Castle Walls Editing

Author: kim

  • Epistolaries at Dawn; or, POV Carousel

    You enter the tavern. Beyond a smattering of tables—some occupied, some not—a boy in grubby attire kneels by a hearth and pokes at a well-stoked fire. You feel the warmth of the blaze on your face and rub your hands together, glad to have found shelter from the night’s chill winds. You are led to a table by a serving girl whose fluttering hands distract you from the suspicious, even threatening, glances of those seated around you. You take your seat and are handed an envelope. The serving girl fixes you with her eyes but hurries off before you can question her. You open the envelope, remove a letter from it, and begin to read.

    ******

    Dear _____,

    I apologize for the manipulation, for having second-personed you. But I had to sit you in this room. Would you feel more comfortable in the third person? I’ll even render you in third-person objective, to be less intrusive.

    ******

    The individual at the table by the fire held the letter with trembling hands and cast furtive glances about the room, then continued reading the letter.

    ******

    Ah, I’m afraid that objective view just won’t satisfy. Let me try limited.

    ******

    The individual began to fear those seated about the tavern but couldn’t remember anything of life outside the tavern or even a reason for being there.

    ******

    Do I make you uncomfortable? Do you not enjoy being written of, or, should I say, being written? I can do third-person omniscient, too, but I don’t think you’ll like that at all.

    ******

    The serving girl cursed the new arrival, knowing that person wasn’t wanted there. The boy by the fire harbored thoughts of thievery. A heavyset man well into his cups thought of something far darker. Two women whispered hateful gossip, and in a dark corner, mostly unnoticed, the author smiled, thinking that everything, having fallen into place, was just as it should be.

    ******

    Ah, you don’t care for talk of the author, do you? You, the “individual,” must have thought yourself the center of the narrative. But it’s always been about me. Look around you. Behind every face are my thoughts. Cast your gaze into a mirror and see my thoughts behind your eyes as well. It seems you’re not an individual at all. You’re me, and I am you.

    CAST:

    First-Person Narrative:

    In this narrative mode, the story is told from the point of view of a person within the story. This narrative mode is marked by the use of “I” and lends itself well to a favorite of mine: the unreliable narrator. The laudanum-quaffing Wilkie Collins of Dan Simmons’s Drood is a good example of a first-person (and unreliable) narrator.

    Second-Person Narrative:

    Second-person narratives employ “you”: You enter the room. You fly into a rage. These are difficult to pull off and have a tendency to feel gimmicky. (Putting it that way makes one want to give it a go, though, doesn’t it?)

    Third-Person Narrative:

    This narrative mode is the real workhorse of literature, and readers will readily recognize its “he/she” style. Third-person objective relates actions but not the thoughts of the characters, while third-person limited relates the thoughts of one character and third-person omniscient floats among characters. War and Peace is a good example of third-person omniscient.

    In third-person narrative, the narrator is usually invisible, but my favorite stories are those in which the narrator seems invisible but gradually bleeds his or her way into the tale—this produces a wonderfully creepy effect.

  • Double Genitive: It Only Sounds Dirty

    Sarah squeezed John’s hand with enough force that, were it coal, she might have produced a diamond, but John scarcely noticed. The delivery room dissolved into a white and grey void where all that existed was his child, entering the world in a feat of biological wonder that, though he didn’t know it at the time, would leave him to forever marvel at his wife’s—and all women’s—capacity to create life.

    The doctor held the newborn, so small, so vulnerable. Was it a boy, John wondered, or a girl? The doctor met John’s eyes. Something was wrong! “Oh, no,” the doctor said.

    “What is it?” Sarah asked, again bearing down on John’s hand.

    “Your child . . .” the doctor started.

    “What? Tell us,” John blurted.

    The doctor’s face went pale. “Your child has a double genitive!”

