have a pet peeve.

I hate when novelists write about extraordinarily smart people when they don’t really know what it means to be smart. Most of these people write smart like it’s a list of accolades. Throw in a PhD, make it in a complicated field. Maybe add witticisms. Quotations from Plato. Public recognition. But being smart isn’t about what you have; it’s about how you see the world. Smart people figure things out. They don’t figure everything out; they don’t even always figure out most things. But on average, a smart person will figure out more things than a person who is not as intelligent. If it were not so, the person would not be smart.

And so I beg you. If you’re writing smart characters, don’t make them smart by giving them interests of smart people. Don’t make them smart by dint of quoting obscure texts. Don’t give them a first in mathematics. Not that they shouldn’t do any of these things, but none of that makes a character smart. It makes the character have characteristics of someone who may be smart.

If you’re writing smart characters, ask yourself: How would a smart character see the world? What would the smart character see that less intelligent characters would miss?
If your answer to that is “nothing”–if your smart character never acts smart, and only has the trappings of intelligence–you don’t have a smart character. You have a regular joe with a first in mathematics.

So is it possible to write a character smarter than yourself? Of course. It’s easy. Why? There’s two reasons. One, you know everything about your world. All you need to do is make sure that your smart character can figure out more about the world than someone less so (it’s fair, of course, for the smart character to misread things, too). It’s the figuring out bit that’s important–you already know the answers yourself. Make your smart character figure things out better, and you’re golden.

The second reason is that your smart character can figure out in three seconds what it takes you two weeks to conjure up. The insight that it took you three drafts and five critiques to see? Give that to your smart character, in the flash of a second. Do that enough times and the character will be smart.

ou’ve probably all seen lists of things you should watch out for when editing. There/their/they’re. Loose/lose. Your/you’re. And innumerable misspellings and typographical errors.

But there are three great editing sins that are very difficult to catch unless you look for them. I’ve detected them both in the last three books I read, I figured I should share them with you.

1. What is wrong with this sentence?
The law required that people prove that they’re a citizen.

People don’t prove that they’re a citizen. They prove that they’re citizens. Remember that if you’re talking plurals, you stay talking about plurals. If you start talking singular in the midst of a sentence, you get singular/plural confusion. This is mocked, delightfully, in Lois McMaster Bujold’s “A Civil Campaign”:

“If nothing else it leaves one more Barrayaran woman for the rest of us.”

“Well, it leaves one more Barrayaran woman for one of us,” Byerly Vorrutyer corrected this sweetly. “Unless you are proposing something delightfully outré.”

One more thing, which it pains me to say. Be aware that–particularly if you are writing a Regency-set historical–”they” is not commonly considered in that era a singular pronoun. It’s not wrong to use it so; it’s not even anachronistic. But it was frowned upon in some quarters, and if you’re writing a real stick-in-the-mud, he will not use “they” as a gender neutral singular pronoun. He will use “he”. (I’ve used the stickler construction in that sentence: if I hadn’t, I might have said, “if you’re writing a real stick-in-the-mud, they will not use “they.”) And they will most certainly not use “cos” or “em” so don’t even think of mentioning it.

2. What’s wrong with this sentence?

Smiling broadly, her elbow brushed against his buff inexpressibles.
Death by clauses. Be very, very careful to know what the subject of your sentence is. Here, the thing that is acting is her elbow. But her elbow cannot smile broadly.

3. What’s wrong with this sentence?

The slow moving man dragged his feet.

Maybe nothing is wrong with the sentence. It depends on whether the man is moving slowly, or whether the moving man is slow. If the man is moving slowly, you should hyphenate the compound adjective: “slow-moving man.” Otherwise, if he’s a really sorry moving man who needs to get fired, no hyphen is needed.
So how can you tell if you’ve sinned? Look it up in the Chicago Manual of Style, of course! The CMS provides absolution for the following:

1. Ending a sentence with a preposition.

CMS says: “The ‘rule‘ prohibiting terminal prepositions was an ill-founded superstition.”

2. Starting a sentence with a conjunction.

CMS says: “There is a widespread belief—one with no historical or grammatical foundation—that it is an error to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and, but, or so. In fact, a substantial percentage (often as many as 10 percent) of the sentences in first-rate writing begin with conjunctions. It has been so for centuries, and even the most conservative grammarians have followed this practice.”

And there you have it. What are your editing peeves?

herry Thomas is a debut author whose book has me salivating. Ever since I read the excerpt posted on her website, I’ve been dying to know both what happens next and what came before. Her writing–or at least, what I’ve seen of it–is clear and evocative. It hits me right in the solar plexus.

She posted on her blog about beauty in writing. Part of this reminded me, shockingly, of something I’ve never quite been able to forget.

One of the most vivid memories I have is of Ekaterina Gordeeva & Sergei Grinkov’s 1988 skating program. I was 11 at the time, and the performance still blazes in my memory. It was so vivid that I remembered the names to this date–and I’m the girl who never remembers anyone’s name.

I adore beautiful things. I love beautiful prose. Janine mentioned people who write brilliantly, and I love every single one of those authors. I especially second the Julie Anne Long mention.

I sincerely doubt there are many authors who think, “well, today I shall pen some truly dreadful prose.” I also doubt there are many writers who even think, “well, my writing sucks but at least I get sold. Why mess with success?” I suspect that everyone thinks they are an excellent writer. The real problem, I think, is that the admonition to “write beautifully” is too often taken as an admonition to write painfully unnatural prose.
It would be impolitic of me to call out offending authors, but I think we’ve all read them. The truly abysmal writing that I see (not just in genre romance) may well result from people attempting to write beautifully and failing. These are the books where the author consistently uses “brilliant orbs” instead of “eyes” and where overblown description haunts every paragraph. These are the books where dull, lifeless description plods on interminably while you wait impatiently for the story to start again.

In both figure skating and prose, true beauty appears effortless to the observer. It’s only the amateurs who think that panting and blowing, showing the world how hard they’ve labored over a sentence, shows real beauty. This is not to say that artists don’t labor; the five-minute program we see is the culmination of years and years of practice and conditioning. To the observer, it seems as natural and unstudied as a bird’s flight.

In Legalese, I wrote what I thought was an absolutely brilliant, evocative sentence. “His perpetually sweaty palm trailed a streak of slime down her cheek, like a snail crossing a garden path.” Both my critique partners read it and commented something along these lines: “Ewww!” Which was precisely the reaction I was looking for. So why did I delete the line? Because they both commented on it. They didn’t say it, but the line pulled them out of the story. It made them pay attention to the writing. It panted and puffed, shouting for attention. And so away it went.

‘ve converted my progress meters to page-count bars on the right. I tend to write very loosely, for whatever reason, and so I’ve decided to go by page count instead of word count. Yay.

Plus it makes it looks like I’ve done more. In reality, I really only have a few scenes to write in Book One, and then it’s revision time. As for Book Two–the progress bar is about right at 25%. I’ve gotten through 20% of the plot, and I’ve written 5% of the nonlinear scenes.

Yes, this is all futile. So, what mathematical tricks do you employ to make it look as if you’ve made progress? And do you manage to fool anyone?

he lovely India Carolina, my CP and very good friend, now has a blog and a website. You probably remember her warmth, her charm, and her lovely writing from FanLit. Visit!

In other news, I just have to wrap up a few loose odds and ends now. Whew! I’ve had time to think about Book One. I revised my synopsis and figured out how to fix a problem in the middle of the book and the end of the book. And I finally figured out what had stumped me for ages. The first meet between my hero and heroine is wrong. It doesn’t work. The mechanics of the meet are fine, even though I agonized about those for ages. But the substance of the conversation–written well before I had really let either character get into my head–doesn’t work with the two anymore. It needs to be rewritten. Not revised; rewritten entirely from scratch.

Okay, I can deal with that. But at this point I have a plan. I’ve realized that the boring little bits in the middle don’t work because they aren’t telling a story, and I finally figured out that there is a story there–an interesting and important story–that needs to be told. It’s good to finally “get” the book again.

So what about you? Do you love India’s new site? Do you have any exciting new beginnings, or ends to share? Let me know.

ricka mentioned that I should save all my deleted fragments. But that gave me a better idea. Why not let you all see some of them?

Here’s a scene that I hated to delete. I hadn’t planned to delete it. But I started from the top. On revisions, it was obvious that the scene started too soon. After all, she gets up and gets out of bed–not particularly important, right? And then she goes downstairs. Yawn. So I started deleting the first few paragraphs, looking for the start of the scene.

