Red Ink -- Passive Verbs

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William Bernhardt started me on the path to writing as craft. (He also ruined my enjoyment of using the exclamation point -- only one per novel -- which also restricts my ability to comment on Facebook posts.)

Bill admonishes us to "show, don't tell" and eschew the passive verb. Ernest Hemingway advised against adverbs, championing the mot juste, meaning the right verb needs no adverb.

Passive verbs and adverbs weaken a sentence and distance the reader from the vision we create. Let me show you. This is the opening from John Lescroart's first Dismas Hardy crime thriller Dead Irish.

     From his aisle seat, Dismas Hardy had a clear view of the stewardess as her feet lifted from the floor. She immediately let go of the tray -- the one that held Hardy's Coke -- although strangely it didn't drop, but hung there in the air, floating, the liquid coming out of the glass like a stain spreading in a blotter.

To rewrite this using active verbs and removing adverbs, it would look like this:

     From his aisle seat, Dismas Hardy saw the stewardess's feet lift from the floor. She let go of the tray -- the one that held Hardy's Coke. The drink didn't drop but hung there in the air, floating, the liquid coming out of the glass like a stain spreading in a blotter.

Nothing is lost from the meaning. The word 'strangely' is unnecessary because the Coke that Lescroart shows us floating is strange enough. We don't need to be told that it is strange with an adverb. (I also replaced the imprecise pronoun. And being an old poet, I enjoy the alliterative d's which are by their nature sudden, strong sounds, even if we read without moving our lips.)

In the heat of writing, it's hard to keep all the good advice in mind. My flash fiction blog Danger from earlier this week contains the following:

   Rain and wind were being sucked into the storm. Once outside the false harbor of my car, I could feel the storm's pull. It was too close.

Open plea to editors and beta readers: Please help us writers to avoid passive verbs. You don't have to figure out what we should say instead, just point out the problem. It may take a while, but we'll figure it out.

One final example from John Lescroart's Dead Irish:

   Moses had raised his younger sister from the time he was sixteen and she was four. When he'd gone to Vietnam, which was where Moses and Hardy had met, she had just been starting high school and Moses was paying to have her board at Dominican up in Marin County.

There you go. Something to be chewed upon. Blech!

Think I'll park my editor's cap and read the rest of John Lescroart's very good book. Good enough that this is my second time through. Alas, we always read faster than our favorite writers can write.

Why Self-Publish

Drawing of a printing press by Brad Johnston

Why self-publish? I can’t answer that question for anyone but myself.

I’ve dreamed of getting a fat contract with a big New York City publisher. There would be hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of readers for a book I wrote. I’d buy a house in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I’d be surrounded by gardenias and bougainvillea and camellias. And I’d have coffee and beignets from Café du Monde every morning for the rest of my life, and sometimes late at night, too. Even more importantly than that, I wanted a book on the shelf in the public library of Edmond, Oklahoma.

I knew I could write. And I’ve never had problems thinking of story ideas. As an English major from before the 4th Grade I had no problem with grammar or punctuation. And as much as I loved reading the dictionary, spelling errors were merely opportunities.

But, and a very big but it was. I was not satisfied that the skills I had were the skills necessary to produce an extended plot and develop characters while sustaining that plot. Skills require training whether you want to repair watches, grind lenses, or build houses. And I wanted to write a novel. So I found a teacher. In my case it was and is William Bernhardt. (www.williambernhardt.com)

I went to class, paid attention, argued, fought, and rebelled every step of the way. Most importantly, I learned.

And I wrote.

Then came the wall. You runners out there, know what I’m talking about. For me, that wall looked like a very nice person sitting across the table waiting patiently for me to pitch my book. Damn. If I wanted to be a salesman or had any talents along that line I’d be in real estate or insurance. And guess what, a writer cannot get to the big publishers, except through an agent. Talk about camels and needles’ eyes.

To make matters worse, I had no track record. A few poems, some newspaper work, and lots of government correspondence. But no book length fiction. Not to mention that I’m in my sixties. I’ve heard that most writers can be expected to have a productive lifespan of 15 years. And here I was asking an agent to invest in me with indefinite prospects for financial reward over a foreshortened number of years. This is, after all, the way they make their living. They have mortgages and children in college. I understand.

Luckily for me at my ripe old age, I came of age at the right time for the self-publishing author. Traditional publishing is in flux. It’s come up against its own wall in this digital age and is having to reinvent itself.

It looks like now, with print on demand and ebooks we don’t have to rely on the deep pockets of the big publishers. DIY has arrived for writers.

Join me on my journey. Tomorrow I’ll discuss the nuts and bolts of self-publishing. As I am discovering them.

C is for Character Development

C is for Character Development

 

If you want to write and write well, no matter the genre, whether memoir, thriller, or a grant proposal, you need skills. I recommend working with a good writing teacher. You can check out my teacher at www.williambernhardt.com. Bill always says, "show don't tell."

 

The following exerpt is from my, as yet, unpublished murder mystery, Murder on Ceres. The story starts out on a colony in low orbit around Ceres, the largest body in the Main Asteroid Belt. The protagonist is a police detective named Rafe. This scene introduces his mother Rose. Lucy is a friend of his wife Terren. Terren is distraught over the death of a very close friend. Charles is Rafe's father.