    ***

    Anyone who’s seen the twin girls in Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Stephen King’s The Shining knows how disturbing doubles can be. Perhaps part of the blame lies in the inordinate number of times we’ve been told that no two snowflakes are alike, or maybe it’s just that our single points of consciousness reject the notion of a duplicate, but whatever the case, people feel a little frisson of horror at the appearance of a doppelganger.

    The sensation many people experience when they come upon a double genitive might not approach actual horror, but at the very least it can be described as unsettling.

    A double genitive, also called a double possessive, occurs when possession is indicated both by the preposition of and the possessive form of a noun or pronoun (for example, the baby of John’s).

    The double genitive serves a dual purpose of making otherwise surefooted readers question themselves. It’s the kind of construction that one might pass over a thousand times and never give a second thought, until one day it’s looked at in a slightly different light and the reader says to him- or herself: That can’t be right!

    There are in fact grammatical purists who will insist that it isn’t right, largely owing to its not having a corresponding construction (a literary doppelganger?) in Latin. The construction has been around for centuries, however, and is perfectly acceptable in all but the most formal writing.

    ***

    This week’s reading list:

    The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky

    The Double by Jose Saramago

  • Easy (Writing) Like a Sunday Morning

    The writer sat before his typewriter and prepared to write. He laced his fingers together, turned his palms outward, and stretched his arms. I’m ready, he thought, and felt a comforting hand on his back as Easy took a seat beside him.

    Where to begin? pondered the writer. Easy smiled and reached into his sack, pulling from it a string of words. “Try these,” Easy offered.

    The writer placed them on the page. The words were recognizable, and they seemed a likely place to start. “A few more,” said Easy, again reaching into his sack. “These should follow nicely.” And indeed they did.

    I’m writing! thought the writer. As the writer brought his hands together, excited enough to clap, Easy placed more words between them, and the writer couldn’t resist.

    The page filled nicely, and the writer began another page, and another. Easy reached again and again into his sack, but the bag looked as full as ever. The writer wondered where the language came from and whose thoughts it represented, but the ease of putting words on the page overcame any misgivings.

    I’m writing, thought the writer, but he no longer believed it.

    * * *

    George Orwell attacked “easy” writing in his essay “Politics and the English Language.” In it, Orwell writes, “Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

    Orwell marks easy writing by staleness of imagery and a lack of precision. He says that easy writing consists of ready-made phrases that will fall together on the page, forming your sentences for you and thereby forming your thoughts as well.

    His essay is directed primarily at political writing, but his advice applies to any language we commit to the page. I think we all recognize what he means, and, even if it’s hard to acknowledge, we can see it in our own writing. Perhaps such language is inevitable in our first draft, but when we begin rewriting, we can ask ourselves the questions that Orwell suggests:

    1. What am I trying to say?
    2. What words will express it?
    3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
    4. Is the image fresh enough to have an effect?

    Orwell then recommends two further questions:

    1. Could I put it more shortly?
    2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

    Writing without ready-made phrases is difficult, even painful, but as has been so often said, writing is rewriting. When the words pour from us and fill out the pages we want so badly to look at our work and feel it’s perfect that there’s a barrier we find difficult to breach. The urge to send a piece out and have others affirm our high opinion of it is almost irresistible. It’s a struggle to go sentence by sentence and question our language, to ask whether we could use stronger, more effective nouns and verbs. Perhaps when we do so we find we haven’t said much of anything at all and have to dig back into our work. And perhaps in the process we open up our writing to new possibilities. Perhaps our language becomes more precise. Perhaps our readers reap greater rewards from the text they are kind enough to dedicate their time to reading.

    Orwell goes on to discuss stale metaphors, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. I haven’t done the essay justice, but I strongly believe that it should be required reading for any writer.

    Final thought:

    Lionel Richie’s “Easy” is a great song (though I’m partial to the Faith No More rendition), but Easy is not your friend. Writing is a solitary endeavor and should hurt a bit. I’m telling this to the only person I have any right to say it to, myself, but you might want to say it as well:

    Easy, my old friend, take a hike.

