Category: Language

Comic book swear wordIt’s no secret I have a love-hate relationship with my first novel. Published as James R. Winter (later shortened to “Jim Winter” because the former sounded pretentious), Northcoast Shakedown was published by a small press in 2005. Part of my ambivalence toward it comes from the press’s implosion. It cost me an agent (I should have waited three weeks), and pretty much pegged me as… Well, it didn’t do me any favors. But another problem: I did readings on the air a couple of times, and it was a pain in the ass to find a passage I could read without violating FCC regulations. 

That’s right. I wanted my writing to sound tough, and so 90% of the pages had the ever-dreaded, ever-popular F bomb on it. The follow-up, Second Hand Goods, had no such problem. Bad Religion would have been right at home in today’s thriller environment. And Road Rules, my Elmore Leonardesqe caper, suffered only from being too short. But NCS, as I’ve shorthanded it over the years?

Yeah, try standing up in front of a bookstore crowd and reading that when you’re parked next to the kids’ section. Not happening.

But how do we handle language? And as an editor, how do I deal with swearing?

Well, first of all, the author needs to deal with that at the developmental stage. If they do it themselves, great. That means they put some thought in their story before tossing it over my transom for clean up. I’ve flagged spellings of swear words. Every editing tool I’ve seen wants “son of a bitch” written as one word if it’s not spread out as a phrase. However, while I seldom see it these days, “sumbitch” is also common, and I have to smack the tool’s hand for getting in my way. The oddest one, though I’ve seen it three or four times in projects, is “sunuvabitch,” or some variation on that. But you probably read that with no problem. There were a couple of authors who wrote it in such a way that I had to sound it out every time. Now you’ve crossed from giving your editor pause to giving your reader permission to put the book down and not finish. The reader is all, and thou wilt consider thy reader in all things, world without end. (Maybe I need to quit watching Shakespeare and RobWords. That’s another post.)

And to that point, how do we handle swearing? There are multiple schools of thought on that. Some say swearing conveys a lack of intelligence. Others say those who swear tend to be smarter. Neither is true. It’s all preference. But tell that to the reader who wants all her romance novels to sound like Hallmark, where it’s Christmas all year long, and Lacey Chabert solves more crimes than the NYPD Homicide Unit. She wants no swearing in her stories. On the other hand, we have the gent who wants all his stories to feature six-foot-four manly men as protagonists as they rip aliens apart bare-handed and drink gallons of whiskey to shake off their exertions. Swearing is not optional. It’s a requirement. So, how to communicate that to a reader without slapping a trigger warning on it. (The fewer, the better. Look at movie ratings. Those of you who still go to movies.) 

I recommend putting your first swear word in the first two or three pages. As readers tend to skim, they look for things: White space, what is referenced, how graphic or genteel, and yes, language. It doesn’t have to be an F bomb. In fact, if my characters’ language is coarse, I, as a writer, do an F bomb check. Author Marcus Sakey once told me he took out one out of every three. I can see two out of three. When it’s seldom used, you have to think about it in the writing. When I wrote Second Wave, I abandoned the conceit this was a YA series. The character of JT and his companions have disobeyed orders and joined a mission to reach a fallen starship. The mission’s leader, Suicide, is angry and says, “Fuck your loss, little boy! We all lost people!” (I’m doing this from memory, so I may have added exclamation points. I use them, but I’m not a fan.) This was not only war, but JT was mere weeks beyond qualifying as a child soldier, and his companions were child soldiers. Politeness went right out the window. Plus, Suicide is a war veteran who lost one spouse in battle and another to a terrorist bombing. She’s not going to talk to him like an Asian Mr. Rogers.

In the scene where that occurs, context carries the meaning. Already, several of Suicide’s more questionable subordinates demonstrate why they were considered war criminals in the previous major conflict. By the time she loses her temper with JT, it doesn’t matter. But what about crime fiction?

Police and criminals can get pretty salty. I know crime authors who believe you can avoid it in dialog, but anyone who’s ever been in a tense situation knows that doesn’t really happen in real life. On the other hand, Law & Order avoids it while The Wire had one seen where the dialog consisted entirely of F Bombs. One is on broadcast, the other on HBO. As always, know thy reader, thy audience, and thy platform. And quit using “thy” like it makes you sound smarter. 

What about slurs? They exist, and people use them. They can convey a person’s prejudices. But they can also throw a reader out of a story. When I’ve had to write them, I’ve often cringed. It should be obvious this character either lived in a certain environment or was bigoted. Still, too many people conflate the author with their characters. Unfortunately, like singers, actors, and even artists, a writer is performing for an audience. If you want to keep an audience, you have to be aware of the consequences. People are under no obligation to like you, so give them a reason to like you.

