Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 65

Capturing your narrator’s voice

Here’s a post from Writers Helping Writers: How Do You Find Your Narrator’s Voice?

Voice is one of those elements that can make or break a manuscript. If you get it right, the novel will live in the reader’s mind long after they put the book down. Without it, the story won’t quite achieve what you’ve intended even if all the structural elements are in place. …

What doesn’t work? asks this post.

Answers: verbal tics and habits. Sarcasm (because it’s overused). I bet we could come up with other things that don’t work. Modern slang in a world far removed from the real world. That can work, but only if the author is doing it on purpose. I’m thinking of the Andromeda tv show here. I quite liked that show — well, some episodes — and I specifically noticed how the modern slang added to the humor of the show. I would add that sarcasm is fantastic as long as it’s not the only aspect of the narrator’s voice. I mean, look at the Scholomance trilogy. Sarcasm, sure, but that’s not at all the sum of El’s voice.

Of course the linked post goes on to propose answers to the question: What does work?

Understanding who your narrator is. That’s the fundamental answer. This post starts by talking about character backstory: how old are they, are they married, what do they do for a living, stuff I guess I do automatically and don’t think about. I’m glad to see this line: I don’t think character questionnaires are the way to nail voice. Right, I don’t think so either. So the post offers just these very broad questions, which I think is fine. You’re going to know the answers to those things, probably.

Here’s the key: slip on their shoes and see the world through their eyes. 

Yes. I agree with that: This is indeed the key, the only thing that actually does the job. I like this line:

Unless the author is the narrator, they have no business speaking up.

That made me chuckle. I think that’s true — I think that’s where a lot of “message fic” fails. We ought to be in the pov of a young woman in a steampunk Victorian-ish setting, but golly gee, amazing how all her opinions are identical to conventional wisdom that’s current today. Wait, I thought we were in a futuristic version of Singapore, but turns out all the protagonists opinions are … yep, still totally identical to current conventional wisdom.

I’m thinking of specific books that failed for me for this exact reason. One was well written in every other way, but though I liked it while I was actually reading it, I liked it less and less in retrospect and finally moved all the way through the spectrum and wound up disliking it. The other book I’m thinking of is quite popular, so it obviously works for many readers, but I rolled my eyes all the time while I was reading it and never touched anything else by the author. In both cases, the author’s voice was loud in my ears; the voice of the supposed pov narrator voice faded into the background or didn’t exist at all.

Back to the linked post:

Voice is not the only thing in a novel. But if you don’t nail it, you won’t have used point of view to its fullest potential, nor will you truly know your story—because you won’t know the main actors who are driving it forward. It won’t feel authentic, and your readers won’t feel the same emotional draw that they’ll experience when a character comes to life on the page and says, Let me show you what the world looks like through my eyes.

Yep, that.

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Recent Reading: Welcome to Temptation and Faking It, by Jennifer Cruisie

Okay, so these are the first of Cruisie’s books I’ve read, and I’m sure the choice wasn’t random because I clearly remember her name coming up some time or other and a bunch of commenters here said, Oh, Cruisie is great, here are my favorites. So obviously I picked something off those lists of favorites.

Now, I thought I’d read Welcome to Temptation, but when I opened it up recently, I realized I’d only ever read the first part, probably the sample. I liked it and got the full book, but I’d never actually read it. So now I have. I liked it a lot, though I have to say, I don’t like any of the covers. If you’re curious:

Beats me who that kid jumping into the lake is. I don’t actually remember either apples OR cherries, so I guess maybe there was at least one apple in the book? But it didn’t stand out for me. I’m sure that the apple is meant to be all like Look! Temptation! Apple! Get it??? But that’s quite a stretch. Nobody in the story is taking the role of Eve or the serpent. There’s no symbolic tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There’s no symbolic apple, as far as I can remember. Nor, as I say, cherries. Sometimes I really wonder what marketing departments were thinking. Fortunately, the cover isn’t important in an ebook, as you don’t have to look at it.

So there I was, going along, reading a bit every day in between doing the [absolutely endless] proofing and revision for the Invictus duology. Temptation kind of went like this: it’s okay … yes, it’s pretty good … sharp dialogue, good writing … liking it better and better … and then wham! it turned into a murder mystery! I did NOT see that coming, and that sudden shift propelled the story right on up to I LOVED IT territory.

