Oz!

My Taos Toolbox pal Oz requested an example of a properly-used semicolon in a comment recently. I'm up to my ass in alligators at the moment, and when I went to give myself a quick semicolon brush-up, I found that there's a lot more to the matter than I'd remembered.

So I'm waiting for breathing space, but there are more OCD-styling semicolon thrills ahead. Will Van Gundy prove correct? (Spoiler alert: probably not.) Will I prove to have spoken with more authority than knowledge? (Spoiler alert: of course.)

Coming soon! If I'm not just gassing.

Priorities

So, what's up with me lately? I'll tell you what's up with me lately. Things are great and kind of awful at the same time. And I just realized that I'm in a particularly tricky position right now.

Right now things are different for me than they ever have been before. Instead of being a creep alone in his room, I'm a lovable eccentric with a small audience and a growing circle of professional acquaintances. Instead of doing this weird, half-formed art and writing, I'm creating at a higher level than I'd ever seriously aspired to. There is a shift in my relationship with the missus; I'm gaining status and a whiff of romance is in the air. I'm currently in a position to make some substantial changes in my living conditions. And it's been nearly six months since I've had a major episode of mental illness. I've gotten a little shitty around the edges here and there, but I've exhibited no genuinely aberrant behavior.

But in the last few weeks, I've started having episodes of insomnia again. Rather than waking up at two or three and going back to bed at three or four, I'm waking up and staying up. Because I'm working or fiddling.

Or, mainly, worrying.

I've managed to overcommit myself and I'm not managing it well. Actually, my suspicion is that I've commited myself to an appropriate degree, but I suck.

That sentence has a familiar look. Let's rephrase that. I don't suck, but I'm going through a period of transition and I wish I was handling it more gracefully. I wish I was carrying out my obligations in a more generous and timely fashion. And I'm going to have to make some life choices (like buying more prepared foods, or pre-making and freezing meals) that I'm not crazy about if I'm going to pursue my ambitions fully.

Right now I'm facing a constant demand for one thing or another from me. An illustration here, a critique there, and then there's the missus, who wants me to do stuff with her and around the house and she's not above yelling and she probably has a point.

And she wants me to write her a promotional piece for her business, but I've been asked for a crit and I've been putting it off and I'm working on it and I get an email asking if the crit is in the works and I say yes and the missus asks me if her piece is ready and she sounds like she's upset and I have to go to class and I haven't done homework all week I'll have to do it in a chunk and my stomach hurts I've got to sign up with California Lawyers for the Arts and find out about health care so I can get a checkup and when was the last time I checked in with Twitter but it's time to make fucking lunch for the missus and all this crap is piling up in the studio and I need to get those blinds put in I can hardly see the fucking screen and I've got to pick up Poppy from school jesus I sweat so much everywhere I go I've taken to carrying a rag crap should I get a macro lens for the next batch of Swillistrations or is there a magnifying setup that would work what if magic was a peasant martial art that allowed an unarmed combatant to take on a member of the local warrior elite that would motherfucking rock I could base it on my high school gang fucking have to write that oh crap I need to xerox this shit scanning it in takes to long crap where's my pen I should be asleep right now why am I looking at musical instruments on line I haven't touched the novel in three fucking days shit shit shit --

Like I said, right now I have all the ingredients for a sweet life and I'm managing to dick things up to a limited extent. Not entirely, thank goodness. If I let myself continue to lose sleep because I'm worried about all the wonderful things going on in my life, I'll screw myself up. I do not want to slide back into that fucking cycle of madness if I can avoid it.

Here's how that goes. I eat one meal a day -- which I've been doing for some time. That interferes a bit with sleep, so the insomnia kicks in. Three, four hours sleep last night, so there we go. The lack of eating and the insomnia feed into each other until other symptoms kick in, like irritability, pacing, compulsive verbalization, perhaps a bit of finger- 0r lip-chewing, and by that point, well, look at the image at the top of this post.

