Tag Archives: fixes

Mechanics, Technique

Fix-It Friday: watch those prepositional phrases

Prepositional phrases can be tricky. I’ve found a few ways they can really trip up writers and change the meaning of otherwise fine sentences. One of those ways: the simple order of prepositional phrases. When they become misplaced modifiers, prepositional phrases throw a money wrench in your sentence’s meaning. fif

What’s wrong with these sentences?

Why would she share the secret he’d confided in her in the hall with her parents?

He remembered the dog he’d found as he was walking in the apartment across the street.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

A man was bitten by a bat walking down the street on his thumb.

She couldn’t believe he was standing there after their conversation yesterday on the sidewalk.

Notice that often the problem is using multiple modifiers or more than one prepositional phrase. As we stack the phrases, we have to be sure the meaning doesn’t get lost, or we’ll leave our readers like these characters from Clue:

So how would you fix them? Next week!

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Mechanics, Technique

Fix-It Friday: Fixing overstuffed sentences

Two weeks ago, we looked at a couple overstuffed sentences—sentences where I was putting too much information in, and tripping up my readers. fifI learned my lesson about overstuffed sentences from editor & RITA-award winning author Alicia Rasley, when she line edited four sentences for me (emphasis added):

Don’t make your reader work so hard to figure out what you’re getting at. Try writing it plainly first, to make sure you’re getting it across, then embellish. But really, I think you’re trying to do too much for one paragraph. This might not have bothered me in two paragraphs or three, if you took your time and really explored what was happening . . . . If that’s too attenuated, see what’s important to keep and make sure everything is clear.

As I’ve said before, sentences should work hard for us as writers and serve several purposes. But there’s a limit to how much you can pack into a sentence or paragraph and still be intelligible to readers.

Another really important point here is that dense (= packed) writing isn’t always better. Sometimes it makes the reader feel dense (= stupid). If something is really important to the story action or the character, often that weight should be matched by the amount of real estate that event gets.

Or as Alicia put it,

If it’s worth stating, . . . it’s worth developing or exemplifying or showing. . . .

I know I’m always saying, “Take it slow.” But don’t try to compress too much.

So, how should we fix our examples from last week?

#1: blow up the emotion

How must the buildings that were so familiar she hardly noticed them look to Father O’Leary? Three years ago, she compared the Gothic chapel, its stone façade flanked by blazing maples in a carpet of lawn, to her parents’ church in city center. At the time, St. Adelaide seemed a suburban oasis; three weeks ago she was disabused of that notion.

“I’m sure it’ll get to feelin’ like home soon enough,” she murmured.

Along with other excellent feedback from editors Alicia & Theresa and other commentators, the passage in question eventually grew—the first paragraph (three sentences) expanded into three paragraphs (eight sentences):

He scanned the whole scene, as if surveying the squat brick school, the rectory, the Gothic chapel’s stone façade flanked by blazing maples in a carpet of lawn. The dismay in his expression dissolved with his satisfied nod. St. Adelaide must seem like a suburban oasis to him.

Three weeks ago, Molly had been disabused of that notion. Now the idyllic scene carried a sinister undertone so strong she couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. She hadn’t even noticed when the maples turned red.

Father O’Leary sighed and looked to her. How could she tell him the truth and shatter his illusion? “It’ll get to feelin’ like home soon enough,” she murmured.

I agreed that this event was important enough to give it more real estate in the book—but it’s not like I devoted an entire chapter to this. Just a few more sentences here made the passage clearer and gave it greater emotional impact.

Note that I decided the reference to the past (three years ago) was not actually worth including, since it distracted from the present—it wasn’t important enough to explore, and thus it probably wasn’t important enough to include.

But you don’t always have to blow it up quite that much. Sometimes, breaking up the action and simply fixing the sequencing is enough.

#2: sequencing and clarity

This is an actual sentence from the first draft of my WIP:

I slip onto the back porch, but the door latch I’m expecting to hear behind me doesn’t come by the time I reach the stairs.

My problems with this:

  • Awkward wording, especially “the door latch I’m expecting to hear behind me doesn’t come”
  • Is the door latch an object? “I’m expecting to” doesn’t tell us right away
  • Most of all, the sequencing is all over the place. She leaves, we don’t see her shutting the door, there’s a sound (or object?), she’s expecting the sound—oh, wait, there’s no sound, stairs?
  • Seriously, where did these stairs come from?

Here’s how I actually fixed it:

I slip onto the back porch, letting the door swing shut behind me. But by the time I reach the stairs down to the yard, the door still hasn’t latched.

