The Right Word vs. a Similar Word, or Why the Thesaurus Is Not Always Your Friend

“The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

–Mark Twain

Writing fiction is an interesting challenge, because it means you’re doing two things at once: you’re writing, and you’re telling a story. As a writer, you care about getting the right words on the page, but as a storyteller . . . sometimes it’s all about getting the story down on the page before that really hot argument your hero and heroine are having gets away from you (or you miss your deadline). In a perfect world, you’d get the story down on paper and then read through the entire manuscript again, punching up the dull bits, reading aloud for stilted language, and generally making sure you said what you meant to say.

Meanwhile, back in the real world world, here are a few suggestions for making sure you’ve used the right words, and not just similar words.

1) Watch out for weasel words: words that fill space without having much meaning on their own. Once you’ve written that story, consider using your word processor to do a search through your manuscript for them, and any place you see one, see if you can reword your sentence to be more descriptive. Every author has particular words they have trouble with, but here’s a list to get you started: some, lots, thing, anything, something, stuff, basically, kind of, got, interesting, very, really, still.

2) When in doubt, read aloud. I know that if you’re submitting 50,000-100,000 words of novel, you’re not going to read the whole thing aloud from beginning to end. It would be too time-consuming. But whenever possible, at least read your dialogue aloud. Narration can also be stilted and awkward, but narration is more forgiving than dialogue is.

3) Love your thesaurus, but know that it isn’t perfect. When you’re trying to make your writing more interesting or avoid an overused word or phrase, look it up in a thesaurus or search for synonyms online. Once you’ve chosen one, take one extra step: look it up in the dictionary and read the actual definition. Make darn sure that you don’t refer to a big, strapping, alpha male hero as having a “demure” smile because you didn’t want to use “shy,” not when demure is generally only used for women.

Your hero will thank you. And so will your editor. ;-)

cross-posted at Words from the Editor

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On the Bookshelves: Two for the Price of One

Yikes, I’m running behind. You’d think I was editing or something.

Two for the Price of One, an erotic romance by Sandy Sullivan, is the latest installment in the Montana Cowboys series.

Red Rock, Montana is one of those little towns where everybody knows everybody else’s business and nothing ever happens . . . until the day Brandon Tucker, country music’s hottest new star, is on his way through town, and his bus hits Emma Weston’s pickup. Suddenly, the bus isn’t going anywhere and Emma discovers the dead-hot country crooner is a jerk. Which doesn’t stop her from reacting to his kiss.

The only thing more complicated than one hot guy you shouldn’t fall in love with his two, and Beau Tucker isn’t just Brandon’s identical twin, he’s a genuinely nice guy. The twins are nothing if not competitive, but they’re both falling for Emma, who won’t be the prize in some game. If they can’t compete for her, they may just have to share.

Two for the Price of One is available from Secret Cravings Publishing.

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Amazon Goes Toe to Toe with the Big Six Publishers

Amazon Goes Toe to Toe with the Big Six Publishers

As much as I think the New York traditional publishing model is past its prime, and that the publishing industry as a whole needs to come into the twenty-first century and de-homogenize, I’m not wild about the idea of Amazon.com trying to replace the existing behemoths. I have this nagging feeling that what we’ll end up with is a monopoly on the written word–or at least the written word than anybody expects to get paid for writing. All Amazon has to do is squeeze out the Big Six and then refuse to distribute books from third-party sellers after that.

Is it likely? I don’t know. Nothing about Amazon.com has been likely from day one, and yet, here they are.

cross-posted at Aging Backwards for relevance

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EPIC Award finalist!

Congratulations to Catherine Wells, who is a finalist for an EPIC Award in Science Fiction for the second year running! This year’s nomination is for The Crystal Desert, which kind of fell through the cracks in the collapse of one publishing house and has not yet been released through the auspices of the new publishing house picking up the series. The original publisher made the eBook version available through Lulu to maintain availability.

I have read the book that comes before this, the Aztec Eagle, presently unavailable but soon to be re-released by Echelon Press, and I was the freelance editor of the book that will follow, and they’re all good–entertaining and funny, sure to keep you thinking, laughing, and engrossed from beginning to end. I highly recommend the series, which stars Enrique, who is a bit like Lois Mcmaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan and a bit like Joan D. Vinge’s Cat.

