Virginia S. Anderson's Blog, page 34
April 2, 2016
Contest Time!
Check out this chance for a critique of your novel! Looks good!
Hello readers and writers!
Today marks the first day in a 20-day-long contest. Andrea Lundgren, who does book coaching services has generously donated prizes to 7 winners. Here’s what 7 lucky people will win (one prize per winner):
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April 1, 2016
Parallelism in Writing for Voice and Style!
One of the hardest writing strategies to teach effectively is “parallel structure.” Yet it’s incredibly useful in all kinds of writing, argumentative and expository as well as literary.
In my last post, I used an example from a terrific education site on grammar to illustrate how sentences could be packed with detail using “absolutes.” This example powerfully illustrates, as well, how parallel structure works.
“Down the long concourse they came unsteadily, Enid favouring her damaged hip, Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet, both of them carrying Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags and concentrating on the floor in front of them, measuring out the hazardous distance three paces at a time.”
(Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001)
What makes this an example of parallelism?
Each descriptive phrase (in this case absolutes, which consist of a noun and its modifiers) precisely mirrors the grammatical form of the one that came before, with all the phrases ultimately connected to each other by an “coordinating conjunction,” in this case, “and.”
favouring
paddling
slapping
carrying
concentrating
measuring
In this example there’s also a parallelism of meaning: the first two phrases compare Enid’s and Alfred’s physical actions
favouring her damaged hip
paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet
But the heart of the parallel structure lies in the perfect repetition of the main verb forms.
Here’s another example, using participles (“-ing” forms) and nouns to create two parallel scaffolds:
“Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine.”
(Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm. Harper & Row, 1977)
Note the grammatical precision of the noun set: not just nouns preceded by “the” and adjectives but also each followed with a three-word prepositional phrase:
the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater
the green leaves of jewelweed by my side
the ragged red trunk of a pine
In literary writing, the use of parallelism, like the use of absolutes, can help you flow into your details so that they seem to be rhythmic extensions of your original clause, much like water flowing down a stream. In expository or argumentative writing, careful attention to parallelism can keep readers on track as you move through related ideas.
Here’s an example from one of my recent summaries on my other blog, College Composition Weekly (where I summarize recent research on the teaching of college writing). I’m presenting Steve Lamos’s argument in the March 2016 College English that job security for writing teachers not on the tenure track will remain elusive if the negative attitudes of college administrators and other powerful stakeholders are not addressed:
Although emotional labor is devalued across most educational contexts, Lamos writes, within more prestigious research universities it is especially “subject to a kind of gendered dismissal” based on a sense that it involves work that women find “inherently satisfying” and thus not in need of other compensation and that, by its nature, consists more of “pandering to difference” rather than enforcing academic standards (366).*
Use parallelism to eliminate tangles in your writing!
This sentence appears in the context of an academic discussion and is part of a “summary,” so it requires me to incorporate fairly complex information in a taut space. Parallelism holds the two points of this sentence together through the repetition of “that”:
on a sense
that it involves
and
that, by its nature, [it] consists
Readers of dense texts like this can benefit from knowing that as long as the long clauses are introduced by a repeated word and structure (“that + verb” in this case), they’re still in the same sentence, progressing through related points.
Writers surrender the power of parallelism when they forget that the last element of a list should echo the previous elements:
The lecture was accessible, helpful, and it gave me lots of good information.
He came in dripping sweat, panting for breath, and he was trembling with exhaustion.
Why not:
The lecture was accessible, helpful, and informative.
He came in dripping sweat, panting for breath, and trembling with exhaustion.
In both cases, parallelism has allowed you to cut empty words (in the second case, you could even cut “and”).
So for fiction and essay writers (as well as poets!), parallelism is a tool for adding detail, creating rhythm, and connecting ideas. For writers in other contexts, it can serve as a logical, connective tool.
*Bonus: many constructions other than lists joined with “and” benefit from—and usually actually require—parallelism. Here, the “more of/rather than” construction is cemented through the mirroring verbs “pandering”/”enforcing.” Other constructions requiring parallelism include “neither/nor”; “not only/but also”; and “both/and.”
Do you have favorite examples of parallelism as a literary device, from your own or others’ writing? Share!