 

Anglo-Saxon knightToday, we’re going to have a little bit of fun. We’re going to talk about English. What is it?

According to WIkipedia, “English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain.” That’s technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.* In reality, English is a linguistic mob led by a medieval form of Germanic that lurks in dark alleys waiting to mug other languages to steal words, phrases, and even sentence structures, leaving the victim language bewildered and afraid. (Sidenote: I don’t think Japanese is scared of any other language, but Klingon tends to keep the bat’letlh sheathed ‘cuz it don’t want no trouble.)

So why is English such a mishmash of rules, words, and idioms that have no relation to each other? Why is the “k” in “knife” silent? (Blame the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.) Why so much Latin and French in the language? (Blame the Normans.) And why does “-ough” have too many ways to pronounce it? (Blame Gutenerg and Tyndale.) And how in the hell did we end up with a Latin alphabet of 26 letters when English has a minimum of 42 sounds. (48 if you use the Shavian alphabet. I’m actually not opposed to that idea, except you’d have to learn to read all over again.)

First, where did English come from?  Well, as the quote above says, it’s a West Germanic language. It came from Germany shortly before the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain. Prior to that, the inhabitants spoke Latin, Celt, and a few other languages. But the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes didn’t so much invade Britain as they landed there over time and decided they liked the place. A few Romans stuck around, and so the new dominant culture, a mix of those same Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, began speaking their common tongue. In a foreshadowing of the future, this new language promptly raided Latin for a handful of constructions. (No, that does not prove the Latin nerds right about prepositions and split infinitives.) While the Jutes were basically ancestors of the Vikings (from Jutland in Denmark), they adopted the evolving Germanic of these Angles and Saxons, later dubbed “Anglo-Saxon.” We still speak a lot of Anglo-Saxon today, but the actual Anglo-Saxon would be unrecognizable both in writing and spoken aloud. It’s the basis of the modern English language, hence we call it “Old English.” Only, it sounds like Dutch.

Anglo-Saxon gave us Beowulf, an epic poem that actually came from the Vikings. Originally, they wrote in runes, but the conversion of the British Isles to Christianity prompted them to adopt the Roman alphabet, keeping some runes to denote certain sounds. For instance, the letter “y” has a slightly different counterpart to the voiced “th” sound that was still used up until Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare and the King James Bible are actually written in modern English. Parts of Yorkshire and Appalachia have kept a lot of this dialect, which falls under the “Elizabethan” banner. But if you want to know why your favorite Renaissance fair has a lot of shops that say “Ye Olde Smithy” or “Ye Olde Turkey Leg Shoppe,” the “Ye” is not the plural ye Jesus used with his pals in the KJV. It’s actually “the.” And that “y” looks different from the one in “yes.” (My favorite Thes album is Close to ye Edge, but I have a soft spot for Drama and 90125. See how silly that mistake sounds?)

Then came the Vikings. Like other languages (including the Old Norse of the Vikings), early English gendered and pluraled their definite articles. If you know Spanish or French, you’ve seen four definite articles–el, los, la, and las in Spanish, for instance. Like most Germanic languages, this got confusing once the Norse settled down and became rivals to the Saxons and overlords of the Angles. (Hence, “England.” Land of the Angles. Saxony was already taken.) They convinced their Anglish and Saxon in-laws to simplify things by just saying “the” without regard to gender or singular vs. plural. In fact, English no longer genders its nouns, not even neuter. They’re just nouns. 

Where things get hairy is the Norman Conquest. After bending French to their will by creating their own dialect, these Viking-descended French proceeded to remake the English language in its own image. So half our words come from French. Not content with that, Willy the C’s grandson, Henry II, had a father named Geoffrey Plantagenet, who was a traditional Frank. So now another version of French came ashore, further muddying the waters. Then King John lost all of Normandy except for two islands (the Channel Islands), English began to drift back into mainstream. But it wasn’t the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred the Great or Canute. This was Middle English. The best example of this version of English is The Canterbury Tales, by John LeGaunt’s (progenitor of the current royal family) BFF, Geoffrey Chaucer. If you read Canterbury Tales in its original form (with modern letters used), you can make some sense of it, or get a bad headache trying. Spoken, it sounds like heavily accented modern English. By this point, English had inherited the pillaging ways of the Vikings, who added to Anglo-Saxon and began raiding Latin, the neighboring Celt languages, and even Dutch and German for words. Another funny thing happened on the way to Shakespeare: Vowel drift.  

