joe McKinney originally appeared on Moon Books on 10/5/14.

There is a fine art to scaring people, and like all art, it is the product of raw talent honed by craft and technique. No one can teach raw talent, of course. You either have it or you don’t. But craft and technique can be taught, and in the following few sections I’m going to walk you through five basic characteristics that all great horror stories share. Learn to incorporate these into your stories, and you’ll find your stories make more sense and, hopefully, sell better.

 

Creating Insularity

First, let’s talk about your story’s setting.

The key to good, memorable horror is much the same as it is in the business world – location, location, location. Many beginning writers come up with potentially great settings, be it an abandoned town, or a graveyard, or a mill, or a big scary house, and then fail to carry through on its potential. As a result, their great setting never rises above the tired old mainstays of B grade horror.

Think about all the great works of horror you’ve ever read. My guess is that, in every single one, you can point to the setting and say, “That right there sealed the deal for me. When the mother and child were trapped in that Pinto in Cujo, I was scared. When the priests entered Regan’s room in The Exorcist, I felt her bedroom door close behind me. When Pennywise the Clown spoke to the children of Derry, Maine through the drains in their bathrooms, I wanted to escape.”

But why does Stephen King’s story about a creepy old hotel in the middle of nowhere get the scares, and Joe Schmoe’s story set in a similar creepy old hotel fail to deliver? Well, think of some of the words I used in the previous paragraph. “Trapped.” “The door close behind me…” “Escape.” In every sense, the effect created is one of insularity. Through the characters in the story, we get a sense that we are closed off from the rest of the world, that we are no longer free or able to run away, that we are shut in with something very bad.

 

Click here to read the full post on Moon Books.

 

Ten Things That Make an Editor Stop Reading Your Manuscript

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This post by Elizabeth Law originally appeared on her Elizabeth Law Reads blog on 7/16/14.

Inspired by Broadway personality Seth Rudetsky‘s extraordinary “Seth Rudetsky Reveals the 5 WORST Audition Mistakes,” I humbly offer my own List of Dreaded Errors you should try to avoid in your children’s or YA manuscript.

#1 NOTHING AT STAKE FOR THE READER This is a BIGGIE, because readers, and maybe even your editor, will forgive a multitude of sins if you’ve got this one working. Is there something in your story we’re rooting for?  A character we care about whose situation we can relate to?  Don’t give us a kid who has a lot of things to say about his life, his parents, his school, his crush, but doesn’t have any problem that pulls us through your book.

#2. THE VOICE IS TOO YOUNG, OR TOO OLD, FOR THE AGE OF KID YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT. Think carefully about what your character would notice at his or her age. And please don’t try to sound cute. Deliberately misspelling something to appear childlike, or having your character say, for example, pasgetti instead of spaghetti, may cause an editor to turn off his computer and start rummaging for an Advil.

 

#3. TRYING TO SOUND HIP, STREET OR ETHNIC IF THAT’S JUST NOT YOUR THANG. We editors implore you to cut this one out! I’ve seen Italian mothers come out with sentences that are practically “Mama mia, that’s a spicy meatball” or an Asian kid in a lunchroom say “my grandfather says, reading enriches a man, conversation makes a man shrewd.” Really? A kid in the school cafeteria would say that?

 

Today this mistake turns up most often when writers try to write in what I’ll call Black or Latino street lingo. We need diverse books, absolutely. We all agree on that. But you don’t have to try to right every wrong in your own novel. If you can’t comfortably and naturally write in a particular dialect, don’t do it.

 

Click here to read the full post on Elizabeth Law Reads.

 

Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice

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This post by Chris Mooney originally appeared on Mother Jones on 10/3/14.

Steven Pinker explains why you don’t have to follow bogus grammar rules.

Leave it to a scientist to finally explain how to kill off bad writing.

In his new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Steven Pinker basically outdoes Strunk and White. The celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist and psycholinguist explains how to write in clear, “classic” prose that shares valuable information with clarity but never condescension. And he tells us why so many of the tut-tutting grammar “rules” that we all think we’re supposed to follow—don’t split infinitives, don’t use the passive voice, don’t end a sentence with a preposition—are just nonsense.