I'm currently at the point where I'm constantly working and I can't feel as if I'm getting anywhere, and every time anyone makes a perfectly reasonable request of me I feel like curling up in a ball and screaming while big chunks of concrete are dropped on me until the screaming stops. So I need to prioritize.

I'm halfway through a critique. Finish it, and then no more online critiques until I've got breathing space. Then write the promotional piece for the missus. And then do my homework for Grammar.

No. Grammar first. This is my fucking livelihood, let's be serious. I'm putting the other things ahead of it in an expression of what some would call a martyr complex.

Then crit. Then Karen's piece.

Then regular doses of Grammar rather than a pre-class cram. And tackle fucking Swill. I have been anxious to do the next batch of Swillistrations since I finished the last. I've refined my system, I'm adding a fascinating new element that will help me ground the images with their inspiration in the novel, I have new tools.

But now that I think about it, there's a big mistake I've made in priorities already.

Why did I write this garble instead of going to bed? Now I've got to get dressed to go shopping and come home and work on my homework and hopefully get some time in on the crits and the promotional piece before I go to class it'll be another late night damnit and --

And the missus yelled at me to go shopping, and I avoided screaming at her. When I explained why screaming was even on the menu, she got it. My not blaming her for anything helped. Which is convenient, because I would have had to work to blame her. And that would take time I should be spending on other things. I need to quit panicking, take a breath, and make some decisions.

Connections. That's my blessing and my curse, is my mind's ability to correlate its contents. I need to stop seeing the forest and start looking at the trees one at a time, instead of being overwhelmed this baffling series of interconnected tasks every I contemplate any labor.

Oafboy? Tomorrow, maybe Friday, you sit your ass down and make some kind of concrete plan, a one-step-at-a-time deal.

And you move sleep to the top of your list of priorities. You see that thing at the top of the post, boy? You seen one of those before? Can you take a motherfucking hint?

Get some sleep, Oafboy. And stop worrying so much.

Punctuation with Van Gundy

So The Other Van Gundy put this up as part of his comments on my post on writing advice.

"What makes a semicolon, em dash, or colon any fancier than a comma or period? They're just different kinds of pauses. Seems like bad advice; I wouldn't want any part of the toolbox off-limits due to perceived fanciness."

I started to reply, when I realized that I was generating a blog post rather than a comment, so here we go. Please note that this isn't a slam. I'm glad Van Gundy brought this up, because I wasn't clear. And yes, I'm going to use Van Gundy's comment as an example of what I'm talking about. I'm not doing it to be a wiseass, Van Gundy. You're obviously a decent writer, and you weren't grossly discourteous or anything.

But you were a little more sure of your position than was warranted.

Here's what I'm getting. First, I get the impression you thought I was advising against the use of anything but periods and commas. Not at all, buddy. I suggested doing an exercise involving strictly avoiding them because I was dealing with a manuscript that had problems with the punctuation, and the problems fell into a pattern I've seen over and over again.

And my use of the term 'fancy' was one that's clearly subject to misinterpretation. Let me explain.

Those forms of punctuation are fancy because they have much more specialized uses than periods or commas. There are specific circumstances under which they are appropriate, and if they are used outside those circumstances they're clumsy and distracting to the reader. Worse; they can reduce a writer's narrative credibility.

When you wrote, "They're just different kinds of pauses," you should have left out the just. They are different kinds of pauses, and they have different effects, and if you use them injudiciously? Your writing will suffer. The colon, the semi-colon, and the dash all set up a sense of anticipation in the reader. They are a message that the phrase that follows will have an immediate and dramatic impact on the phrase just read.

The ellipsis, on the other hand, says that the reader should take a moment to ponder what has just been said...

If you use a high density of these kinds of punctuation, you are in effect giving the reader a series of stage directions, and reading becomes a very different experience. This can be done properly -- may I draw the brilliant works of Avram Davidson to your attention? he does this beautifully -- but it is a feat for a master.

