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Articles about craft.

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.

 

Stephen King, the Threat That Hangs Over All Writers

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This post by Jessica Aspen originally appeared on her site on 8/21/14.

I’ve started writing ghost stories. Gothic romances of vulnerable heroines, desperate heroes, and scary haunted ghosts. I have an extensive reading background in Gothic romance and I love it, so it’s easy for me to create the spooky house, the dark and stormy night, and the hero who might be a threat.

What isn’t so easy for me was writing the ghost. But luckily I have my own ghost lurking behind me, Stephen King. Not that my little haunted holiday romance is anything like Stephen King’s writing. It’s not. Not at all. Don’t pick it up thinking it is. But more to the point, Stephen King is what scares me.

I’m so terrified of him that I’ve never even read one of his fiction books. Just the idea of reading Cujo or Pet Cemetery makes my palms tingle and my knees weak. I know I won’t sleep. I know I’ll be afraid to even turn off the light.

 

Click here to read the full post on Jessica Aspen’s site.

 

Confessions of a Bad Writer Gone Good

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This post by Julia Scott originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 9/2/14.

There is a certain kind of bad writing that occurs when you are between the ages of 16 and 24 and have an audience of one. ‘Self-indulgent’ doesn’t begin to describe it, and in fact to do so would minimize the intense feeling of urgency of budding writers of a certain age who feel called to bear witness to our years of transition. From falling in love to falling apart, the themes are big and the feelings are bigger. It’s all so overwhelming. The only way to get a grip on the given moment – to slow it down long enough to see it pass — is to write it.

I want to experience LIFE viscerally, but at the same time step back and think about it all.

That’s a line from a journal entry I wrote as a trembling, sensitive 19-year old on the eve of my 20th birthday, rediscovered nearly 15 years later whilst looking through the diary pages of my sad, anxious year abroad in Paris. The ink was green on yellowed stationary, and as I read it, I remembered walking the streets of that indifferent city as a virginal college junior — the dank wetness of winter, the diesel fumes, the existential fear of failure that leveled me for hours on my thin cot in the drafty boarding house I shared with a hundred other women, run by nuns.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Huffington Post.

 

What’s Up With That: Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos

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This post by Nick Stockton originally appeared on Wired on 8/12/14.

You have finally finished writing your article. You’ve sweat over your choice of words and agonized about the best way to arrange them to effectively get your point across. You comb for errors, and by the time you publish you are absolutely certain that not a single typo survived. But, the first thing your readers notice isn’t your carefully crafted message, it’s the misspelled word in the fourth sentence.

Typos suck. They are saboteurs, undermining your intent, causing your resume to land in the “pass” pile, or providing sustenance for an army of pedantic critics. Frustratingly, they are usually words you know how to spell, but somehow skimmed over in your rounds of editing. If we are our own harshest critics, why do we miss those annoying little details?

The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart, explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. “When you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high level task,” he said.

 

Click here to read the full post on Wired.

 

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.

 

Cultural Appropriation and the Inclusion of the Other

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This post by Alan Baxter originally appeared on his Warrior Scribe site on 8/8/14.

I read this excellent article by Jim C Hines today. I agree with it completely. There has been much discussion on published writing, especially SFF, being an old white man’s club and that we need to see more diversity in the stories we read. Then there are people saying that white people shouldn’t/can’t/aren’t allowed to write other cultures. It’s not actually a problem, because the second opinion is bullshit. Let me explain.

I don’t believe any subject or culture is off-limits for fiction. With fiction we actively engage with the world around us, we interrogate our reality and look at how it reflects back at us and we try to make some sense of it. Even the most dense, hard SF is, at its core, an exploration of simple humanity. In my world I’m surrounded by people of many races and cultures. I’m surrounded by people of varying sexuality. I will absolutely reflect that in my fiction. If I don’t, the darkest and most fantastical part of any dark fantasy or horror I write is this imagined homogenous world of hetero cis white people like me. That’s just horrible. I do not want to be a part of that vanilla environment.

 

Click here to read the full post on Warrior Scribe.

 

How to Write a Book or Blog (The 6 Danger Stages You Need To Overcome)

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This post by Ali Luke originally appeared on Write to Done on 7/24/14.

You’ve probably had the experience of starting a novel or blog with great intentions…

…only to find that, a few months later, you’ve barely made any progress.

Maybe you started strong but lost momentum.

Maybe you jumped ahead when you should’ve paused.

Or maybe you got discouraged and gave up.

And you wonder: how to write a book (or blog).

I’ve coached many writers in workshop groups over the past few years, and I’ve noticed that there are six key stages when projects often stall or go wrong.

Here’s what to watch out for.

 

Danger Stage #1: Once You’ve Got a Great Idea

Let’s say you’ve got a new idea you’re excited about. Perhaps it’s a great premise for a novel, a topic for a blog, or a prompt you want to work on for a short story.