It was around this time that -ough started to take on as many pronunciations as possible. In Chaucer’s time, it was pronounced like “cough,” only with a soft K sound at the end instead of an H or silent. So you would plugh your field, but if you did it in the rain without a coat, you would catch a cogh, and that might be rogh. According to language nerd Rob Watts, whose RobWords YouTube channel I’m now addicted to, the ough sound, represented by a letter that looked something like a stylized 3, began to change when the Black Death abated in London. (Ironically, so did the Wars of the Roses and the Hundred Years War.) People speaking different dialects drifted toward the major cities like York and London seeking higher wages because, well, death creates labor shortages.  Also, people from other countries came to England seeking higher wages because, well, death creates labor shortages. But that letter might have preserved a uniform -ough sound. Then Gutenberg had to create his printing press with a Roman-only alphabet.

Mind you, Gutenberg was German and only had to replace one letter and maybe slip in an umlaut or two. IT workers (like me) of a certain age can remember a similar problem when computers did not all run ANSI or, later, Unicode, which have robust symbol libraries. No, we had ASCII, which made for some interesting text-based artwork, but made formatting a pain in the broc. (Anglo-Saxon for ass.) 

By the time of Shakespeare, English had evolved into modern English, what we speak today. 

“Wait a minute. What about ‘How now?’ and ‘Thee’ and ‘Thou'”? 

I said it was modern English. I also said the dialect, commonly called Elizabethan, is only spoken in a few places now. The rules we know were pretty much solidified in this era. You can thank William Shakespeare. And John Milton (a Shakespeare uber-nerd.) And King James I of England (or King James VI of Scotland. They wouldn’t unite the thrones for another 2 centuries, just in time to import kings from Germany.) People notice the second-person pronouns more than anything else. This is because English still had formal and informal “you.” Your friends and neighbors are thee/thou, using thy or thine to show possession. The formal “you” also had “ye” (not to be confused with Anglo-Saxon “the” because… Reasons.)  As Britain, and subsequently America and Canada, moved away from the Catholic Church and even the Church of England, it also moved away from formality in the language. It just became easier to say you and yours. If you live in the American South, “y’all” is acceptable (as are the Yinzer “youins” and East Coast “youse”) for a plural of you. Some people even believe thee and thou are formal. Why? Well, the only place they see it is in the Bible. Just not in any translation since 1700.

The language is still evolving. Technology has accelerated verbing a brand name. We Xerox, even though Xerox is not the most common copier or printer anymore. Even in Bing and Duck Duck Go, we Google. And try as we might, those of us who have fled X, and quite a few who stayed behind, still “tweet.” Additionally, before it become a political hot potato, the language already began to accept “they” as gender neutral third person. Why? Calling someone “it” just makes you sound like a douchenozzle. (That is actually in at least one dictionary, and as both a hygiene device and an unlikeable person.) I ignore the political rancor over singular “they” because it lets me spike the football on my tenth-grade English teacher’s grave. That’s right. Suck it, Clara!

Ahem! I mean, sorry, Mrs. S.

*No, it’s not.

CrutchesA while back, I wrote about crutch words and the approach I took to weeding them out. A working editor is a work in progress, and I am no exception. I developed a four-word approach to “Words That Must Be Scrutinized!!!” (Cue really loud gong.) The offending words are “suddenly,” “just,” “very,” and “that.” Yes, “that” can be a crutch word. The story analysis project I’m finishing up as I write this also abused “and.” Mind you, the author is an admitted first-time writer who does not speak US English trying to write in US English. English as a first language is weird enough. I get headaches rendering an alien language into Elizabethan English to convey excessive formality, so I get it.

I’ve modified since then. I don’t do a “that” check anymore. That is used more often legitimately than as a crutch, so you could easily get a thousand instances of it in a long manuscript. ProWritingAid is pretty good at flagging it when it’s used to join a long sentence together. Never say “The fact that…” Just say “The fact…”

But I got so zealous about purging and replacing “that” with “who,” “how,” and “which,” that I got pushback from both author and publisher. (The author turned around and wrote a blurb for my editing work, so it’s a case of making good better.) So now, I look to see if “that” is unnecessary in context. 

I still go after “very” and “suddenly.” In fact, I get mad if I can’t delete “suddenly.” “Just” remains a sticking point. It’s the most abused of the three. One writer, who’s been around for decades, had seven instances on one page! It is a monumental pain in the ass to weed those out, and in a couple of instances, I had to leave two on the page. But it’s a crutch word.

Once upona, I used to go after “should” because Bestelling Author™, who had a writing course®, said it’s a bad word. Probably is. Too many “shoulds” on a page will annoy the reader without them realizing why. I quit doing that because it ended up giving me stilted prose in my own work and annoyed an editing client early on. This is also I don’t do writing books. I publish independently or small press, so until they start showing up on bestseller lists or I have a waiting list for my services, I’m not going to be a shill and pretend to know more than I do. Here, I’m sharing what I see on the job. 

