Adverbs! I am not alone

I was pleased to see this post today at the There Are No Rules blog at the Writer’s Digest site: The Much Maligned Adverb.

The guest poster, Jim Adam, makes the point that while adverbs sometimes do get overused, occasionally they are necessary too. This is something I have been arguing with people about for quite a while now. The current rage is to strip all adverbs out of everything, searching instead for “strong verbs” that can stand alone and carry all the narrational weight on their own.

In my own writing, I’ve recognized that adverbs can indeed serve to shore up verbs that are too weak for the function they’re supposed to fulfill. I’ve enjoyed correcting this problem when I find it, looking for those stronger verbs, and I think my writing has improved as a result.

Yet I think the idea that all adverbs must be obliterated is not only an unbalanced view, as Adam says, but it’s inaccurate too. The darn things came into existence for a reason, as modifiers, and sometimes you simply can’t do without them. Sometimes the gymnastics you have to go through to say the same thing without using an adverb get ridiculous. Adam gave an example, contrasting “with a reluctant grin” and “grinning reluctantly.” When you find yourself multiplying words just to skirt a single word that would have said it all, maybe the darned adverb is the right word.

I’m grateful for Mr. Adam’s post. I don’t feel quite so much the solitary voice crying out in the desert any more.

Author Greed and Demands on Agents

I was actually surprised to read this blog post at the Waxman Literary Agency blog: Letting the Market Speak. Holly Root, the blogger in this case, talks about authors who demand that agents live up to certain timelines or other standards the authors have set.

“Get me a publishing deal for four books a year. Get me a movie deal. Get me foreign publication.” And so on, and so on, and so on.

I was astonished that there are as-yet-unpublished writers who actually think that a) they can express those desires and the whole publishing world will just fall obediently in line to accommodate them, and b) they can order an agent around like that and actually expect that agent to take them on.

Rather than being thankful that the agent is interested in helping them further their career, and being eager to learn from the agent’s experience and get some advice on helpful ways to proceed, these writers apparently just waltz in and assume that whatever decrees they lay down, the agents should just fall all over themselves to try to fulfill. Even if the demands would hurt the author’s own career, if only they knew what the agent knows.

I’m surprised that writers are so naive as to assume they can plan out the course of the career like that. It seems to me they’ve fallen prey to too many business marketers who promise that they can climb the ladder of success by being “proactive” and having a business plan. This doesn’t even work that well in the straight-on business world. (Just have a chat with the hordes of people who’ve been “downsized” unexpectedly in the past year or so.)

I’m also surprised – though I suspect I shouldn’t be – that these writers are simply that incredibly selfish. That’s not entirely their fault, because another facet of today’s business and consumer climate is to teach people (incessantly) that they are the center of the universe. The fact that they’ve come to believe it shouldn’t surprise anyone.

But one assumes that they’re capable of thinking, if they’re really writers. And they should be capable of discovering the utter fallacy of that “center of the universe” thinking. They need to recognize that the universe is going to do what it’s going to do, whatever this writer’s own stipulations, and in a clash of wills like that, the universe always wins. Add the publishing market in there, not to mention the human wills and decisions of the agent, other members of his or her agency, and all the people working at all the publishers…

Well. You get the picture. No intelligent writer will walk around with the attitude of “the world revolves around my business plan.”

Dialogue: handling authentic speech, archaisms, and dialect

I’ve often had the experience of picking up someone’s writing, and as I read a conversation between a couple of their characters I ended up thinking, “No real human being would ever talk like this.” And usually that meant that I had a hard time enjoying the book, if I finished it at all. For some writers, dialogue is hard to handle; in fact, many writers are strong in either narrative or dialogue, but not always in both.

The most important thing to do with dialogue is to make your characters talk like real people. That doesn’t mean you stick in every “um” or “like” that a speaker would inject into their conversation in real life, but they do need to talk the way their character would talk if you ran into them on the street. If dialogue doesn’t come naturally to you, you need to ask yourself one question with every word you put into a character’s mouth: “Would a real person be caught dead saying this?” If not, then imagine a real person saying it – imagine yourself saying it in your normal way – and write it that way.

