writing

“Literally” Is The New “Figuratively”…And Other Word Anomalies

Aug 28, 2013 | Language, Writing

Language evolution is an understandable and even necessary thing – linguists agree that when a language stops evolving, it quickly becomes a dead language. But English is undergoing an interesting type of evolution: word definitions are changing and expanding to conform to formerly incorrect usages, even if that means that two definitions of the same word are actually opposites of each other.

Take the word “literally”, for example – the latest evolutionary victim. Countless articles have been written about the misuse of “literally”, advocating for its correct use and trying to get writers to stop saying things like “I literally fell off the face of the Earth for a while”. Thinking of “literally” in its literal sense (aka actual meaning), you’d picture someone actually falling off this planet, as if gravity suddenly decided to release that one person. And then that same person would be drawn back after “a while”, like some invisible magnet stretched out to reattach them to the surface. That’s the kind of imagery such a misuse could evoke in a reader’s mind, which can stop them from reading and draw their minds right out of the story.

But the English language, in its infinite evolutionary process, has decided that rather than making people use language correctly, definitions will be altered to conform to language misuses, even if it has to twist itself into an oxymoronical (say it enough times and it, too, may become correct) pretzel.

“Literally” now has these two opposing meanings according to Merriam Webster:

1. in a literal sense or manner: actually <took the remark literally> <was literally insane>

2. in effect : virtually <“will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice” — Norman Cousins>

So now, because of continuous misuse, a person can say that they “literally fell off the Earth” and still be correct in using it just for emphasis. This can become confusing in some cases, though – what if that story was a futuristic piece and the possibility of sudden disappearances of small areas of gravity were as possible as sink holes? A reader might interpret the writer’s figurative use of the word as a literal use instead, and he’d be confused when follow-up text proved his interpretation to the contrary. In that case, he’d probably have to go back and reread that phrase again, which is annoying to any reader.

So while the language is giving us permission to use words in opposite ways, it may still not be prudent for writers to walk away from smart writing in favor of acceptable writing. The problems that it can bring up might just make their novel literally fall off the face of the Earth. 😉

eBook Plague – Errors Aplenty

Aug 7, 2013 | Proofreading, Proofreading errors, Writing

“Annoying.” “Very irritating.” These are just a couple of the most common descriptives readers are using when talking about their frustrations with the numerous errors in e-books.

These readers are asking Amazon and other e-book distributors for refunds without finishing the books….and they’re getting them. This should be Chapter 1 in the “Don’t Let This Happen To You” handbook for indie writers.

It’s such a prevalent problem that there are entire forum threads in which readers are complaining about this problem. To give you some idea of their feelings, one of those readers said, “I really believe that writers need to make an effort and deliver a product worthy of what we are paying for it.”

Another contributor voiced a similar feeling, which sums up the sentiments of most, “When I pay for a book, I want it to be done correctly.”

Yet another reader had great advice for writers, “Stand out in the crowd – make that effort, and give readers the best experience possible. They’ll thank you with repeat business and recommendations.”

Information like this is extremely valuable to indie authors because it gives us important insights into what readers want, don’t want, and won’t tolerate. And let’s face it – once you turn a reader off with so many errors that they can’t read on, they’re not likely to give your upcoming books a chance.

So how can an author produce the cleanest copy and best possible experience for his/her readers? Some rely on proofreading software, but that doesn’t always do the trick. Here’s why:

1. Much like spell checking tools, many times it will allow incorrect words to remain unquestioned because they’re spelled correctly.

2. It won’t always pick up repetitions of words or phrases and so many other things that require a trained human proofreading eye.

3. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scans are notorious for misreading certain letter combinations, especially in certain fonts: “th” can be misread as “til”, “1” instead of “i” or “l”, and “rn” is misread as “m”.

Rampant misspellings, punctuation errors, characterization problems (among the top three complaints), and spacing issues should all be corrected before you publish your book, especially if you introduce it through a limited time free offer – lots of readers take advantage of those offers, and word will quickly spread if they are annoyed by errors. As the saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”.

