Jan Christensen's Blog, page 6

GRAMMARLY’S GLOBAL LITERACY CHART

Attribution: https://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker

Visit www.grammarly.com for more graphs and other interesting items about writing, grammar and literacy.

 

 

WRITING FOR THE READER���NOT JUST FOR OTHER WRITERS

Since I joined a couple of writer critique groups back in the early 1990s, I learned a lot of basic guidelines for good writing. The majority of them made a lot of sense to me. And as a reader as well as a writer, I now notice some awkward, clunky writing that miss the following points.

��� Stay in point of view���no head-hopping inside a scene.

��� Write as much as you can in active voice; don���t be passive.

��� Leave out the boring stuff.

��� Use modifiers sparingly (some say not at all, but I don���t agree with that���see below).

��� Never use a semi-colon in fiction. (I break this one every so often, just because I���m a rebel.)

��� Learn and use all the rules of grammar.

��� Spell check over and over again.

��� Get critiques and edits.

Then there were other rules I had trouble with:

��� Show, don���t tell. In my opinion, this can lead to choppy writing and lack of interesting details. Yes, show action, but tell descriptions.

��� No prologues. Come on. Sometimes they���re exactly what���s needed. They can pull the reader in and explain some backstory so there���s no ���info dump��� later on. I agree, though, that they need to be done very well. Many best-selling authors use them. Why shouldn���t the rest of us?

��� No epilogs. I have two reasons for using them in my Paula PI books���one is that as a reader myself, I like to know what happens with some of the characters later on. In a mystery in particular, it���s hard to wrap up all the loose character threads during the hopefully action-packed ending. The second reason was simply because it was a senseless rule. (There���s that rebel again).

��� Don���t use he said/she said. Have the character do something instead (cough, sigh, drink coffee, drink beer, whatever). Sorry, after a while of reading all these small actions (especially the coffee drinking) it gets old AND intrusive AND boring. He said/she said is invisible to most readers. It doesn���t stop them. So, why not use it? I do both the saids and the small actions, mixing it up.

��� Split infinitives are evil. Only if you���re an English teacher who hasn���t kept up with the times. When Latin was in use, this was a necessary rule. It���s not one for those of us who speak English. And sometimes splitting the infinitive makes the sentence much stronger: ���to boldly go where no man has gone before��� has a much better cadence than ���To go boldly where no man has gone before.��� Right? Right. When we were motorhoming I found a great bumper sticker that we promptly put on the couch: ���Boldly going nowhere.���

But I digress.

One warning about head hopping:

If you do head hop between scenes, be sure the reader knows right away whose head you���ve hopped into if you���ve changed it since the last scene. The book I���m reading currently has made this mistake several times, and it always make me stop in order to figure out I���m in a different head.

So, the biggest rule is to do what works. What works is smooth writing that doesn���t in any way make your reader stop reading to figure something out. This is okay for non-fiction. Not so much for fiction. Thus the rules about using good grammar and spelling in particular.

WRITING FOR THE READER—NOT JUST FOR OTHER WRITERS

Since I joined a couple of writer critique groups back in the early 1990s, I learned a lot of basic guidelines for good writing. The majority of them made a lot of sense to me. And as a reader as well as a writer, I now notice some awkward, clunky writing that miss the following points.

• Stay in point of view—no head-hoping inside a scene.

• Write as much as you can in active voice; don’t be passive.

• Leave out the boring stuff.

• Use modifiers sparingly (some say not at all, but I don’t agree with that—see below).

• Never use a semi-colon in fiction. (I break this one every so often, just because I’m a rebel.)

• Learn and use all the rules of grammar.

• Spell check over and over again.

• Get critiques and edits.

Then there were other rules I had trouble with:

• Show, don’t tell. In my opinion, this can lead to choppy writing and lack of interesting details. Yes, show action, but tell descriptions.

• No prologues. Come on. Sometimes they’re exactly what’s needed. They can pull the reader in and explain some backstory so there’s no “info dump” later on. I agree, though, that they need to be done very well. Many best-selling authors use them. Why shouldn’t the rest of us?

• No epilogs. I have two reasons for using them in my Paula PI books—one is that as a reader myself, I like to know what happens with some of the characters later on. In a mystery in particular, it’s hard to wrap up all the loose character threads during the hopefully action-packed ending. The second reason was simply because it was a senseless rule. (There’s that rebel again).

• Don’t use he said/she said. Have the character do something instead (cough, sigh, drink coffee, drink beer, whatever). Sorry, after a while of reading all these small actions (especially the coffee drinking) it gets old AND intrusive AND boring. He said/she said is invisible to most readers. It doesn’t stop them. So, why not use it? I do both the saids and the small actions, mixing it up.