The ideas are all still there, but now I’m explaining what happens in order, without skipping steps. She goes onto the porch and shuts the door. She reaches the stairs (which go somewhere that makes sense now) and realizes the door hasn’t latched. Voilà.

And the word count difference? Five words.

Neither of these are going to win a Pulitzer 😉 but perhaps the serviceable lines should be even more smooth to keep your reader moving on to the big stuff, right?

Onward!

#3: breathing room

Those fears and feelings, raw and vulnerable, echoing through me, must be why I finally have to pull back to wipe away my tears.

Also a line from my WIP, this is just a few paragraphs after the above. Kind of a lot to digest all at once, isn’t it?

Again, the change is really simple here, and right to the point: that’s just too much for one little sentence to handle, so we make it two. My fix:

Those fears and feelings, raw and vulnerable, echo through me. Finally I have to pull back to wipe away my tears.

Is it less powerful as two sentences? I don’t think so. In fact, there are some things I like about it better. Instead of stuffing everything into one thought (for what reason?), we give the two important thoughts there a little more room to breathe. It gives each of them a little more time to make an impact.

Oh, and the word difference? -3.

What do you think? Have you found any overstuffed sentences in your writing? How do you fix them? Come share!

Photo credits: tools—HomeSpot HQ; overstuffed beef ravioli—George Hatcher

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Mechanics, Technique

Fix-it Friday: Overstuffed sentences

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Line-editing is now part of editing my book Fix-It Fridays!

fifWay back in our Secret Sauce Series, we talked about overstuffed sentences—sentences where we’re trying too hard to appear writerly, putting too much information, being entirely too clever, and just generally confounding our readers.

Once upon a time, I must have held a subconscious belief that a “real” writer made their sentences work two and three times as hard. That’s probably true in a way—each action of a story, each scene and maybe each sentence can accomplish more than one thing.

But instead, I took that to mean that the more complex a sentence, the better. But that’s simply not the case. Yes, sentences should work hard for us as writers and serve several purposes. But there’s a limit to how much you can pack into a sentence or paragraph and still be intelligible to readers.

Here are a couple such overweighted sentences from my own works:

#1 (the passage that taught me this lesson!)

How must the buildings that were so familiar she hardly noticed them look to Father O’Leary? Three years ago, she compared the Gothic chapel, its stone façade flanked by blazing maples in a carpet of lawn, to her parents’ church in city center. At the time, St. Adelaide seemed a suburban oasis; three weeks ago she was disabused of that notion.

“I’m sure it’ll get to feelin’ like home soon enough,” she murmured.

And #2

I slip onto the back porch, but the door latch I’m expecting to hear behind me doesn’t come by the time I reach the stairs.

And #3

Those fears and feelings, raw and vulnerable, echoing through me, must be why I finally have to pull back to wipe away my tears.

Next time (Sept 13 27!), I’ll share how I fixed them—but first, what would you do? Come share!

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Technique

Fix-It Friday: Fixing Info Dumpy Dialogue

Have you signed up for the I Spy a Secret blogfest yet? One more week!

fifSooo it’s kind of been two months since I posted the first part of this. Whoops!

So back in May, we looked at a couple of ways to identify your info dumping dialogue. Some of the guidelines:

  • If one character is sharing something with another character who should already know this—that might be an info dump
  • If you’re really trying to talk to the reader with the dialogue—that might be an info dump
  • If it’s more than a sentence or two of backstory—that might be an info dump
  • If it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in the present scene—that’s an info dump.

Fixing that Info Dumpy Dialogue

Not all exposition, even in dialogue, is bad. We always need to maintain the tension level while conveying necessary information, and there are a number of ways to do that, including inner tension, bypass dialogue, borrowed conflict and other techniques. Frankly, all of these examples could use some of that!

So let’s look at how those principles apply to our examples from last time.

“As you know, my darling, we’ve been married for seven years, and our two children, Tina and Tommy, are almost perfect angels.”

“Yes, my love, and we’ve lived in this same house for three years, but we’re thinking about moving.”

So obviously we have a married couple here. There is no reason they’d ever say something like this to one another. So how can we convey this information?

  • First, check which information is vital. This will depend on the story, of course. Do we need to know they’ve been married for exactly seven years? They’ve lived here for three years? Toss the info that has no bearing on the story.
  • Next, decide whether dialogue is the best “mode” to convey this information. If the only available person to talk to already knows it, the answer is a flat-out NO. If you can find someone who needs to be informed of the facts—the cop who’s looking for her missing husband, maybe?—they can really come in handy here.
  • Find a source of tension or conflict. Maybe Tina isn’t his child, and the years of lying are finally wearing down on the mother.
  • Finally, slip in shards of backstory at a time, usually in context of something else. The cop looking for her husband, perhaps. The wall color she’s always hated in this living room, etc.

