Click for free blog updates via RSSCome play!
Getting the most out of writers conferences
I’m at a writers conference today, so I’ve pulled out a great guest post from the archives, which originally appeared as part of the writing resources series.
I love going to writing conferences. There’s something so inspiring about sitting in a large of group of people who all share your same passion. No matter whether it’s a big conference or small, both have their advantages.
My first writing conference was a biggie. Back in 2007, I was living in Los Angeles and attended the big summer conference for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators there. Three days of information, inspiration, fun, jokes, motivation and creativity. I sat in the big and small gatherings and soaked up everything I could, every word from the speakers as well as the every ounce of excitement in the air. By the end of the conference, I was hooked. It was like drinking a giant Slurpee cup of creativity, and I wanted more.
Since then, I’ve moved away from Los Angeles, but my love of conferences has continued. In my current home near Houston, I’ve found wonderful single-day conferences that give me just as much as that big summer conference, with the added benefit of a more intimate setting. At these smaller conferences, there’s much easier access to the speakers. Generally, at the summer conference, the attendance is so huge, the speakers are swarmed after every appearance. But smaller events are much more relaxed. Our annual Houston SCBWI conference holds a dinner where attendees can chat with the invited speakers over fajitas. What better way is there to get to know someone?
From conferences, you obviously get access to the information the speakers provide, which could be anything from an editor telling you what they’re looking for to an agent giving query letter writing tips. But there are lots of other benefits:
- Friends. Writing is solitary, and conferences give us an opportunity to get together with other people like us.
- Writing help. As well as the writing tips speakers often give, conferences usually offer critiques with professionals, including agents, editors and published authors. These usually require additional payment, but they can be worth.
- Contacts. Conferences are a chance to meet agents and editors you might work with later. Writers have made connections with editors at conferences and later sold them a book or been asked to write on assignment.
- Inspiration. Every writer has bouts of doubt and times when our creativity pool dries up. Going to conferences is like getting a shot of inspiration in the arm. This is a business of passionate people, and that passion brims over to attendees at conferences. Without fail, even if I haven’t heard anything new at a conference (which is rare), I’ve always left feeling energized, and that was worth the price of entry.
How do you prepare for a conference?
- First, research the conferences in your area. The SCBWI website has a list of the group’s events, but you can find others with an Internet search. Research the speakers and make sure they’re people you’d like to hear. There’s no point going to a conference focusing only on picture books if you write novels.
- Once you know which conferences you want to attend – and can afford – register early. If you plan to get a critique, registering early means you’re more likely to get the person you want. Also, many smaller conferences sell out, so registering early secures your space.
- A few days before the conference, research the speakers again. The conference will have their basic bio, but look around on the Internet for interviews and read their blog, if they have one. Jot down some notes in the notebook you’re planning to take. This way, when you see them speak, you’ll have a better idea of who they are.
- If there are any speakers you would like to talk to, perhaps to ask a question or just compliment them on one of the books they’ve worked on that you’ve read, seek out this person in a nice, polite way (i.e. not in the bathroom, not while they’re eating unless you happen to be sitting at their table, and not interrupting their conversation). If they’re talking to another attendee, stand by and wait your turn. Once you have their attention, introduce yourself, tell them what you love about their work, ask them your question, then thank them and say goodbye. Keep it short, sweet and professional. In my experience, speakers are more than happy to talk to attendees as long as it’s on a professional level.
Going to conferences can be a very rewarding way to boost your writing life. Take advantage of the conferences offered in your area, and when you get home, your brain will be begging you to start writing.
About the author
Samantha Clark writes middle-grade fiction and blogs about writing, children’s books and writing conferences at DayByDayWriter.wordpress.com. You can subscribe to DayByDayWriter to read more.
Photo credits: SCBWI conference—Rita Crayon Huang; click—Jordan McCollum
Choosing the right POV character
Each book, each character and even each scene requires you to make choices about what POV to use. If you have more than one POV character in a scene—as you will in many of your most pivotal scenes—you have to decide which character should control the scene, or whose eyes your reader gets the scene through. The way you use the POV in a scene and in a whole book affects the way your characters and your story are perceived. It’s important to get it right!
Today we’ll look at one aspect of POV: choosing the right POV character.
Choosing POV Characters
Sometimes it’s very easy to pick who to use as the viewpoint character—they’re our only viewpoint character in the scene. But quite often, we’ll have more than one viewpoint character in a scene and we’ll have to choose between them. Whose scene is this?