Okay, so, Welcome to Temptation

Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.

Half an hour earlier, Sophie’s sister Amy had been happily driving too fast down Highway 32, her bright hair ruffling in the wind as she sang “In the Middle of Nowhere” with Dusty Springfield on the tape deck. Maple trees had waved cheerfully in the warm breeze, cotton clouds had bounced across the sky, and the late-August sun had blasted everything in sight.

And Sophie had felt a chill, courtesy, she was sure, of the sixth sense that had kept generations of Dempseys out of jail most of the time.

So you see, sharp, clever writing. This is just delightful. Sophie and Amy have come to Temptation to make a little film about a friend … that’s a strong term … an acquaintance, who wants this film made for various reasons that are too complicated to go into. Clea, the acquaintance, used to be romantically … that’s a strong term … sexually involved with their brother, Davy.

Clea is a self-absorbed, manipulative gold-digger who is fortunately not a big presence in the story, even though she’s why Sophie and Amy came to Temptation in the first place and the plot is wrapped around this movie.

Anyway, first thing, this little fender-bender with the beige Cadillac and everything unrolls from there and the story is fine and the characters are fine and the writing is excellent, and then there’s the murder mystery dropped on top and everything sharpens up. The story is suddenly excellent and the characters better and the writing even more delightful. There’s a big cast of characters, with the pov carried mainly by Sophia and by Phineas Tucker, the mayor of Temptation. I’m trying hard not to provide spoilers, even though this means I can’t mention some of my favorite details, things that made me laugh out loud.

I will say, the person who got murdered is a really unpleasant person, and also this is handled … it’s … okay, look, it’s handled in a tongue-in-cheek way that is almost, but not quite, too far over the top. This is one reason the story is low tension. Everybody pretty much gets what they deserve, everything works out for the people who ought to live happily ever after, and the game of pool between Phin and Davy was a particularly great scene and made me love Davy. So I typed “Jennifer cruisie davy dempsey” to see if there was a book from Davy’s pov and there was and I bought it immediately and read it promptly [still in between endless revision and proofing of Invictus].

Faking It

Every single cover is better, not that that’s a high bar, but although the yellow cover is baffling, at least it’s not implying all sorts of biblical allusions that aren’t in the story. Also, I know why there’s someone painting on the second cover, though a painting actually from the book would have been a better choice imo. Also, I quite like the dog on the third cover, though the purple chair is a bit strange. And the dog wasn’t a red sable Dachshund, but whatever, fine, he was a Dachshund and I liked him.

Matilda Goodnight stepped back from her latest mural and realized that of all the crimes she’d committed in her thirty-four years, painting the floor-to-ceiling reproduction of van Gogh’s sunflowers on Clarissa Donnelly’s dining room wall was the one that was going to send her to hell.

Tilda is one pov protagonsist, Davy Dempsey is the other. Tilda has a secret past. Davy has a secret past, or at least a past he isn’t eager to mention around. They meet when Tilda tries to steal a painting from Clea (same Clea as above, obviously) and Davy was already trying to steal passwords to Clea’s computer, and they both hide in Clea’s roomy closet to avoid being caught. Davy sends Tilda home, steals the painting for her, it’s the wrong painting, and the story goes on from there, surrounded by Tilda’s wildly eccentric family on one hand and Clea’s attempted machinations on the other.

I loved Tilda’s family. Not Davy’s dad so much. We got occasional brief pov sections from Tilda’s mother’s pov, which I enjoyed since anybody can see she’s going to wind up in a much better place by the end. I’m pretty sure the reader will realize how that part of the story is going to work out. It’s a very low-key romance taking place tangentially to the central romance between Tilda and Davy and the histrionic romance taking place between Tilda’s sister and Davy’s friend.

We also get some brief pov scenes from Clea’s pov, which I didn’t particularly like. You probably all recall how much I detest villain pov scenes. However, in this case, for a change (a) Clea’s pov sections were actually crucial to understand some things that would have been difficult to handle in any other way; and (b) Clea’s pov sections set up the climactic confrontation scene, which is wildly funny and also shows that Clea is not really such a villain as all that. Though definitely a self-absorbed, manipulative gold-digger.