That covers you or people who talk like you, but what about different types of characters? Say you’re writing a frontier western, and want to get across the “cowboy” feel. Or you’re penning a fantasy, and think that it will sound more authentic if people talk in more flowery or archaic language. It’s clear that you’d never run into anyone who talks like that in real life, but surely that doesn’t matter so much when you’re writing these types of novels?

In fact, it just might. If you make the speech overly “authentic” in those scenarios, you run the risk that your readers will spend far too much time wrestling to read the dialogue itself, instead of following the actual story. If “getting” the dialogue becomes the point of their reading, instead of the plot itself being the point, you’ve lost them. You want your readers to flow right along with the story and not even be conscious of the mechanism that’s drawing them along.

So does that mean your characters have to talk like twenty-first century people? How can a fantasy novel about a noble courtier sound remotely authentic that way, not to mention plausible? Do you have to abandon all attempts to make your characters sound like they really come from the place and time you’ve set them in?

Absolutely not. There’s a fine line to walk, but you can indeed create your setting and make it sound authentic, by putting in just enough “archaic” or situation-based words to suggest it to your readers. But remember that words on the page make more of an impact on the reader’s consciousness than spoken words, especially if they’re spelled differently than the reader is used to. A word with an altered spelling or pronunciation will leap off the page and take on significance. These words become things that entangle the reader, preventing them from moving quickly through the page.

A real person might use five obscenities in a sentence, but if you repeated all of them in written dialogue, they would come across much too powerfully. Two, or even better, just one would have as much impact on the reader. So pare down the archaisms or the “y’alls” or the “yo’s” and use them judiciously, every now and then when they seem natural. Sprinkle them lightly here and there, and the reader’s imagination will absorb them and visualize the context you’re trying to create. Flood the conversations with dialogue that feels too unusual to them, and their eyes will “catch” on each word and have to puzzle it out before they can move on.

Language evolution and why grammar sometimes doesn’t matter

Yes, yes, it’s blasphemy to say grammar doesn’t matter. I myself get bristly about correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and all that. Yet even while I maintain those standards as I edit documents, I simultaneously have a more relaxed attitude about our language and its future.

One only has to watch the evolution of the LOLspeak language to realize that things are going to change no matter what we do, and perhaps we should just watch and enjoy rather than fret overly much. Because my belief now is that good grammar is what works. Yes, I adhere to the rules, rather stringently sometimes, but I also know perfectly well that, for example, some day the possessive “it’s” (with the apostrophe) is going to be correct usage.

I thought of this inevitable change again as I read this piece by Jan Freeman at the Boston Globe: Fade Away: The slow retirement of a tricky subjunctive. She’s talking about the way the subjunctive “were” is gradually fading out of English, and how already it doesn’t really matter.

It’s especially interesting that the  verb “to be” is the only verb that doesn’t use its normal past tense (was) as a subjunctive, as every other verb does. And as one of the people Ms. Freeman talked to about this reminded her, “was” has also been used as the subjunctive by a great many people for 300 years, so it’s already halfway the norm.

This means that nobody misses what you mean, even if you don’t use the “were,” but use “was” instead. And once a grammatical or spelling change doesn’t affect the understanding at all, I think that spells doom for the original “correct” form. So “was” will become the subjunctive of “to be,” and some day grammarians will look back and think how archaic it sounds to use the old “were” form.

Grammar rules are codified by people who want the language set in stone, and the rules can be very useful to promote clear writing and communication. But language is a living thing, and will always change. And what is “correct” is what works best for people as they actually communicate. When using the “correct” way actually makes communication less clear, it’s simply no longer correct.

Why self-publishing may be a bad option

Patty Jansen at the Beyond Infinity blog has written an informative but rather disturbing post about self-publishing: shattering the illusion – self-published book and bookstores.

