Words that have been used to death

The consistently useful WordWise blog has a list of words that have been overused by marketers and other writers to the point where they have lost all their original power.

As blog posts go, it’s a seamlessly integrated synergistic paradigm-shifting solution, leveraging a win-win proactive strategy for facilitating robust communications. Or rather, it’ll help you not sound like a hackneyed personal development coach every time you sit down at the keyboard.

Words that get interchanged incorrectly

Word Wise also has another post that lists words frequently yet improperly used in place of one another; ‘reluctant’ and ‘reticent’, for example.

I’m always secretly rather pleased that I usually know the right use for each word when I read a post like this, but every now and again I’ll discover an error I’ve been making for years. Which is one of the reasons I’m so fond of the online Chambers Dictionary reference page, which I can search from the Firefox search box … it’s saved me from more than one potentially embarrassing mistake in the past.

Writing characters of colour without being racist

While aimed at the fanfic community, this post offers great advice for anyone who wants to write about characters of a different ethnicity to their own, without falling into the trap of crass stereotyping. It’s also delivered with just the right mix of seriousness and humour:

You are probably wondering, “Good grief, this is a lot of work, and if I screw up, all I can do is lie down and get kicked in the head. Why on Earth should I write CoCs? I can just avoid the mess by only writing about white people!”

That thing where you are considering only writing about people of the same race as you is an exercise of white privilege. It is something that you are able to do because you are white.

I’ve not written enough fiction to have fallen into the trap of stereotyping coloured characters, or the even more insidious trap of never writing them at all for exactly that reason – all my characters so far have been equally cardboard, whatever their ethnicity. But having read the above post, I’m a little more confident about making the effort in future.

I’ve been a bit lax on posting up useful bits of fiction writing advice – largely due to being busy as all hell trying to scrape up some paid work writing non-fiction, as it happens – but a couple of doozies were sat in the feed reader that I thought were worth sharing.

First off, Luc Reid (who certainly seems to know his writerly onions) has a post on writing believeable fiction:

“Of course, if the reader just wants a good story and isn’t in a critical mood, you can get a lot more by that reader with less work. Unfortunately, this is in the individual reader’s hands rather than the writer’s, so it’s best to write for the skeptical and unwilling reader, since the willing reader won’t be overly bothered by the detail.

However, there is one element of willingness over which you have control, which is how compelling your story is. If you introduce your pond scum creature in the midst of a tense scene in which it immediately becomes clear that the pond scum creature may be able to give your main character the name of his birth mother, the reader may care so much about the story that they will accept whatever they need to in order to continue seeing it unfold.”

That advice has to be useful to anyone writing any sort of genre fiction.

Elsewhere, the Slushmaster approaches a thorny issue in a humourous way, by making a metaphor between the writing life and Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest*’:

“Let’s use cavemen to illustrate some points, because cavemen are funny.  “Man next door has fire.  Me no need fire.  Me know what me doing.”  Translation: “I don’t need to read the submission guidelines.  I know what I’m doing.”  These are the writers who fail to put their stories in the proper fonts, fail to enclose their SAE, or stamps, or IRCs, send fantasy stories to science fiction markets, send poetry to markets that publish strictly fiction, etc.  If there are better methods of hunting/gathering you can easily learn, use them.”

Zing!

[* Yeah, I know, 'Darwinism' and 'survival of the fittest' aren't really the same thing ... but we both got the point he was making, right?]

The one golden rule of writing that brooks no breach is, of course, that a writer must write. Every day, without fail.

If you fall down at this first fundamental hurdle (and I do, all the time), knowing the layout of the obstacles beyond is worthless. Personally, I’m hugely intimidated by the blank page. Not so much with non-fiction, I might add, but that merely underlines the overall point - I write non-fiction every day, and it really makes a difference to your abilities after a little while.

Jim van Pelt reiterates this crucial truism:

“For most of the writers I hang around with, this isn’t a problem.  They are so attuned to their own story-making apparatus that they have more than a lifetime of ideas to write already.  But not everyone is that way.  For some they have to work at getting ideas, or they have to have some way to prime the writing pump to get words flowing.  For them, writing exercises are a godsend.”

Indeed they are – and that’s the main reason I miss going to the poetry workshop I used to attend, because the regular exercises used to get my brain (and pen) on the move. Van Pelt also links to this online random writing prompt generator, which looks like it could be a very useful tool for me.

***

Another oft-quoted writing rule is show, don’t tell – and that’s an important one, too, especially in poetry.

However, there are times when the reverse is true. It’s vital to keep your story lean and cruft-free, and E. E. Knight has some suggestions on how telling rather than showing can be the course of greater wisdom in certain situations:

“Most of your telling-not-showing is going to happen at the beginning or end of chapters or scenes. It’s routine business keeping, letting the reader know that time has passed and location has shifted (if it has).”

As usual, he’s included examples and quotations – which are invaluable, as it helps to see the effect of a technique rather than simply being advised to use it.

***

The common ground of those two posts is the fact that one only ever learns something by doing it, not just knowing it. John O’Neil, editor of Black Gate magazine, shares a list of points he has written out for himself, to remind him to put knowledge into practice. The last entry sums up the whole thing:

“10. You tend to think that once you understand something that you’ve learned it. By this time you should know better. Continue to refer to this list, because if you’d really learned all this stuff you wouldn’t have had to write this list in the first place.”

Zing!

So, lots more sound advice for fictioneers. Though I will, of course, have to put more effort into crossing that first hurdle before the later ones will become of any real use to me!

Despite the name, science fiction isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) all about science and technology.

Sure, you need some of that stuff in there – in varying degrees, from each writer according to his or her individual preference. But first and foremost, the second part of the name is the important bit: science fiction. It’s just stories, first and foremost. And because of the way human psychology works, good stories – the ones that engage the most readers the most effectively – are about people.

Well, maybe it’s better to say characters, because in science fiction some of the ‘people’ aren’t necessarily human people, but the point still stands – and it is made successfully by Ian Hocking’s essay for Concatenation’s twentieth anniversary issue:

“When the story is put on hold for attention-stretching paragraphs, even pages, you place your fiction into the category that justifies the response of those who hate science fiction: ‘I’m not interested in all that space stuff’. You shouldn’t have to be interested in the space stuff to an enjoy an SF story any more than you need to have an intrinsic interest in African territorial jurisdiction to enjoy Casablanca, Russian history to enjoy Dr Zhivago, or time paradoxes to enjoy The Terminator…”

Reading that reminded me of one of Jeremiah Tolbert’s recent posts (that I was sure I had linked before, but can’t seem to find in the archives). He’s talking about reaching the same character-over-gimmicks realisation Hocking discusses above, and mentions that Ted Chiang’s anthology of short fiction was the catalyst for this epiphany:

“What I thought I had realized was a pattern in his collection. Each story seemed to be an idea story, only he had two ideas that he had connected at an interesting intersection. But what he was doing that I had not yet learned how to do was taking a character’s life and figuring out where that idea intersection impacted them most.”

Wise words, I think. As Tolbert’s parting shot mentions, this probably isn’t news to many readers here at VCTB. But to someone struggling to learn the basics of the craft, it’s a crucial revelation, and it’s certainly changed the way I think about writing fiction.

Personally, I have no problems with being objective about the quality of my fiction writing – it’s plain to see, even to its creator, that it’s bloody dreadful.

However, it’s a little more difficult for people further down the path of storywriting craftspersonship to assess their own work. A. R. Yngve suggests that you:

“1. Open one of your unpublished manuscripts on your computer.

2. Using the Search function, search and count the number of times the following phrases and words appear in your writing prose:

- “that will/would change your/his/her/their life/lives forever”
- “He/She loves me. He/She really loves me.”
- “heart will never heal”
- “as you know” (followed by exposition)
- “was all he/she had to live for”
- “love him/her forever”

If ANY of the above clichés appear in your prose, it ain’t good enough to be published.”

Brutal, but pretty fair.

Meanwhile, Jim van Pelt is working toward a more positive assessment method:

“My thoughts on this aren’t fully formulated, but I think there must be something right going on in a story that establishes a context for a line that would make no sense in any other context. What I mean is that a fully functioning story creates an environment for sentences that could only make sense within that story.”

He uses examples from movies, but that strikes me as a great way of drawing a line between works of science fiction that have truly absorbed the novums into the narrative and those that have merely used them as window-dressing.

… from Jonathan Strahan, who I hope won’t object to me reproducing almost the entire post here:

“… all reviewers of science fiction should be banned from using the phrase ‘what it means to be human’. If they were, then they might explain what it is they think they see in an SF novel without dropping into safe cliche.  I’ll never forget when I was maybe fifteen years old, an English teacher of mine said it wasn’t enough to say that something in a book was evocative, you had to say what it evoked and what that meant. This phrase, which I’ve used often myself, is SF’s equivalent of ‘the imagery is evocative’.  Surely we can be smarter than that?”

Surely we can – though I still find that it’s only at the rewriting stage that I catch myself making mistakes of just that very type, and even then only recently. Life’s a learning curve, after all.

On the subject of reviews, here are some goodies:

• David Soyka compares the two new anthologies from Pyr and Solaris at Strange Horizons, and
• Graham Sleight keeps it old-school with his Locus column on the classics of sf, this time looking at Pohl and Kornbluth.

Okay, genre people; I have a mystery to solve, and I need your help with it. Continue reading “Mystery SF/F blogger”