Congratulations, Catherine!

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Diminishing Profit Margins and the Rise of eBooks

In case you weren’t aware of it, the publishing industry as we know it has been in a downhill slide for some years now. The joke goes that in the publishing industry, a straight line is the new upward swing, meaning that if you aren’t losing money, that’s as good as it gets anymore. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mostly, it has to do with easy access to information is changing the world. Companies are no longer owned by people who got into this business for the love of it, they’re owned by shareholders who don’t care what business they’re invested in, so long as the profits keep going up. On the flip side, it no longer seems acceptable that it takes a year or eighteen months from the time a book is accepted to the time it’s published, not when we expect that movie in the theaters to be streaming on Netflix in a couple of months or newsworthy events to be on our phones and computers quite literally as they happen.

eBooks are a game-changer. They decrease production times. They increase profit margins. And most importantly, they don’t have to be remaindered or warehoused. It doesn’t cost any money to keep an eBook on your website, and you can’t be taxed on it as an asset. This makes a really critical difference for publishers.

Want to know more? NPR asks if eBooks can save book publishers.

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“I’ve got this great idea for a book!” (or What to Do When You Write Yourself into a Corner)

Once again, I have one of these posts for which I have to wear both my writing and editing hats part of the time, so I am cross posting it in both blogs.

The number two thing writers don’t want to hear when someone finds out they are actual published authors is probably “I’ve got this great idea for a book!” (The number one thing is probably “Where you get your ideas?”) Not because it isn’t great that you’ve got an idea for a book, but because it’s not the writer’s idea, it’s your idea. Rather than hear all about it, we generally think you should go home and write it yourself.

For a lot of writers, that’s harder than it sounds. Even those of us who have studied writing, who do characterization in our sleep and have settings coming out of our ears and at least one publication under our belts, still occasionally write something and get part way through it and just get stuck. I’ve had several people ask me, over the last couple of years, how to get something “unstuck,” or what things are the usual culprits when I’ve been stuck in a manuscript myself. I started thinking about it and keeping mental notes, and while there is no cure-all, no one magic answer that is true all of the time, I’ve noticed that there really are certain recurring problems that tend to cause “stuckness” on a reasonably regular basis.

Wrong point of view. This is the problem about 85% of the time. Usually, all other things being equal (i.e. there’s nobody who’s point of view I have to avoid for a story reason), I almost always want to write from the point of view of the character experiencing the most change or the most significant emotional reaction. If I’m stuck and I don’t know why, or if I finish a scene or chapter and it just feels flat to me, this is my number one culprit. I will always start here and try to figure out if there’s a better point of view. As a matter of fact, I usually save what I’ve already written under an alternate file name and go back and try to write it from the point of view I think might be better, because sometimes I can’t puzzle it out without actually giving it a go.

Wrong choice. One of my characters has made a choice somewhere in the scene, and it’s the wrong choice. For me, this is very often a turning point in the dialogue, but it can occur in narration, too. I start out by looking for a serious or negative choice and considering whether the character should have made a funny or positive choice. If I don’t find anything that looks like that, sometimes I’ve actually made the scene too light and it needs to be darker. (Not usually my particular vice, but it does happen from time to time.) This is the part where I have to do the painful thing, once again saving the version I’ve got under an alternate name and deleting everything back to that point of choice. I have the character make the other choice, and play the scene forward from there, which generally gets things moving again.

Wrong focus character. Despite my point of view character being correct, the problem scene may focus on the wrong character. This one is a little harder to pin down, but if I’m writing a scene from Juanita’s point of view, but the scene feels like it’s about David, that doesn’t always serve the story. If I really need that scene to be about Juanita, I need to go back and change her thoughts, feelings, etc. so that the scene becomes about her.

Not showing the action. There are lots of ways to do this. For me, the usual culprit is writing a scene that lays the groundwork for the action, rather than writing the scene that actually shows the action. As a spin on this, it’s also possible to write a scene remembering the action, or a scene that takes your point of view character away from the action, rather than into it. Believe it or not, this applies even if what you’re writing is not an “action” scene. If the action in the scene is an argument between two people over whether or not it’s appropriate to drape the blue jeans over the back of a chair to dry, that’s still the action for that particular scene, even if it would never pass as action on a movie screen. The point is that you need to show where things are happening–keep the “camera” on that, and don’t give in to the temptation to go elsewhere either in space or in timing.

