S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 129

Writing Lessons: Word Repetition

A while back we talked about using "power words and phrases" and adding adverbs and adjectives to nouns in order to paint a picture and/or to punch up your writing.

Today we're going to talk about a common mistake beginning writers often make: word repetition. 

Read the following not very interesting passage that I just made up:
 Tom got on his horse and rode the horse out of the town toward the sunset.  The horse was a strong horse and would take Tom to his next adventure in the next town where his horse would remain his faithful horse.
At this point you should be throwing things at the computer screen that passage is so poorly written.  So what's wrong with it (other than it's just dumb)?  Well, the word "horse" appears six times in forty-two words.  That's 14.2% of the words are "horse."  (Admittedly, I wrote that passage trying to put in references to the horse as often as I could.)

What you want to avoid is "word repetition" in your writing.  And that's where having a good vocabulary comes in.  So let's rewrite that passage and see if we can avoid word repetition as much as possible:

Tom got on his horse and rode the animal out of the town toward the sunset.  The horse was a strong beast and would take Tom to his next adventure in the next settlement where his pinto would remain his faithful steed.
Okay, we're down to two uses of "horse" and, in my opinion, both of them are needed.  The first one, you could say "Tom got on his pinto/steed/equine" (as long as the word referred to "horse") but I believe start from the simple "horse" and move to the more complex "steed".   But try to never have the same noun in one sentence.  (You could say "Tom got on his animal" if you were writing science fiction or fantasy and the animal was something other than a horse and you were stringing your reader along before revealing that Tom was indeed riding a thoat.)

Also, the second use of "horse" is the second sentence could be changed, perhaps to "mount" giving us only one use of the word "horse."

And, notice that "pinto" gives us more information about the horse.  Avoiding word repetition is a good chance to supply your reader with more detail.  And of course once you call it a "pinto" you can't later call it a "mustang."

One of the hardest scenes to write was in my novel (unpublished) Rock Killer where there was a shoot-out between the heroin and the bad guys at the same time a house was burning.  So I had the burning fire and guns firing.  It was a challenge.  I loved writing that scene.

Use your thesaurus (the one that comes with Word is fairly good) and your vocabulary to avoid word repetition.

Movie Review: Hit and Run

I rented Hit and Run from Netflix (is it really "renting" when it's from Netflix?) despite it's low Rotten Tomatoes score because, well, it had a Corvette in it.  (I thought it was a Z06 but it was a Grand Sport.)  It also had a very cool Caddilac CTS-V stationwagon.

And had I realized that one of the stars was also the writer, director, and editor, I might have backed off.  But I didn't discover that until the end credits rolled.

Hit and Run was sometimes funny, occasionally had a cool car chase, but overall was just too dumb to be believed.  The main romantic relationship was completely unbelievable.  The girl was a hyper-politically correct liberal with a doctorate in "non-violent conflict resolution" and drove a Prius.  The guy was a criminal in the witness protection program who had a 700 horsepower 1967 Lincoln Continental (Apparently the actor owns the car in real life) that was very cool (except for the really big wheels and low low profile tires)(when will this stupid fad for obnoxiously big wheels end?).  Tom Arnold (who I like for some reason) plays a bumbling federal marshal (is there such a thing?).  The only believable character was the villain who liked dogs (and drove the CTS-V).

If the movie had concentrated on car chases with these amazing vehicles it probably would have been better.  But instead it had to go for cheap laughs (twice people walk in on an old and fat people orgy) and try to have character development the actor/writer just couldn't handle.  And there is far far too much discussion about a guy getting raped in jail.  So, it's kinda fun, but I don't think the fun is worth the bad parts.

RadCon Schedule

This weekend is RadCon science fiction and fantasy convention in Tri-Cities, Washington.  It will be at the Red Lion Inn by the Pasco Airport (across the street from the community college).  I am a "visiting professional" and will be doing a reading and appearing on three panels, including one about asteroid mining (viz, Rock Killer ).

Here is my schedule of events:

Friday the 15th, 4:30 P.M. to 5:00 P.M., Small Press room: I'll be reading from my urban fantasy, Adept Series novels  Hammer of Thor and Book of Death .  I'll also be handing out swag.

Saturday the 16th: 1:00 P.M. to 2:00 P.M., Small Press room: "Working with a Small Press Publisher" panel.

Also Saturday: 2:00 P.M. to 3:00 P.M., Sage room: "What can we do with an asteroid?" panel.

And finally Saturday: 4:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M., Room 2205, "Mixing Genres" panel.

I hope to see you there.  Come up and say "Hi!"

Sunday Six: The Towel

Today's Sunday Six from Chapter Six of Rock Killer :

"Anxious about going back into space?" she asked, sitting at the small breakfast table in a sunny atrium just off the kitchen. 
Her towel almost fell off but she caught it and adjusted its tension.
He shrugged. "I guess." He dried his hands on a dishtowel and joined her at the table.   She’s damn sexy like this, he thought.

Another Earth Right Next Door

New research based on data from the Kepler space telescope's observations indicates that an Earth-like planet maybe right on our doorstep . . . astronomically speaking.

Keep in mind, the galaxy is huge.  It's 100,000 light years across.  And a light year is 5,878,499,814,276 miles.  So that's . . . a very big number.  Just call it 5.88 x 10^17 miles across the galaxy.  That's absolutely unfathomably huge.