Don’t take chances – nothing beats the accuracy of a sharp, trained, professional proofreader’s eye.

Hot Today, Cold Tamale…Another Menu Misspelling

Jul 26, 2013 | Proofreading errors

Restaurant menus are fertile grounds for misspellings that are either funny or create double entendres. This one actually gave its customers the wrong impression, as the entire dish was hot:

So this hot dish has a chilled sauce? Interesting…. 😉

The funny thing is that “chili” was used in almost every dish on the menu, and it was correctly spelled everywhere else! Sometimes I think restaurant owners do these things on purpose just to give us a chuckle. 🙂

Tuxedoed Writing

Jul 9, 2013 | Writing

Will Rogers, Jr. once advised a fellow actor, “Don’t ever take a dramatic lesson. They will try to put your voice in a dinner jacket, and people like their hominy and grits in everyday clothes.” The actor – Dale Robertson – followed Rogers’s advice and became a highly successful television star.

This golden advice is similar for writers: don’t let writing classes, editors, or well-meaning critique groups dress your writing up so much that it’s no longer yours. Separate good advice that will benefit your story from advice that would change your voice, tone, or direction.

Without a doubt, writing classes and seminars can be beneficial, as can the opinions of friends and fellow writers. But opinions are just that – opinions. They’re not black and white formulas for writing success, they’re someone else’s personal ideas and preferences, and those may not necessarily be right for the story you had in mind.

Sometimes we writers tend to forget that helpful, well-meaning suggestions aren’t solid answers for writing a best seller, and we take them as hard facts rather than suggestions. I have a friend who belongs to an informal writing group that critiques each other’s works. She finds going to the monthly meetings helpful in keeping her on track with her writing commitment, which is great. But because there are a couple of published authors in the group, she takes their critiques as etched-in-stone fixes for her work, which they’re not. In fact, even though some of their suggestions are excellent, others were derailing her plot and changing her main character so much that she didn’t even recognize him anymore. She kept hitting walls and found that she couldn’t write about this new “stranger” in her novel. Had she tried to force her story out, it would have suffered and lost its authenticity. All those well-meant critiques would have turned her novel into everyone else’s novel. She finally realized that she had to back away from certain suggestions in order to move the story forward and keep it hers.

So weigh those well-intended suggestions and critiques objectively and see if they actually improve your story or if they’re just putting a dinner jacket on your words. Readers want authenticity – they can see right through the fake bow tie and tux; what they want is your style of everyday clothes.

The Joys of Language Evolution

Jun 27, 2013 | Writing

No one likes change. Or so they say.

The English language is in a constant state of evolution. Some people think it’s a bad thing and mourn the idea of static language. I think it’s a good thing – even an exciting thing – especially for writers.

Why is this a good thing for writers? Because we’re continually being given new ways to express ourselves, ways that may define our characters and their actions with even more clarity while giving them a contemporary edge.

It’s true that some very good words and phrases are falling by the wayside, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used. It’s always better to get your point across clearly than to avoid using a term just because it’s less popular. And you may find a new word or phrase that works just as well or even better.

Contemporary terms are being influenced by many different things, from hip-hop to the tech world. Some nouns are doubling as verbs, portmanteaus (blended words) are multiplying at the speed of sound, and old words are taking on multiple new meanings. (Just check out the word “bodied” in the Urban Dictionary…)

People have always shuddered at the “corruption of English” when new blended words – or “frankenwords” – were created, but most of those words are regular parts of our language now, including “brunch”, “guesstimate”, and “smog”. Even “motel” is a portmanteau, combining “motor” and “hotel”.

We don’t raise an eyebrow at terms like those anymore. Yet the more recent explosion of word blends like “infotainment”, “bromance”, and “irregardless” still meet with resistance by some language purists. Give them another decade and no one will so much as wince at those words. After all, by that time, they’ll have a whole new crop of portmanteaus to set their teeth on edge.