March 29, 2016
The problem of book theft …
A really scary story! It seems important to make sure that when we buy a book from a new site that we’re actually supporting the actual author. Let Susan know if you’ve seen or experienced anything like this!
Books: Publishing, Reading, Writing
Close to two years ago, I discovered that my eBooks, both of them, were being listed for sale on a site about which I’d never heard before. They were not under contract to sell my eBooks nor was I receiving any payment for the nearly 1000 times the site reported my novel had already been downloaded. There was a link on the site authors could write to, if they felt their copyright had been infringed. So I wrote, asked them to take down my books, and … nothing happened. That’s when I contacted my friend Tim Baker, whose books were also listed on the site, and he wrote this blog post about our experience. Many of our friends also took up the cause, sharing this blog post and following up with more information as they heard of it – good friends like Chris Graham who blogs as The Story…
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March 28, 2016
6 things you won’t hear from an English Major
A great laugh for you English majors out there. What about you? What are some thing you would never say?
March 27, 2016
Cut Back on “To Be” with “Absolutes”
We’re told all the time to cut back on the verb “to be”: you know, “was” and all its cousins, like “is” and “are” and “were.” Sometimes we get so paranoid about these ubiquitous little linkers (linking nouns and pronouns with other nouns, linking nouns and pronouns with adjectives) that we twist ourselves into pretzels trying to eliminate them:
Does
He is a good horseman
Improve if it turns into
“Good” characterizes his horsemanship
?
I doubt it.
But one use of “to be” that often can be easily eliminated is its use in the “progressive tenses”: the tenses that combine a form of “to be” with the “-ing” form of the main verb. (Btw, note how invisible “to be” can become: I used it twice above, once in a passive voice construction and once as a linking verb, as well as within this parenthesis).
For example, these use the progressive tense:
I am writing.
I was dreaming.
She was driving through her neighborhood on a beautiful spring day.
Sometimes you can easily substitute the simple past of your verb without consequence, eliminating the “to be” auxiliary:
She drove through her neighborhood on a beautiful spring day
may work just as well if you mainly need to place her on that sunny street.
But in other cases, the progressive verb tenses serve special purposes. Note the big difference between
He was taking a bath when I knocked on the door
and
He took a bath when I knocked on the door.
As this example illustrates, if you want to describe an ongoing action, especially one already taking place when another action commences, a progressive tense does essential work.
Still, there’s no doubt that “to be” can clutter your writing. “Is,” “was,” “were,” and their ilk don’t convey much action; they can bog down your prose. So if you can cut back on them without making the effort look like a strain, often you should. And sometimes eliminating them in a progressive tense construction is an easy call.
Look at this example:
He came to the door. His hair was dripping wet and he was wearing a towel around his waist.
I’ve written sentences like this. Nothing grammatically wrong, of course. But if you’re overbudget on your “to be” account, this kind of sentence offers an easy savings of two “to be” verbs.
He came to the door, his hair dripping wet, a towel around his waist.
This specific strategy involves the use of “absolutes,” which consist of a noun and whatever modifiers come attached to it. In this case, the nouns are “hair” and “towel”; in the first case, an “-ing” form, a participle, modifies “hair,” and a prepositional phrase modifies “towel.”
Ages ago (the 1960s, to be precise), a rhetoric and writing teacher named Frances Christiansen argued that “absolutes” were among the kinds of modifiers that enrich sentences by adding detail. Such sentence-building practices, he pointed out, show up regularly in the work of expert writers, particularly literary ones, and can be effectively taught to students as a way of avoiding choppy, boring sentences.
Above all, absolutes and similar modifiers allow you to move from a general description to tighter and tighter detail without having to figure out how to tack together independent sentences. Here’s an example from an excellent site with many other examples of how to use absolutes in your writing:
“Six boys came over the hill half an hour early that afternoon, running hard, their heads down, their forearms working, their breath whistling.”
(John Steinbeck, The Red Pony)
And as this example from the site illustrates, the absolute modifier can appear in the middle of a sentence (or at the beginning) as easily as at the end:
“The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick.”
(George Orwell, “A Hanging,” 1931)
Among the most enjoyable functions of absolutes is the rhythm they can create, one of those elements that imbue plain prose with that elusive thing called “voice.” Again from the site:
“Down the long concourse they came unsteadily, Enid favouring her damaged hip, Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet, both of them carrying Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags and concentrating on the floor in front of them, measuring out the hazardous distance three paces at a time.”
(Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001)
Note how these slow, complicated absolutes, with their parallel structure, make us feel the long, “unsteady” progress of the characters as they approach.
Do you use this tool? Share your examples.
http://grammar.about.com/od/ab/g/absoluteterm.htm
http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/cumulativesentencegloss.htm
March 26, 2016
The Basics of Common Book Sizes Infographic…
This post from the Story Reading Ape answers some basic questions about choosing a format for a POD edition of a book. I’m working on that right now!
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog
March 21, 2016
How Would You Solve These 4 Writing Challenges?
Writers who want to create a compelling story never stop looking for solutions to certain eternal problems. Sometimes, though, a particular story you want to tell runs you smack up against these problems. That’s the case in the book I’m working on right now.
This is the second book in a three-part project, in which university professor Sarah Crockett must come to terms with the disappearance of her eleven-year-old daughter while finding herself entangled with other endangered children over the course of the books. The first book is out for beta reads right now; the new one resides in five notebooks, slowly evolving from a handwritten first draft to a word-processed second. Something about this second book has made me think hard about some of the conundrums writers face.
Do you face these problems in your writing? How do you solve them?
Writing SCENES, not streams of thought
It’s all too easy to simply let the characters spin out their thoughts and emotions in what just feels like the loveliest prose. After reading about a page of this stuff in my own writing, I recognize how deadly it is. Sarah presents a particular challenge: She has a professional life, and there’s a lot she can’t talk about with her colleagues. (Your conviction that your ex-husband murdered your child doesn’t make good conference-banquet banter.)
So how do you solve this? How do you insert the necessary backstory or information readers need without letting your characters blather away?
Writing scenes where things HAPPEN
I remember seeing commentaries on Breaking Bad episodes in which the writers and directors discussed their worry that long scenes of information-heavy dialogue would turn off viewers. They used movement within the setting as much as possible, and of course there was so much action in other scenes that the talky ones never felt static. (By the way, I much prefer commentaries that feature writing and staging problems and solutions, not how much all the cast members love each other!)
Dialogue can be quite dramatic—even violent, both in meaning and in the way it’s conveyed. But I’m faced with too many scenes that are mostly dialogue. My worry, though, is that too much effort to make a scene active can lead to contrived events.
So how do you solve this? If you’re not writing a Mad Max script where nobody can catch his breath long enough to talk, how do you keep dialogue-heavy stories lively?
Finding the PERFECT word
I’ve (mis)quoted Mark Twain on writing before: the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. How do you tap the lightning? The thesaurus helps, but often the word I’m looking for isn’t really a literal synonym. Just as often, it’s a metaphor, especially in a verb. Here’s one I like that popped up out of the blue, from the first chapter of the new book:
For Clauson, interrogation was a daily, a material, practice. His gaze was scissoring me apart even as I tried to decide how I felt.
No thesaurus is going to give me that.
What tricks do you use to chase down those lightning-bolt words?
And while we’re on the subject: Making metaphors WORK
Sometimes I wonder whether I’ve already picked the low-hanging fruit: the metaphors that take me beyond clichés but slip into my prose as easily as my cat into my lap. Recently they seem more prone to circle me warily, making me snatch at them, half the time scaring them away. Here’s one from the first chapter I’ve struggled with:
From the way Clauson seemed to sag as I stared back, I knew he felt what I did: the pull of our history, a chain weighted with an impenetrable anger, so dense and resistant to reason no acid could have dissolved it. I think he knew he had just added a link. He had said the wrong thing.
I don’t dislike it, but it lacks the perfected aptness of, say, Sarah Waters’s metaphors in The Paying Guests:
Frances felt a rush of the abandonment that had overwhelmed her a few nights before. The feeling was like a wailing infant suddenly thrust into her arms: she didn’t want it, couldn’t calm it, had nowhere to set it down.
How do you solve this? What strategies do you use when you’re looking for imagery that leaves cliché far behind, yet doesn’t tangle you up in illogic and improbable comparisons so bad they’re sometimes even funny?
Share your solutions! (Stealing from each other allowed!)