I know that Cruisie has a big backlist. I’m interested in Agnes and the Hitman, but I’ve got Lavender’s Blue on my Kindle already, so I’m torn.

Here’s the beginning of Agnes:

One fine August evening in South Carollina, Agnes Crandall stirred raspberries and sugar in her heavy nonstick frying pan and defended her fiancé to the only man she’d ever trusted.

It wasn’t easy.

“Look, Joey, Taylor’s not that bad.” Agnes cradled the phone between her chin and her shoulder, turned down her CD player, where the Dixie Chicks were doing a fine rendition of “Am I the Only One,” and then frowned over the tops of her fogged-up glasses at the raspberries, which were being annoying and uncooperative, much like Taylor lately.

Here’s the beginning of Lavender:

On a cold April Day, thanks to an awful card my awful Aunt ML had sent me, I was driving down Route 52 along the Ohio River toward my home town for the first time in fifteen years. I had a six-foot plus teddy bear riding shotgun (color: Guilt Red) while I told myself not to be ridiculous, everything would be fine, and look how beautiful the Ohio River is, and ML is nuts anyway. (The card ML had sent had one sentence on it: ‘Your mother is sick and in terrible trouble and needs you, but you don’t care because you’re a cruel, thoughtless daughter and a disgrace to the family.’ On the front, it had said, ‘Thinking of You…’)

I may flip a coin.

If anybody’s got a specific Cruisie favorite, let me know, because I’ll definitely be reading more by this author!

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Surprise!

None of the BookBub ads performed as well as I had hoped, but the clear winner was this one:

Which I did not expect to use, but I tried this version when various other version proved unexpectedly disappointing.

Things that did not help: Red boxes around the text. Adding “All Books On Sale.” Adding “All Books in KU.” Having a statement about the books rather than a quote from another author, and this quote from Rosamund Hodge did better than the one from Sharon Shinn. It’s a more memorable quote, so maybe that’s why? It uses capital letters, so maybe that’s why? This exact quote didn’t work as well when the ad showed the first book large and all the other books lined up small at the bottom or when the text boxes were red. I have no idea why.

Other comments: Yes, you can easily switch out images at any moment. You can add or subtract targeted authors at any moment, change your bid amount, change the amount of money you’re spending, all sorts of things. This rapid adjustment allowed me to try the ad above just to see what would happen, and that was good. You can also pause or stop an ad that is doing really horribly, which is also good, because wow, you can blow through money fast running ads and get practically nothing for it.

Were ANY of the ads actually cost effective? Though some were better than others, I don’t think any were actually cost effective. I think running BookBub ads lost money. This was money I was willing to lose; that’s why I was experimenting with ads; but frankly I thought the ads would do significantly better. My best guess is that running BookBub ads led to fewer than 200 people downloading or buying books, which is quite terrible compared to Freebooksy, pretty bad compared to Fussy Librarian or Robin Reads, and about the same as EReader IQ or BookRunes — and the BookBub ads were more expensive to run than even Freebooksy.

I agreed with you all that the red text boxes ought to “pop” more and they didn’t, or if they did, it didn’t help. Running the ads in Canada as well as the US and UK didn’t do much. Did any of the ads do ANYTHING? Yes; series books sold slightly better than when using promotion services alone. That’s true even for Freebooksy series promotions, and at this point I don’t think the series promotion via Freebooksy is worth the additional cost.

Overall conclusion: At this point, there’s no doubt in my mind that good promotion services give you a lot more bang for your buck than BookBub ads, unless and until you really figure out how to run the ads. Also, as a bonus, promotion services are MUCH EASIER and involve almost no learning curve at all.

This result doesn’t make me eager to play with ads in the near future, though I’ll try running the Black Dog series ad anyway because why not, it’s set up already. I may try a few versions, with relatively low amounts of money per day. Also, when I have time … late this fall or maybe next year … I should try testing author names the way David Gaughran suggests and then try another ad to see how that works. This is not a priority, and I don’t plan to look at how to do Facebook or Amazon ads right away either.

I did learn stuff about putting images together and how BookBub ads function, so overall this was a worthwhile experiment, even if results were disappointing.

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Update: Nearly there

Okay, so in keeping with the notion that everything takes longer, I’m almost but not quite there with the Invictus duology.