  • Rat-a-Tat-Tat

    Say, what’s the rumpus? I ain’t going back to the big house, see? I’ll fill ya full of lead, copper! I’ll fit you for a Chicago overcoat, see?

    Too many ellipses on a page and the text begins to look as though a 1930s-era gangster had strafed it with a tommy gun. Rat-a-tat-tat! Ellipses represent omitted text and are also used in dialogue to indicate pauses and trailing off. (Judge me if you will, but I’ll also cop to using them excessively in e-mail and when chatting.)

    The presentation of ellipses, however, is the cause of much disagreement. Should you use spaces between the periods? Should you use a nonbreaking ellipsis character? Why do you sometimes see four periods?

    The Chicago Manual of Style, my go-to reference, recommends using three spaced periods with a space before the first period and a space after the third (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning . . . he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”) This is my preference. My eyes flow easily from period to period, and I’m reminded of a stone skipping across water.

    For a quotation, Chicago recommends using the terminal punctuation followed by the ellipsis when the omitted text follows the end of a complete sentence (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .”). There we have the four periods, which aren’t a four-period ellipsis at all but a period followed by an ellipsis. Note that there is no space between the last word of the sentence and the terminal period.

    To some eyes, three spaced periods are not as attractive as a formatted ellipsis character or simply three typed periods with no spaces in between. Holding the periods in such a tight little bundle seems too cramped to me, like people standing shoulder to shoulder in an elevator, but some styles call for this, and doing so keeps ellipses from breaking across lines. You would never want to see two periods at the end of a line with the third stranded at the beginning of the next line.

    Some styles even call for no spaces to either side of the ellipsis (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning…he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”) I would think this would leave the periods feeling as hemmed in as the characters in the trash-compactor scene in Star Wars, but, as editors, we must comply with the style our clients specify.

    Complicating matters further is that some styles call for the ellipsis (no matter how it’s formatted) to come before terminal punctuation if the omitted material comes before the end of the sentence (As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning . . . .). This practice makes it perfectly understandable why people could get the impression there is such a thing as a four-period ellipsis, but there is not, and understanding this makes it easier to adhere to whatever style you’re following.

    One of the publishers for whom I proof favors the ellipsis at the end of promotional copy for the purposes of dramatic trailing off. The copy might read along these lines:

         The desperadoes thought their reign of terror would last forever,
    but Johnny Gunhammer had other plans . . .

    The problem is that sometimes the publisher, for no apparent reason, insists on using four periods in this construction. I suspect there might be the thought that if three periods are dramatic, four would be really dramatic. It’s enough to make you want to reach for a tommy gun.

    See?

  • I Come to Bury Verbs, Not to Praise Them

    Mourners of the soon-to-be-buried verb looked on as the coffin descended into the open grave. The question mark hunched over in grief. The exclamation point stood bolt upright, its posture a salute to its good friend’s passing. Three periods stood side by side, a single space between them. They looked off into the distance, elliptical expressions only hinting at the emotions roiling within.

    As a pair of quotation marks prepared to say something profound, a single, overriding concern passed among the congregants: Why, cruel Fate? Why?

    Every day, all across the land, people are burying verbs. The practice undoubtedly seems like something that happens elsewhere, something that happens to other people, in other neighborhoods. The truth, however, is that it occurs closer to home than most would care to think.

    A buried verb, also referred to as a smothered verb or nominalization, results when a verb is hidden within a noun phrase. If a person says “She made an agreement” instead of “She agreed,” then that person has buried the verb.

    The following are a few other examples of buried verbs:

    • take a look (instead of “look”)
    • make a recommendation (instead of “recommend”)
    • make the argument (instead of “argue”)

    One consequence of using buried verbs is that the writer is unnecessarily adding words. Another is that the writer is obscuring meaning. By their nature, nouns are less active than verbs, so employing a noun to do the heavy lifting for a sentence deadens the language.