“That’s the reactor or coil. It’s a a passive two-terminal electrical component which resists changes in electric current passing through it. It consists of a conductor such as a wire, usually wound into a coil. When a current flows through it, energy is stored in a magnetic field in the coil. When the current flowing through an inductor changes, the time-varying magnetic field induces a voltage in the conductor, according to Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, which by Lenz’s law opposes the change in current that created it.”

This long speech is an info dump in dialogue or in narration. Let’s assume the character is talking to someone who doesn’t know anything about the topic.

Seriously, is this much information necessary to the story? Unless every bit of technical information here actually impacts the plot or the characters, or if we would be totally unable to understand the action of the story without it, we don’t need this. (I don’t understand it, and apparently I wrote it, so . . . awesome.) Face it: this is showing off your research. And your research involves reading Wikipedia.

If you want your character to look knowledgeable, focus on the reaction to his information, and summarize what he says. For example, “Dr. Liffenblatz explained the reactor, but his string of technical jargon only left me even more confused.”

“Do you remember Jimmy? The guy from high school who was virtually president of the A/V club, but then went on to make it big in the dot-com boom? He managed to get out before the bubble burst, and he’s still living large in Silicon Valley. I heard he actually sold Page & Brin the name for Google. It was originally called Backrub, of course.”

Good old Jimmy. Let’s say Jimmy will be an important figure in this story (because if he won’t, you’re losing your reader RIGHT HERE).

First of all, there’s just flat out too much information in this passage. The last sentence is totally unnecessary here, and most likely unnecessary altogether.

Now, the rest of the passage is still a bit too long of a speech for one person to deliver. One idea: break this up among multiple speakers. Make it a conversation instead of a monologue. If you’ve got two or three people reminiscing about high school together, it’s much more natural to exchange information—but again, only if we’re actually informing (or trying to inform) the other speaker of something s/he doesn’t already know.

“Look, I know you’re going through a hard time with your breakup, but I just need to tell you this right this minute: when I was seven, I had this puppy, and he got lost and we looked everywhere for him . . . [ten pages later] . . . and that’s why I don’t like cheese.”

Um, wow. Most likely, there’s one excellent way to fix this: the delete key.

What do you think? How would you fix this dumpy dialogue?

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Technique

Fix-It Friday: Info Dump Dialogue Makeovers

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fifInfo dumps, or long, unnatural passages of exposition, are a good way to bore and lose your reader. Sometimes we try to sneak in that backstory through dialogue, but it isn’t always better to have a character say the info dump than to think it!

Find your dialogue info dumps

How can you tell if you’re dumping in dialogue? Here are a couple tips:

  • If one character is sharing something with another character who should already know this—that might be an info dump
  • If you’re really trying to talk to the reader with the dialogue—that might be an info dump
  • If it’s more than a sentence or two of backstory—that might be an info dump
  • If it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in the present scene—that’s an info dump.

Fix those info dumps!

Here are a couple made-up instances of “info dumpy” dialogue. How would you fix them?

“As you know, my darling, we’ve been married for seven years, and our two children, Tina and Tommy, are almost perfect angels.”

“Yes, my love, and we’ve lived in this same house for three years, but we’re thinking about moving.”

“That’s the reactor or coil. It’s a a passive two-terminal electrical component which resists changes in electric current passing through it. It consists of a conductor such as a wire, usually wound into a coil. When a current flows through it, energy is stored in a magnetic field in the coil. When the current flowing through an inductor changes, the time-varying magnetic field induces a voltage in the conductor, according to Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, which by Lenz’s law opposes the change in current that created it.”

“Do you remember Jimmy? The guy from high school who was virtually president of the A/V club, but then went on to make it big in the dot-com boom? He managed to get out before the bubble burst, and he’s still living large in Silicon Valley. I heard he actually sold Page & Brin the name for Google. It was originally called Backrub, of course.”

“Look, I know you’re going through a hard time with your breakup, but I just need to tell you this right this minute: when I was seven, I had this puppy, and he got lost and we looked everywhere for him . . . [ten pages later] . . . and that’s why I don’t like cheese.”

Share your solutions in the comments and we’ll take a look at some fixes next week!

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Mechanics

Fix-It Friday! Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers

Inspired by a discussion on one of my writing mailing lists, I’ve been thinking about misplaced modifiers. One of my favorite examples allegedly comes from a medical transcription (but I’ve also seen it credited to a police blotter):

A man was bitten by a bat walking down the street on his thumb.