So when scientist say an Earth-like planet could as close as 13 light years away, that's, well, right on our doorstep.  Only problem is getting there.  If you could (you can't) go the speed of light, it'd take 13 years to get there.  If you could fly a 737 there (you can't), it would take about 17.5 million years.  That's a long time in a coach seat.  If you could build a spaceship capable of going a million miles per hour it would take about 8,700 years.

Still, 13 light years away is, on the scale of the galaxy, right next door.

Research

Learn how doing research (and finding out I was wrong) improved my novel Book of Death at the Ask David blog.  And while you're there, leave your own review!

Movie Review: Flight

Last night I watched Flight .  The movie stars Denzel Washington as an airline pilot who miraculously (and skillfully) lands a crippled aircraft saving most everyone on board.  The plane was in a dive that would have killed everyone but he managed to crash land it with only six out of 102 people on board killed.  However, this starts a chain of events that lead to his life falling apart.

I thought this was going to be a conspiracy thriller, the big evil corporation or the big evil government intelligence service set him up somehow and it would devolve into car chases and shoot-outs.  But no.  This movie is a character study of a man whose life is crumbling around him.  I don't want to give too much away but Washington gives an amazing performance and the entire film is just shot with simplistic beauty.  I thought the ending was a little unbelievable but up until then it was a first rate character study and as a writer I appreciated that.

Flight is rated "R" for "drug and alcohol abuse, language, sexuality/nudity, and an intense action sequence" so it's not for kids.  But adults should enjoy it.

There is one glaring error aviation buffs/pilots will catch.  I'll leave that up to the student to find.

Zen and the Art of Driving Fast

(Editor's note: I wrote this in 2007 in response to someone saying my driving fast-even on a racetrack-was irresponsible.)

Nirvana.

The ears are overworked with wind noise, road noise, engine and exhaust noise.  Only the wind can be ignored.  The road noise tells you that the car is stable.  When you hear a whine is when you worry.  Engine and exhaust noise tell you the engine is healthy and when it's time to shift.  There's no time to watch the tachometer so you must rely on your ears and experience.

The eyes are sweeping.  The pavement coming at them at over 100 miles per hour is ignored.  You know this sheet of asphalt like you would know a lover's body.  The eyes are looking for visual cues to turn-in, apex, and exit of each corner.  Here it's the blue part of the stands, there it's a wooden structure called a "turn station" and there it's a telephone pole.  Being a class there are cones demarking these things but due to hills and weeds, they are not always visible.  But the eyes are also watching the other cars.  While looking through them to find the corner markers, it is watching them for sudden unexpected moves and slowdowns.  Here as nowhere else do you  dare be this close to another car at highway speeds.

The inner ear, felt in the ass, tells you the car is tacking straight and the  tires are not sliding over the asphalt.

The right foot is planted against the firewall, the left hovering over the clutch.  Both hands are on the steering wheel, probably at "nine and three."

Your brain is processing all this information.  The baud rate is enormous and the limited bandwidth of your brain becomes selective.  The itch of your nose, the discomfort of the helmet, the cold of the wind coming in the window all fade away.  Your mind is completely and utterly concentrating on its task, on piloting a powerful car at speeds over one hundred miles per hour around a track that twists and turns seemingly at random.

Your mind has reached "speed nirvana."  Gone is everything other than driving, other than moving your body to make the car move as you wish, observing, listening . . .

Driving.

Not commuting, not "operating a motor vehicle," but DRIVING.  The skills were acquired in years of back-roads speeding and days of track training.  Talent plays a role, the ability to process the information coming in fast enough to react.  To hear the screech of tires and know you need to look for a car sideways in the road.  To smell brakes and know you need to slow down and give your over-heated pads a break.  To run your eyes over the instrument gages on straight aways to make sure the beast under the hood is not suffering.

This is driving.  This is speed nirvana.  Gone are the worries of work, relationships, money, whatever.  It is you, the car, and the pavement coming at you at 220 feet every second.

Nirvana

Sunday Six: The Mugging

Today's Sunday Six from Chapter Five of Rock Killer :

Charlie took the bag from her shoulder and held it out for him.  He reached for it.  Once he had his hand around the strap, she pulled back hard.  The boy was pulled off balance and Charlie grabbed the wrist of his knife-wielding hand and twisted hard. 
She was rewarded with a dull, moist pop as she broke the joint. 
He howled in pain and dropped the knife. 

Close Shave

Because my novel Rock Killer is about asteroid mining (sort of like Gone With the Wind is about the Civil War), anything in the news about asteroids tends to grab my attention.

It seems that on February 15th a small asteroid (that probably looks nothing like the one pictured here) will make a record close pass by Earth.  As Fox News reports:

“This is a record-setting close approach,” Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at JPL said in a video released by NASA this week. Yeomans, however, emphasized that the asteroid, designated 2012DA14, won’t hit Earth.

“It will come interestingly close, closer than many man-made satellites,” he said.
 

How close is "interestingly close"? About 17,500 miles above the surface at closest approach.  This is within the orbit of communication and GPS satellites.

 The rock is 50 meter wide (165 feet about) and if it hit Earth would most likely leave a crater like Meteor Crater in Arizona.  Not a catastrophic impact unless you're in the vicinity.

As scientist look we're going to find more of these Near Earth Objects (NEO).  NASA has a project to find as many as possible with the goal of, partly, give us some warning of an impact.  As we find more NEOs, we'll become aware of more close approaches to Earth that in the past we never knew happened.