    The verb is the engine that makes the sentence run, and people can always improve their writing by using stronger verbs. For the same reason, as Stephen King recommended in his fantastic book On Writing, people should not use adverbs to cover up weak verbs.

    This does not mean that people should never use buried verbs or adverbs, but a careful writer is aware of their potentially adverse effect on a sentence. When editing your work, these are two more things to keep your eye on. And honestly, considering the doleful expressions in the scene above, burying a verb may not be worth the guilt that is sure to follow.

    Note: In the first paragraph, I used the phrase “side by side.” This phrase is not hyphenated when used as an adverb, as above, but it is hyphenated when used as an adjective (“side-by-side periods”). A similar expression, “face-to-face,” is hyphenated as both an adverb and an adjective. No wonder people have such a difficult time with hyphenation!

  • I’m in the (Subjunctive) Mood for a Melody

    I wish I were the subjunctive mood. So mysterious. So misunderstood. If I were the subjunctive mood, only the cool crowd would get me, man. People would want to plumb my depths, find what lurks beneath these still waters. But my innermost nature would remain an eternal mystery, because I’d be like the wind, baby.

    The subjunctive mood has been referred to as a linguistic fossil, and as fewer and fewer people understand it, it falls farther and farther out of use and someday could conceivably disappear entirely. What a pity that would be.

    Of the people who do use it, one has to imagine that a good portion of those don’t know why they use it beyond recognizing that it “sounds right.” Someone might sing, “If I were a rich man,” but if pressed on why he or she sang “I were” instead of “I was,” the person would likely have no real idea—and might even fear that an error had been committed.

    The Merriam-Webster definition of mood is the “distinction of form or a particular set of inflectional forms of a verb to express whether the action or state it denotes is conceived as fact or in some other manner (as command, possibility, or wish).” (I could have paraphrased the definition right off, but this way I can recommend Harm∙less Drudg∙ery, an informative and entertaining blog from Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper.)

    To put it more simply, mood shows the mode or manner that thoughts are expressed. Most people are much more familiar with the indicative mood, used to express facts and opinions and to make inquiries, and the imperative mood, used to give orders and make requests.

    The subjunctive mood, marked by seemingly odd verb forms and sometimes known as the malady-sounding conjunctive mood, is used to express statements that are contrary to fact or conditions that are doubtful or unreal, such as wishes and possibilities. Clauses beginning with if are a frequent hideout for subjunctive verbs.

    The following are a few examples of subjunctive verbs:

    • If I were taller, it would be you looking up to me.
    • I wish it were a sunnier day.
    • Her command was that we all be on our toes.

    Unreal states, wishing, longing even: yes, the subjunctive mood is a dreamer, and what a beautiful thing to be.

  • A Look at Scrivener

    During my college years (e-mail was as yet all but unheard of, and kids could still smoke in dorm rooms, if that gives you a general time frame) I was mystified by the processes other students employed during their studies. I took notes in class and would review my textbooks, but that was the extent of it, and that worked for me.

    For some students, however, studying seemed to consist of painstakingly highlighting so much of their textbooks that I wondered whether the few words left unmarked were in fact the ones of greater significance.

    While mindlessly highlighting line after line of text, these students might not have been doing any real, actual studying, but in their minds they were following the processes of studying and so were in fact studying, even if it didn’t translate into the point of the whole exercise: learning.

    I’ve always been wary (note the use or wary rather than weary, so commonly confused) of embracing processes that give me a false sense of accomplishment. People often spend so much time going through the motions and getting their processes in order that they never truly engage in the pure, undiluted work of whatever art it is they are practicing.

    Get ready to accuse me of burying the lead*: The preceding paragraphs are meant as a (perhaps unnecessarily long) lead-in to my thoughts on a tool I have approached cautiously but am nevertheless finding myself excited by.