If you don’t get the joke, it’s about to become a lot less funny. Modifiers—adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, even participial phrases—should usually come as close to the word they’re modifying as they can. While we can (eventually) figure out the man was bitten on his thumb, that sentence says he was “walking down the street on his thumb.” (In fact, it says the bat was walking down the street on his thumb. The bat’s? The man’s? The world may never know!)

Gonna fix it?A friend mentioned that in school, he had to do an entire worksheet of fixing these sentences, and ever since then, he’s been very sensitive to them. Dude, I thought, is that all it takes? That might be pretty useful!

For each of the following, look at the “modifying” elements to figure out why they are WRONG. Feel free to share your fixes or your favorite dangling modifier examples in the comments! (And feel free to laugh, too—they’re supposed to be comical. Sometimes.)

1. Sensing her brother was about to pounce, he bent his knees, ready to jump at her.

2. He couldn’t believe she was standing there after their conversation yesterday doing the dishes on the sidewalk.

3. At the age of seven, his father told him the truth.

4. Running from the scene, the horror clung to his mind.

5. “As mayor of Park City, people often ask me, ‘[I forget the rest of the sentence, but that was an actual commercial. Agh!]'”

6. “At 26 ounces, you’ll find yourself drinking more.” (Another actual commercial)

7. “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. (How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.)”

8. We tiptoed over the ice in our heavy boots, which had begun to crack.

9. “McCance was found shot to death by her family Monday afternoon at her southern Wake County home.” (Actual news article.)

10. “Nearly six months after taking office, Gov. Beverly Perdue’s political honeymoon is over.” (Actual news article.)

11. “As a parent, the so-called “Halo killer” may have you nervously watching your kids as they jab at their joysticks.” (Actual news article.)

12. “After grounding her grandson, Allen Gann, from playing games the night before for not doing his chores, he sat down and played a full day’s worth, including Resident Evil, Smackdown vs. Raw and Midnight Club 2.” (Same article as the previous.)

Work better on paper? Download the worksheet as a PDF and print! Can’t get enough? Lots more examples to play with!

Photo by Ricky Bragante

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Works

Story department!

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A while ago, I posted about a story department for writers, like that of a Hollywood movie studio. Basically, it’s a place where we can find help identifying weaknesses, brainstorming new ideas, making the jokes better, getting the story structure right and more.

How this works:

The lucky volunteer submits whatever s/he wants help with: this could be the seed of an idea if you’re in the brainstorming phase, a query-length blurb if you’re looking for more specific brainstorming help or stuck in between plot points, a synopsis if you want structural advice, or even a scene or passage if you can’t quite put your finger on what’s not working. For maximum effectiveness, a short list of what you’re looking for is helpful.

I post the material on the appointed day. Then we, the kind, thoughtful and helpful readers and writers around here, put our minds to work. Think about it all day and come back with an insightful idea, or post the first thing that pops into your head.

Of course, the volunteer author doesn’t have to use anything we toss out—but now s/he isn’t the only one having to think of ideas. And even if we don’t come up with something specific to help the volunteer, maybe something one of us says will spark another idea and the story will take off again, magically healed 😉 . (The volunteer is more than welcome to engage in a discussion, of course, but we probably don’t need a full explanation of just why our ideas won’t work.)

The story

Today, I’m the volunteer again. I’m looking for help with one of those “little ideas,” a scene-level fix.

The setup:

Our bad guy (whom we may call . . . “Tom”) is trying to induce our heroine (“Nina”) to come somewhere with him to save our hero (“Johnny,” Nina’s fiancé). Nina has known Tom for years—and knows him well enough not to trust him. But when Tom shows Nina Johnny’s prized watch (or something else) that he never parts with, she knows something is wrong. Nina allows Tom to drive her car, and they’re leaving the garage at her building when one of her neighbors gets suspicious. When the neighbor starts to call the police, Tom shoots and kills him.

What I’m looking for:

  • A way to keep Nina in the car after the gun goes off. Nina knows better than to go driving off with an armed murderer. I think Tom needs to physically restrain her in the car somehow.
  • I’m also open to suggestions on Johnny’s prized, personally identifiable possession (something he’d be able to function without).
  • If it helps, I think it’s not crucial that they use Nina’s car. (However, the neighbor is more likely to think something weird is going on if Tom’s driving Nina’s car. On the other hand, if you can give a reason for the neighbor to attract Tom’s attention and ire from Tom’s car, I’m open to that)

Want to participate? Jump in the comments! Want to volunteer? Send your material—including what you’re looking for—to storydept at JordanMcCollum.com. I’ll contact you to work out a date.

Original photo by Tom Magliery

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