A) Still proofing the first book, should finish that today, after which I’ll immediately discard the drafts I currently have and send it to myself again as an ebook and order another paper copy.

I found out something important! If you drop the font size from 12 to 11, and you do that by changing the font in one paragraph and hitting the “update Normal Style to match current selection,” then oops! you can lose all kinds of formatting including italics.

This matters A LOT, because in Invictus, it’s not just the ship’s name and occasional emphasized words that are italicized. This is a world where people send each other the equivalent of text messages all the time, and all of those are italicized rather than in quote marks, and wow, does it look completely awful and weird if the italics aren’t there. This was just the paperback version, which came out too long in Times 12, so I dropped it to Times 11, which got the number of pages to something sensible, but as I say, serious bad stuff happened with accidental removal of italics.

Fortunately, this did not do a thing to the copy on my laptop or most of the flashdrives, just to the version on the hard drive at work, from which I was loading the paperback file to KDP and therefore that’s the only file where I messed up everything in the Normal style. I now have a perfectly fine paperback version with all the italics correct. But from now on I’m going to remember to be cautious with the “update style” function.

B) Finished with major revisions to the second book, which I’m sending to a proofreader now, which is to say, in a few minutes. Serious tweaking has happened throughout both books. I hope I’m done with that now, with just minor tweaking to come. And endless proofreading, after which no doubt a few of you will point out various typos that I missed, and thank you for doing that, but I sure hope no one catches much.

C) Finished the Cruisie duology I was reading, so that was great fun and I’ll post comments later this week.

D) You know what’s handy? I’ve been putting off getting a new couch for literally years, and now I don’t care if the kittens climb up the back of the couch. Someday I will get a new couch, but not this year. Also, ever since getting the robot vacuum cleaner — still love it btw — I’ve been putting most of the chairs upside down on the table to give the vacuum cleaner access to the floor under the table, and you know what makes a cute jungle gym for kittens?

They aren’t showing huge desire to go outside, so I’ve been putting off letting them on the deck or out in the yard. I’m very certain little Magdalene, above, could still get through the trellis that keeps puppies from falling off the deck, and basically I just haven’t wanted to risk it. I need to get some kitten treats and teach them to come when called, which will provide a helpful line of defense against getting too exploratory. I also need to ask my mother to come sit on the deck and keep her eyes on Maximillian while I keep and eye on Magdalene, because I don’t want to look away from one kitten and lose track of the other.

AFTER Invictus: Captive is locked on KDP — September 11th — I will have time for all that. Until then, I expect proofing, proofing, proofing.

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This is amusing

Here’s Jennifer Cruisie’s blog post from yesterday: This is a Good Book Thursday, August 24, 2023

It’s amusing because the good book I’m reading right now (slowly, while working on multiple projects of my own) is one of Jennifer Cruisie’s books, Faking It, which I expect I’ll be writing a post about one of these days because I like it a lot, so this post is sort of meta.

What’s Cruisie herself reading?

’ve been reading books and getting halfway through and giving up, fast forwarding to the end just to see what happens which is never a surprise. And then I hit the jackpot: Connie Willis’s new book, The Road to Roswell, is fantastic. It starts a little slow, and then it hits the ground running and it’s wonderful. A maid of honor who needs to talk her best friend out of marrying a UFO nut gets abducted by an alien who looks like a tumbleweed made of tentacles, and they start a road trip that gets more and more crowded as the alien picks up others along the way–a smart con man, an annoying UFO nut, a sweet little old lady, a cowboy–and it’s just flat out wonderful. Of course, it’s wonderful. It’s Connie Willis.

That does sound pretty wonderful! Here’s the description from Amazon:

When level-headed Francie arrives in Roswell, New Mexico, for her college roommate’s UFO-themed wedding—complete with a true-believer bridegroom—she can’t help but roll her eyes at all the wide-eyed talk of aliens, which obviously don’t exist. Imagine her surprise, then, when she is abducted by one.

Odder still, her abductor is far from what the popular media have led her to expect, with a body like a tumbleweed and a mass of lightning-fast tentacles. Nor is Francie the only victim of the alien’s abduction spree. Before long, he has acquired a charming con man named Wade, a sweet little old lady with a casino addiction, a retiree with a huge RV and a love for old Westerns, and a UFO-chasing nutjob who is thoroughly convinced the alien intends to probe them and/or take over the planet.

