McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Difficult little toddlers, first drafts & writing rules

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SuperflyMD:

--- Quote from: Enjorous on March 05, 2011, 05:13:42 PM ---In American English you would say "I went toward the light" in British English they would say "I went towards the light"

--- End quote ---

This one has annoyed me since high school. 

I write like I speak, and I say towards, forwards and backwards, so I write those words as well.  Maybe it's a southern dialect thing? My family is all old Louisiana  preachers and teachers, maybe something stuck.

I'm not sayin' I'd let it keep me from getting published, but I'd at least arm-wrestle an editor over it.

Enjorous:
Or just find an editor who's also British :P

meg_evonne:
 :D

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
Grumble moan grump grumble moan.

Some of those rules there, like seeking out the simple verbs and not using passive voice, seem to me to come from notions of what makes good prose that are a bit too restrictive; it feels like the underlying assumption is that the Object of the Exercise is for the words to be transparent and simple and convey the story as simply and clearly as possible, which is a way for a story to be good, but not the only way for a story to be good.  Working that way kind of rules out a whole bunch of books that are very dear to me, highly regarded, and really worth having; it would mean there'd be no Gormenghast, no Book of the New Sun, no Desolation Road nor The Phoenix Guards nor The Worm Ouroboros. The beauty of the words in themselves can be part of the pleasure of the reading experience.  I hate to see people giving up on that, as if all prose aspired to the condition of a New York Times editorial.

An example, a t-shirt from Steve Brust's cafepress shop:

My esteemed parents did themselves the honor of traveling to Dragaera City for a holiday, enjoying the city's tolerably fine meals and expensive entertainments. However, the unfortunate timing of their visit led to its interruption by the riots and uprisings preceding that crucial point in our history when the conflict between Lord Adron e'Kieron and Emperor Tortaalik erupted into open rebellion, culminating in the explosion of raw amorphia that transformed the city and its environs into the Lesser Sea of Chaos.

While I am happy to report that my parents had the good fortune to escape the Disaster and return home safely with their luggage, they pretended that due to the haste of their departure from the city, the only token that they could provide of their adventure was this nearly unremarkable garment, made, you perceive, of sadly cheap fabric with unimaginative tailoring: a common shirt.

--Two Words from a Certain Gentleman of the House of the Hawk

You could in theory make the core content of that "My parents went to Dragaera City and all they got me was this lousy t-shirt" (that's kind of the point).  Think how much world background and character information you lose by doing so.  (Paarfi not being an overly verbose windbag with a very finicky attention to precise small points of etiquette and a tendency to digression would not be Paarfi. I've no idea what Paarfi's average sentence-length is; when I do the same sort of Alexandre-Dumas style, I can easily get chapters where the sentence length averages fifty words, and that's counting dialogue exchanges where a goodly fraction of the sentences are two or three words long.)

The words aren't a conduit between a Story and a Reader, that are doing better the smoother the flow from one to the other.  The words are the story.  Every word you pick, and every choice you make, is informed by who is telling the story, and tells the reader about the kind of person the viewpoint character is, that they are the person who would make that word choice.  This is true of any POV, though it's most obvious in first. And, well, there are people who inside their heads think of their mother as "Mother", and people who think of their mother as "my mother", and the decision of which you use tells you something about the person and the social context.  (Viewpoint character of the thing I am working on right now was brought up in a society where biological parentage is not important in defining who counts as your family, and the people who are actually around is.  The guy who brought her up is "Great-uncle Marcus", in her head, but her actual biological mother, whom she's met a handful of times, is "my mother", not "Mother".  This is one of many indications that there is not a contemporary-Western-assumed-standard important emotional connection there.)

meg_evonne:
Neurovore, how true, how true. Even more so, how sad, how sad.

These rules of course apply to the run of the mill commercial piece and the desires of run of the mill editors and agents in today's market. Frustrating, but, I think, agonizingly true. It also applies to the vast majority of readers who prefer the quick and easy over the more in depth work.

That being said, I have always applauded your style of writing and it will do you well!  Rules are meant to be broken, especially petty, get-her-done, get-her-out there type rules.   

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