So it’s “very,” “suddenly,” and “just.” I’ve added one more because I caught it in print in one of my own books: form. Why is “form” bad? It’s not as long as you are filling out a form, you’re admiring that other person’s cute form, or your mother-in-law, in her rage, assumes her demon form.* But every so often, in the heat of writing, we type “form” instead of “from.” It’s something that even an editor can miss. We’re not perfect, and two errors can hide a third in plain site. So I check all the instances of “form.” 99% of the time, they’re all correct. That remaining one percent usually sees a character bopping out to Sinatra singing “The Girl Form Ipamena.” So, yeah, the writer probably wants to know about that typo.

As I said before, different editors have different approaches. Some will zap anything with an “-ly” in it. Some have long lists of words they never want to see in a manuscript again. Others just read it in context and decide if it sticks out like a sore cliche.  

* Actually, my mother-in-law is a sweet 80-year-old lady. My ex-mother-in-law is a nice Mormon lady with a decidedly un-Mormon sense of humor who definitely gave it to her daughter. Who happens to be my favorite ex. I’ve married often. And well. Not many people can say that. 

Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in concert.
Led Zeppelin

Following on last week’s column (or was it this week? I was late getting it out.), the word “was” and its close relatives bring to mind the core reason I wrote about it last week. It robs the prose of immediacy. Let’s face it. If you’re a writer in today’s world, especially a fiction writer, you can’t afford to lose immediacy. People have short attention spans. If someone has been sitting down to read your work, you’d better keep their attention before Netflix drops the final season of Stranger Things or the Kardashians do something they think is noteworthy.

First, let’s look at the three main verb tenses in English. And thanks to eslgrammar.org for the assist. They have a handy page to look this up.

Writers in rough drafts, including those two hacks TS Hottle and Jim Winter, tend to use what’s termed past continuous when writing action. Most prose is written in past tense. They often write past continuous to convey action. Only, to the reader, it just looks like passive voice. 

“He was walking into Clarksdale.”

Robert Plant gets a free pass on that line because he needed to keep time with Jimmy Page’s chords in that song. You, gentle reader, who hope to have gentle readers of your own, don’t get a pass. Unless our intrepid Clarksdale-bound hiker is interrupted as he’s coming into town, the line should be “He walked into Clarksdale.” Simple. Short. Declarative. Hemingway would be proud. And he would know. Even Hemingway’s passive voice reads like action. (That’s another post.)

So what are the tenses?

There are three main ones: Past, present, future. If you’re writing time travel, you’re on your own. Even Douglas Adams and the writers of Doctor Who make fun of those who try to invent tenses. 

Then we have the continuous tenses, indicating ongoing action by the subject. I was walking into Clarksdale. I am walking into Clarksdale. I will be walking into Clarksdale. In everyday speech, this is fine as long as you can be understood. In prose, I read it aloud and look at the sentences around the offending phrase. As I said in my last post, it’s fine if our intrepid walker does one thing and is either interrupted or does something else as well. If not, well then, he walked into Clarksdale. This assumes, of course, the main action will be happening in Clarksdale (and without that clunky future continuous phrase, which has damned few use cases.)

Then we have the perfect tenses. The first two almost always indicate past events. Past perfect (“I had walked into Clarksdale.”) and present perfect (“I have walked into Clarksdale.”), indicating the speaker or point-of-view character has walked into Clarksdale at least once. Future perfect means the speaker or POV character will walk into Clarksdale at least once before a future point in time in question.

But wait! There’s more!

Past/present/future perfect continuous!  “I had been walking into Clarksdale,” meaning this was at some point in the past a frequent occurrence. “I have been walking into Clarksdale,” meaning this is something ongoing. “I will have been walking into Clarksdale,” meaning this is something likely to occur regularly or repeatedly in the future.

Again, you need a good reason to go with this. A lot of writers use the continuous tenses (both basic and perfect) thinking it conveys action. Unfortunately, there’s that word “was” (or “is” or “are” or “will be.”) Any time the reader sees that, the brain fires up “Passive voice!” and passive voice is to be avoided. (Not always, but a future post will be written about that.) The best use case for continuous is when the phrase is followed by “when.” “I was walking into Clarksdale when…” Then the action is disrupted. Which basic past/present tense doesn’t convey very well.

The only other time you should really use it is when you need to line up your rhythm with Jimmy Page’s playing. Then you’re going to send your old pal Tom tickets as I’ve only seen two Yardbird guitarists live. One has passed on, and the other has turned out to be an idiot. Unfortunately, Pagey is largely retired, so a pass to see him live would be greatly appreciated. 

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Was (Not Was)
Source: last.fm

No, not the well-regarded 80s band led by producer Don Was. Was (along with is, are, were) is a double-edged sword for writers. Why? Used in action verbs, it blunts to impact of a sentence. And used as the verb itself, it’s passive voice. If you listen to hundreds of writing experts and “experts,” passive voice is to be avoided like cliches. Or like the plague, which is also a cliche.