But the more Francie gets to know the alien, the more convinced she becomes that he’s not an invader. That he’s in trouble and she has to help him. Only she doesn’t know how—or even what the trouble is. 

Part alien-abduction adventure, part road trip saga, part romantic comedy, The Road to Roswell is packed full of Men in Black, Elvis impersonators, tourist traps, rattlesnakes, chemtrails, and Close Encounters of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth kind. Can Francie, stuck in a neon green bridesmaid’s dress, save the world—and still make it back for the wedding?

I have to say, this sounds better and better. It’s been a good long time since I read anything by Connie Willis. Maybe I should add this to the TBR mountain.

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Superstitions

Here’s an interesting post at Crime Reads: SPOOKY TRADITIONS: USING SUPERSTITIONS IN THRILLERS TO ENHANCE STORYTELLING

“Put silver in your pockets, walk with dirt in your shoes, or he’ll poke your eyeballs from their sockets, and boil your bones in stew.” 

Ick, and also, that’s new to me. Where’s it from?

Our upcoming psychological thriller,  The Woods are Waiting begins with a morbid nursery rhyme that highlights a very specific set of superstitions that are followed by an isolated community in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. … The silver and dirt in The Woods Are Waiting is directly tied to a belief in the fictional Hickory Man, a malevolent spirit in the woods. In the same way that superstitions are passed on, so are urban legends and folklore, like the Moth Man in West Virginia and the Jersey Devil. These spooky stories can provide an undercurrent of darkness and tension that lends itself well to the unpredictable twists and turns of a thriller novel. 

So I think the authors made that one up. For me, it doesn’t have the spooky coolness of the thing from T Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones. What was that? Oh, right:

I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.

That is thoroughly creepy. Here’s my post about The Twisted Ones, which I liked quite a bit, and yes, that line above was sooooo effective in establishing and maintaining the atmosphere of the story.

What does the opening line of this post lack that T Kingfisher’s line captures? The first two lines, prescriptive advice, are good. The latter two clauses are too mundane, I think. Poking out your eyeballs is bad, but not particularly creepy. “Shoes” and “stew” rhyme (pretty much), but the line lacks the beautiful cadence of the one about the faces on the rocks and the twisted ones.

But the overall idea of the post, that working superstitions into your creepy psychological thriller adds depth, is certainly true. I would probably like supernatural elements compared to mundane elements in a thriller. Not always, but I lean that way. The linked post continues by looking into the background of a few common superstitions, which is interesting:

1. It’s bad luck to walk under a leaning ladder.

This originated over 5,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt. A ladder leaning against a wall creates a triangle, and Egyptians regarded triangles as sacred–as exhibited by their pyramids. To them, triangles represented the trinity of Gods, and to pass through a triangle was to desecrate them. Another exciting fact is that in England in the 1600’s, criminals were forced to walk under ladders on their way to the gallows!

I wonder if all that, or any of that, is true? What trinity of gods could this mean? The ancient Egyptians had a lot more than three gods. To me, this sounds like somebody just made that up. But I guess if you wanted to, you could take this as true and work the detail into a story that uses it somehow. That reminds me that I’ve been reading MG fiction lately and I’ve been wanting to try The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I have it on my Kindle, buried way down there somewhere in the depths … let me pull it up to the top … there we go. Hopefully I will read it soon! I doubt I will encounter a trinity of Egyptian gods in the story, and probably not a superstition about ladders, but who knows.

Okay, just for fun, here: 55 of the Strangest Superstitions From Around the World.

Bored with superstitions about knocking on wood or black cats crossing your path? Click through and pick your favorite of these less familiar superstitions. I will say, some seem pretty familiar to me! I do like the one about placing two mirrors facing each other creating a way for the devil to get into the world — lots of story potential there. I also like the one about wearing red attracts lightning.

Also, definitely do not make faces like the faces on the rocks. Really, just don’t do that.

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Troubling

This is something that has troubled me for a long time, so I’m linking to a post that draws attention to the problem in a personal way. This is author Jake Seliger:

I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and the treatments that might save me are just out of reach. Alex Tabarrok writes about how “when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bodies are buried in an invisible graveyard.” I’d like to make that graveyard a little bit more visible because I’m going to be buried in it, in a few weeks or months.