“There are so many bogus rules in circulation that kind of serve as a tactic for one-upmanship,” explains Pinker on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “They’re a way in which one person can prove that they’re more sophisticated or literate than someone else, and so they brandish these pseudo-rules.”

Unlike past sages of style, Pinker approaches grammar from a scientific perspective, as a linguist. And that’s what leads him to the unavoidable conclusion that language is never set in stone; rather, it is a tool that is constantly evolving and changing, continually adding new words and undoing old rules and assumptions. “When it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum,” writes Pinker in The Sense of Style.

Indeed, Pinker notes with amusement in the book that in every era, there is always somebody complaining about how all the uncouth speakers of the day are wrecking the Queen’s English. It’s basically the linguistic equivalent of telling the kids to get off your lawn. Why does this happen? “As a language changes from beneath our feet, we feel the sands shifting and always think that it’s a deterioration,” explains Pinker on the podcast. “Whereas, everything that’s in the language was an innovation at some point in the history of English. If you’re living through the transition, it feels like a deterioration even though it’s just a change.”

 

Click here to read the full post or listen to the podcast on Mother Jones.

 

Likeable, Relatable, and Real

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This post by Annie Cardi originally appeared on Ploughshares on 9/17/14.

When I was a junior in high school, we read The Great Gatsby in English class. I hadn’t read the book yet, but I knew the rest of my family hated it. (They’re Hemingway fans.) “Ugh, that Daisy,” my mom said. “Who cares?” Obviously a lot of readers care about Daisy and Gatsby, but many readers also place a priority on likeability.

On popular review sites, reviewers refer to everyone from Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley to Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester to the cast of A Visit from the Goon Squad as unlikeable. Part of this is a personal taste issue, but it also deals with what kind of people we want to surround ourselves with. A novel that’s over three-hundred pages long is a fair time commitment—it can be grating to spend that much time with a character you wouldn’t want to interact with on a daily basis. Likeability is about ease and comfort and a kind of emotional bond. Connected to that is the issue of relatability, which NPR host and producer Ira Glass brought up when he tweeted that Shakespeare’s plays and characters aren’t relatable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

You’ve Been Writing Sentences Wrong All Your Life! Find Out Why

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This post by K.M. Weiland originally appeared on her Helping Writers Become Authors site on 9/21/14.

The sentence. It’s the building block of all books. Without it, we may have a poem, a song, a movie, a painting, an interpretative dance. But we sure as scuttlebutt don’t have a book. Most of us learn how to write (and diagram!) sentences in grade school. Out of the many potential pitfalls of writing a story, surely the simple sentence isn’t likely to be one of them. But what if I said you’ve been writing sentences wrong all your life?

And I’m not talking grammar here, folks. You can have a perfectly parsed, perfectly punctuated sentence that would have that grade school teacher of yours blushing for pride—and it can still be wrong as wrong for your novel. (I’m also not talking motivation-reaction units, or MRUs, which I’ve addressed elsewhere.)

Why We’re All Writing Sentences Wrong
So what’s with this pandemic of poor sentences? Why are even the best diagrammers amongst us at risk?

Basically, it all comes down to this: we totally take the sentence for granted. The very fact that we’ve all been writing more-or-less grammatically correct sentences for most of our lives means we don’t even think about what we’re doing. Subject? Check. Predicate? Check. Period at the end? Check. Done.

That may be good enough for your latest email to the bank. But it’s not good enough for an author.

 

Click here to read the full post on Helping Writers Become Authors.

 

How to Appropriate by Not Really Trying: An Author’s Guide to Writing Socially Marginalized Communities in Romance

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This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her blog on 9/23/14.

I hate to start a post with a dictionary definition, but this topic needs every card laid out on the table. Let’s begin with the beginning. Appropriation is the act of using something that doesn’t belong to you as if it does.

Authors do this hourly. It’s practically our job: we’re professional pretenders. In my published career alone, I’ve appropriated more than I have time to list, but let’s tick off a few. Long-distance truck drivers. Pawn shop owners. Ballet dancers. Football players. Poker players. Italians.