But in order to find the start of a scene, you have to figure out what the scene does for the book. And unfortunately, I had to admit that the answer in this case was: nothing. Nothing at all. So I deleted the scene. It was all setup for the scene when the boys come visiting, after all, and that scene is much more fun if the reader discovers the flowers at the same time the hero does. So sad, but goodbye.

Enjoy!  The scene is after the jump.
(more…)

‘ve been spinning in circles on revisions for Ornithology, mostly because I had this really nasty problem.

Plot A was originally going to be the plot of the book. It became quite clear to me when I first started writing that Plot A couldn’t possibly sustain the length of the book. But B and C happily stepped in, and Plot C took on a life of its own, aided by bizarre recalcitrance, in such a way that Plot C almost looks like it was planned, even though the motivation for Character D didn’t come in until very near the end of the book, and resolution E was added last-minute. Still, there are scenes that have been there from near the beginning–not just from near the beginning, but that were written around the time I wrote the first two chapters–that make it look like resolution E was planned all along. All hail the almighty pants.
In any event, there are still remnants of Plot A still stuck in the book. And the problem is, they’re grafted in well and tight. I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with them. I can’t tug it out entirely, or the rest of the book unravels. But if I leave it in, it’ll look like a misshapen monstrosity with two heads.

I finally figured out how to deal with it. Unfortunately, it will require me to rewrite my first chapter. I’m going to lose a huge number of lines that I really, really loved. Ouch. Ouch, and ouch. I want to hold onto them so badly, but it’s just structurally wrong. It’s not fair. It’s really just not fair. Not at all.

Excuse me while I beat my head against the wall yet one more time. Then I will go and cut. Sigh.

he biggest lesson I learned writing my first book is that you can’t craft a story, or even a scene, if you’re writing towards a resolution rather than a hook.

What do I mean by that? In the first book, I figured out what problems were arrayed against my heroine, figured out how to get around them, and wrote towards that moment when the problems were resolved. It turns out, of course, that some of the resolutions I had weren’t completely satisfying. Both my critique partner pointed this out to me, and I grumbled to myself for half an hour or so about how it was FINE, and DON’T BOTHER ME and all that stuff. But the truth was that the resolution wasn’t very satisfying because the problem wasn’t very hard. And I realized this a little bit later, and then I whined to myself a little bit harder, and I said, “But if I make the problem hard there’s no way to solve it!”

So imagine you’re faced with a castle and you’ve got three men, one of whom can barely wiggle his fingers. You’ve got to stop the wedding and kill the man with six fingers, and you’ve got to do it now. It’s not possible. And you say to yourself, “If only we had a wheelbarrow!” “What I wouldn’t give for a good Holocaust cloak.” Buh. Right. I am, in fact, the author. It’s actually quite, quite easy as an author to solve problems your characters have. All you have to do is recite the rules, and boom. Problem solved.
The rules? Ah yes. The rules.

1. The character must solve the problem him or herself.
2. In a way that’s true to the character of everyone involved.
3. And it has to be a real problem. None of this: “Oh, you said goats? I thought you said BOATS. Never mind then.”
4. The problem presented should be one that the character must have grown to overcome. If presented with the problem at the beginning of the book, the character should not be able to solve it.

Once you set up those relatively rigid rules, the right solutions become rather obvious. And so I made the original problem intractable. I took away the person who she could turn to to solve the problem, if only she got the nerve up. I took away the safety net, the thing in the background that every reader would see and say, “Look, you don’t need to throw your life away. Just step over there.” And then I forced my hero to solve the problem using the tools he knows best.
Having figured this out at the end of my novel, I’ve finally realized that I wrote the book exactly backwards. I started off with the solution. But the solution isn’t the book; the problem is the book. The solution is what wraps everything off, but a great problem with a lame solution is a better book than a great solution with a lame problem. (Think: The Stand by Stephen King.) This is not to say that I advocate lame solutions, of course. But you cannot have a great solution in the first place without a great problem.At this point, I started thinking–again, as pressed by a critique partner who pointed out that all my scenes started way too soon–about what a scene was supposed to do. Silly me; I thought scenes were where things happened. Nope. Not at all. Scenes exist to set hooks. Nothing else. If there’s a scene that doesn’t set a hook in it somewhere, that’s a scene you can delete from your book.