The FDA routinely delays approval of life-saving drugs and routinely denies experimental treatments to people who are dying anyway and can’t possibly have anything to lose. They do it all the time, for everything. The invisible graveyard is filled with millions — not an exaggeration; literally millions — of people who died long before they needed to. This is a difficult problem to solve because the FDA is operating under strong incentives that push them toward delay and denial no matter how much harm that does for how many people.

So, yes, take a look at that invisible graveyard. If more people saw it, the incentives might lessen to the point that the FDA would reform at least a little.

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Hearing what you write

Here’s a post by PJ Parrish at Kill Zone Blog: I Hear A Symphony

The post starts with this quote:

Writing prose without thinking about cadence is like trying to seduce a man by handing him your résumé. The facts are there, but the electric charge isn’t. —Meaghan O’Rourke

My immediate reaction: YES!

Alas, this isn’t what the post is actually about. The post at least starts out by discussing the structure of a story as that compares to the structure of a symphony. No doubt that’s a worthy topic, but it isn’t what I was thinking. I was right there for this argument: Writing prose without thinking about cadence is going to produce flat prose. That’s so unrelated to story structure that I skimmed the post, and sure enough, Parrish does get to this point partway through the post:

Sure, you can write a pretty good book without rhythm. You can even get famous. But you won’t write a book that people remember.

I think that’s arguable. In fact, I know that’s overstated, because I can think offhand of various books I enjoyed and found memorable despite flat or clunky sentences. However, the broader point, that cadence and rhythm are important, is still one I agree with.

Good writing is an aural thing. But to get that aural vibe right, you have to be visual. You have to pay attention to how your writing looks on the page. Your rhythmic tools are:

Sentence lengthParagraph lengthSentence fragmentsPunctuationPacing.Alliteration. This is a potent spice. Use it sparingly.

Too many long paragraphs? It looks old-fashioned and boring. Too many short paragraphs? That makes your rhythm choppy and nervous. 

This is very interesting! To get the AURAL VIBE right, you have to be VISUAL. You have to pay attention to HOW YOUR WRITING LOOKS ON THE PAGE. What a strange thing to say! It’s not that I disagree that your tools for cadence and rhythm are different from the ones listed above. Those are the tools, all right. Also repetition; that’s an additional element left out of that list. Maybe other stuff I’m not thinking of right now — oh, word choice! Actual word choice, the sound of the words! I notice I’m thinking of the sound of the words, not how the words look on the page. That’s true even though I love love love names such as Meadhbh, pronounced Meave, which is a name I’ve mentioned before, and thank you CJC for introducing me to lovely Welsh names.

Tools for building cadence and rhythm: paragraph length; sentence length; comma splices and fragments; punctuation; alliteration; repetition; word choice. What else? Oh, right:

Image from feeloona on Pixabay

The most important tool for writing with cadence and rhythm is NOT how the words LOOK on the page; it’s how they SOUND in your mind.

I actually do think that how the words look on the page contributes somehow to how they sound in your mind. A paragraph break is a tiny pause. A sentence that stands by itself, especially a short sentence, is emphatic. Any short sentence is emphatic. A period is a tiny pause. A semicolon is a tiny pause, and using a semicolon followed by a conjunction sounds different — feels different — than the correct comma followed by a conjunction. That’s why you may want to break that rule (among all the other rules) and occasionally put a semicolon rather than a comma in front of a conjunction.

But, although the words on the page contribute to the sound, the sound is what matters. To write with cadence and rhythm, you have to hear the words.

Or I’m pretty sure you do. It seems impossible that anybody would write with cadence and rhythm without hearing the words in their mind, but the world is wide, so maybe somewhere someone does. I just find that unimaginable.

Personally, I hear the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, and the flow of the writing.

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Quelling Quirks

Here’s a post from Writer Unboxed: Quelling Those Writerly Quirks

We all have them. Our peculiar, individual tics. And no, they’re not the same as a “voice.” They’re scamps that sneak into our writing, and weaken it. I have a document on my desktop called Check For, with a long list of words and phrases to track when I do a “search-and-destroy” edit...

This made me laugh. I mean: both a wry laugh of recognition and shared annoyance and with actual humor.