• Split infinitives are evil. Only if you’re an English teacher who hasn’t kept up with the times. When Latin was in use, this was a necessary rule. It’s not one for those of us who speak English. And sometimes splitting the infinitive makes the sentence much stronger: “to boldly go where no man has gone before’ has a much better cadence than “To go boldly where no man has gone before.” Right? Right. When we were motorhoming I found a great bumper sticker that we promptly put on the couch: “Boldly going nowhere.”

But I digress.

One warning about head hoping:

If you do head hop between scenes, be sure the reader knows right away whose head you’ve hopped into if you’ve changed it since the last scene. The book I’m reading currently has made this mistake several times, and it always make me stop in order to figure out I’m in a different head.

So, the biggest rule is to do what works. What works is smooth writing that doesn’t in any way make your reader stop reading to figure something out. This is okay for non-fiction. Not so much for fiction. Thus the rules about using good grammar and spelling in particular.

WHAT WOULD TINA RECOMMEND ABOUT OVERWHELMING CLUTTER?

She’d say, “Take it easy. With baby steps.”

• Pick an area that needs de-cluttering. The corner of a room. Your home office. A closet.

• Discard or put away two items. Then stop.

• Discard or put away two items every day from now on (okay, take the weekend off, or at least Sunday).

• If you’re on a roll one day and feel like doing more and have the time, go ahead until you want to stop.

• BUT, the next day, discard or put away two more items. No resting on your laurels.

• Repeat until done.

Then you can pick another area to work on.

To keep the clutter permanently gone from the areas you’ve worked on, be sure to discard or put away any items that have accumulated in that spot before you go to bed every night. After a while this will become such a habit that you won’t be able to go to bed without having everything put away.

This is how I do it. I have two hot spots. Home office and kitchen. I make sure all surfaces are clear before I head off to bed every night. The rest of the house I keep up with as I use the space—the closet, for example, or the table next to my chair.

I hope this will help anyone who has trouble with excess clutter. Let me know how it goes if you use this system. And if you have any other tips, please leave a comment.

EXCERPT FROM ORGANIZED TO DEATH

My novel, Organized to Death, is the first in the Tina Tales mystery series. Tina lives in Newport, Rhode Island, with her mother and great uncle in an old Victorian home. Her first job as a professional organizer goes horribly wrong when she and the home owner discover a dead body.

Here’s an excerpt from later in the book (on-line booksellers just give you the first few pages). I hope this will intrigue you enough to purchase or borrow the book, if you haven’t already. It’s available in print, for Kindle, as well as other ebook formats for your iPhone or Nook, Kobo, etc. Here goes:

Tina grabbed her winter coat from the hall closet and stepped out the front door. A shadowy figure leaning against the old maple tree in the front yard straightened up as she approached. Hands in her jacket pockets, Tina’s grip on the pepper spray tightened. The urge to turn around and run back inside was strong, but she made herself keep walking.

“Hello, Tina,” the man said.

Gooseflesh rose on her arms. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Ted Hockmann.”

“Who?” Tina shivered in the cold night air.

“Ted Hockmann.” He stepped into the light, and she recognized Dr. Hockmann. He’d taken over old Dr. Stevenson’s practice a few months ago, and she’d gone to see him for her yearly exam. She blushed. She so did not want to talk to Dr. Hockmann.

“Oh, Doctor,” she said, realizing he’d called her by her first name. Since she’d become an adult, she didn’t like that. She admitted he was one of the most handsome men she’d ever met. Way over six feet, slim, and elegant with fine, chiseled features and piercing blue eyes. Blond hair. Yum. Except for some reason, he creeped her out. He stood there, not saying anything more. Her hand tightened on the pepper spray. Her mind told her she was being ridiculous, but all her mother’s past warnings clanged in her brain.

“Nice to see you,” he said, finally.

“Um, you too,” she squeaked.

“Going for a walk?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if I join you?”

Yes, her mind screamed. “No,” she said. “That would be fine.” He was a doctor after all. They knew each other, sort of.

They fell into step. “I live just two doors down from you, you know, in the conversion to condos,” he said.

“No, I didn’t know that.” Her voice was still too high.

“Yes. Just moved in a week ago. Do you often take walks at night?”

He’s just being friendly, she told herself. “Sometimes.”

“Interesting neighborhood. I hope eventually all the homes are renovated.”

“That would be nice.”

“Would increase the value, of course, but the main thing is how wonderful it would all look.”