(more…)
Posted in Technique
Tagged characters, emotional turning points, perspective, point of view, pov, turning points
1 Comment
New PDF: Character Arcs!
Yep, I have character arcs on the brain. It happens every time I finish a book and think about how I can better align the internal journey and external plot climaxes. (I think I have it for this last one. Still have to hammer out the details.)
Since we revisited character arcs last week, it seemed like the perfect time to compile the PDF of the series, including last week’s post. Even though I didn’t look back at the original series as I was writing the new post, I was surprised at how well the new material meshed, expanding on some topics I mention in passing.
So if you’re having trouble figuring out how to found, form or finish your character’s emotional journey, check out the PDF version of Character Arcs!
Photo by Riccardo Romano
Posted in News & Contests, Technique
Tagged character arc, character arcs, emotional arcs, free guide, free writing guide, guide, internal conflict, pdf, story architecture
2 Comments
Everything you ever wanted to know about character arcs
Part two . . . sort of
Character arcs are vital in most fiction. We read to connect with people emotionally as they grow and change on the journey. We’ve already covered character arcs in a series once, but I’ve been thinking about and working with and digging deeper with character arcs since then, so I collected all that (and others’ thoughts, too) to put 
them together.
This “omnibus edition” post covers some of the same topics as the series, but this is a new look at character arcs, digging deeper into some of the things we didn’t cover the first time around. Hooray!
Why characters should arc
In most fiction, character arcs are a vital element. A character who doesn’t arc (with specific exceptions) isn’t nearly as fulfilling to read about. In Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwritding You’ll Ever Need, Blake Snyder describes character arcs (italics in original, bold mine):
Arc is a term that means “the change that occurs to any character from the beginning, through the middle, and to the end of each character’s ‘journey.’” . . . But when it’s done well, when we can chart the growth and change each character undergoes in the course of a movie, it’s a poem. What you are saying in essence is: This story, this experience, is so important, so life-changing for all involved—even you, the audience—it affects every single person that is in its orbit. From time immemorial, all good stories show growth and track change in all its [sic] characters.
Why is this?
I think the reason that characters must change in the course of a movie [or book] is because if your story is worth telling, it must be vitally important to everyone involved. This is why set-ups and payoffs for each character have to be crafted carefully and tracked throughout. (135)
Character arcs aren’t just nice for readers—they show that the events of our story are worth reading about. The impact of the story is shown in the character arc, almost like a corollary to the “why does this story matter?” question that few people voice, but most people at least subconsciously wonder.
Answer that question, and your fiction doesn’t feel like a waste of time.
Finding your character arc
There are dozens or perhaps hundreds of character journeys for arcs. (Alicia Rasley lists a bunch with some tips on plotting out that journey.) Think about how your character grows and changes over the course of the story. It doesn’t have to be a drastic 180-degree U-turn all the time. For example:
Romance fiction, and most of its sub-genres, the hero is also the villain to the heroine. He’s a grump or a tyrant or a renegade. Maybe he’s the Rochester to your Jane Eyre, a married and bitter man to a sweet and innocent, though world-weary, ingenue. The point of the book is for him to “get” the heroine, which means the hero’s villainy must be “overcome.”
The hero has to change—not from actually evil to good, but from rude/inattentive/not interested/self-absorbed to its opposite.
But plotting this out from the beginning isn’t the only way to do this.
Developing the character arc
You can find your character’s arc at any point in the writing and editing process. When I first began writing, I didn’t give much thought to character arcs. If they got in there, it was either a coincidence or something I added in revisions.
After that, about the time I wrote the first series on this topic, I figured out the character arcs halfway through a first draft, and I often stopped to go back and adjust what I had.
Lately I’ve thought more and more about my character’s arcs before starting my story, and that helps me to the broad strokes in there. It does make a big difference in the quality of the first draft—my most recent book was <7 weeks from idea to finished novel, but it has those broad strokes. But, as always, there’s plenty of work left to be done in the next draft.
In a guest post on Writer Unboxed, A. Victoria Mixon talks about rethinking your character arcs and their motivation after the first draft, starting with the end of the book:
Now, what deep inside this protagonist is pitted against them in that Climax? Not external forces—internal. What do they love and believe that’s irreconcilable with their first need? What’s the equal-but-opposite fire in their belly in this Climactic scene that’s fighting back?
Remember to focus only upon the climax scene of the Climax. . . .
Now we’ll ask ourselves, “Exactly how could these two needs have gotten this protagonist into this dreadful calamity?”
Yep, it’s okay to find or or develop or change your character arc after you write the book. Sometimes it’s easiest that way: you see what your character learned and then go back to the beginning to make it match the conclusion better. (Victoria’s article talks about circling back through your character’s internal journey to the beginning of the book. Deep stuff!)
Testing out your character arc beginning
If you don’t plot out your character arcs in advance (or even if you do), the beginning of the character arc often needs the most work. We have to match and offset the ending and make the change as dramatic as possible. Or, turning to Save The Cat by Blake Snyder again, use the “Take a Step Back” principle (emphasis mine):
Take a Step Back applies to all your characters. In order to show how everyone grows and changes in the course of your story, you must take them all back to the starting point. Don’t get caught up in the end result and deny us the fun of how they get there. We want to see it happen. To everyone.
This is just one more example of how movies [and novels] must show the audience everything: all the change, all the growth, all the action of a hero’s journey. By taking it all back as far as possible, by drawing the bow back to its very quivering end point, the flight of the arrow is its strongest, longest and best. The Take a Step Back rule double-checks this.
If you feel like your story or any of its characters isn’t showing us the entire flight, the entire journey… Take a Step Back and show it all to us. We want to see it. (156)
Dig deeper in the beginning and show a big change! If your hero learns to show appreciation to his wife in the course of the story, don’t just have him be somewhat rude to her and pay more attention to the TV than her (not intended as a hint, Ryan). Have him be a total jerk.
Taking it a step back also makes the middle of the character journey more challenging for the writer—but if it’s handled well, it makes the whole journey more realistic for the reader.
The middle of the character arc
I think most writers have trouble with middles, and character arcs are no exception. The basic guideline here is to show the character making real choices between the beginning point and the ending point, and gradually moving toward the ending point—without making a full commitment to change yet
Or, as Alicia Rasley says in her article “Changes and Choices: External Action and Internal Reaction“:
If we keep presenting him with the choice to move closer or farther away from family [the character journey she's using as an example (definitely worth reading!)], and make each choice an authentic one, then his growth will come out of his own actions and decisions. It’s best to make every response somehow different, and then assemble them in the order of emotional risk (no big deal to build his own house instead of one with them… but very big emotional risk to decide he’s responsible for the kid’s welfare at the end). But they have to be real choices, and he has to make real decisions and take real action.
This gradual change shows the journey better than thinking or pontificating about it could. (Though those are both part of the process, usually.) It also is a great opportunity to show the characters’ resistance and reluctance, making the final choice even more satisfying (and HELLO, CONFLICT!).
Ending the character arc
For me, this is the trickiest part, and the source of the biggest challenges and revelations I’ve had in the last couple years. There are two aspects to the end of a character arc: the climax and the rest of the dénouement.
The climax
At the climax of the story, we have to do more than just defeat the external plot forces. We either have to show that the character has learned his/her lesson and can use it to defeat the bad guy, or force the character to make the BIG choice to change, to take a leap of faith into the U-turn, post-arc state.
And that really affects how your climax goes.
I’ll give you an example: in a MS I wrote last year, the heroine’s journey was one from disbelief to belief. The external plot had to do with bad guys chasing them and a physical confrontation with a psycho (obviously this is vague, but it’ll take too long to explain the rest, you know?).
In the first draft, the hero and heroine work together to defeat the psycho and the bad guys. And that was it.
I knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been. I needed the external and internal plots to hit their high points at the same time. That balance is HARD. After pondering and brainstorming, I finally found a way to bring those to stories to a head at the same time: I had the psycho challenge the heroine about what she believed, telling her she was foolish to believe in the hero (who is separated from her right then). But despite the imminent danger, she still chooses to believe and throws her lot in with him instead of compromising
The rest of the dénouement
After the climax, it’s still important to show the results of the characters’ final choice, to confirm that change is real and permanent, not just an act of momentary convenience to beat the bad guy at a critical moment.
I really like how Alicia Rasley talks about this, again from her article “Changes and Choices: External Action and Internal Reaction“:
One last tip– readers will believe in the internal change only if they see it manifested on the external level. So we need some last little event that affirms the choice he made to become part of this family [the specific journey in the example]. Maybe the last sight we have of him is surrounded by the kids as they work together move his hut across the stream into the family compound– and Julie helping to set the hut on a new foundation.
We have to show that the character has changed, even if it’s a one-line post script.
Character arcs are challenging, and sometimes we leave them to chance. But if we execute our character arcs well, they make our fiction fulfilling to our characters—and our readers.
What do you think? How do you write character arcs? What are your favorite character journeys to read?
Photo credits: character arc logo—Ruth and Dave; St. Louis Arch—Matt;
starting line—Jayne and D; finish line—Aaron
Using your web browser as a writing tool
It’s not just for research (and procrastinating) anymore!
Back in November, we ran a whole series on little ways to psych yourself up for your story. Since then, I’ve found another way I really like.
I recently switched my browser from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome. It’s a few months in and I’m still getting used to it, but there is at least one feature I really like: an add-on called Incredible StartPage. Whenever you open a new tab or empty web browser, it loads a set of links/information that you might need: your bookmarks, your Chrome apps, your recently closed tabs, a set of notepads, links to your email and calendar, and a picture.
You can use the default picture from Flickr, or you can set up a custom picture. I decided to set up my Incredible StartPage to help fire me up to write. Since I like making covers for my WIPs, I resized the cover for the book I was writing or revising at the time:
Notice the little note to self: Shouldn’t you be working? It shows up every time I open another tab for more research.
There are lots of other ways to use your browser to get you back to writing. When I was on Firefox, I used an extension called LeechBlock to limit the time I spent on time-sucking websites. I loved how flexible it was: you could allot yourself a certain number of minutes per hour to use your web-based email or social networking sites (you specify which sites to block!), pick the days of the week, select the time of day, or block certain sites altogether!
I haven’t tried any of the similar apps in Chrome, but StayFocusd comes highly recommended.
What little tricks do you use to get excited for your story every day?
PS: a special reveal today. This month as part of the Authors Incognito March-a-thon, I set a goal to write a new book. And of course, I made a cover. So here’s a tiny peek at the book I should be finishing tomorrow!
Posted in Publishing, Technique, Works
Tagged covers, encouragement, incredible start page, incredible startpage, inspiration, productivity, web browsers
2 Comments
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Surprise
A portion of this post was originally part of the Tension, Suspense and Surprise series.
In science, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states, basically, that if you know an object’s momentum, you cannot know its precise location at the exact same time. And to apply this principle in writing . . . okay, I’m pretty much just stealing the name because of the word “Uncertainty.”
Uncertainty doesn’t sound like something we want in our fiction, unless we’re going for experimental or highly literary works. But I think that uncertainty—and its cousin, surprise—are a vital part of a work in any genre.
Uncertainty is what keeps people reading. We have to know if the hero and heroine will get together, or if they’ll defeat the bad guys, etc. The principle actually comes straight from real life (and neuroscience):
Livia Blackburne posted a fascinating study on uncertainty in romance: when college-aged women were shown profiles of men who’d seen and rated the women’s profiles, the women were most attracted to the men when they were not told whether the men had rated them average or highly.
The uncertainty made all the difference—the women who were told the men (imaginary, by the way) rated them highly were interested, but not as much as the uncertain women. The uncertain women also reported thinking about the men more often.
For a writer, uncertainty is a powerful tool, and not just in romance. The uncertainty in any story question is a major factor in keeping people reading, and the question of a developing relationship is the biggest draw in a romance (which, it should be noted, is heavily read by women, of course).
I think part of the reason why that uncertainty is so appealing is that the outcome is something we might not expect. While it’s definitely possible to build the uncertainty around something we’re pretty sure will happen (romance and mysteries generally only have one option for a successful ending, and there’s uncertainty throughout), it’s important to remember that a jolt of something unpredictable is vital for a fresh read.
Or, as Arthur Plotnik says in Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style:
Scientists have identified a patch of the forebrain called the nucleus accumbens as a center of pleasure in humans. Imaging shows heightened activity in this area of the brain when people receive a reward—whether sugar treats, money, or drugs. . . .
Unpredictable stimuli excite the nucleus accumbens, while expected stimuli elicit no response. In the experiment that led to this conclusion, researchers Gregory Bruns (Emory University) and E. Read Montague (Baylor College of Medicine) administered squirts of Kool-Aid and plain water to human test subjects in either predictable (alternating) or random patterns. Pleasure-wise, random squirts won it all.
A fresh locution may not be quite the same as Kool-Aid, but writers can extrapolate from the experiment’s conclusion: Brains love that little squirt of surprise. (12)
Uncertainty, and the tension and suspense that come from it, and unexpectedness are both really important in a novel. When you’ve got a huge event coming in your novel you have two choices. You can lead up to it with a lot of anticipation, promises, foreshadowing and/or dramatic irony—building suspense, making it uncertain whether it will happen, generally getting readers anxious. Or you can throw your readers for a loop and just drop it on them (though at least a little foreshadowing is usually good here—hence the spectrum).
Alfred Hitchcock has famously explained the difference (emphasis added):
There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise’, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table, and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the décor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene.
The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb underneath you and it’s about to explode!’
In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.
—Hitchcock by François Truffaut, p 79-80, as quoted by senses of cinema
Not to disagree with my good friend Alfred, but both surprise and suspense are important. For major events and big promises, suspense is generally better. But for smaller events—especially things that don’t need the extra explaining and won’t live up to the level of suspense—surprise is a great thing.
If we lead up to all the events in a story, we run the risk of being too predictable. If we lead up to none of them, our readers are more likely to experience PTSD than suspense. One is probably better for your event and your story.
How do you determine whether your event should be a surprise or be used to create suspense? Hitchcock’s guideline is a starting place: if it’s a twist ending, surprise is pretty dang important. On the other hand, if that surprise would heighten the suspense throughout the book (without dragging it out too much) and if you can set it up for the audience to know without informing the characters, you could think about whether you could use the extra layer of suspense.
Conversely, consider whether you spend too long building up to minor events—what if you cut all the foreshadowing? Would the reader be slighted or delighted when the surprise is sprung?
What do you think? How do you decide whether an event will be used for suspense or surprise?
Photo by Invizible Man
Reading your work aloud
Should you really?
“Read your work aloud” is pretty standard critique advice. I do it—I really do—and yet I’ve had critique partners read the same chapters and basically tell me there was no way I could have read it aloud.
The thing is, when I read something I’ve written aloud, I know how to read it. I know how to turn the phrases and the intonations and set aside the asides and make a very long sentence flow smoothly. Honestly, when I read my own work, it’s almost cheating.
It is important to read your work aloud—but it can’t be the only way we determine whether 
something is good writing or not. There are so many things that people say that you’d hardly bat an eye at in conversation, but written down, you’d be left to puzzle over them.
I came across one great example in a chat I had with a friend a long time ago. Here’s what I typed:
I read once that in Sweden you get 3 years maternity leave.
The person that said that said that returning to work was mandatory afterwards, though.
You catch that? In speech, you could easily said “the person that said that said that.” Try it. (Here’s a hint: it means “the person who said the foregoing also said that . . .”) Grammatically speaking, you can’t even put a comma in there. (“The person, that said that, said that”? Restrictive clause, no commas. “The person that said that, said that”? Separating the subject [the person] from the verb [said].)
Not great writing. But I can totally work that circumlocution in speech. I mean, if I’d been talking, I wouldn’t have even noticed the oddity of “that said that said that.”
Speech and writing are two different arts. I loved how The New Yorker put it in an article about writing voice my dad stumbled across recently:
Writers often claim that they never write something that they would not say. It is hard to know how this could be literally true. Speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. And yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony.
Ouch. And yet somehow, writing seems more powerful than speaking, doesn’t it? Writing requires you to get across your meaning based only upon the words, and the words, then, must be even more powerful. It’s condensed and distilled and, most of all, it’s refined over and over again.
The author of the article gives a better metaphor for finding that voice:
A better basis than speaking for the metaphor of voice in writing is singing. You can’t tell if someone can sing or not from the way she talks, and although “natural phrasing” and “from the heart” are prized attributes of song, singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation, and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, by a neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselves into vessels of musical sound. . . .
What writers hear when they are trying to write is something more like singing than like speaking. Inside your head, you’re yakking away to yourself all the time. Getting that voice down on paper is a depressing experience. When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music. This writing voice is the voice that people are surprised not to encounter when they “meet the writer.” The writer is not so surprised. Writers labor constantly under the anxiety that this voice, though they have found it a hundred times before, has disappeared forever, and that they will never hear it again. Some writers, when they begin a new piece, spend hours rereading their old stuff, trying to remember how they did it, what it’s supposed to sound like. This rarely works; nothing works reliably. Sooner or later, usually later than everyone involved would have preferred, the voice shows up, . . . and walks onstage.
We’re getting a little far afield here, but I like the concept—and I like knowing that the anxiety over rediscovering one’s writing voice isn’t so unusual.
