Spotting smart-arsery in your writing
[image error]First things first: if you have already pre-ordered Invasion, sincerest thanks. Everything is on schedule for the Kindle version to go live in just under three weeks on 16 March. Last Friday, Amazon did its thing and spammed informed its customers that I have another novel on the way. Behind the scenes, the text continues to benefit from the external help every book can’t do without if it is going to hold its own once it gets kicked out of the nest.
Editing is an extremely testing part of the writing process. One of the key rules to keep in mind is that you—the author—need to be as invisible as possible. You are the storyteller, not the protagonist. The reader should be immersed in the characters and what is happening to them, from page to page. Any smart-arsery from you, in the form of purple prose or flashy vocabulary where you just show off all the big words you know, will pull the reader away from the story, and that is exactly the last thing you want to happen.
Now, when you write the first draft, you must just write it, however you like, because you need to get the story out of your head and onto the page. Smart-arsery is allowed—even necessary—because you want to tell the story as entertainingly and effectively as possible, so when writing the first draft, creativity takes first place.
But a first draft should never be published.
When editing, you must identify and remove your initial smart-arsery, making sure you take the furthest possible backseat behind the plot and characters, and let the reader roll along with the story. However, sometimes the decision as to what constitutes agreeable word-smithery and what is merely unacceptable smart-arsery is not so easy to make. Here is an example from Invasion. We are aboard the USS George Washington, which is out in the Atlantic bringing vital supplies to Europe. Several hundred enemy ACAs (Autonomous Combat Aircraft) are closing rapidly in to attack. The ship seems to be doomed. Everyone aboard knows what happened a few weeks earlier, when the enemy wiped out US and Royal Navy formations with ease. We are reading the scene from the point of view of Powell, a member of the command crew:
Powell felt the tension on the ship build. All of them knew what had happened in the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Gulf, but the crew also knew of the hard-won developments NATO had made since then. Powell felt certain each man and woman on the George Washington asked him or herself if these developments would make any difference, some difference, or all the difference.
So, the three uses of difference at the end of the passage: a neat three-time alliterative repetition that the character thinks, or unacceptable smart-arsery by the author? Is it better to end the sentence after any difference so the reader moves along as the enemy ACAs attack the ship and the tension goes up a few more notches, or is there some value in the semantic contrasts between any, some and all the?
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I think it was Wilde who said he spent an entire morning deciding to remove a comma, and then in the afternoon put it back in again. Good for him. Most of us wordsmiths do not, sadly, enjoy the temporal freedom to indulge our vanities to quite that degree. The passage above will be published as you read it now, because it looks okay to me, and, sometimes, that will have to do. After all, if you don’t believe in yourself at least to some degree, you can’t expect your readers too, can you?
To end, here’s an unknown and underrated track to which I listened more than a few times while writing The Repulse Chronicles, Book Two: Invasion. It’s a nice foot-tapper and it’s great for writing action scenes to. You might like it:
