Category Archives: writing

Is there no end to this lack of “-ly”s?

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Last week I wrote about how one popular writer gets around the “-ly” problem. Diana Gabaldon is the author of the much acclaimed Outlander series. I think the acclaim is well deserved. These are wonderful time-travel romance books that I am enjoying thoroughly and would recommend to anyone.

But Ms. Gabaldon has developed one stylistic quirk that brings me up short and right out of the story every time I encounter it. Which is, regrettably, often. In what might be a response to the current undeserved disfavor in which adverbs ending in -ly find themselves among self-proclaimed writing gurus, Ms. Gabaldon often simply leaves off the -ly. I’m not sure how she punctuates this particular variation on the language (I’m listening, not reading). Problem solved, right?

Well, gentle reader, here are some real examples from An Echo in the Bone. You decide:

“He turned for the shore, cutting smooth through the water.”

“Roger shrugged helpless.”

“‘What?’ I said startled.”

“‘You can’t leave,’ I whispered urgent.”

“Tears welled in his own eyes then, unexpected.”

“She bit her lip at that and nodded reluctant.”

I offer these examples reluctant, since I love this book wholehearted. But I do wish somebody had edited a few -lys back into it.

Those Pesky –ly Adverbs

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It’s all the rage these days among writer-mavens to advise the disuse, where possible, of –ly adverbs. (Some of us, for the record, disagree.) Substitute instead, these mavens urge, a stronger form of the verb. Use of –ly adverbs weakens your writing, they say, by implying poor verb choice.

I absolutely agree.

Oh. Excuse me. That was a mistake. What I meant to say is that I am in complete concordance. There. Much stronger.

Writers should use the strongest appropriate verb instead of a weaker verb and one of those pesky –ly adjectives. Where possible.

But of course this is not always possible.

In particular, these same writer-mavens also advise never to use speaker dialog tags other than “said” because they get in the way of the dialog itself.

“But my third-grade teacher encouraged me to use verbs other than ‘said’!” I gasp.

I remember—I remember, and this was half a century ago—the class making a list on the blackboard of all the picturesque, strong verbs we might use instead of “said.” And our teacher encouraged us to use them.

Oh. Half a century ago, that explains it. Times change, and so do writing styles. Nowadays, if dialog tags must be used, “said” is the one. It’s the only one where the writing does not insert itself between the reader and the dialog. This is fine. But now we face the conflict of two writer-maven rules: Always use the strongest verb form possible, except always use “said.”

And forget those –ly adverbs, even with “said.” What’s a poor writer to do?

I have been listening to Diana Gabaldon’s An Echo in the Bone, the seventh in her brilliant Outlander series. This generally well-written and thoroughly enjoyable book has almost completely solved the –ly adverb problem. (Which, you may have noticed from the previous sentence, I have not.) You see, it turns out that adjectives are still acceptable. Use them instead of those pesky –ly adverbs. Behold, actual quotes from this book.

“Only until the war is over,” he said, encouraging.

“You never said anything about wanting to write a book,” Ian said, curious.

There must be at least one construction like this on every page. Maybe more. I love this book, but the eradication of –ly adverbs is painful to listen to. Every time the –ly should be there but isn’t, I cringe.

My new writing group

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I have recently joined a new writing critique group, organized at least loosely through the Kentucky Romance Writers of America.

(Aside to everyone who knows me, knows my fiction, knows my home in New England: You are thinking, “Romance?” You are thinking, “Kentucky?” It’s complicated. Don’t ask.)

This crit group was so successfully subscribed that it divided itself into subgroups, and I am in the Fantasy subgroup.

(Aside to everyone who knows me: You are thinking, “Well, aha!” You sit back in satisfaction at knowing *something*, at least, that makes some sense. And I feel the same way. I know something about you, too.)

There are nine of us in this group. So far, maybe half a dozen have submitted pieces to be critiqued, and each of the submittals has received three to six reviews. The reviews are detailed and thoughtful. I can honestly say that the three reviews I received so far on my story have been eye-opening.

And not just the reviews. *We* are eye-opening. We are so different, one from another. We live in all parts of the country (okay, maybe more in Kentucky than elsewhere, but plenty of elsewhere too). Some of us are still in college and some of us have children who have already finished college. Though we all write “fantasy,” our works are in quite different genres. You would be surprised. Some of us have published many books; others are still hoping.

And here’s the thing that blows Dan away. The critiques are given generously, carefully, wholeheartedly. I’d even say lovingly. (Adverbs… one of our topics of discussion… Aren’t writers an interesting bunch? 😉  In a profession where competition is so mind-bogglingly fierce, writers are unselfishly kind and helpful to one another. If any of us makes it, we are all genuinely happy. We want to boost every last one of us over the fence.

We’re in this together.