Not all passive voice is bad. But a writer should use it sparingly. A lot of times, I’ll end up flipping a sentence around to get rid of it. It’s best left to description. Action? That’s a little different. You have to read each and every instance of was/is/are/were followed by an -ing. Nine times out of ten, you can shorten it to the actual verb.

“He was walking toward the park…” Now, if he’s going to be interrupted in the act of walking to the park, this makes sense. Or if another character intercepts him while he’s walking to the park (like I just wrote here), the “was” and an “-ing” makes sense. If he’s getting from point A to point B and ends up in the park before anything happens, then “He walked toward the park…” is better.

Was takes the immediacy away. Do that, and you also take the reader interest away. A lot of editors brag about cutting. (And sometimes, a less-skilled editor cuts just to cut. That’s when it becomes about the editor. If you’re a freelance editor, stop that!) But a good rule of thumb is to look for any fat you can trim. “Was/Is” makes a great shorthand to get rid of a lot of fat and punch up the prose. And while passive voice will show up in everything we write, less is always more.

Next week, I will talk about a rule about prepositions up with which I will not put!

 

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Broken pencil while writing
1311784 by smengelsrud/pixabay.c
Copyright: CC0 Creative Commons

Ah, the lowly dash. And it’s many forms. We so love using them, especially Gen X and Millennial writers. We especially love our em dashes (— ). Nothing wrong with that, though I wish Cormac McCarthy had made peace with quotation marks before he died. Blood Meridian was brilliant but hard to read.

And yet, as I go through my latest editing project and look back on my previous one, I keep seeing a dash error that drives me to distraction. The previous project came from the pen of a guy who started doing this before I was born. (My first election was Reagan’s reelection bid, for perspective, when David Lee Roth sang for Van Halen on Ye Olde Victrola whilst we drove the ol’ La Salle to the Woolworth’s for a grape Nehi.*) Yet, I also received back the latest Jim Winter offering back from Dawn Barclay, my talented colleague at Down & Out Books. As I am Jim, I received a rude awakening. I do the same damn thing! What is this horrific atrocity in writing?

Grandpa Simpson yells at cloud.
Fox

Everyone, and I mean everyone, including your humble narrator, hyphenates adverbs. STOP THAT! (Pauses to go yell at both TS Hottle and Jim Winter and hopes wife doesn’t call the men with the butterfly nets and strait-jacket.)

What bugs me about Dawn’s horrific revelations is the next Winter book is a collection. Which means two-thirds of these stories were edited by someone else before I cleaned them up. Eek! That’s two editorial passes that missed that error. Strangely, I never get called out on em dashes. Once, when Second Wave was beta read, I did get a note on the difference between the em dash and the en dash and a hyphen.

  • Hyphens: Hyphens are used to join two words into the single idea. Most often, you see it in some last names, like Alec Walker-Jones. It also can join two adjectives, such as “music-obsessed.” Occasionally, it’s used with nouns, but not often. Technically, hyphens are not dashes. They are not to be used to join any word ending in –ly to another word. So, the phrase “criminally-wrong” is just “criminally wrong.”
  • En dashes: Sometimes used to join words the way hyphens sometimes do. Calling a hyphen an en dash in a number, time, or date range (200-300, 1939-1945, 3:00-3:45) is technically correct, which is often the best kind of correct. But never best-kind, because “best” is an adjective, which is like all those “-ly” words Stephen King tells you not to use yet frequently abuses.
  • Em dashes: Em dashes are the favorite punctuation mark of any writer born between 1964 and 1997. We love them! We use them in lieu of parentheses—though inside a sentence, they must be used in pairs—and to indicate someone’s speech has been interrup— Why the disdain for parentheses? Why not use ellipses(…)? Ellipses indicate trailing off. As for parentheses, believe me, when I first started writing, I was a serial parentheses abuser. Someone pointed out I wrote too many asides in my essays—which, by the way, can get annoying. (See what I did there?) As Microsoft Word improved, along with its alternatives and tools like Scrivener, grammar tools helpfully autocorrected the double hyphen (“–”) into an em dash. Em dashes may or may not be technically correct—still the best kind of correct, but not best-kind of correct, but they really do enhance readability. My tenth-grade English teacher may disagree, but my tenth-grade English teacher thought Led Zeppelin would give me a heart attack and Heinlein would rot my mind. (Jury’s out on the latter.) So, suck it, Clara.

So there you have it. Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.

*Do they still make Nehi?

Wadded paperWhen I was a kid, every teacher, from Mrs. Dunham in the fourth grade to English literature teacher Mrs. Snell in high school, pounded into us not to write phonetically. Especially in narrative. Nope, kiddies. Queen’s English was the rule. Joke’s on them. Now it’s the King’s English! 