All that being said, there are valid reasons for reading your writing aloud. Here are just a few:
- Getting to know your character’s voice. My authorial voice doesn’t overlap with my characters’ voices 100%, for a number of reasons. My characters speak more plainly and don’t use thesauruses as often as I’m willing to
. My characters have different backgrounds and outlooks on life. My characters might even speak different languages or dialects than I do. I’ve found that many of these differences are easier to pick up on while reading aloud. I’ve gotten better at catching them while reading silently over time, but they can still slip through. And they usually only hit me when I’m reading to someone else. Sigh. - Grammar check. Sometimes we don’t recognize dangling modifiers or sentence fragments until we try to read them, and as we’re reading we get all bogged down.
- Flow and cadence check. Reading aloud can help us to identify the places where we trip up too easily, and there’s no better way to find the rhythm in our writing (or lack thereof).
Another awesome technique is to have someone else read your work aloud to you, especially a “cold read” (they haven’t read it ahead of time). This person has to interpret what they’re reading to get the inflections right. If they have to start the same sentence over again several times to get all the stresses and phrasing right, or if they just can’t get it at all, that’s a sentence you want to take a closer look at.
Because of the nature of speech, reading writing aloud cannot be your sole judgment over whether that writing is good. And because of the nature of writing, reading writing silently cannot be the sole judgment over whether it’s good, either.
What do you think? What are your good reasons to read aloud? Have you ever read something aloud and made it sound so much better than the writing really did?
Photo credits: dramatic reading: “Pip R. Lagenta“; young man reading: Judy Baxter
It was really, just so—should you cut them all out?
Late last year, I was doing a quick/final once-over of a manuscript. I decided to see how many times I used “just.” The answer was around 300, or about once per page. I went through most of the manuscript and cut out about 90 of them.
Proud of myself for making that effort, I tweeted about it (naturally). An author friend responded that she had cut 242 justs from her manuscript the week before. (Granted, she was editing one of her early manuscripts, so I have no idea how many she started with.)
I had a momentary panic. Yes, this manuscript had been accepted for publication already, but did I need to delete the rest of my justs?
And justs are just one of this variety of word that pretty much everyone uses—and overuses—because it’s so common in speech. But in most writing, these words are pretty empty, almost like throat clearing. (I’ve committed a few of these “sins” in here. Catch them?) A few favorites:
|
|
But if they’re so awfully awful, why don’t we just cut all of them all out? It would certainly be even easier that way (though there would be a number of really odd gaps leftover). Or, conversely, do we argue that we want our writing to reflect how people really speak?
I think the answer is somewhere in between. As Arthur Plotnik says in Spunk & Bite,
Just because intensifiers course through informal speech, must we also use them in journalism and literature? Not necessarily—but we certainly can use them in situations where they feel natural, or communicate a particular tone. At the very least, we should not hamstring our writing styles trying to replace each intensifier with a more powerful locution. (123)
What does that mean? Don’t solve underwriting by overwriting every use. Because how is that any better?
So what should we do? Honestly, I’m not going to say you have to eliminate 50% of all your intensifiers (or de-intensifiers as the case may be). I do think we should be aware of how often we use them—so pull out the Find function and get a count. (In Word 2007 and up, if you Highlight All or use the Reading Highlight function, it gives you a count. Select Whole Words Only, though! Just != justice, justified, etc. etc.)
If the count is fairly high—let’s say one use for every two pages (or more frequently)—start at the beginning and check out how you used it. Take the word out of the sentence. It will probably may lose a shade of meaning—but is that meaning really necessary? Does it actually change the sense of the sentence or even the voice in a bad way? If not, finally cut it.
Editor Alicia Rasley gives more guidelines in an edittorrent post that has stuck with me for almost 3 years:
Of course, sometimes it works to over-modify (especially for comic effect). But this is something to watch for. “An inch below the bottom of her skirt” is a good description. “A little bit more than an inch” makes me envision some nun with a ruler measuring the space. Precision is actually distracting sometimes.
And especially watch out for redundancy. Mountains are high, but some are higher than others, so maybe we will allow “high mountains” (I did grow up in a valley below some not very high mountains, I guess– 3000-4000 feet, so I’d allow “high mountains” if you’re talking about the Rockies, say). But “toweringly high?” Come on.
But if the specific meaning is necessary, if the sense of the sentence is damaged or if the voice breaks because you took the word out, leave it in. If the modifier you’re checking is vital to most of the occurrences you find, use your judgment about whether you need to check the rest. Yep, you can stop. You have my permission.
What do you think? When do you take out intensifiers—and when do you leave them in?
Picture credits: Edit Ruthlessly by Dan Patterson; ruthless editing by Joanna Penn