And here’s the thing that blows me away: We’re also all in our own separate worlds. Jagi frets over Kestrel and shapes him and smooths him and lives with him and loves him and molds him and makes him real. I do the same for Kell, and Linda for Moira. There’s no overlap. Not of time, space, world, or destiny. We create them with such love and such tenderness and such difficulty, and so imperfectly.

This is *hard work*.

We have to help each other, or we wouldn’t stand a chance.

I am afraid of this post

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I am afraid of this post, but I have to do it. I have installed two widgets in my WordPress blog software, one of which is supposed to cross-post to my original LiveJournal blog, and the other of which is supposed to cross-post to my Facebook wall. But all this seems so complicated and so unlikely to me that it’s been sitting here in my computer (or wherever in the cloud such things sit), and I’ve been procrastinating trying it out.

NO MORE PROCRASTINATION!

Wherever, and in whatever form this post appears, please forgive me if it’s less interesting than most. With luck, it will be a milestone for me.

Writers Block

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Writers block. It’s in the air. Last Wednesday my friend Jagi Lamplighter Wright wrote a blog entry about it. And for the last few weeks I’ve been struggling with it.

Since breaking through the block that barricaded the final scene in The Last Lord of Eden (as described in my blog post of September 13th and that of October 4th), I’ve gotten all tangled up in rewriting An Appointed Time. And so I’ve managed to do just about everything else, some of it high on my avoidance list, while An Appointed Time is opened up like a patient on the operating table. But I can’t bring myself to put An Appointed Time back together again in the new way. Even though it’s going to be ever so much better, honest.

Here’s how it happened.

About 66,000 words into The Last Lord of Eden, my protagonist rather forcefully let me know that he didn’t want to be a married man. And more to the point, his wife agreed. The problem is that I married the two of them off toward the end of An Appointed Time in a chapter that one of my friendly reviewers long ago suggested was just a little bit boring. The book will be better off without it.

However, as now written, An Appointed Time leads to this marriage as surely as the Yellow Brick Road leads to Oz. In order to have the option not to marry the two of them, I have to make changes that reverberate all the way back to the beginning of the book.

This has turned out to be a Good Thing, because the extent of the required rewrite also enabled me to scrap major parts of the first two chapters and begin the action where it should begin instead of way back in the back story where I tend to begin things.

And now that I have the patient opened up on the table, I see that I can consolidate two separate minor characters into one character, who will therefore become an interesting character in his own right. And this, in turn, gives our heroine a more believable motive for something she does that gets her into a lot of trouble.

So An Appointed Time is getting a revamp from start to finish. But it’s bloody hard work, all this throwing out of the good stuff I’ve written in order to make room for the even better stuff that will replace it. No wonder I’ve been avoiding it. This makes submitting the flex account receipts, rebalancing the retirement investments, following up on medical bills, making airline reservations, and preparing the documentation for 2009 taxes all look like enjoyable tasks.

I think I’m in trouble.

The Halfling’s Court

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My friend Danielle Ackley-McPhail, whom I have never met, is launching a new book. Strike that “never met” part: We may have said a few words at Balticon a year and a half ago. Or maybe not; in any case, it never got as far as, well, names or anything. We’ve gotten to be friendly through belonging to the same writers’ group and through Danielle’s writer-oriented Yahoo group. I’ve also gotten to be friendly with some of her other friends in these groups, and it feels kind of strange and nifty to have a circle of friends whom I like but have never met.

The new book is called The Halfling’s Court, and it sounds like a good read. I’ve read some of Danielle’s other books, Yesterday’s Dreams and Tomorrow’s Memories, and I enjoyed them very much. Danielle is good with characterization and descriptions and doesn’t draw back (as I do) from blood and gore, either. The Halfling’s Court, like the other two, blends hard modern times and the Land of Fae. Danielle mixes them well and pours a pleasant tale.

The Halfling’s Court will be launched officially at Arisia in Boston in January, but it’s already hit the ground running (er, hit the air flying?), with a listing in amazon.com and reviews starting to come in.

What an exciting time for a writer! I wish her so much success!

My life on standby

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My life has been on standby since we got in the standby line for the Block Island ferry at 7:30 this morning. The first ferry of the day left at 8:30, and there were already three cars ahead of us. Two of them got on.

I’ve gotten friendly with the Interstate Navigation employee, Joe Houlihan, who is running the standby lot today. “How’s your writing going?” he asks me. So I tell him the story of my writer’s block and getting past it. And he shares with me his story of a warm and personal rejection letter from an agent who read his manuscript. For, you see, Joe is a writer, too. We are both on standby today.

There are now five cars behind us in line. Two large trucks are waiting in the same lot for the 11 o’clock ferry, but they’re not on standby. They have reservations. At about ten minutes to the hour, Joe comes by on his bicycle and sends the trucks over to the ferry as we folks in the standby line watch hungrily, hopefully, despairingly. “Sorry,” he tells us.