When I say that misuse of these punctuation marks costs you credibility with readers, it's because each of them issues an order, and makes a promise. As an example, a semi-colon primes the reader to expect a close enough relationship so that the phrase following the semi-colon should make the phrase preceding it take on new meaning. Overuse of these variant punctuations makes the manuscript more tiring to read.

So now I'm gonna be a dick, Van. Honestly, what you wrote makes me think that I probably wouldn't bother making that particular note on one of your manuscripts. But the particular sentence in which I think I've located an error is irresistible. Sorry, Van.

"Seems like bad advice; I wouldn't want any part of the toolbox off-limits due to perceived fanciness."

As a reader, that seems flat and anticlimactic to me, specifically because of the use of the semi-colon. The second phrase doesn't add anything to the first. It repeats it. Let's see.

"Seems like bad advice. I wouldn't want any part of the toolbox off-limits due to perceived fanciness."

I think that reads more strongly. The second phrase seems like clarification rather than repetition. This is a very mild example, and is a matter of taste. I can see how someone might think the sense of flow in the first version was nice.

They'd be defensibly wrong, but wrong. If the full meaning, including emotional tone, is the same, simpler phrasing is always to be preferred.

I mean, that was me being picky. But when you find manuscripts where there are more semi-colons than periods, where there are multiple dashes inside of a paragraph, and then you compare them to manuscripts where all variant punctuation is avoided? The simpler punctuation is more readable, more graceful, and carries more meaning. To a stunning degree. If you do the comparison, you will not debate. You may have a personal fondness for convoluted prose -- and I do -- but if you want to communicate, speak as simply as you possibly can while still saying what you mean.

And that goes for punctuation as much as anything else.

Come to the City and Strengthen Your Writing through Intellectual Labor

Well, I was planning on performing at this reading. It was going to be my very first time, and I was so excited. I was asked if I had any preference; I said I'd be able to clear space for this no matter what else I was doing.

I was wrong; something was going on that had slipped my mind. Something I should have posted about a while ago. I'm going to be attending Nick Mamatas's class on writing the popular novel.

Here's the course, and how you can sign up for it.

And here's Nick's own description.

I'll be bringing copies of the first chapter of my novel Ghost Rock to the first class, if that offers you any discouragement. So come on! Anyone who's reading this and is closer to San Francisco than, say, Milwaukee should at least give it some wistful consideration.

Helping Anonymous

Yes, I know. We're acting like a couple of children. That's just how it is with hyperintellectuals and whatever the hell he is.

Anonymous said...

My google alert caught your response & i was atingle to discover a new blog. If i'd known "That really stupid essay in the Times" was not in quotes for irony, i wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice. Try some subtle gradients in your prose !It sound's like Waynes World, which was satirical mockery of dude jargon in the last century. No idea what you were trying to say about anything but your own choice(?) or default (?) lack of skillz with words. And yes, i used skillz because it's from back in the day when middle school kids called called everything fucking nuts &retarded, dude. ;)
Use a thesaurus! Edit!
Bonaboba

Look. Anonymous. When you criticize someone's prose, it's a good idea to either qualify your criticism with a statement like, "I not smart but know words stink," or "Since that's how I'm handling it, my writing is going to be fucking awful," so as to draw attention away from any of your own shortcomings in that area.

Another way of handling that situation is to show some minimal command over the English language. On consideration, that might be best. Let's see how your comment would read if written in something closer to standard English, just for chuckles. Proper nouns, punctuation, all those petty things with which we low-grade prose stylists are so infatuated.

Anonymous said...

My Google alert caught your response and I was atingle to discover a new blog. If I'd known the post's title, That Really Stupid Essay in the Times, was not in quotes for purposes of irony, I wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice.

Whew. The obvious fixes are not going to be enough to salvage this one. Now, I know this isn't a compliment. So as we go, if I find myself feeling as though I've been praised, I'll know I'm in error.

