Castle Walls Editing

Tag: Karen Russell

  • Lie Down Already

    Today I finished a book I had been looking forward to reading, and in fact the book had been a Christmas gift from my daughter, making me savor its reading all the more. I won’t name the book, though, because however much I enjoyed it—and I enjoyed it immensely—there was an incorrect usage throughout.

    And it rankled.

    The book repeatedly used “laying” when it should have used “lying,” and each time I came across one of these instances I was taken out of the book, the narrative spell broken by an inattentive copy editor. To be fair, the rest of the book was remarkably clean, and “lay vs. lie” issues are understandably difficult.

    But with the price of hardcover editions, you have the right to expect better.

    Lay means “to put” or “to place,” and its forms are lay, laid, laid, laying. Lay also requires an object to complete its meaning (a chicken lays an egg; I laid the envelope on the table).

    Lie means “to recline” or “to take a position of rest,” and its forms are lie, lay, lain, lying (I need to lie down; he was lying on the ground).

    A good trick is to substitute the appropriate form of the word place for the corresponding form of lay or lie, and if it makes sense, then you know to use lay (for example, being able to say “I placed the envelope on the table” lets you know that you should use a form of lay).

    It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to keep straight, especially for those who couldn’t give a rat’s arse, and especially considering that the matter is further confused by lay being the past tense of lie.

    Still, mastering the correct usage of lay and lie is well worth the trouble and may even win you a nod of approval from those who notice such things.

    At the very least, keeping these troublesome words straight will prevent you from irritating your audience, and whoever your audience is, you don’t ever want to inadvertently provide an excuse to quit reading.

    To wrap up, I’ll mention that the title of this blog entry is a reference to a novella from the fantastically talented horror and crime writer Tom Piccirilli. I only used the title because it’s one I like (especially the full title; go look it up!)—to be clear, it wasn’t his book that had the incorrect usage.

    I’ll also mention that last week I returned the book-giving favor to my daughter by attending a Karen Russell book signing and landing my daughter a signed edition of the Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! (Lest anyone think I’m more selfless than is really the case, I also had Russell’s new collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, signed for myself.)

  • 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.