Writers tend to make one of two mistakes here:

They jump straight in, full of enthusiasm, without planning. They make a great start, and might get a few chapters into the novel or a few posts into a blog…but then they get stuck.

They wait – and wait – until the “perfect moment” to begin actually writing. They put off starting until they’ve got past family commitments and a busy spell at work…or they read about their chosen field of writing without getting any words down on paper.

 

Click here to read the full post on Write to Done.

 

The Three Reasons I Have Fallen In Love With Writing Short Stories

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This post by M. Louisa Locke originally appeared on her blog on 6/12/14.

I am the last author you would think would be writing short stories. As a writer who tends to be prolix, the short form wouldn’t seem a good match for me. I don’t write anything short––not emails, not blog posts, not books. Twitter, forget it––the most I can do is retweet those of you who are good at being succinct. I don’t even read many short stories, (except by 19th century writers like Alcott, Wharton, and James).

Yet, this spring I took time off from doing the research for Deadly Proof, the next book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, to write my third and fourth short stories, which are now part of a collection, Victorian San Francisco Stories, that I just published on Kindle, and I have every intention of putting out more short stories in the coming year.

 

So what happened?

Dandy Detects, my first short story happened. Three months after the publication of my first book in my series, Maids of Misfortune, I started to write a short story about the Boston terrier I had introduced in the book. I had read that publishing an inexpensive short story was a good way of introducing potential readers to your work, so my reason was completely pragmatic. Maids of Misfortune was selling less than one ebook a day, and I wanted to feel like I was doing something to help gain it some visibility. I was only producing about two blog posts a month (remember my tendency to be long-winded), and writing a short story and putting it up on Kindle seemed like manageable activity.

Dandy Detects ended up doing more than I could have thought possible to boost sales. Stephen Windwalker picked it as one of his earliest Kindle Shorts on Kindle Nation Daily (probably the first site to effectively promote ebooks) over the weekend of July 4, 2010. This prompted so many people to buy the full-length book that Maids of Misfortune raced to the top of the historical mystery category, where it stayed for over two years.

But even more significantly—writing this story turned out to be great fun, and the readers enjoyed it. Dandy Detect also was less than 8000 words—a triumph for me since I swear I have blog posts longer than that!

While I didn’t write the next story for another two years (in this case after the publication of my second novel), during that time I started keeping track of short story plots I wanted to write. By the time I had written my third story, I had concluded that writing short stories is about more than providing a loss leader to sell other books. In fact, I believe that, particularly for authors of series, short stories can be one of the most effective methods of building and maintaining both the readers’ and the author’s enthusiasm for a series.

 

Reason #1: Short stories permit me to expand on events, places, and, most importantly, characters from my longer novels.

 

Click here to read the full post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.

 

Whisper, Don't Shout

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This post by Jill J. Marsh originally appeared on her site on 8/25/14.

How to get sound onto paper.

An issue I’ve wrestled with for some time, especially when it comes to characters’ voices.

Several recent books irritated me enormously with an excess of signposts as to speech style. Every utterance written semi-phonetically was boring and hard work. An excess of ‘local colour’ turned character into caricature before the story even began. Every single person in a broad cast using the same vocabulary but with different adverbs equalled monotony.

The reason the books above failed is for exactly the same reason writers should show, not tell.

Leave space for the reader’s imagination. Inference is a powerful and natural phenomenon.

Do not tell. Do not shout. Whisper and let us follow the clues. We may end up in different places. That is our prerogative.

The complexity of rendering voices, accents, speech impediments or verbal tics on paper while not getting on the reader’s wick is both tricky and simple. I often write characters who speak other languages than English. How close to native speaker should they sound? Would adding mistakes in English add authenticity or distract? A key character has a peculiarity of expression – should I explain or risk incomprehension?

 

Click here to read the full post on Jill J. Marsh’s site.

 

Bubble Vocabulary: The Words You Almost Know, Sometimes Use, But Are Secretly Unsure Of.

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This post by Seth Stevenson originally appeared on Slate on 4/29/14.

Shibboleth. Casuistry. Recondite.

A little while back, I was chatting with a friend when he described a situation as “execrable.” He pronounced it “ex-EH-crable.” I’d always thought it was “EX-ecrable.” But execrable is a word I’d mostly just read in books, had rarely heard spoken, and had never once, in my whole life, uttered aloud—in large part because I wasn’t exactly sure how to say it, and because the nuances of its definition (beyond “bad”) escaped me.

Since we have a trusting, forthright relationship, I decided to broach the topic. “Is that how you pronounce that word?” I asked. “And what exactly does it mean?” Here my friend confessed he was not 100 percent certain on either count. He added that, earlier that same day, he’d pronounced avowed with three syllables and then immediately wondered if it might only have two.