Seriously, though, we also had to read Huckleberry Finn. I kind of get the point as Twain laced his first-person narrative with enough apostrophes and malaprops to warrant a magic decoder ring in places. Well, if Twain did it…

So did Chandler, now pointed at as a paragon of style, the master of simile. When you write like him, it’s as cliché as a Twitter bot hijacking a webcam girl’s images so you’ll follow it. (Spoiler alert: I usually block those.) But Chandler, despite not having much use for Hemingway, took Hemingway’s lean approach a step further. He rendered fiction in a way the average reader could grasp it. And he wrote his dialog to sound like the characters, not what Mrs. Peterson or Sister Mary Bruno wanted. 

Hmm…

Then we come to one of Chandler’s literary descendants, Walter Mosley, he of Easy Rawlins fame. Mosley did write a science fiction novel based in the days of slavery called 47. I’ve read it. Fortunately, he doesn’t write the title character’s dialog like Huck, though like Twain, he’s unflinching in his portrait of the Antebellum south. However, there’s that Easy Rawlins series, which unapologetically has swallowed letters and words and Texas idioms force-fit into Los Angeles from the late 1940s onward. I met Mosley once while he toured for 47. He said there was no way he would not write that accent Easy grew up with. Both he and Easy came of age in that part of the world, and he wanted it celebrated. A few months later, I read another novel by the late great Bill Crider, another Texas native, and found a lot of the same speech in his work. Crider, however, smoothed it out some for us ignorant Midwesterners, New Yorkers, and sundry West Coast folk. But then speech was there.

So, how does one edit for this?

Very carefully.

As I’ve written here before, I use ProWritingAid as my main tool, though PerfectIt is becoming a major part of my process. PerfectIt is better suited for writers who write with an accent while ProWritingAid has a fit if it thinks an American is using “leapt” instead of “leaped.” In the past two years, I’ve seen one non-UK writer use “leaped.” She’s from Canada. I write “leapt.” Blame Mrs. Snell.) My first challenge with accent and ProWritingAid came from a recent project by an Australian author. The publisher said they wanted to keep the Australian grammar and dialog. Since I can’t change the Word plugin to Australian English, esp. while revising my own American English work, I grabbed a PerfectIt trial. (BTW, I’m sold on the tool.) It does change dialect on the fly. I actually suggested putting back in the “-our” endings of words as opposed to America’s insistence on “-or.” (Flavour instead of flavor.) That was easy enough once I got into the flow.

However…

UK, America, Canada all have regional dialects. In North America, some places mix in French or Spanish without translation. Then there’s the rural Texas dialect used by Crider and Mosley, which both refuse to imply rather than spell out. That can get dicey. I know. I’m editing a Yinzer right now. What’s a Yinzer?

Yinzer is the dialect spoken by people living in Western Pennsylvania. To us Rust Belters, it’s as distinctive as the drawl of Kentucky or the twang of West Virginia. It draws from German and Italian, and thanks to an influx of West Virginians during the Depression, it’s taken on a but of a southern flavor. So why’s it so hard to edit?

Yinzers love sentence fragments. Not surprising. I grew up in Cleveland, which had those same West Virginians coming to the steel mills and auto plants there, but with more Slavic overtones mixed in. And it took me well into my twenties to ease up on the sentence fragments. But not only are the characters in this book Yinzers, so is the author, a Pittsburgh native. So his narrative has a lot of sentence fragments. Another author, or someone editing me, would find a manuscript awash in red tracked changes with lots of comment balloons. This particular author?

I find myself hitting ignore a lot. My job is to clear up the writing, not rewrite the novel. (And I strongly disagree an editor sometimes has to do that. Not unless they are doing a developmental edit, in which case, you’re going to call me after that part’s done. Dev edits leave a lot of copy editing to be done it their wakes.) Writers tend to write the way they talk. Or want to talk. And sometimes, they write like their characters. Military characters tend to speak in short, declarative sentences. Gossipy people prattle on incessantly. Introverts are prone to one-word responses. Those, of course, are stereotypes. I have met some rather verbose introverts and really quiet extroverts. That’s another topic for another blog. 

The point is to make it readable, but preserve the author’s voice. You can’t do that if you listen to Mrs. Snell nagging you in the back of your mind to zap every single one of those sentence fragments and make Easy Rawlins use the King’s English.  

In fact, I consider rewriting Mosley’s work along those lines blasphemy.Wadded paper

Wadded paperMy brother-in-law, who’s started writing in the past year, mentioned some notes he got back from an editor. “I didn’t know ‘suddenly’ was a crutch word.”