March 15, 2016
How To Become A Successful Blogger: Part 5 – How To Get Readers To Leave Comments On Your Blog Posts
Here’s a post on an important question for bloggers: What persuades readers to comment? I’m curious—do you comment for the reasons Hugh suggests? Or does some other motivation prompt you to start a conversation? I’d love to know!
The question I get asked most about blogging is “How do I get other bloggers and readers to leave comments on my post?” It’s an interesting question and one that can produce many different answers.
Most bloggers want readers to leave comments on their posts. Over the time I’ve been blogging, I’ve found many key elements of how to get readers to interact with me. However, today, I’m going to give you what I believe are the three most important.
Content
Is this a no-brainer and something nobody needs to tell you? I think not because we probably all come across posts which have little content to strike up a comment, or posts that have been badly put together and leave us wondering why they’ve even been published.
From my first days as a blogger, I was always told that the quality of the posts I publish was going to be far…
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March 14, 2016
World-Buiding: Not Just for Fantasy or SciFi!
I recall being asked about my enthusiasm for Patrick O’Brian’s 20-novel series about British sea captain Jack Aubrey and his eccentric friend Stephen Maturin as they navigated the Napoleonic Wars. Why would I keep returning to these books, beginning with Master and Commander (in 2003 a movie starring Russell Crowe)? I’d answer, “What’s amazing about these books is that you enter such a complete world!”
This memory has come back recently as I’ve traveled through new reading experiences: sampling indie authors, returning to old favorites, and meeting new traditionally published and often best-selling authors. Like all readers, I’ve found books that work for me and books that don’t. A writer myself, I’m always interested in what makes a book spring into gear or stall out, even if only for me, since I want to sort out strong and weak strategies in my own work.
I know that “voice” can override glitches that try to pull me out of the story. I’ve enjoyed books with plot flaws because I enjoyed hearing the writer talking to me through characters, description, and style.
But there’s another important quality akin to voice: the writer’s ability to build a world.
In fact, I’ll take a big chance here: the ability to build a complete, believable world may make a difference if being traditionally published is ever a goal.
What builds such a world?
The quality that makes a book impossible to put down is our total immersion in its reality. That metaphor implies that when we enter a book’s world, we lose sight of our familiar world in which we have to clean house and go to work and wash the car. For that to happen, this new world must be divorced from the mundane. It has to provide us with a set of eyes that see differently, that notice things we would not have noticed until the author seized our gaze.
Writers of historical fiction may find monopolizing our imaginations easier to achieve; even touches of daily life illuminate corners of a universe that takes us out of our own. For example, in Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests, there’s the sound of shillings clunking into the gas meter, there’s the slog across the yard to the outdoor WC. But modern stories should also be flush with such mind-capturing details. In Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie takes me into a Trenton, New Jersey, hair-braiding salon, an atmosphere completely alien to me but starkly evocative in the world she invites me into. I had never seen this corner of a modern city. I walked with her, across the divide between our worlds.
But the trust that sustains that journey is fragile. It can be shaken in many ways. Somehow, above all, a creator of worlds must convince us that her world really could exist, really does exist, even if only in mind.
A sense of accuracy is essential. Creators of worlds in sci-fi and fantasy have more leeway than authors in other genres; details need mostly to be consistent. True, in historical novels we are at the mercy of an author’s research. Patrick O’Brian never sailed on one of the ships he wrote about; how can we trust his depictions of 1800s British naval life?
He seduces with details: How the ship’s company had to tap their biscuits to knock the weevils out before eating; how the men at the cannons had to arch their bodies to avoid being killed by the guns’ recoil. If he knows these things, surely he knows the rest. Again, we’re sucked out of our daily worlds into his by the precision and clarity of what he puts before us. We’re too busy absorbing all the surprising pieces of his universe to look away.
Accuracy is especially vital if you’re writing for a specific community that knows its own contours well. I felt kicked out of a horse book when, among other glitches, the writer had a teenage girl galloping up on one of her farm’s “yearling thoroughbreds.” Now, they do back late yearlings on Thoroughbred farms, since the young horses will all officially turn two on January 1, and these babies often run their first races before they actually turn two. But if this is a real farm, training real racehorses, no teenage girl will be galloping around pastures on a newly broken baby destined for the track. When just a few pages later, a character attached crossties to a bridle. . . !