“Yes.”

He was just being friendly, making conversation, she told herself again. They were neighbors, after all. They walked in silence for a while.

“You work?” he asked abruptly.

“Yes. I’m a professional organizer.”

“Really? What’s that?”

“I go to people’s homes or offices and help them clear out clutter and organize their space so they can put things away easily and find things when they need to, and just so it generally works better for them.” She was babbling. She hated feeling this nervous.

“You do offices?”

“Yes,” she said cautiously. He hadn’t been in practice long enough to need organizational help, had he?

“I could use your help then.”

******

And here’s the description:

Back in her hometown of Newport, RI, Tina Shaw, twenty-nine, is picking up the pieces of her shattered life. She begins her first job as a professional organizer in a house filled with cardboard boxes and clutter, only to discover a dead body in an eerily neat baby nursery. She fears this career move may be a short one until the handsome but spooky new doctor persuades her to reorganize his office left in disarray by the former physician. Ignoring the doctor’s obvious interest in her, Tina begins seeing her former boyfriend. When he protests against her new profession, she realizes what a control freak he is. Then there’s another old flame who is making her hotter by the minute. As she works through the office clutter, she learns the doctor has a possible motive for the killing. But when someone else is shot, the doctor has a solid alibi–Tina herself. Drawn unwillingly into the case, she searches for answers as her list of suspects multiplies. When the killer begins targeting Tina and her friends, she works harder to learn the murderer’s identity before someone else is found dead.

Okay, enough advertising. Next time I’ll post something entirely different.

WARDROBE TRUNKS

Authors generally love to do research. (Secret: It’s a good excuse for procrastinating—don’t tell anyone!). I’m no exception. That doesn’t mean I enjoy researching every single subject. I might look up some information on guns, for example, which don’t interest me much, but I don’t want to make any errors about how they work because people who do know become incensed if a writer gets something wrong. Many times I simply become vague. She pulled out her gun—not she pulled out her [brand of gun] [name of gun] and inserted [type of bullets] into the [cylinder/chamber/magazine/whatever], screwed on the silencer [make sure type of gun allows for this] and pulled the [safety/hammer/whatever] . . . Well, you get the idea.

But when something does interest me, I can get lost in the details.

Take wardrobe trunks, for example. Also called steamer trunks. They could be huge—as big as a telephone booth. They were great for keeping clothing in good shape because you could hang it up. Drawers kept other things organized. You didn’t have to unpack—just open up the trunk, and there was everything you needed.

Only problem—you wouldn’t be able to put it in an overhead bin, or check it at the airport. It took at least two men to carry it around.

But they could be the perfect solution for someone who likes to be super organized, like Tina Shaw, my protagonist in her professional organizer series. In Cluttered Attic Secrets

an old wardrobe trunk plays a small part in the story. Researching them, I found out they could have ironing boards:

https://shard2.1stdibs.us.com/archivesE/upload/9390/02_13/IMG_1254/IMG_1254_l.jpg

or

http://bit.ly/1hiGWtZ

Fold down desks:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e0/96/eb/e096ebb9f1e553582a9abb248343a5ad.jpg

or

http://bit.ly/1N907jP

And be as big as telephone booths:

http://www.thisoldtrunk.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=179

or

http://bit.ly/1Made7l

Isn’t the internet great? I could find all this information in a matter of minutes. What have you been researching lately?

LESSONS LEARNED ABOUT DRAFTING A NOVEL

The list below of things to do after writing each chapter of your novel came about because I’ve edited nine novels now, and learned from personal experience that they would all have been easier to edit if I’d done everything on the checklist before continuing to write the next chapter. I’ve gotten timelines mixed up, character names mangled, forgotten whether it was spring, summer, or fall, left out sensory input where it would have worked brilliantly, and used “was,” “a while,” and other pet words way too often. Following the checklist should only take a few minutes and will make your first full run-through edit a lot less painful. See what you think. I only wish I’d done it for all my books, including my latest:

After each chapter is written:

1. Read it over and make minor changes and to refresh your memory.

2. Make a chart (word processing table or spreadsheet) with columns for Chapter Number, Day of Week, Time, Location, and Outline (synopsis).

3. Nail day of week, time of day, and location, put on chart.

4. List all new characters on another chart with first name, last name, and description so you can sort by first/last name to be sure not too many characters have similar names or begin with the same letter. Usually I do a small description of characters as they’re introduced, so I often just copy and paste the description into that column. If later on I mention something else about the character (eye color, make of car, for example), I put those details into that column, too.