I hadn’t thought about that in a while. Suddenly, I realized I don’t use the word that much anymore.  Yet a lot of professional editors I know hate it more than adverbs. Oh, they might talk a good game about words ending in “-ly” (then liberally use them in their own prose), but nary a word about “suddenly.” But they’ll cut it without explanation. You might say it disappeared…

Suddenly.

Suddenly, and its companion word, surprisingly are really crutch words. They’re also adverbs of the worst kind. Editing for a crime imprint, I don’t get much adverb abuse. The prose tends to be straightforward, gets to the point. The biggest issues I have (especially with a science fiction author named TS Hottle and his virtual crime fiction twin, Jim Winter) is with “that,” “very,” overuse of “so,” and “Well…” But “suddenly” comes up. A lot.

These are words you don’t think of much, but too many of them slow the prose down unnecessarily. (See? I used an adverb. Sparingly.) As with “very,” the writer is trying to manage stage direction. They don’t believe the reader will get the swiftness with which an event occurs or a person or thing appears. To the writer, this is a reasonable assumption.

To the reader, it comes off as, “It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, bad writing appeared! Someone screamed!”

(In some cases, someone screamed very loud. In a few cases, very, very loud. Which should be written “loudly.”)

Some of you will recognize that hideous passage as a send up of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is responsible for the old cliché, “It was a dark and stormy night…” Aside from starting in passive voice, it begins with a weather report. I can think only of one lengthy work that needed to start with a description of the weather, and Stephen King opted to write Storm of the Century as a screenplay. It also has two exclamation points in one line. So, not only does it offend David Morrell, the prophet of lean prose, it summons the angry ghost of Elmore Leonard, who famously said one exclamation point per hundred thousand words. And Elmore wrote short, so whole novels would pass without one. But “Suddenly” is the most offensive part of that line. OK, the second, but passive voice is not being spoken of here.

A really good editor would suggest depicting a flash of lightning revealing Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s writing. You can keep one exclamation point. I’m more of a one-per-page kind of guy. 

The real problem with “suddenly” is it shows instead of tells.  Now, “Show, don’t tell” can be a trite, overused bit of advice, like “Write what you know.” (Honestly, I don’t need bored single women writing about watching Hallmark or men farting while they play Call of Duty. Do some research. That’s the fun part.) I’m of the mindset that, since showing takes more words than telling, make sure you tell the write things. If Johnny is sick because he’s confronted with a stressful moment, simply say he’s sick, and get to why he’s stressed. By now, you’ve guessed he’s stressed out suddenly. As vaguely as I wrote this, you didn’t need that word.

Once in a while, I’ll use it in my writing. And if a manuscript I’m working on contains it, I may stop and do a crutch word check. Five times out of 85,000 words is not worth the extra effort for me or the writer. The reader is not going to care. If it’s every other page, expect a lot of red ink.

During the writing of this post, I started my latest editing project. Before diving in with ye olde editing tool, I checked for crutch words. “That” did not surprise me. We all abuse the word. “Very” almost didn’t show up at all. I did “suddenly.” Not a single instance. Not. One. So, often, a writer already knows it’s a word to avoid. Makes my job easier. It’ll make your readers’ jobs easier, too. 

Wadded paperI wrote a few weeks back about crutch words. I also said some lists tend to be long more because a particular editor gets sick of reading a group of words than a reader would even notice. My list I kept to a minimum, though there are some doozies on it. “Just,” “could,” etc. I should add “immediately” and “suddenly,” which, as a writer, I still abuse. You need to understand, though, I don’t write as an editor. I don’t read as a writer. And I don’t edit as a reader. Those are three completely separate tasks in my mind. It’s very important they stay that way.

Which leads me to a word I left out. I’m very concerned about its misuse. Very, very concerned. Of course, it’s an adverb. Very much so.

I speak, of course, of “very.”

The Washington Post ran a recent article (pay wall. Sorry, but worth a read) in which the writer advocated slashing it the way one might aggressively go after the giant hogweed.  (Google it. Then listen to Genesis’s “The Return of the Giant Hogweed” on streaming. You’ll thank me for the story prompt alone.) Unlike hogweed, it’s very unlikely you’ll have to, as Peter Gabriel warns, strike by night, for it does not need the sun to photosynthesize its venom. (And Tony Banks wins points for using the word “photosynthesize” in song lyrics. Top that, James Taylor.)

Very is one of the most common words in the English language. But it’s an adverb, and as a writer, I already have to restrain editors in use of the Loving Mallet of Adverb Annihilation. This is best mitigated by judicious adverb pruning. They’ll cut the ones you don’t want and leave the ones you can defend.  But very?