If you look back through the centuries, you’ll see that language has never been static. It just seems to be evolving differently and (arguably) maybe a bit faster. Take a look through the Urban Dictionary – you may think you’re reading a different language.

There’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of language evolution and contemporary phrasing in your writing, as long as they express your ideas clearly and reflect your characters properly. Just don’t use so many so frequently that your readers have no idea what you’re talking about!

Sex Scenes in Young Adult Books?

Jun 20, 2013 | Genre Talk

Malorie Blackman and Melvin Burgess say teenagers should read books in high school which tackle realistic sexual relationships as well as realistic sex itself. Their argument is that teenagers are going to get their information on sex and what it’s like (or should be like) from somewhere, so the information might as well be provided “within a kind of safe setting”.

You can see the whole article here: http://bit.ly/12Xoyyp.

Do you agree that young adult fiction should have explicit sex scenes in order to teach teenagers what sex is really like? If so, do you think YA novels should then include a defined set of morals and ethics and/or healthy relationships as a sort of compromise? How far is too far, or do you think, as Burgess does, that there should be no limits?

What Makes Good YA (Young Adult) Fiction?

Jun 19, 2013 | Writing

Every genre has its own characteristics, and characters in novels each have their own personalities, accents, speech patterns, etc. It’s what distinguishes them from each other and makes each character unique, turning them into believable people.

YA writing goes a bit further. It’s not enough just to make your lead character – and other supporting characters – tweens or teens with particular accents and personalities; those characters need to sound, react, and think like tweens or teens. It’s all about believability.

Sometimes as adult writers, we tend to forget the painful and thrilling intricacies of youthful behavior. We need to get in touch with our younger selves and draw on all of the chaos we survived in our youth, then update it to contemporary norms.

Think back to those middle school and high school years, or think about your children’s experiences at that age. There’s drama, and lots of it. Major drama, minor drama, unnecessary drama, tearful drama, exciting drama, angry drama. Dating drama, crush drama, you-stole-my-best-friend drama. Secrets, gossip, broken hearts, lies and half-truths. Add to that all the modern drama created by social media, texting, sexting, and “unauthorized” online photos with scandalous implications, and you have a tween/teen life. Makes you wonder how anyone gets through it all!

But it does make fertile ground for novel writing. Because even though some of these same situations overlap in the adult world, reactions can be far more extreme in tweens and teens than in more logical-thinking adults. They cope and reason differently. And because they’re dealing with some of these situations for the first time, they lack the life experience that gives adults better coping and reasoning skills. They’re also working with immature thought processes, which tend to make a minor drama turn into something worthy of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara.

However, you may have to tone down the language a bit. We know that kids use plenty of foul language in their everyday speech, but it’s been shown that their parents aren’t fond of tweens reading books with heavy language. Too much of it or the use of certain words considered more offensive has been shown to cause a backlash from parents, and let’s face it, that’s where tween and teen buying power comes from. In fact, many librarians refuse to stock such books. So even though it’s realistic, it’s not always appreciated by the Those Who Hold The Purse Strings.

The best way to overcome challenges like offensive language and to get a feel for what the YA crowd is looking for is to read lots of different types of Young Adult fiction. From highly successful series to quietly successful indie books, you’ll see what’s hot and what’s not in the ever-changing world of youth.

Falling In Love Can Be Dangerous

Jun 13, 2013 | Writing

As writers, we love what we do. Let’s face it – if we weren’t passionate about it, would we pour our hearts and souls onto page after page, into book after book, not knowing if anyone else will share our passion? Of course not.

We also tend to fall in love with our prose. Our phrasing, word choice, settings, and characters mean something to us and can weave their way into our hearts. While that’s a good thing in one way (after all, if we don’t love our work, who will?), it can be a drawback if an agent or editor recommends necessary modifications that our hearts aren’t willing to make.

I witnessed this first-hand a couple of years ago.