At this point, I’m looking at my first book and shrieking, “But how else will I tell everyone about X!” Yeah–not the problem. Expository scenes–no good. They all have to go. There is no place for an expository scene in a novel. I’ll tell the reader about all that when I have the chance. i just need to work it in somehow. Working it in to a scene that has a hook is way better than working it in anywhere else.
So I have a lot of work ahead of me, but it’s exciting work, because I can now see all the places that I screwed up. I still have one subplot problem I’m
thinking through. I’m still shocked though, at how little I knew when I first started writing. There’s no other way to learn, though. You can buy all the books you want, attend all the workshops out there. But until you write it wrong, and see the wrongness staring you in the face, you’ll never get it.

What’s the most important lesson you ever learned from your own writing?

o you want to write a kiss. If you’ve ever tried to spend more than about two sentences on the scene, you’re probably familiar with my quandary. There just aren’t enough good synonyms for “mouth” and “lips.” He moves his mouth. She opens her lips. And then . . . we can add tongue in. But pretty soon, he’s putting his tongue (in her mouth) and she’s sighing against (his lips) and he’s taking her upper lip between his lips and there are lips all over the place! (Which is fine in a sex scene, but we’re still just kissing here.) Isn’t there another word I can use?

Yes, says thesaurus.com. I can use: aperture, beak, box, buss, cavity, chops*, clam, crevice, delta, door, embouchement, entrance, estuary, firth, fly trap, funnel, gate, gills, gob, harbor, inlet, jaws, kisser*, lips, mush*, orifice, portal, rim, trap*, yap*

Thank you, thesaurus.com. “He ran his tongue over the seam of her aperture. She opened her trap, and he slid inside the orifice. The warmth of his breath against her chops excited her.”

Very hot. Anyone have any better ideas?

h, how difficult it is to have my characters give one another advice pre-Freud!

So, I firmly believe (heh, I said firmly–that tells you what kind of mood I’m in) that one of the ways that lust shades towards love has a great deal to do with ego. I don’t buy–never have–that unrequited lust is a wonderful basis for love, because most people like having their egos stroked too much. I mean, it’s really hot when someone you find attractive wants you. In some ways, it validates not only your sexual desire, but your sexual worth.

I think this is doubly true for men. There’s this trope that some guys out there don’t care about anything except their own release. I’m sure it’s true for some guys. But the vast majority of men that I’m aware of desperately want their partners to get off. It’s partly because they’re good guys; it’s partly because the big-O is a wonderful inducement to get a girl in bed again. But it’s also partly because it makes the guy feel like such a stud-muffin. Hell yeah, he thinks. I’m good in bed. No guy wants to think that he’s bad in bed.

And yet when a Regency character tries to express this sentiment, she can’t say “stroke his ego” because “ego” didn’t have the modern meaning until Freud came along and turned our understanding of ourselves on our ears.

I’ve also come across references to “green sickness” which is apparently a wasting disease that only afflicted virgins. Virginitis, if you will, the female equivalent of blue balls. Apparently, it’s a disease that cropped up mid-16th century and disappeared in the early 1900s. I’d never heard of it.

And that leads me to another thought. I read in the New York Times the other day that a team has been searching for examples of repressed memory in literature, and hasn’t been able to find any proof that the concept existed before the 1782. The team argues–and I am not trying to take sides here, just report what others have said–that repressed memory is a cultural creation, and it’s not real.

All this makes me think: Our understanding of our own brains–of what makes us tick–is by necessity bounded by our time period. In writing historicals, do I strive for verisimilitude? Or do I import modern sensibilities and understandings, so that the books are more appealing to modern readers? Personally, I tend towards modernism. I try to write heroines who have more modern sensibilities. They’re sex-positive along with love-positive. They think about egos, even if they use the words “conceit” and pride” instead. I know that this is anachronistic, but it doesn’t bother me one bit. After all, I like writing the Regency period because it comes at the beginning of some immense cultural changes. Why not have my heroines be harbingers of that change?

So what about you? Do you find it jarring if heroines have more “modern” sensibilities? Do you care? Or do you prefer having modern heroines in historical settings?