Compound problems. It’s possible to have more than one of these problems at the same time. I only hit this one recently, when I resolved the point of view issue with a particular scene and was still stuck. So if fixing problem A doesn’t do the trick, start looking around to see if there is a problem B.

Nothing is happening. Finally, sometimes the problem is not actually internal to the scene–sometimes, we get stuck in a story because we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere in the plot. Unfortunately, this is one of those things that’s only resolved by better pre-writing, or by taking a step back and deciding that you have a lack of action or need another subplot even though you’re already into the story. And pre-writing and outlining, I’m afraid, are an entirely different post. *g*

I don’t know if these situations apply to everybody, and if you’ve had other experiences or have other suggestions, I’d love to hear them. But I do know that I’ve had people complain to me that their seen is stuck, and ask what I do, and then come back to me afterwards and say “You know, you were right, it was a point of view problem” or “I did what you suggested, even though I really didn’t want to make that change, and all of a sudden everything worked again.” So hopefully it will help at least some, and maybe most, of us crazy people who write. :-)

cross-posted at Againg Backwards, my professional writing blog

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On the Bookshelves: Murder Most Dreadful

Murder Most Dreadful, by Jacqueline Stirrup, is one of those delightful little gems I get to read occasionally that’s written for a romance market, but which has a stand-alone plot separate from the romance which is engaging and entertaining at the same time.

Wren Coatsmith has no recourse against her husband’s abuse in 1880s London, but she never meant to kill him. She means to hide the body, though, and isn’t at all pleased when it turns up and she has to go identify it. When a bruised and battered woman in the morgue catches Wren’s attention, Detective Sergeant Alfie Beckett can’t understand why she doesn’t dismiss the woman as a dead prostitute like everyone else.

Alfie pursues the woman’s death, first out of obligation, and then to keep Wren from investigating on her own–for as well as that works! As their paths cross more and more often, he finds himself increasingly and unfortunately suspicious of her husband’s death. He likes Wren too well to want to see her hanged as a murderess, but no one is above the law . . . is she?

Murder Most Dreadful reminds me of the mysteries that were my guilty pleasure reading until I was somewhere in my teens, only with more humor and set against a historical backdrop. And what a historical backdrop! I cringe every time I get a historical romance to edit, because I spend half my time cross-checking facts and turns of phrase to be sure they are correct for the time period. This manuscript was a joy: the writer knows exactly what she’s doing, and I didn’t catch her in anything historically inappropriate throughout the course of the novel–not once! London in the 1880s jumps off the page and invites the reader to come along for joyride in a time long gone.

An engaging and entertaining read, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys sweet romances, mysteries, or both.

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E-Books and the Changing Face of the Publishing Industry

Sorry, I’m in a bit of a rush today, so you don’t get the brag post I was planning. Instead, let me direct you to Sam Starbuck‘s blog for his very excellent thoughts on e-books. In particular, he points out that the publishing industry has been following the same model for the 400 years since Gutenberg started printing, and e-books are the first thing to really rock the boat.

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Dashes vs. Elipses

How Are Dashes and Elipses Related?

The second-worst offenders in the wonderful wide world of punctuation is dashes and ellipses.* I count these two together because the single biggest problem I see with them is that most people don’t know the difference between the two. Oh, we can all tell one from the other as printed. This is a dash:

—

And this is an elipsis:

. . .

The problem is that their usage looks similar unless you’ve actually studied them. Writers use them in a lot of the same locations in sentences, but for very different reasons.

If, like most people, you’re not entirely clear on those reasons, you will consistently be ever-so-slightly in error. If you are an as-yet unpublished author trying to sell a book or story, you’ll find it’s much easier to sell your manuscript if you appear to have a grasp on some of these fundamentals.

If you’re a published author or one currently contracted to be published, learning the difference will probably make your relationship with your editor smoother, because your editor won’t be left to clean it up. Speaking on behalf of editors everywhere (or at least the ones in the vent-session I was exposed to yesterday) . . . we are not the maid. Our job is to help you produce a stronger story that will sell more copies–not simply to clean up after you.