One of the early readers for INVICTUS said, basically, “And quit using ‘very’!” Of course she was right, and of course you all know what’s happened, yes? The problem is that because Ryo uses “very” all the time, I’ve let myself use the word much (much) more freely than I used to, and now it’s a quirk, or at least a habit, that needs to be quelled. Did I take ALL instances of “very” out of INVICTUS? No, but I took out the vast majority. Most that remain are in phrases such as “That’s the very one, yes,” or “The very same,” or whatever. Phrases where the word is intrinsic to the larger phrase.

I haven’t updated my “check for” list, but I need to. It’s a growing list, as perhaps you might imagine. Or perhaps not, but I assure you, it is.

My characters have chins, shoulders, and eyebrows that lift. Lips, jaws, and throats that tighten; eyes that narrow, widen, meet, and lock.  And, of course, bobble heads that are constantly nodding, shaking, tilting, dipping, and getting tossed. Gently. Softly. Carelessly.

Another wry laugh, because yes. I generally catch this during some part of the proofing process, but if a character inclines her head twice on one page, well, ugh. That’s the flip side of movement tags; if someone nods, then someone else nods, then the first person nods, well, that’s a lot of nodding.

“Ever since I read Stephen King’s directive to eliminate adverbs, I cringe every time I wander into the -ly universe. So I try to avoid saying: ‘She went home quickly.’ Instead: ‘She rushed home.’  But if you combine that with the admonition to avoid pronouns referring to the third person POV narrator, wonky sentences result. ‘The wind pushed her home.’  Then I look at all those choices, and decide to ignore the rule. ‘She ran home.’”

What rule? There’s a rule to avoid pronouns referring to a third-person pov protagonist? Really?

Honestly, this is yet another instance of “There’s a rule? Throw it out!” That goes quadruple for proscriptive rules: Don’t use said, don’t use adverbs, don’t use adjectives, whatever. And now don’t use pronouns, seriously? Just say no to proscriptive rules. Oh! THERE’S a rule to follow:

Don’t take proscriptive advice seriously.

Probably almost every aspiring author would be better off putting that on a banner above their computer.

Here’s the take home message from the linked post:

Check the frequency and placement. It’s not simply the number of times a phrase appears in a manuscript, but how close together. Will the reader remember (or care) that she read the phrase she narrowed her eyes fifty pages ago? Probably not. It might be okay. My rule of thumb: no more than once in a single chapter or scene.Get rid of it.  As an experiment, try deleting some of those narrowed eyes and wistful smiles. Is anything really lost? The paragraph might even be stronger without it. Or try expressing the same idea in a simpler, more direct way. Trying to be “creative” doesn’t always enrich the writing. If the language pulls the reader out of the scene, it may distract from her experience, rather than enhancing it.Go global, instead of specific. If eyes are always blinking and widening and darting, try substituting a gesture or movement that uses the whole body. Or, at least, a different body part, one you haven’t used a lot.  Of course, a character only gets so many flinches and freezes and backward staggers; “going global” is another tactic that can turn into a tic if overused.Vary interiority and exteriority. If your character is always telling herself what she is feeling (excess interiority), try shifting that experience into a gesture or visceral sensation. Or the reverse.  Too many blinks and shrugs?  Give her a thought instead.Forget about Stephen King. Sometimes a “rule” really needs to be broken. Adverbs are not always the enemy.

Good for the author! Indeed, adverbs are not always, or even often, the enemy. Most writers are not so incompetent with adverbs as the proscriptive advice “kill all adverbs” assumes, and it does not matter one jot that Stephen King hates adverbs.

Schoolhouse Rock: Anything that can be described can be described some more!

However, yes, I do need to update my “check for” file, because I removed literally 180 instances of “very” from the first half of INVICTUS.

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Update: Finished! Also, Finished! Also, Scrambling to Complete Stuff

OKAY, A LOT GOING ON. There’s lots of news, so it’s hard to know where to start. But I have to start somewhere, so:

The TUYO World Companion, ebook version, ought to be available today. I hit publish Sunday evening. Many relieved sighs that everything was finished by today, because I really wanted to to get it out by today, and here it is, barely. I hope. KDP says it can take up to 72 hours to publish a book, but usually it’s more like a couple of hours, so barring something going wrong, I hope it’s available by the time you read this post, which I also wrote Sunday evening, so I haven’t actually SEEN the World Companion go live yet, but I hope there are no glitches. It’s up! Here’s a link: Tuyo World Companion.