Nine cars are waiting in line for the 1:30 ferry, seven behind us, one in front. Another truck has also shown up. “What happens,” I ask Joe, “if a car has a reservation on the 1:30 ferry but doesn’t get there in time?” “Oh, then he’s on standby just like anyone else.” “Back of the line?” “You bet.” Then Joe tells the story.

“They used to have a policy where there was a priority standby line for people like that,” he says. “You can imagine how well that went over with all the people like you who were waiting in line since 7:30 in the morning, and now this guy comes along at 1:35, and he’s first in line. I saw it almost come to blows a couple of times. People would be yelling at me—and it wasn’t my fault. I’d tell them, ‘Hey, I agree with you. Go complain to the company.’ Well, I can tell you, that priority standby didn’t even last two weeks.”

Another truck pulls up. This is a really big one, carrying major steel beams. I tense up, but then the driver tells Joe that he’s on the 5:15 ferry. Not a problem. Well, not yet.

“What are the beams for?” I ask one of the men with the truck. “Construction,” he says. Well, duh! Hey mister, I’m on standby here; I have all the time in the world. “What kind of construction? They’re too big for a house, aren’t they?” “I can’t say,” he says. “You don’t know?” “I don’t know if I’m supposed to say.” “They’re for a restaurant,” says the other man with the truck. “Oh, really?” I’m at my peak of no-hurry friendliness. “A new restaurant? Where?” “No, it’s for moving it.” “They’re moving a restaurant? Which one? Where?” And he tells me. The things you don’t learn.

An additional truck shows up last minute. Dismay replaces optimism in the standby line. Joe pedals around on his bicycle. I have learned: he’ll come to the drivers’ side of the cars if he’s going to board some of us, to the passenger side if he’s dealing with the trucks over there. It’s the drivers’ side—fantastic! But he crosses over. Rats! He’s on his walkie-talkie; he relays truck measurements and then bikes back again. Up and down the line, hearts sink. A moment later, he returns and sends the car ahead of us to the ferry.

But they take no more.

So now we’re number 1 in line, and we’re on standby for the 3:30 ferry. Time to recharge: lunch for us, an electric plug at the restaurant for the computer batteries.

Avoidance, Part 2

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About three weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on avoidance, perhaps otherwise known as writers block. The scene I was working on describes what is, perhaps, the climax of the entire tale, in which Our Hero brings himself to perform a difficult act, the very last thing he ever wanted to do. And moves on. I knew what was in the scene. I had gone over it a dozen times in my head. But it seemed like everything in my life, even the time spent actually at my computer, conspired to take precedence over actually writing the scene down.

I have to confess that I’d half hoped that writing that blog post might open whatever gate was closed and allow me to write the darned scene already.

But it didn’t happen quite that way. What actually happened was that I managed to continue to avoid writing the scene for another week. And then one night while lying in bed not quite sleeping, I went through the scene again. A new character showed up this time–not new to the story, but new to the scene. And when this character showed up, the nature of the scene changed. It got more complicated and interesting, and a lot less dismal.

The next day I started writing. I wrote the pivotal moment in the scene.

Over the last two weeks I have also completed half a dozen scenes leading up to that final scene, detailing Our Hero’s struggle to avoid the act he has been cornered into. And I completed the scene itself, tying the pivotal moment into all that leads up to it. And I even wrote the one small scene needed afterwards. In all, I’ve written well over 7,000 words in two weeks, more than a tenth of the entire novel so far—not exactly fast enough for National Novel Writing month, but probably about as much as I’ve ever succeeded in writing in any two-week period. And hey, you know what? It’s pretty good stuff!

So maybe, just maybe, the scene was resisting me all this time because it wasn’t the right scene yet.

On Raising a Writer

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This is way cool! Please check out my guest blog posted today at L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Wright’s Writing Corner. My son Adam was born with an innate and strong storytelling ability. This post is about nurturing that talent. I hope you enjoy it.

And if you’re interested in fantasy, check out Jagi’s new book, Prospero Lost.

Blood Meridian

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I am reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. By “reading” I mean that I am listening to it on CD, a rather odd and, well, bloody companion to my food preparation and meals.

“What’s it about?” you might ask. It doesn’t have much of a story arc, and so it can be easily summarized. There are no spoilers.  Here goes:

A young man and assorted companions travel through a vast, magnificent, desolate, and wonderfully described landscape, in which they encounter a diversity of people and other creatures, mostly dead. Those that are not dead generally either kill or are killed by them, often in gruesome ways described in the same emotionally neutral yet poetic language as the landscape. And then they ride on.

It’s the weirdest thing, but I wish I could write like this.