Door chimes startled Lucy awake. She glanced at the screen and saw Terren’s mother-in-law in the pop-up. Rose Sirocco’s eyes gazed inquiringly up at the door cam. Green eyes like Rafe’s. Two of the few people she knew with green eyes. She liked having someone look up to her, or at least seem to look up to her. Even a much older person. To be fair, at 162 centimeters, they were exactly the same height. Short by Cererian standards.

Her reader slipped to the floor as she got up to answer the door.

“Mrs. Sirocco.”

“Hello, dear. Didn’t Rafe tell you I was coming to sit with Terren?” Rose Sirocco looked her up and down. Probably noting her rumpled appearance.

Lucy finger-combed her straight brown hair. “Yes, ma’am. He did. I must’ve dozed off.” She picked up the fallen reader. “Three chapters deep in the latest Turner thriller. Guess it’s not that thrilling.”

“Oh, keep at it, dear.” Rose set a bright pink bag emblazoned with a crisp letter “S” on the floor. “Though not quite as thrilling as his last book. Still, it’s worth reading.” She put her blue beret and handbag, each also marked with an “S” on the entry table next to Rafe’s chess board.

She centered the white queen on the correct square. “Charles is forever accepting things in lieu of money for his legal services. This was from that woman they thought embezzled from the hospital.” An antique from Earth, the chess set was probably very valuable. “I can’t remember for sure. Maybe it was from that man accused of killing his wife and her lover. A nice man, really. Ah well, it was a good gift for Rafe.”

She straightened the mirror over the table. “Don’t you think this looks so much better here than it did in that tiny little place they used to live in?” She plumped her iron gray curls into shape. The hat had not flattened her hair at all. Like her, those curls would not be restrained.

“Don’t you have reading glasses, dear?” Rose turned to the house controls near the door and brought the lights in the living room up to near full-sun, dialed the room temperature down, and switched off the lights in the garden.

 “I think they’re much easier on your eyes.” She pulled food containers out of the pink bag. “Charles thinks mine are too heavy. They make little dents on my nose, but I think the graphics are so much better than the new ones.”

Lucy didn’t offer her opinion. She didn’t find an opportunity to.

 

Self-Publishing

 

    Friends, neighbors, and kin there is great danger out there for the would-be-published writer. Just like this selfie, the self-published book is likely to fall victim to the vagaries of amaturism.

      If a professional had taken the above photo, they would have at least suggested closing the bathroom door. Though I am relieved that my bathroom looks fairly clean. There would have been a suggestion that I comb my hair and put on a little make-up. And, without a doubt, the photographer would have made my face the focal point of the portrait. There may even have been an attempt to catch some facial expression other than this wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights look of surprise. How I could have been surprised when the camera flashed, I cannot explain, since it was I who pushed the button.

      I bought a book yesterday from a self-published author. He was selling them cheap because his wife found some typos in them.

      I had high hopes for him and his book and terrible fears. I am completing my own book Murder on Ceres and plan to also self-publish. Oh, bless his heart, if the only problem with his book had been some typos.

      I believe writing a book is like building a house. You can build a house without experience or training as a carpenter, plumber, or electrician. But having always lived in a house does not qualify you to build a house that works. The same is true of writing a book. True, reading books is essential to writing them, but it's not enough.

      Where to begin? Desire always comes first. Always. Because everything else is hard, lonely work. Next is a good teacher. That can be expensive both in time and coin, but if you're serious, you will make arrangements. That's where desire comes in.

      I had the good fortune to find William Bernhardt. And it's not important what the teacher writes, only that they do write. And that they understand the mechanics of writing inside and out and upside down. Otherwise, unless you are a much quicker study than I, they won't be able to explain it so you can understand it.

     And then you have to listen to what they say. Personally, I do not like to be told. Anything. So my first reaction to any kind of instruction is negative. I never follow instructions until I discover for myself that my way won't work. After all, without the concept of mid-course corrections, we'd never have made it to the moon. And my mid-course correction involves arguing with my teacher, going away and thinking about what he said, and finally seeing that he is right. Then I apply it to my work.

     Bill Bernhardt has several pet sayings, one of which is "show, don't tell." The author of the book that started me on this rant, spends pages dropping brandnames and fancy places to tell us that his hero is rich and cool. There are ways to do this in a line or two. When an older woman is announced by her butler as "the Dowager Countess," we know we're looking at old, English money. When the hero climbs out of a natural gas powered Humvee, we've got a pretty good idea he's a former California-governor-type and his first name may be Arnold.

     If your hero's socio-economic status is not the main point of the story, please don't bore us with constant reminders of it. I promise we will remember that he drives a brand new Lexus even without your saying it every time he gets into or out of his car.

     Oh, yes, and that can easily get to be too much choreography. If he starts the page in Manhattan and ends two pages later on Long Island, we don't need a turn-by-turn narrative of his trip. Unless it somehow shows up later in the story and we were supposed to remember it because the bad guy takes a different route. In which case, the writer will have to make this clear some other way, because I will not remember all those turns and probably won't continue reading long enough to get to the bad guy. 

     There are lots of other opportunities to fall on our butts when we self-publish, but you're probably as tired of reading this right now, as I am tired of writing it. Besides, I have a re-write to finish.

     Bill has a website with his seminars listed and he has several good books and videos on the art and science of writing. Check him out at www.williambernhardt.com/