Drag queens. Practitioners of BDSM. Persons with OCD and autism. Transgender women. Gay men.

Some of these things are not like the other. If a poker player reads Double Blind and feels I got something wrong, their personal injury goes no deeper than annoyance, possibly with a side order of irritation. The same goes for the truck drivers and football players and Italian families. None of these groups currently experience deep prejudice. If I screw up when I borrow them for my work, the egg is on my face alone, and they have every right to call me on it. They will do this from a position of if not privilege, at least a confidence in their semi-comfortable place in our common culture.

If I misrepresent the groups italicized above, matters change quickly. Every group listed have been significantly marginalized by the societies in which they exist, and by simply declaring themselves part of that community, the members experience prejudice, social stigma, and often outright abuse. If I screw up when writing about these groups, not only do I have egg on my face, I contribute further harm and insult to persons already bearing a full plate of social struggle. If they simply hear about it happening, that’s bad enough. But if they purchase my book to see themselves represented in a positive way, and I slap them in the face? That’s bad. That’s very, very bad.

 

Click here to read the full post on Heidi Cullinan’s blog.

 

The Craft of Voice: Part 1

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This post by JJ Marsh originally appeared on the Vine Leaves Literary Journal on 9/8/14.

In this section, I’m looking at choices: person and tense, distinctive character voices, Point of View (POV) and how to make the reader take sides.

I assume you have a Work-In-Progress (WIP) or some material you can use to practise the exercises below. If not, use the exercises to create some, or play with an existing work.

 

Person

The most popular ways of telling a story are in first (I) or third person (s/he), although second person (you) has occasionally been used to powerful effect in such novels as Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. Some books make a feature of switching the person. For example, in Complicity by Iain Banks, the readers only know we’re in the killer’s head by the change to second person narration. Many writers have strong opinions on which is best and why. First person aficionados cite intimacy and identification with the narrator. Those who favour third quote the freedom of being able to change characters or observe things the narrator cannot see/know. (WARNING! See POV points below*.)

Publetariat Editor’s Note: asterisk refers to another section in the full post, linked below.

 

Tense

 

Click here to read the full post on the Vine Leaves Literary Journal.

 

What’s in a Word: Emotional Atmosphere

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This post by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff originally appeared on Book View Cafe on 8/25/14.

Like all writers, I have a special relationship with words. In my case, I love them. I am fascinated by the way they work (or fail to work), the myriad ways in which they can be misunderstood, misused, even abused by people who don’t know any better or who should know better or who abuse words with malice aforethought.

I know some writers who have a love/hate relationship with words, who claim they hate using them but love having used them. I don’t get that at all, so I’ll leave it to someone else to blog about that. This blog is about the use of words to create emotional atmosphere.

As a writer of fiction, I rise or fall on how well I can use words to create an atmosphere in which my characters live and move and in which my readers exist with them during the length of a story. Words are symbols. They are signposts. They are colors. They tell the reader how to view a place, a person, a thing.

There are two parties to this, of course, the writer has to know how to use the words, but the reader has to know how to read them. This requires a shared knowledge base or shared experience or, at minimum, a shared definition and/or connotation for the words.

 

Click here to read the full post on Book View Cafe.

 

Top 25 Reasons Your Submissions are Rejected

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This post by Heidi M. Thomas originally appeared on The Blood-Red Pencil on 9/30/10.

Tips from the Surrey, B.C. Writers Conference (Oct 22-24). Each year agents and publishers conduct an exercise, where they read aloud the first pages of writers’ submissions to see how far they would read before it would be rejected. Here is a list of reasons for rejection, courtesy of Anne Mini, Author!Author!:

1. An opening image that did not work.

2. Opened with rhetorical question(s).

3. The first line is about setting, not about story.

4. The first line’s hook did not work, because it was not tied to the plot or the conflict of the opening scene.

5. The first line’s hook did not work, because it was an image, rather than something that was happening in the scene.

6. Took too long for anything to happen (a critique, incidentally, leveled several times at a submission after only the first paragraph had been read); the story taking time to warm up.

7. Not enough happens on page 1

8. The opening sounded like an ad for the book or a recap of the pitch, rather than getting the reader into the story.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Blood-Red Pencil.