    Scrivener software is a content-generation tool for writing and organizing documents such as novels, screenplays, research papers, and nonfiction works. The software allows writers to view their work in a number of different ways and allows writers to break their work into separate scenes. Writers can therefore open the program, go to their work in progress, and select a specific scene to work on. Scrivener provides a corkboard, index-card view as well so that writers can view the arrangement of their scenes and rearrange them with ease.

    The program is also notable for easily accessed folders where writers can store research and character and scene sheets. At any point, writers can compile their scenes and format complete documents.

    Scrivener is available on a thirty-day free trial, and I downloaded the trial software yesterday. The price of the full software is $40, and even with only a few hours of testing, I am certain it is a purchase I will make.

    Another reviewer, who writes long, research-heavy nonfiction works, noted that the software has become almost indispensable for him, even though it won’t do the hard part of actual writing. This brings me back to my introduction, in that writing is always core, whatever methods one employs. No one wants to fall into the trap of thinking and talking about writing more than doing the actual work of writing, but I can see the benefit of this software.

    Visualizing one’s work is often difficult if it’s viewed as one unwieldy mass and not as a collection of parts that work together to create the whole, so this index-card view of one’s work could be beneficial. There are certain works I would want to lay out on the corkboard, scene by scene, before diving into the actual scenes themselves. Having written primarily with Word, the ability to go to a certain scene without managing different files or locating it within one large file is extremely attractive. Scrivener also allows users to import and export one’s work easily with programs like Word and Final Draft, so it isn’t necessarily the only software one would use when working on a project.

    In short, whatever one’s method, I think this software is worth a look.

    * The introductory section of a news story is also called the lede, but, and I would appreciate someone with a more extensive journalism background correcting me if I’m wrong, I believe the expression is more properly burying the lead.

  • The Second Time Through

    In preparation for this week’s release of Justin Cronin’s The Twelve, I spent a good part of last weekend rereading its predecessor, The Passage. Here is a sentence from Cronin’s epic work:

    “By nightfall they were fifty miles past Oklahoma City, hurtling west across the open prairie toward a wall of spring thunderheads ascending from the horizon like a bank of blooming flowers in a time-lapse video.”

    A number of things struck me about this sentence. There’s tremendous movement, for one thing, and there’s the use of the word thunderheads, which seems to me suggestive of someone who’s spent a great deal of time looking at the sky over an open landscape. The imagery of flowers is beautiful and also cinematic (time-lapse photography has been employed with weather quite effectively in numerous films). Writers are correct to exhibit concern over using too many prepositional phrases, which can suck the life from a sentence, but I think they work here.

    Though obviously outside the realm of authorial intent, the sentence did put me in mind of these lyrics from the Alice in Chains song “Brother”:

    Roses in a vase of white

    Bloodied by the thorns beside the leaves

    That fall because my hand is

    Pulling them hard as I can

    Something I picked up during my second time through the book is the theme of falling that follows the character Wolgast. At one point, Wolgast is carrying the girl Amy, who is unconscious, up a ladder in an air shaft. He has to lean out with her and maneuver her into a duct above him, and there’s this line:

    “He began to fall. He’d been falling all along.”

    Caught in the moment, I only read this the first time as coinciding with the physical action of the scene. But on my second reading, it brought tears to my eyes, because it said so much more.

    And then there is this line, which I found devastating the first time through and just as affecting the second. Notice again the reference to falling.

    “Amy, he thought as the stars began to fall, everywhere and all around; and he tried to fill his mind with just her name, his daughter’s name, to help him from his life.”

    This sentence is dear to me, and I have trouble speaking it aloud without being overcome. Cormac McCarthy, whose stunning work The Road was frequently referenced in reviews for The Passage, is famously quoted as saying that semicolons and exclamation points have no place in literature. McCarthy is a brilliant writer, but I think the semicolon works well here, and I also enjoy the way exclamation points are used in the works of Sarah Langan (a writer whose fiction blows me away) and Swamplandia! author Karen Russell.

  • Have You Seen My Towel?

    The hyphen is an unassuming little bugger, isn’t he?