But this need for convincing accuracy lies at the heart of the world-builder’s dilemma. Immersion depends on strangeness. The details that capture me cannot be details I could have supplied myself. Want me to stick with you on a spring morning in the countryside? Don’t tell me about the bright blue sky or the fluffy clouds or the green fields. I know about those without your help. No, tell me something I wouldn’t have noticed or cared about until you opened my eyes.
Yet if we are to believe, we must be able to connect these new worlds to landscapes where our usual compasses will work. The minute a reader says, “Oh, that would never happen!” or “People wouldn’t act that way!” or “I know that’s not true!”, the trust is gone.
So world-builders must construct double journeys: along a mysterious new road that keeps us gasping, yet one that parallels the world we do know. For example, Bev Pettersen’s Backstretch Baby showed me specifics of racetrack life I hadn’t witnessed myself, but the details that did match what I’d seen for myself prepared me for what she wanted me to accept. I felt I’d entered her version of a world I’d been in before, a version that was going to show me something I’d never have guessed.
In dialogue, this essential double journey shows clear.
Dialogue must be accurate to its time and place. Our characters need to “talk like real people.”
And yet nothing can be deadlier to our immersion in a story’s world than characters who talk like real people. All the little “hellos,” “how are yous,” “fine, thank yous,” with which we coat our exchanges have to be mercilessly expunged. Dialogue has to sound “natural” to the worlds we know while obsessively, ferociously, devoting itself to building the one we don’t.
Rereading National Velvet recently showed me how dialogue contributed to the world of this stunningly realized plot. Here’s Mi Taylor (the Mickey Rooney character in the movie) to Velvet early on—he’s just given her money to put down on the raffle ticket for the Piebald:
“. . . And see this, Velvet, I’m a fool to do it. That piebald’s as big a perisher’s the fellow that tipped me the five. ‘M going up to look at him this afternoon and likely I’ll be sorry when I see his murdering white eye.”
“Can we come too, can we come too?”
“You got yer muslins to iron.”
“MUSLINS!” said Velvet, outraged.
“Yer ma’s just wrung ’em out of the suds. I seen ’em. For the Fair.”
“I’m not going to wear MUSLIN,” said Velvet with a voice of iron.
“You’ll wear what yer told,” said Mi placidly. “I’ll slip up after dinner. Nearer one. I got them sheep at twelve. . . .”
If you’ve read the book, you know that its world forms around families and dreams and how they play out or fail in the environment of a small English village in the 1930s. The detail of what the Brown girls will wear to the fair and the distinct voice in which Mi delivers that detail become, in this dialogue, a demonstration of how authority functions in this world, warning of the challenge to that authority from the magical horse with the “murdering white eye.”
World-building is a little like trying to catch skittish mice. We want to entice readers along the paths we’ve laid with tiny bits of carefully laid-out cheese. If the cheese is stale, they’ll turn up their noses. If the tidbits are too far apart, asking for too much empty wandering between offerings, they’ll venture off the path. If the cheese isn’t recognizable as cheese, if it’s too alien, they’ll be too wary to bite.
When I read your book, I want to follow that path without looking back or aside. I want to be captured. I want to find myself helplessly enclosed in your world. You have a double journey to accomplish; I want you to keep me pressing toward the vista straight ahead.
WHAT MAKES A WORLD COME ALIVE FOR YOU?
March 6, 2016
Applying for the Grammar Police? Take this test!
The real grammar police (the ones for whom a split infinitive is a sacrilege) would foam at the mouth over these sentences. Can you spot what would set them off (the “error’)?
Click on the link to jump to the corrections and explanations.
Neither of us are going to be there.
The data explains why the theory is wrong.
McDonald’s raised their prices again.
None of us like making mistakes.
Education in Europe is a lot cheaper than the United States.
Would you worry about correcting these in your own writing? Why or why not?
Education in Europe is a lot cheaper than in the United States. (You can’t logically compare “education” to “the United States.” They’re not the same class of things.)
None of us likes making mistakes. (“None” is also technically a singular pronoun.)
McDonald’s raised its prices again. (“McDonald’s” is a collective noun; these are usually singular.)
The data explain why the theory is wrong. (“Data” is the plural of “datum.”)
Neither of us is going to be there. (“Neither” is considered a singular pronoun.)