So let me try to break it down and make it understandable. Let’s start with dashes. There are two types of dashes, the en-dash (–) and the em-dash (—). The en-dash is short and most of us already know how to use it. When someone stutters in dialogue, this is the symbol we use to indicate that stutter at the beginning of the word (e.g. “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”).

 

Dashes

When I talk about dashes going forward, I’ll be talking talking about em-dashes. These are longer, which is easier to see in some fonts than others. To avoid confusion, I’m going to represent an em-dash as two hyphens (–) throughout the remainder of this post. This is old-style manuscript formatting, from before we all had word processors that were smart enough to put a real dash in for us.

And on that note, let me mention that most word processors will automatically do that dash wrong. You never want spaces around your dash. You may see that in blog articles or news articles and think it’s the right thing to do. Don’t give in to that temptation–journalism frequently has an entirely different standards for formatting than fiction does.

Right: No one would be listening–not the tourists, not the locals–because no one cared.

Wrong: No one would be listening — not the tourists, not the locals — because no one cared.

Even More Wrong: No one would be listening – not the tourists, not the locals – because no one cared.

A dash has two primary uses, depending on where it is in a sentence. In the middle of the sentence, it sets off additional information more strongly than a comma would.

No one would be listening–not the tourists, not the locals–because no one cared.

He’d taken her out to buy clothes–that was his angle.

At the end of a sentence, a dash indicates an interruption. You should almost never use this in narration, only in dialogue. Your character may interrupt her own train of thought, or she may be interrupted by someone else. It makes no difference to the punctuation.

“But I thought–”
“I don’t care what you thought!”

 

Elipses

Elipses are another thing your word processor will try to “help” you with and almost always do wrong. If you type [...] into your word processor, it will probably change it into […], a single-character symbol which makes editors want to tear their hair out because it’s hard to read and turns into garbage when you try to convert a manuscript into an e-book.

Elipses are tricky, because different publishing houses want them represented in different ways. I’m not even going to go into them here. Read the house’s style guide ahead of time if it’s available. Never use more than three dots within a sentence or four dots at the end of a sentence. And most importantly, however you choose to write your elipses, do it consistently–global search-and-replace is an editor’s friend.

More important than any of that, be sure you understand how an elipsis is used. Within a sentence, an elipsis indicates a pause far more strongly than a comma, but does not typically set off additional information.

Sorry, Charlie, that’s . . . pushing it.

At the end of a sentence, an elipsis indicates that the sentence trails off. This usually occurs in either dialogue or character thoughts, rather than in narration.

But I can’t just . . .

How long . . . ?

As with all rules, there will always be exceptions. In particular, artistic license allows authors to justify doing non-standard things in their text. When you consider invoking artistic license, please remember that writing is about knowing the rules . . . and then deciding how to break them. You can absolutely choose non-standard usage: to make a point, for emphasis, or for clarity. But you have to know the rules before you make that decision. If you don’t take the trouble to know the rules first, your chosen violations won’t look like artistic license. They’ll just look like you don’t know what you’re doing.

 

* The worst offender I see go by in manuscripts I edit is the comma, but that’s such a minefield, it will take more than one post to cover it. *g*

Most examples shamelessly borrowed from the text of “Crash,” by April L’Orange, because I am rubbish at making up examples (and if I can’t steal for myself, who can I steal from?). Available in Corpus Pretereo, forthcoming from Escape Collective Press in October 2011.

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Once upon a time, Lester Del Ray turned down a second Shannara book

I really meant to do a mechanics post this week, but we’re doing a bit of preparation for a probable visit from Hurricane Irene, which has thrown my schedule off. In the meantime, please accept this entertaining bit of editorial history. Once upon a time, back in 1977, Terry Brooks sent his editor three quarters of what was supposed to be the second Shanarra book, and his editor told him he was going to have to throw it out and start from scratch.

And he was right.

While the Shannara series has gone on for a remarkable number of books, I’m told that it’s the first two that continue to sell consistently thirty-five years later–the first book because it is the first book, and the second because it’s simply head and shoulders above the rest of the series after the writer listened to the editor’s advice.

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