A fellow writer friend submitted her manuscript to an editor who had good connections to some promising agents. This editor had her finger firmly on the pulse of the publishing industry, so her input was extremely valuable, especially to a previously unpublished author. Her expertise and ability to connect writers with agents were reflected in her rates – she didn’t come cheap.

This writer decided that if she seriously wanted to get published “the old fashioned way” instead of indie publishing, it would be worth the editor’s fee. She submitted her manuscript and waited anxiously for its return so she could make her revisions and get her work between a couple of hard covers.

When the manuscript came back, she found more corrections, modifications, and recommendations for changes than she expected. Way more. She flew into a rage as she read through her edited work, accusing the editor of being “too nitpicky” and of trying to change her voice.

It wasn’t true. The editor was just doing her job, and she was doing it well. Those changes, suggestions, and recommendations were critical to the improvement of her book, but the writer didn’t want to hear it. She had fallen in love with her words to the point where she just couldn’t break up with them – she kept reading passages aloud and arguing that they couldn’t be changed without destroying the tone of her story.

In the end, her book never got published. She submitted it over and over to various agents and then directly to publishing houses with no success. While most sent generic rejection letters, a few agents took the time to give her basic reasons why the book wasn’t salable, and all of those reasons coincided with the editor’s edits.

Sometimes we writers have to face the emotionally difficult task of doing some tough surgical edits to improve our manuscripts. That writer’s beloved novel now sits in a bottom drawer collecting dust, whereas if she’d accepted a little “tough love”, she could already have been a household name.

The Absence of Writing

Jun 6, 2013 | Writing

Dennis Quaid said, “Good film is the absence of acting.” What a great point. If you notice the acting, you’re removed from the depth of the film itself. Actors need to be natural and to fit their roles, not to deliver a series of choreographed lines and moves that distract you from the story.

That got me thinking that the same can be said for books: A good novel is the absence of writing. If the writing is so flowery, so filled with adjectives, or so contrived, it pulls the reader out of the story. Take this passage, for example:

Amy wandered aimlessly, her blue-black hair shining in the hot, bright sun. As her flowing red dress blew in the warm summer breeze, her freckled face reddened with the frightening realization that she may never find her beloved childhood friend in the thick, dense crowds of the noisy city.

Yikes.

I don’t know about you, but I got lost in all those descriptives. Because of that, there is no momentum leading to the nerve-wracking point of the paragraph – and by the time I got there, I didn’t care. The “writing” in this passage is glaring, the message is not. The writing overshadowed the message with all of its heavy adjectives; the passage is weighty with unnecessary verbiage.

I compare adjectives to accessories in a room: if you over-accessorize the room, you have nothing more than clutter, no matter how expensive those accessories might be. Their individual beauty is lost; only a general impression of messiness remains. When I edit manuscripts, I look for “over-accessorized” passages and suggest cleaner, more succinct ways of getting the author’s thoughts across.

Don’t let readers walk away with an impression of messy, cluttered pages. Make every sentence count, and keep those sentences lean and mean. Your story will shine.

Ironic Forbes Error

Jun 4, 2013 | Proofreading errors

This misspelling – and obvious proofreading oversight – was in a June 2, 2013 Forbes article titled, “Book Publishing May Actually Save Itself”. What’s ironic is that the error appeared in an article about publishing! And the misspelled word, which should have been spelled “Hackathon”, was the subject of most of the article.

Forbes’ sales probably won’t decline due to mistakes like this, but books, articles, or publications without as much credibility – especially those just trying to establish themselves – may not fare as well. It’s always best to have your work reviewed by a detached expert.

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writing

“Literally” Is The New “Figuratively”…And Other Word Anomalies

eBook Plague – Errors Aplenty

Hot Today, Cold Tamale…Another Menu Misspelling

Tuxedoed Writing

The Joys of Language Evolution

Sex Scenes in Young Adult Books?

What Makes Good YA (Young Adult) Fiction?

Falling In Love Can Be Dangerous

The Absence of Writing

Ironic Forbes Error

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