Stephen H. Provost's Blog, page 12

Using the Right Word Isn't a Special Effect

Effects or affects? Which is the noun and which the verb?

To find the answer, just think of the phrase special effects: The second word starts with the sound ef. You'd never think of saying (or writing), "special affects," as a noun, would you? Since effects functions as a noun in this instance, just remember that it works that way in most other instances, as well - except when it means to cause. In that case, it's a verb: One effects (or causes) change.

Similarly, affect can act as a noun occasionally: Someone's affect refers to that person's observed emotional state.

Those are exceptions to the rule, but try not to get hung up on them. They're not the true source of the confusion. The real problem is that we think they sound alike, so we forget which one goes where. And when we speak quickly, they do sound alike. They both come out as uh-fect, just as February tends to come out sounding like Feb-yu-wa-ry and often winds up as aw-fun. 

It takes careful enunciation to reveal that effects (think FX, as in the FX Channel) doesn't really sound like affects (uh-fects) at all. If you remember that much, it might affect how well you remember overall rule. When in doubt, just consult your TV listings.

It's not a special effect, it's just proper usage.

Choosing a Title for My Highway Book

It's easy to agonize over every sentence when you're writing, but if I kept stopping to rework everything I'd typed, I'd never get anything done. Early in my career as a journalist, I learned to spend the most time working on the first paragraph: the hook or, as it's known in the business, the lede. (They started spelling it that way to distinguish it the from the lead used in hot metal typesetting - which doesn't explain why so many reporters insist on misspelling the past tense of the verb to lead as lead. It's led as in Zeppelin.)

If the first paragraph's important, the headline is crucial. You get somewhere between four and 10 words to get the readers' attention and tell them why they should bother to read the story. I've spent the bulk of my career writing these things. When I wasn't writing stories or columns over a span of nearly 15 years, I was writing headlines.

Once I started writing books, I had to come up with titles - for the overall works and for individual chapters. As in journalism, you want something distinctive and eye-catching. How many times have you seen 'tis the season in a headline around yuletide? Or the phrase remembered fondly on a story about some beloved figure's death?

Book titles can be just as challenging. It's nearly impossible to come up with one that hasn't been used before at some point, but similar titles for dissimilar works aren't likely to cause any confusion. Hypothetically speaking, books about Pat Benatar and Muhammad Ali might both be titled Hit Me With Your Best Shot, but no one's likely to mistake the '80s rock star for the former heavyweight champ.  

Occasionally, you may manage to hit on a truly original idea. To my knowledge, the title Identity Break hadn't been used before I published my first novel, under that title. I didn't have to search long and hard for it; the idea came to me without much effort even before the book was finished.

Finding a title for my latest work, a history of U.S. Highway 99 in California, was a different story. For much of the time I spent writing it, I planned to call it Ghosts of Old 99. That was the title I used when I submitted the idea to my publisher. But then I started seeing books on retail shelves with titles that referred to highways haunted by "real" ghosts, and I started thinking the title might not work too well, after all. The ghosts I was referring to were memories, not actual phantoms that might require the attention of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and company (or whoever winds up in the remake). 

I scrapped that idea and started running through potential keywords in my mind. Whether you're writing a headline or a title, once you get the right keyword, you're halfway there. In this case, my mind fixed on the word Golden, as in the Golden State Highway - the name chosen for much of Highway 99 in California way back during the 1920s. My first idea was The Golden Era of the Golden State Highway. I liked it - especially the repetition of the word golden, but it seemed too wordy. Titles, like headlines, should be as punchy as possible, so I started scaling it back. First, it became The Golden Highway and then, finally, The Golden Road, with the subtitle Memories of Highway 99 in California.

I liked it. My wife liked it. My publisher approved it as a working title, so there you have it. Unlike with Identity Break, other books share the main title here, but none involve Highway 99 specifically or even highways in general. L.M. Montgomery, who also produced Anne of Green Gables, did write a children's novel by that title more than a century ago, which no one would ever mistake for a highway history. 

So The Golden Road it is. That's my big announcement for today. You can read more about it on the page dedicated to this work elsewhere on my website. It's due out in 2016, but I've been talking about it for the past few months online. At least now I won't have to refer to it as "my Highway 99 book" anymore.

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The Writer Ain't Your Personal Pinata

It's not the reader's job to whack away at the author until candy comes spilling out of his or her guts, then continue to swing away in frustration because said writer has dispensed fruit sours instead of Hershey's kisses. The writer isn't my slave, and George R.R. Martin doesn't "owe" me another Game of Thrones installment any more than he owes it to his characters to keep them alive.

They're his characters, and we're his readers. Note the sentence construction. No one ever says, "Neil Gaiman is my author" (with the possible exception of Amanda Palmer) or "Joss Whedon is my screenwriter" (unless it's the CEO of Disney, which employed him for the latest Avengers flick). There's a perfectly sound reason for that: Neil Gaiman, George R.R. Martin and Joss Whedon are the ones doing the work. Without them, there'd be nothing to criticize. Do you think J.K. Rowling goes around bashing her readers for mispronouncing the name of a character, skipping a chapter or failing to finish the book in one sitting? Get real. She's got better things to do with her time - like write another book.

Some people are ripping Joss Whedon for the way he wrote the Black Widow character, Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson), in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. As near as I can tell, the criticism is mostly about a story arc in which Romanov and Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) tentatively explore their feelings for each other and she reveals that she was subjected to the trauma of a forced sterilization procedure.

Hey, critics: Last time I checked, there was nothing wrong with falling in love - it can be a downright pleasant experience, and it doesn't automatically make you a "weak" character. In fact, the Romanov character is a lot stronger than the indecisive Banner in the movie. As to the forced sterilization procedure, yes, that would be traumatic, and the inability to have kids does have the tendency to create a sense of loss - for men and women alike. Both Romanov and Banner feel it. 

The subtext of the scene in which this is revealed suggests that the inability to have children doesn't make someone a monster. It doesn't make either of them less human. And for those critics who failed to notice, procreation as a means of continuing the species was a fairly clear theme running through the plot as a whole; I suspect Whedon wove this secondary story into the script as a means of exploring that theme on a more personal level.)

Regardless of such considerations, however, it was Whedon's story to tell. He didn't deserve to get death threats on Twitter for writing the Natasha Romanov character the way he did - or for not writing it the way a few strident critics wanted it written. A say "a few" because, as of this writing, 89 percent of audiences and 75 percent of critics on Rotten Tomatoes liked the movie. Whedon can take that as vindication. And he can take pride in the fact that his name's on the film - because he did the work. You didn't. I didn't. We have a right to our opinions, but this will never be "our" movie because without us, it would still exist. Without him, it wouldn't - at least not in its present form.

And that would be a shame, because it was a lot of fun to watch.

Note: Careful observers will have realized that I misspelled the Black Widow character's last name - which is actually "Romanoff" in the Marvel Universe - throughout this post. This was by design. My wife's next novel is titled "Romanov" (with e "V"), so I thought I'd plant a little seed: a little advance marketing. Wink.