 

12 Most Go-To Grammar Tips

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This post by Becky Gaylord originally appeared on 12 Most on 8/19/14.

Most of us must communicate in writing — not necessarily with paper and a writing instrument anymore, yet digital media has changed only the tools we use. In fact, as new-fashioned means of communication have multiplied, so have demands for the old-fashioned skill of conveying information in writing.

See, we still write cover letters, memos and notes. But now, we also write status updates, blog posts, emails, online comments, tweets, bullets for slide presentations, captions for visuals to share on social media, and so on.

In nearly all cases (text messages aside) correct grammar matters. This is especially true if communicating for work or to a professional audience. Using correct grammar begets credibility. Think of it as an extension of appearance: Spiffy beats sloppy.

The goal, though, is to be spiffy, swiftly. And that’s the purpose of this post: It’s an organized, streamlined guide. It’s alphabetized. And, it gives one-word answers. (Example sentences follow each answer, giving context.)

So, next time you need grammar help on the fly, here are 12 go-to tips!

 

1. Accept/Except

Accept = Receive
I must accept blame for the accident because I ran the red light.
He accepted the award on behalf of the whole group.

Except = Excluding
Everyone is going except Harry.
I like all vegetables except broccoli.

 

2. Advice/Advise

Advice = Noun
The advice you gave me was really useful.
No, I don’t need, or want, your advice.

Advise = Verb
He advised her to be careful in dealing with the complicated situation.
I don’t know anything about it; please advise me how to proceed.

 

Click here to read the full post on 12 Most.

 

Why Dangling Modifiers Aren't the Real Problem

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This post by James Harbeck originally appeared on Slate on 9/9/14.

There’s been a little kerfuffle lately over danglers. Steven Pinker, who is a noted linguist, said in an article in The Guardian that some dangling modifiers are OK to use—in fact, according to him, they’re not even ungrammatical.

What are dangling modifiers, or “danglers” for short, you ask? In a nutshell, a dangler is a little phrase—not a complete sentence—that is used at the start of a sentence to describe something, but that something is not the subject doing the main action of the sentence. Since dangling modifiers don’t attach to what comes right after them, they “dangle.” The result is that they can be read as describing the subject of the sentence when they actually don’t, which can be pretty funny, and we must not be unintentionally funny when we are writing.

Danglers can use present participles:

Walking down the street, a statue of King George appeared. [It’s not really the statue that was walking.]

They can use past participles:

Trapped underwater, the cook recounted his miraculous rescue. [He wasn’t trapped at the time he recounted it, just at the time he was rescued.]

 

Click here to read the full post on Slate.

 

Our Use Of Little Words Can, Uh, Reveal Hidden Interests

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This article by Alix Spiegel originally appeared on NPR. Its content and conclusions can be very helpful when it comes to writing dialog that reveals character.

One Friday night, 30 men and 30 women gathered at a hotel restaurant in Washington, D.C. Their goal was love, or maybe sex, or maybe some combination of the two. They were there for speed dating.

The women sat at separate numbered tables while the men moved down the line, and for two solid hours they did a rotation, making small talk with people they did not know, one after another, in three-minute increments.

I had gone to record the night, which was put on by a company called Professionals in the City, and what struck me was the noise in the room. The sound of words, of people talking over people talking over people talking. It was a roar.

What were these people saying?

And what can we learn from what they are saying?

That is why I called James Pennebaker, a psychologist interested in the secret life of pronouns.

About 20 years ago Pennebaker, who’s at the University of Texas, Austin, got interested in looking more closely at the words that we use. Or rather, he got interested in looking more closely at a certain subset of the words that we use: Pennebaker was interested in function words.

For those of you like me — the grammatically challenged — function words are the smallish words that tie our sentences together.

 

Click here to read the full article on NPR.

 

Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing

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This post was originally shared on Brain Pickings by Maria Popova on 9/28/12.

In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian reached out to some of today’s most celebrated authors and asked them to each offer his or her commandments. After Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, here come 8 from the one and only Neil Gaiman:

1. Write

2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

 

Click here to read the full post on Brain Pickings.