Very makes editors very, very annoyed. As a writer, I usually limit it to dialog because characters don’t give a rat’s ass what you’re editor thinks. (Unless they’re incoherent when they need to be clear. That’s another topic.) It’s a common verbal gambit to use “very” or its evil twin, “very, very,” in dialog. Done lightly, it works. But Elmore Leonard’s disdain for the exclamation point should really be focused on the word very. Only once every so many words. My view on crutch words is one or less per page. The exception is very. Once every hundred pages of manuscript.

And only in dialog! I am of the school that says very has no place in narrative. First person, you say?

Do you want someone to read your book? Again, only once every 100 pages of manuscript. That’s roughly once every 25,000 words double-spaced. 

Yes, very is a legitimate English word. It doesn’t have the stink of, say, irregardless, which should be printed out and stabbed mercilessly whenever spotted, irregardless of whether your editing client will see that or not. (For electronic copy, a nasty comment about irregardless will accomplish the same goal.) But very is so overused and so empty it really just bogs down a sentence. Even in dialog, unless the effect is obvious, it should always be flagged. In narrative? 

Drive it from the prose like St. Pat running snakes out of Ireland.*

Yea, verily.

*No pedantic screeds about snakes in Ireland being a myth. I shall be very rude to you if you do.

 

 

Wadded paperCould. Just. So. Well.
You think those words are invisible like “said” in dialog. In reality, they come across as fingernails on a chalkboard.*
 
“But, TS,” you say, “why not use them if they’re part of the language?”
 
Adverbs are part of the language, but a writer still needs to use them sparingly. (See what I did there? I made Hemingway mad throwing in another adverb.)
 
These words that send editors into fits of rage are called crutch words. Writers use them to get a point across, but they’re often overused to the point of annoying the reader. I don’t know about you, but if a book annoys me, I quit reading. Mind you, it’s usually dialog and plot, or lack thereof, that annoys me, but that’s another post.
 
I’ll start with “just,” a word I’ve worked very hard to purge from my writing. I never noticed how often I used it until about 2005 when I placed a story in the late, lamented Plots With Guns. Written as Jim Winter, the story had the title “Just Like Suicide,” taken from a Soundgarden song. With a title like that, editor Anthony Neil Smith sent back edits with that word flagged several times just on the first two pages.
 
Some of it had to do with the title. Yet, when I wrote my next short and as I worked on a novel called Second Hand Goods, I started seeing it all over the place. From then on, I did a “just” purge on my work. Like passive voice or other crutch words, I shoot for one crutch word per manuscript page. Of course, I hardly use the word that much anymore and zap it quite often during an eyeball copy edit.
 
There are, of course, other crutch words. My celebrity crush, Jenn Nixon, brought one to my attention I’d never thought of before. “Could.”
 
Would/should/could can be crutch words, but would and should do not get used nearly as much as could. If you write in past tense, which most writers do, could is hard to avoid. Unlike just, which is basically zapping an adverb, could often needs to be there. So, you have to think about it.
 
Like any other word or phrase you write, one-per-manuscript-page is a good rule to keep your readers happy. (I leave you to figure out if your plot is a dud or not. I’m not a developmental editor.)
 
Are there others? We started this post off with “so” and “well.” These usually turn up in dialog. I’ve gone through first or second drafts where a character will start every sentence with “so” and “well.” One did it for two straight pages. Every line of dialog began with ” ProWritingAid, Hemingway, and Word’s rather improved editor won’t flag these words. They’ll only call you out on your comma usage. Make no mistake, however. Too many sos and wells on a page will have your reader tossing your epic fantasy and reaching for the nearest Harlequin romance. (Where, I’m sure you’ve noticed, most of the rules get broken anyway.)
 
What else sets editors off?
 
Sometimes, it’s editor’s choice, but it’s a choice you should at least pay some attention. Michael Bracken, a crime editor of some note, rails on the word “got.” It’s an irritant to him. I recently placed a short story with an anthology he edited. I had one “got” in the entire piece. It sailed through without a note. However, I can think of some earlier work that would have had him deleting or shredding his copy.
 
Ellen Campbell, aka “The Cutter,” has a growing list of words she’s tired of seeing. Ellen has an eye for detail few editors can match. I recently worked with one editor whose suggestions I rejected on the basis of “Yeah, but Ellen wouldn’t care.” That gambit works 99% of the time. Her list is on the Keystroke Medium group on Facebook. If you have access to the file, it’s worth your time to download.
 
Ultimately, you have to make the choice. But if editor after editor flags the same thing, it’s probably something you should limit to one or less per page.
 
Just do that, and you got it. You could if you tried.
 
*Back in ye olden days, when my dad would drop me off at school in his Model A, we used these things called chalkboards, which were dusty and noisy when used. Now we use whiteboards, which are smellier but less noisy. Or we use tablets, which tend to need a charge when you have to use one.