"If I'd known the post's title was intended seriously --"

Really? That's what that said? Interesting.

"If I'd known the post's title was intended seriously, I wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice."

I fail to get the connection here, but this does look a lot like a comprehensible sentence so we'll let it stand. I'm nurturing a fantasy of Anonymous hoping for a brilliant excoriation of that squealing, vapor-filled article fit to stand with the works of Swift and Mencken, and writhing in an agony of disappointment on finding, instead, the word 'dude.' Alas, this sentence is our only hope of knowing more.

"Try some subtle gradients in your prose! It sounds like the dialog in Wayne's World, which was a satirical mockery of dude jargon in the last century."

I think the exclamation point is a bad idea. It pokes a hole in what's left of your gravitas after the capitalization and spacing errors had their way with it. But it's your anonymous comment, Anonymous.

I have to admit, you pricked me with this one, you scoundrel. I must admit, I'd thought a piece of writing that runs from, "Are those guys huffing thinner?" to, "Anyone with the most infinitisimal grain of sense or experience knows that suffering is an absolutely necessary and unavoidable part of life, and that exaggerated attempts to avoid it cause grotesqueries that bring suffering of themselves," might have some subtle gradients to it, but then, we're always the worst judges of our own work, aren't we? Thank you, Anonymous, for calling this weakness to my attention.

No idea what you were trying to say about anything but your own choice(?) or default (?) lack of skillz with words.

Anonymous, at this juncture I must act with boldness, and I crave your pardon if I misread your intentions. However, this sentence is a crafty foe, and resists all conventional analysis. I must allow myself the luxury of intuition. And out of sheer love of invective, I will endeavor to bring your insult out of the murky depths of awkward syntax and up into the light of day.

I have no idea what you're saying here, due to your extremely poor writing ability. I would suggest that you polish your 'skillz.'

Ho! Ho! Anonymous, I just slapped my thigh in mirth. That's the stuff, is it not? Do you notice how it's not necessary to explain that your use of the word 'skillz' is sarcastic when the rest of your missive is written in standard English? I may not be able to write the way you think you can, but I do know a little bit about humor. Word to the wise. Make sure your jokes are funnier than you are.

Now that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. How about...

You should know, only middle-schoolers use terms like, 'fucking nuts,' and, 'retarded.' 'Dude.' ;)

You have no idea what it cost me in terms of emotional health to leave that emoticon in place. But for you, Anonymous? No sacrifice is too great.

Use a thesaurus! Edit!
Bonaboba

Okay, I'll leave those there. In a way, they're the best part.

First off, 'use a thesaurus' is terrible, terrible advice to someone who needs access to a more varied and flexible vocabulary. Learn to use words in speech before you put them into your prose. When you fish in a thesaurus for interesting words while you're composing, you wind up with the kind of verbal slop McMahan produced in The Meat Eaters.

And that last word. The cherry on top. Literally the punchline. Edit! At the end of that email, the command, Edit! Really, Anonymous. Now you're just being silly. If your comment is the result of someone scrupulously editing with a thesaurus at their elbow? Do I need to continue?

So let's see how it turned out. From...

Anonymous said...

My google alert caught your response & i was atingle to discover a new blog. If i'd known "That really stupid essay in the Times" was not in quotes for irony, i wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice. Try some subtle gradients in your prose !It sound's like Waynes World, which was satirical mockery of dude jargon in the last century. No idea what you were trying to say about anything but your own choice(?) or default (?) lack of skillz with words. And yes, i used skillz because it's from back in the day when middle school kids called called everything fucking nuts &retarded, dude. ;)
Use a thesaurus! Edit!
Bonaboba

... to...

Anonymous says...

My Google alert caught your response and I was atingle to discover a new blog. If I'd known the post's title was intended seriously, I wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice.