5. Have yet a third chart to list names of businesses. My current novel has a made-up museum, funeral parlor, theater, and restaurant. It’s easy to forget many chapters later what I made up. It’s just two columns—name of business, and what it is. It won’t take you much time at all to add anything to it.

6. Check that senses other than sight are included–smell, hearing, touch, taste.

7. Find and replace your frequent words, for example, “was,” “that,” etc.

8. Check for your own personal demons—lack of description, echo words, tags missing making conversations confusing, mixed-up names, character positioning, and so on.

9. Do a final spell check.

10. Save your day’s work on your computer and back it up (I do that on the cloud).

11. Write the outline/synopsis for your chart.

12. In your notes file, (you have a notes file, right? With maps, research, anything else related to your particular project. I put these two charts in that file, always open when I’m writing the novel) list anything you want to cover later on, and any good ideas you have for later action. This is especially important if you are not an outliner, and it can help prevent writer’s block.

Your future self will thank you later for doing all this. So will your editor. Anyone have any tips to add to the list?

ARE YOU A GRAMMAR LOVER?

Grammarly is at it again with a new infographic:

Are you a grammar lover/nerd?

 

 

 

ALICE IN WONDERLAND’S ANNIVERSARY

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

This year marks the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the first printing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderful, commonly referred to as Alice in Wonderland.

“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”

When I was about five, my mother read me both the Wonderland book and the Looking-Glass one, and I loved them so much, I begged her to read them over and over again.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

But until this year, I never checked into the background of how the Wonderland book came to be written. I thought I’d share some of the interesting facts I found out about the author and the book here.

“Have I gone mad?”

“I’m afraid so, but let me tell you something, the best people usually are.”

First, probably a lot of people know that Lewis Carroll is a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, but I didn’t. Or that he based a lot of his characters on real people and places, even images. Because he stuttered, he said his last name Dodo-Dodgson, and thus the dodo bird in the book was created. The rabbit hole was probably a symbol for the stairs, called the rabbit hole, in the back of the main hall in Christ Church where Mr. Dodgson was a mathematician.

“I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?”

Mr. Dodgson first told many of Alice’s adventures to three little girls on a boat ride with their father, Henry Liddell. Lorina Charlotte, aged thirteen at the time, Alice Pleasance, aged ten, and Edith Mary, aged eight. They loved the stories so much, he later wrote them down, expanded on them, did his own illustrations, but later hired an illustrator, John Tenniel. The first draft was 15,500 words, but then he added more material such as the Cheshire cat and the Mad Hatter tea party (one of my favorite scenes) and it became 27,500 words.

“Curiouser and curiouser!”

“Off with their heads!”

The author had a rare neurological disorder that causes hallucinations and affects the size of visual objects, which can make the patient feel bigger or smaller than he is. This of course became a major part of the book. The disease is now often called the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.

I have to say that Mr. Dodson’s life was almost as fascinating as his stories. Happy Anniversary, Alice!

As the Cheshire Cat said, “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” And now you know why I love to read and write. What is your favorite book? What was the first book you remember being read to you or that you read yourself?

NEWPORT, RI, FUN FACTS: THE AWFUL AWFUL™

I love Newport, RI, so it was logical for me to set my Tina Tales mystery series in that city on Aquidnick Island. And I thought it would be fun to share some facts about Newport here on my blog from time to time.

Today I’m going to talk about a famous drink served there, which is mentioned in my latest novel, Cluttered Attic Secrets. It’s not unusual for a drink to become famous, but usually they’re alcoholic drinks. This one is free of alcohol, bigger than any cocktail you’ve probably ever had, and almost a meal in itself.

It’s called an Awful Awful™. A little known (almost secret) fact about the Awful Awful™ is that it originated in a town next to the town where I grew up in in New Jersey. The Newport Creamery bought the trademarked drink’s secret recipe way back in the 1950s, and when I first visited Newport, I was amazed to find I could get one there. The small chain, Bond’s in New Jersey. is long gone, unfortunately—they had the best hamburgers, too.

An Awful Awful™ is a blend of a secret frozen ice milk mix, whole milk, and flavored syrup, and is very, very cold. It’s obviously patterned after milk shakes, cabinets (what milk shakes are called in Rhode Island), and frappes. They can be made from any flavor. If you drink three, you get the fourth one free. It used to be (maybe still is) a rite of passage for young boys to do that in high school. Only five hundred calories each.

So, if you’re ever on Aquidneck Island, stop by the Creamery on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, or go just down the road a way to Middletown, and have an Awful Awful™. You’ll be glad you did. Go here for more information: http://www.newportcreamery.com/icecream.asp