This isn’t really encouraging:

So why on earth would a run-of-the-mill bookshop stock a book from an unknown self-published writer, who can only offer 30% off RRP, and whose stock is ‘firm sale’ (in other words: non-returnable), who cannot be paid through regular digitised channels, whose stock carries a lot of extra administrative work?

No reason, really.

It’s not that it can’t be done, but it appears that the option of self-publishing should only be on the table as a very last resort, unless you’re content with mainly online and word-of-mouth sales. Or plan to spend virtually all your time trying to encourage bookstores to sell a few of your books.

Radio Room – A Cup of Poetry – Penguin Group (USA)

I just discovered this weekly series of short poetry readings that Penguin USA has been posting. They’re calling the series A Cup of Poetry, and they put up an audio file that consists of a brief description of the poet and poem, and then the reading.

Today’s posting, Episode 9, is This Living Hand by John Keats.

Today’s  Radio Room – A Cup of Poetry – Penguin Group (USA)

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Writer’s Block Remedy

And yes, this is tongue in cheek!

Courtesy of WeBook: 911 Writers Block

Maintaining your relationship with your book

Courtney Summers, author of the YA novel, Cracked up to Be and the upcoming Some Girls Are, wrote this wonderful blog post on Friday: You Aren’t The Book I Married Anymore.

She talks about a writer’s relationship to an ongoing book as though it’s a marriage, with all the attendant ups and downs – and sometimes the divorces. If you think writing a novel is all exalted inspiration and Visits By the Muse, do read her hilarious account of a marriage, separation, near-divorce, and reconciliation.

I gave that book my heart and soul and it was like, “Whatevs.”

So I threw all its clothes out on the lawn.

We stopped speaking to each other.

When people say that writing – real writing – is work, they know what they’re talking about. But Ms. Summers does give us all hope that, like any marriage built on The Real Thing, it’s often possible to work things out and make the relationship not only work, but be happy too.

Authors, deadlines, and the troubling economy

The New York Observer has an interesting article today, by author Leon Neyfakh: Note to Authors: Make Your Deadlines!

Neyfakh talks about how it used to be okay to go somewhat beyond your delivery deadline if a publishing company had bought your book, before the economy began forcing publishers to take more heed to their cash flow and bottom line. In the past, even if they had “buyer’s remorse” and regretted that they’d contracted two years ago to publish the book, they usually wouldn’t cancel outright.

Now, Neyfakh says, that’s changed to a large degree. If a publisher no longer wants to do the book, they’re going to start looking for an excuse. And getting it in late can now loom very large, resulting not only in cancellation of the contract, but the demand to pay back any advance.

Neyfakh remarks,

As a result, authors are under unprecedented pressure from their agents to stay on schedule. Most of the literary agents interviewed for this article said they have tried to impress on their clients that if they want to make sure they don’t lose their contracts and find themselves having to pay back an advance that in many cases they’ve already spent, they had better be vigilant about turning their manuscripts in on time.

It may not matter that the Muse hasn’t visited enough to make your prose just perfect. It may be more important to sit down, get the thing written, and hand it in on time, to make sure it will still be published. Or save that advance until you’re absolutely sure the book’s going to happen.

Finding an agent vs. just writing a good book

I just found some very good advice re: getting a book published and finding an agent. (And yes, sometimes it actually goes in that order, believe it or not.)

On the Aspiring Author blog, Alexis Grant talks about a conversation she had on Twitter with an author who gave her a lot of good advice. It pretty much boiled down to

1. Don’t spend all your time studying the publishing industry and trying to decipher the “tricks” to use to get in;
2. Most agents don’t find clients through the Query pile, but through contacts, and especially if they see the author’s writing somewhere and like it;
3. Have something to say; find your voice, and say it clearly.

Have a peek at the whole post; there’s a lot of meat there. And follow the blog!