Try some subtle gradients in your prose! It sounds like the dialog in Wayne's World, which was a satirical mockery of dude jargon in the last century. I have no idea what you're saying here, due to your extremely poor writing ability. I would suggest that you polish your 'skillz.'

You should know, only middle-schoolers use terms like, 'fucking nuts,' and, 'retarded.' 'Dude.' ;)

Use a thesaurus! Edit!

Bonaboba

Bonaboba... Oh, you tease. You may be Bonaboba to your mother, but you'll always be Anonymous to me. And Anonymous, just between the two of us? When we're together, I imagine -- and how sweet it is, to imagine this -- that you are Jeff McNamara. Ours is a strange love, is it not?

That Really Stupid Essay in the Times

Further refinements and a touch of color. I don't like the black corners; only the streetlamp and lines should be black.

Note the subtly varied color -- I've found that by using layers of transparent gradients, I can get a much more interesting, much less 'dead' result than a straight-up from the box gradient. Bringing life to digital art is the real trick.

I thought I was going to be able to avoid writing about this, but I've been obsessing on it to the point where I've been losing sleep. This is retarded, but this is what it's like to be crazy. How crazy?

Crazy enough to care about the state of intellectual discourse in the US. I mean, you've seen crazy from me before, but not on that scale.

Here's the article I'm addressing.

If you ain't up for it, dude is saying hey, shouldn't we be thinking about how we can eliminate meat-eating? As a behavior? In animals everywhere? Like, just get rid of the carnivores because they're real mean.

I shit thee not.

I tried to imagine that this is some kind of put-on but if it is, this guy puts Andy Kaufman in the fucking shade. I really think he means it. Red wine? Pot? Both of the above, maybe a little medication mixed in? Because these just do not seem like the thoughts of a sober man.

Let's get this straight. I don't think Jeff McMahan is a bad person. And for all I know he's done work that would blow me out of the fucking water. But as I write this, I will abuse him as a fool over and over and over again because this essay is stupid as shit -- which is bad -- and it was published under the rubric of the New York Times. This is fucking nuts. Isn't that the paper of record? Are those guys huffing thinner? What the hell is going on?

Okay. I don't want to spend time on this. I want to spit my bile and move on. Since that's how I'm handling it, my writing is going to be fucking awful, so I won't make a big deal out of how...

Rob once sent out a rejection letter where he accused the person's manuscript of having been 'rat-fucked by academia.' If you're wondering what that means, go read the essay. 'Too stuffed to jump' is another phrase that comes to mind.

Anyway. On to the meat. First off, the core of his position is this statement.

"It is relatively uncontroversial that suffering is intrinsically bad for those who experience it, even if occasionally it is also instrumentally good for them, as when it has the purifying, redemptive effects that Dostoyevsky’s characters so often crave."

I'm sorry, but that's a load of stupid you need a wheelbarrow to move. It is not at all uncontroversial; rather, it is the exact opposite of the truth. Anyone with the most infinitisimal grain of sense or experience knows that suffering is an absolutely necessary and unavoidable part of life, and that exaggerated attempts to avoid it cause grotesqueries that bring suffering of themselves. Without the experience of suffering it is impossible to truly understand the suffering of others.

Life exists in a dynamic situation of contending forces. Pleasure is the way our organismic selves guide us toward things that have proven beneficial to the meta-organism in the past, while suffering guides us away from things that have proven harmful. To the species, not the individual, please note. Suffering is not a source of harm; it is a warning that harm is being done. To struggle against the real sources of suffering is a noble thing. To attempt to eliminate suffering itself is like tearing out your goddamned smoke alarms. Jackass.

Are you familiar with the fate of those who do not feel pain? They, and those around them, must be constantly inspecting their bodies for unnoticed injuries. They frequently die young.

Get me?

And starting off with that muttonheaded Schopenhauer quote -- “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.”