    He’s happy to break a word between lines, but he doesn’t expect you to take much notice of him. He seems content to say, “The rest of the word is down there, on the next line.” The hyphen practically waves his hands in the air, bashful as always: “Really, just pretend I’m not here.”

    Hyphens are also known to disappear over time. Words such as “teen-ager,” which once used hyphens, eventually abandon them: “teenager.” It’s as if the hyphen eventually begins to feel extremely uncomfortably and simply says, “Well, I’m not needed here any longer. Don’t worry, I’ll show myself out.”

    Hyphens will even stand in for their bigger brother the en dash (–) when a typeface won’t accommodate the lesser-known mark. An en dash is the length of a capital N and is used for number ranges (1940–1960) and to hold together certain compound expressions that require a mark stronger than the hyphen to hold the expressions together (a Nobel Prize–winning scientist, for instance). Because the vast majority of the population can’t pick the en dash out of a lineup, the hyphen all too often gets away with this impersonation.

    A mark more people are familiar with is the em dash (—), which is the length of a capital M and is often just called the dash. The em dash can be used in a sentence in place of parentheses, to indicate an interruption in dialogue, or, as more and more seems to be the case today, to set off dramatic statements—or supposedly dramatic statements.

    Unlike the unassuming hyphen, the em dash is all bravado. Increasingly, writers are using em dashes with a frequency they can’t seem to control. These em dashes are like spontaneous erections. The writer might be a bit embarrassed by them, but that doesn’t stop them from popping up all over the place—quite frankly, it’s enough to give anyone a headache!

    It’s not that the em dash doesn’t have its uses, but with its almost ubiquitous presence in today’s writing—especially on the Web—a little propriety might be in order.

    One might also think just how all this celebration of the em dash makes the humble hyphen feel. You can hardly blame him for wanting to avoid public showers.

    Note: Although en dashes and em dashes are commonly understood to correspond to the lengths of upper-case N’s and M’s, respectively, their actual lengths vary by font.

    Reading Update: Last night I began reading The Double by the extraordinary writer José Saramago. I have always been fascinated by doppelgangers, so you can imagine my excitement.

  • Mommy and Daddy Still Love You

    Commas are often like confused children who have to learn different sets of rules for each of their divorced parents’ homes. At Mom’s house, it’s perfectly acceptable—in fact, it’s mandatory—to jump into place before the word and in a series.

    “You need to do your homework, eat your dinner, and get to bed!” insisted Mom.

    But at Dad’s place, things are different. Dad, at his grumpiest, recently told the comma, “Quit fooling around with that and! Do your homework, eat your dinner and get to bed!”

    The comma does his best to do the right thing, but even when he knows he’s in the right place, Mom and Dad still give him trouble. At Mom’s house, he took his rightful place behind the state name in this sentence: “Solomons, Maryland, is a wonderful place to live.”

    “What in tarnation are you doing there? You don’t belong there!” chided Mom.

    At Dad’s, he rightfully slipped in behind the year: “January 1, 2013, is going to be the best New Year’s Day ever!”

    “Get out of there, boy. You being there just ain’t natural,” cried Dad, horrified.

    And the poor comma certainly never meant to come between Mom and Da—er, the subject and its verb.

    The comma Mom favors in our first example is referred to as the series (or Oxford) comma. It is considered more exact and it helps to avoid confusion. This, however, is a style choice, and Associated Press style, favored by most newspapers, allows this comma to be dropped.

    So neither Mom nor Dad is more correct than the other, though Mom has plenty of friends who support her point of view and Dad has his own pals who think he’s absolutely right. It’s all very confusing for a young comma struggling to find his place in this upside-down world.

    At least there’s one thing Mom and Dad can agree on: It would be nothing but trouble if their little comma started hanging out with semicolons.

    Reading update: I’m currently enjoying James Newman’s The Wicked, his spin on a 1980s-style horror novel, and Ian McEwan’s debut collection, First Love, Last Rites.