Reading Like A Writer

Before I start: Our Realtor called and said he wants to hold an Open House both Saturday and Sunday afternoons. In addition, there's another DUI stop that starts Saturday night and runs through about 4 AM Sunday. Looks like it'll be a busy weekend. And a lot of prep work beforehand.

On Monday, we'll be celebrating our anniversary with "Victoria & Albert" at the Grand Floridian.

Back on topic: Reading like a writer. Once you start learning the craft of writing, the entire reading experience changes. All of a sudden (a phrase one of my editors did NOT like), you start noticing things like speaker tags. Point of view. And word usage. Sometimes they'll clunk; sometimes they'll trigger an, "I've got to borrow that one," moment. Sometimes both.

Keep Reading...

One author seems to love the phrase "blew out a sigh." Or there's the dialogue tag that says, "Mary said to John," and then "John said to Mary." In a crowded scene, I can see where that comes in handy. I've used it myself. But when there are only two people in the scene, it's obvious who each is talking to. After the second time, it starts leaping from the page. And, strangely enough, it seemed to predominate in only one or two chapters, as if the author meant to change it but forgot. Was there another person in the scene in an earlier draft? Curious writer-readers want to know.

I also noticed the use of someone who 'angled a chair' to face another character. That was one I thought I might borrow. (Hey, it's a word in the dictionary, so it's not stealing). Then I noticed a whole bunch of 'angling', which started to be conspicuous. But I did like the word, and went through my manuscript to see if it would be a better word than 'turned.'

I did a Find on "turned" and found far too many of them. Another word to add to my ever-growing checklist. Checking my Synonym Finder yielded a full page of variations on the word, broken down into 44 sub-categories. You'd think a few of them could replace some of my eighty-something 'turneds'.

I didn't find any "angleds" when I searched, but there are a couple of them now. The caution is that when you replace a word with a better one, you're likely to find that you've used it already within a page. Or a paragraph. I don't know why we tend to keep using the same words over and over.

Sometimes, there just aren't any decent synonyms that make sense. Or that don't sound contrived, or like you just looked them up in a Thesaurus. It's important that the word choices match your writing voice as well as the character's. If you have a teen-aged boy locked in a dark basement, he's not going to be looking for a point of egress. So poor vocabulary choices can also slow a read.

Which segues into today's fun. I haven't shared many of my Dictionary.com words of the day in some time. So here's a list of recent words that probably will never make it into anything I'm writing:

Furbelow
Brio
Adumbrate
Daedal
Tergiversation
Oneiric
And here's one from Susan Wiggs, which doesn't mean what you probably think it does
Hootenanny

I've finished (I hope) finding all the "real life" stuff in my manuscript. As far as I can tell, the only one that might require permission is the name of a restaurant chain where I've set a scene. I called their company, and the girl who took my call thought it was 'really cool' that I wanted to use the name in a book. She directed me to their PR firm, and we'll see if I get a response. The passage, taken out of context, might look like there's a problem with the food, although that's definitely not the case. If they don't like it, it'll be a 'coffee shop.'

Tomorrow, I'm finally back to working on my new manuscript. Not only did I finish the Tip Sheet, but I also managed to get a good draft of my contest entry. The challenge: a 7200 word limit for the beginning of a manuscript PLUS a synopsis. The manuscript pages had a perfect ending point at about 7600 words, so that wasn't going to work. The synopsis I'd been using was almost 2000 words. Balancing what to include in each so that the synopsis covered the major plot points, turning points, and GMC, while still leaving enough room for a good chunk of manuscript was an ordeal. I'll look at it again in a day or two, but now, I'm eager to get back to dealing with my newly discovered villain. Once I've got his back story figured out in more detail, and filtered in a few more clues, I can start moving forward.

And don't forget – Homicide – Hussey is back tomorrow. This week: "The Littlest Cop."