What kind of idiot actually thinks that is a reasonable picture of life? I rather doubt it was one who had any experience of animals and how they live. Note the pleasure/pain dynamic above. It is tuned, so that a typical animal under typical conditions will of course experience more pleasure than suffering because that is how the relative functions of pleasure and suffering balance. Mild pleasure lets you know you're doing okay, suffering tends to indicate special circumstances. An organism that suffers more than it experiences pleasure is not a typical organism -- it is unfortunate.

And as for the specifics of one animal eating another. This is squeamishness, plain and simple. Would you rather be eaten by a shark or die of AIDS? Neither will be pleasant; the first will be much faster.

It also may not be as bad as you'd think. When David Livingston was attacked by a lion, he reported a dreamy sense of disconnection; anyone who's handled animals injured by cats has seen something of this.

Listen, McMahan? Most animals don't die of predation. Most animals die worse deaths. Most small animals die of pneumonia. Think of all the tiny mice and birds laying on their sides and quivering as they drown in their own snot and then tell me how cruel predators are.

Goddamnit.

Next up is this little doozy. In reference to the notion that it may be possible to some day engineer carnivorous behavior out of the ecosystem, he says, "Rather than continuing to collide with the natural world with reckless indifference, we should prepare ourselves now to be able to act wisely and deliberately when the range of our choices eventually expands."

So let me get this straight.

If we ever get magical superpowers, we should already have our wishes lined up. Is that what he means?

The idea that we should invest thoughts in hypothetical situations like this does have a place. It is in fiction. And if McMahan had plotted this out with the intellectual rigor used in the best science fiction, he may have come up with something of interest to say.

But that would mean speaking from a position of knowledge. He would have to say something meaningful about how predation operates in the ecosystem, how we'd manage birth control for moths and so on. He would have to really think, not engage in the outgassing of an intellectual colon.

Doing this kind of half-baked wambling about does not have anything to do with real thought. This piece consists of words and half-understood emotional impulses chasing one another around a cranium that is either permanently fuzzy or temporarily pixilated.

To prime oneself for possible action based on guesses made from a position of profound ignorance is a terrible, terrible idea. Jesus, McMahan! What the hell!

Okay, I'm sorry. That was uncalled for. But it really, really pisses me off that this kind of vague dopey slop -- and sorry, McMahan, I'm sure you're a nice guy and this isn't representative of your work, but this honestly does read like the transcribed ramblings of an over-educated stoner -- is being placed before the public eye and given the gloss of credibility that comes with The New York Times. This is the pathetic state of discourse. And here I sit, stewing bitterly in petulant insignificance. Unread save for the true elite.

(If for incomprehensible reasons McMahan is reading this, that was for you -- I am a spiteful nobody. Go ahead and dismiss my ravings. Plus, really, I'm irked because you want to get rid of all my favorite animals.)

Listen up, US of A. This is a warning. I'm watching you.

Think better.

Or else. I mean it.

Notes to a Fellow Writer

This is the first test I've made of the process I'll be using to generate the half-tones in the series of Swillistrations I've got in the works.

This uses the Phantasm plug-in for Illustrator. This is an incredible tool, and I'll no doubt be doing a more extensive review of it later. But this is so much nicer than the half-tones in Photoshop, and it's resolution independent. I can print this at any size that I want to.

Oh, this is going to be sweet.

So the cat's out of the bag. Ol' Ferrett Steinmetz has fessed up to being my correspondent here in this blog post.

(On the internet, we call that a 'link-like loop.')

Anyway, you can go out and buy a story right now that he wrote and I helped critique. It's called Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol, and it's in the current Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

And for the record. I do not 'eviscerate' prose. I do not 'cut it to fucking ribbons.' For goodness' sake, it's just a little spit on the corner of a napkin and the way some people squirm you'd think it was boiling acid. Honestly.

So dude!