I loaded the World Companion to KDP and scanned through the entire preview with every new tweak, AND I have looked at it on my Kindle AND my phone, and adjusted the formatting until after many finicky adjustments it looks good on both — and Craig looked at it on HIS Kindle — and as far as I know it looks good. If anybody hits any formatting weirdness on whatever device, let me know and I will beg an expert for help, but I think it is good to go. Also! Quite a few people participated in producing this book, so if I inadvertently left someone out of the acknowledgments during the flurry of last minute tweaking, a thousand apologies, and please remind me and I will add your name, because I greatly appreciate you all.

I’m having some trouble getting the maps to load properly in the paperback version and I don’t want to rush — I swear, I had it, but something went funky — anyway, I think I ought to be able to hit publish for that version this week. Almost totally for sure! Oh, by the way, the final wordcount was just barely under 130,000 words, so THAT is why I’m a little late moving seriously to work on SILVER CIRCLE. The novella is just under a third of the total length, and I hope you enjoy it!

NEXT!

The TUYO series is on sale starting today. This is the day to recommend to friends that they buy this series. I lowered the prices by hand, so the sale prices OUGHT to apply in Canada as well as the UK and the US, hopefully also in Australia and basically everywhere. Even if you already have the series, if you live somewhere other than the US or the UK, I would appreciate it if you would check and confirm that the whole series is showing price reductions wherever you live. That would be helpful in planning future promotions.

I checked Sunday evening and all the prices were down in the US, so it looks fine! I will put the prices back up this coming Saturday.

NEXT!

The audiobooks of SUELEN and TANO are both finished and both available! Yay!

So that’s definitely good. TANO was a particular challenge because there were so many voices, including all those young men. I think the narrator did a great job. They all sound distinctive. Sinowa sounds great, Marag sounds great, Ryo sounds all right, Aras sounds acceptable, and I’m just really pleased with it. There weren’t nearly as many voices in SUELEN; that narrator wasn’t as good at doing lots of different voices, but it also wasn’t as important.

NEXT:

I’ve moved on to final proofing for INVICTUS: CAPTIVE. Once again feeling stressed about this! I guess I’ve felt stressed at this point before every single release this year. Probably every single release ever. In this case, I’ve got to have the final version loaded by September 11, which is exactly three weeks from today. I’ve gotten a proofing copy in paper and I’ve also sent it to myself in ebook form so I can read it on my phone while walking the dogs. I’ve said this before, but I’m still amazed at how much more I catch when I read the book in a different format.

I’m still doing minor revision for INVICTUS: CRISIS. It’s on the To Do list for the coming week, you bet, but I don’t think it will take that long. I sure hope it doesn’t take more than a day or two longer, after which this one will also move into final proofing, for a change well before it’s due out. By the way, getting to this point means that based on feedback from early readers, I’ve added two — or was it three? — more chapters, plus additional scenes in a different chapter. That’s in addition to extensive tweaking throughout.

Wow, I’ll be SO glad to check off the INVICTUS duology and move on.

What else? Oh, right —

ALSO:

I’ve re-read COPPER MOUNTAIN and the 4th story collection. I enjoyed that. I do enjoy going back and re-reading series books, which probably is not a surprise since otherwise I probably wouldn’t write series in the first place. In this case, I made actual notes in pencil in the books about stuff that needs to be handled in SILVER CIRCLE. That’s not something I’ve ever done before, but this time, yes. The real point of re-reading isn’t so much to remember details — that’s important, but it’s not the point. The actual point is to put myself back in this world and this story so that scenes start to occur to me. Attractive scenes, that I’m eager to write. I need those scenes to start unrolling in my mind because if that doesn’t happen, it’s a thousand times harder to get words down.

And whew, that happened, so that’s great! I’m still being pulled away from SILVER CIRCLE by all the detail work for everything else, but the beginning of the story has come together in my head. At least, I think it has. Lots of rapid-fire scenes to begin with, lots of urgency right off the bat. It’s going to be a fast-paced story, probably. I hope I will actually write the first scenes this week, and regardless, I should certainly be able to make significant progress fairly fast in September, which is now the goal, since August is practically over.

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