Sunday Quotes

What I'm reading: Without Fail, by Lee Child

Tonight's the last night of Hanukkah, which means we'll open the rest of our presents. Although I thought hubby and I had agreed not to do anything special for each other, last night he pulled two small boxes from the array. They were wrapped in gold paper, and I'd pegged them as Godiva, even though he'd already given me a box of truffles. I was wrong. As the commercial says, "He went to Jared." Now he's got lots of hubby points and I'm feeling guilty at the tokens I got for him.

Here are a couple of quotes from my Quote of the Day list:

The relationship between the fiction writer and the reader is, in some ways, tantamount to a seduction: the writer, via the plot, awakens a desire within the reader, and the longer the desire remains unsatisfied, the more intensely it burns. You aim to immediately introduce a source of tension and fan its flames until the conflict is finally resolved. You want your readers aching to know if Atticus wins the trial, if Elizabeth Bennet will marry Mr. Darcy. You want them to race through the pages, gobbling up every word... ~Bret Anthony Johnston The Writer, Dec 2008
I have mixed feelings about this one -- while I love to love the characters and worry about them, if a book hooks me, then when I get near the end, along with wanting to get to the end to see everything resolved, I want to go slowly and savor it because once I reach the last page, it'll be over. Maybe that's why I enjoy reading series author's back lists -- because I can keep going and find out what happens next.

To me, the secret to writing is knowing your own mind and the way it works. As far as advice goes: Get it down, as much and as quickly as you can, and fix it up later. Write every day. When you can't write every day, read as much as you can and take notes of the things that work in the novels of others. ~Sheridan Hay The Writer, Dec 2008
I've been negligent in my actual writing (the edit/revision phase does that). I'll confess to spending most of the last week simply reading for pleasure, But once you've started writing, you'l never be able to read the same way again. I'm looking at Lee Child and John Sandford, both of whom write protagonists with serious character flaws, and marveling at the way they can make them sympathetic, so I care about them.

Can writers read for pleasure?

What I'm reading: Dead Silence by Brenda Novak

What I'm writing: Fozzie's book, Chapter 2

Since I'm back at intensive writing, and doing crits for my group, I find my reading for pleasure moves deeper into edit mode as well.

Most of these things have no effect on plot or storytelling, but they're things that slow my read. I wonder if anyone else notices or even cares.

I don't begin to consider myself a grammar guru, although I had a lot of basics pounded into my head by Miss Cook in junior high, and Mr. Holtby in high school. Lately, I've noticed that some of these lessons don't seem to matter anymore. Or else copy editors had different teachers. Our language is fluid, and constantly changing (my agent said the comma before "too" is no longer required and made me remove all of them which still waves red flags for me), so I wonder if there are other memos I've missed.

One 'rule' I learned is that two things can be compared, but in order to use the superlative it was absolutely required that there be three. When one of my writing partners critiqued a recent sub, she flagged the chair "nearer" the wall and said it should be nearest. I said there were only two chairs, so "nearer" should be correct. She said she'd never heard of that rule.

When I was in school, this is what we learned, and the way I still remember it:

Good, Better, Best. You can't have the best of two, or there will be red marks on your paper. So when I noticed a character talking about his youngest child, I assumed there would be at least three kids, and I kept waiting for a middle sibling to appear. But no, there were only two, and one was the youngest and one was the oldest.

And people are 'who', things are 'that'. So when I see "The man that was arrested" or, "the dog who ran away," my teeth clench.

Granted, these things don't affect the plot. But to me, I'm seeing those big red marks on the page and am pulled out of the story.

On a non-grammar note, research is another pet peeve. I don't know a lot, so when I see something I do know, I wonder why an author didn't take the time, or the copy editor let it slide. Number one biggie, because of my preferred genre, is characters who carry Gocks, yet click the safety off or on. Glocks just plain don't work that way. And revolvers don't have safeties either.

So, any other pet peeves, or am I the only one who even notices these things? Do you read differently as a writer? Can you turn off that internal editor?