We’ve all experienced moments in which we brush up against the ceilings of our personal lexicons. I call it “bubble vocabulary.” Words on the edge of your ken, whose definitions or pronunciations turn out to be just out of grasp as you reach for them. The words you basically know but, hmmm, on second thought, maybe haven’t yet mastered?

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes a Bubble Vocabulary quiz, on Slate.

 

Five Great Ways To Combat Writer’s Block

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This post by blurb staff originally appeared on blurb on 8/8/14.

You’re sitting at your computer, staring at a blank document. You’re poised in front of your notebook, but can’t seem to move your pen. Sound familiar? Writer’s block strikes again. But you don’t have to suffer for long. Great writers throughout the years have faced this problem and come up with clever tricks to get the words flowing again. If you’re having trouble getting your writing project finished (or started) here is some advice to get you going.

1) Just start typing or writing
It really doesn’t matter what you’re saying, as long as you’re saying something. Simply typing the same word over and over again, the simple motion of typing with your fingers, can force your brain to come up with something clever eventually.

“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’” — Maya Angelou

Even drawing or doodling—just moving your pen around on paper—can set your imagination going. Consider writing captions for your drawings, word bubbles for pictures of people talking, anything and everything that simply gets words on paper.

 

2) Pretend you’re writing for yourself

 

Click here to read the full post on blurb.

 

Writing A Relationship

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This post by Adam Ganz originally appeared on The Last Word on Nothing on 8/20/14.

About a year ago I sat in the Members’ Room at the Royal Society as Professor Judith Howard FRS, once a doctoral student of Dorothy Hodgkin’s, explained how crystallographers worked in the early days. She showed me how Dorothy would begin by calibrating the black circles in an X-ray diffraction pattern by eye, to begin the long process of assembling from the shadows cast by an X-ray beam the complex three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in the molecule. Hanging on the wall outside was a Henry Moore drawing of Dorothy’s arthritic hands, the hands she said she thought with.

What intrigued me [was] seeing the combination of skills she needed, not only mathematics but hand and eye co-ordination and vision to work out how the thousand atoms in say the Vitamin B12 molecule fitted together. It was somewhere between chess and Rubik cube- a giant jigsaw puzzle where she couldn’t see the picture, or even all the pieces.

I met Judith as part of my research for a radio play about Dorothy Hodgkin and Margaret Thatcher, two extraordinary women who reached the pinnacle in their chosen spheres –and were about as different as any two women could be.  From 1943 to 1947 Hodgkin was the then Margaret Roberts’ s chemistry tutor at Somerville College, Oxford from 1943 -1947 when Hodgkin was working at the cutting edge of X ray crystallography. In her fourth year Thatcher worked in Hodgkin’s lab on a molecule called Gramicidin S, which originated in the Soviet Union and had some antibiotic properties.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Last Word on Nothing.

 

Historical Fiction with Catherine Czerkawska # 1

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This post by Catherine Czerkawska originally appeared on the Edinburgh Ebook Festival 2014 site on 8/11/14.

1 THE CURSE OF PRESENTISM

Thanks to Valerie Laws of Authors Electric for helping me out with the term presentism. I wasn’t aware of it, but it neatly encapsulates a point I want to make – and it seems like as good a beginning as any to this residency. Here’s a useful Wikipedia definition: Presentism is a mode of literary or historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past. A quick scan online will reveal plenty of blog posts and other pieces pontificating (with some justification) about anachronisms in historical fiction as well as in film and television programmes. Sometimes they can be deliberate. The judicious use of anachronism in movies like A Knight’s Tale where the fuss and adoration surrounding participants in these Mediaeval tournaments is beautifully paralleled by that accorded to gladiatorial athletes like Ice Hockey players, manages to be both accurate and illustrative of a genuine truth about the times. We recognise the parallel and extrapolate from it. It’s also enjoyable and entertaining. There are novels as well as movies where these deliberate anachronisms are used to illuminate some kind of parallel between past and present culture and society. In many ways they involve the opposite of presentism, using present day ideas and preoccupations to elucidate the past.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Edinburgh Ebook Festival 2014 site.

 

Writerisms and other Sins

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This post by Alexander M. Soltai originally appeared on Notes From An Alien on 8/11/14.

Dare I say it—there’s too much crappy advice for writers on the Web.

Far too much of it aims to teach the rules of genre-writing rather than the ways to write clearly.

If a writer is trapped in someone else’s mold, their true creativity will be strangled.

My all-time favorite fiction writer (after my Best Friend) is C. J. Cherryh; and, I’m going to share some of her writing advice.

She’s written more than 60 books since the mid-1970s and won multiple awards.

One of the most interesting things about her is that even her most adoring fans say she’s challenging to read…

Yet, it’s not because she’s lost in florid prose or chained to a genre-muse.

She does write in certain “genres” but she creatively bends them to her writing-will—never a tortured trope, never a borrowed plot, never a bunch of hackneyed characters…

 

Click here to read the full article on Notes From An Alien.