I have dealt out the praise and addressed the specifics of your story in personal correspondence, but as I began to write of more general matters I found myself saying things I've wanted to say to other people, so I wondered if this might not be placed in front of a wider audience. If you don't mind the internet listening in, here's some large-scale advice. Please note that I'm well aware that you're further down the professional path than I am; the arrogance of my stance is tempered by this humbling knowledge. If I over-explain anything, it's for the benefit of those peering over our shoulders.

Here's a big one. Scenes. The basic units of organization of a dramatic story are the sentence, the paragraph, and the scene. A scene is a specific action or interaction, usually but by no means always taking place in a specific location. It has the shape of a story, with a beginning, complete with inciting incident, middle, and end.

You frequently use extended passages of exposition in your stories rather than scenes. "She thought back on those lost years, when she had wandered free..." and you go on for a while. This is a technique of oral storytelling rather than dramatic fiction as it is currently written. And as it stands, those passages stand out as weak spots in your work.

If you want to make them work, you might try framing stories that use this technique as oral stories. Let the voice of the storyteller be present at the beginning to introduce the story, and when it returns later, it will be accepted. Having conventional dramatic scenes inside of a fairy-tale framework works fine.

But I think you'd be better served to learn how to think in scenes more consistently. Conventional fiction is written entirely in scenes -- even when there is exposition, it takes place inside the context of a scene. A lot of the time your exposition leaves me wondering if you're avoiding the hard work of imagining a specific event or interaction that will say what you want to say. You do this perfectly in most places -- I think you should do it everywhere, all the time. Of course, that's me.

If you want to go that way, I would suggest doing at least one draft of one story in script format. Imagine it as a film rather than fiction, and only tell us what happens through dialog and action. You can go back and add the frosting later.

(A quick aside. For years, I avoided doing writing exercises because I was writing my fiction. Big mistake on my part. It turns out that writing exercises can be really, really useful for targeting specific areas of writing that can't otherwise be reached. Kind of like a Nautilus for prose.)

Now I'm going to address a tangle of stylistic issues that I think relate to the above-mentioned issue of oral versus written storytelling. These are things I've had to fight with in my own writing, and I've seen them in a lot of other people's writing. They tend to occur together, and I think I've finally figured out what they're about.

And you will find all the mistakes I'm talking about right here in this post. This is my casual writing. Don't look to it as an example. It's fun, but it kinda sucks.

Anyway.

The use of fancy punctuation -- dashes; semicolons, ellipses... The use of lots of modifiers. The use of meaningless conventional phrases, such as 'and then', 'of course,' and so on. These all seem to go together, and I think I've finally figured out why. They're from oral storytelling. From speech.

The punctuation and conventional phrases act as ways of linking ideas so as to provide a continuous flow. That flow is further enhanced by the use of conventional phrases and modifiers to allow time to think. In addition, there is a music to the spoken word whose tempo and beat can be controlled by such words. These are all functional when spoken.

But on the page, ideas are linked physically, and there's no need to pause for thought. Anything that doesn't contribute is in the way. Grit in the lubrication. Every little flyspeck of a comma or unneeded 'ing' paves the path to Hell.

Try writing a draft of something without colons, semi-colons, dashes, or ellipses. None. At all.

I mean it, dude. Worked for Jersey.

And here's a little mind-blower I got from Nancy Kress. I wouldn't put it out on the blog -- guild secrets, you know -- but she swiped it from Ursula Le Guin and it's got a name and everything so I think it's out there in the public welkin already.

It's called Chastity, and it's dead simple. Write a page without using any adjectives or adverbs.

Dude, stop laughing. I mean it. No, really. None.

Dude?

Dude... Oh, brother. Sorry. Should have been more gentle with that. Here's some Kleenex, buddy. It'll be okay. Just try it once. It's curiously refreshing.

And as for meaningless words and conventional phrases, hard work at revision is your best bet, but this can be aided by the use of search functions in word processing. I know that if you were to do a search on the following words --

and
so
then
but

and the phrase

and then

and then look at each instance and ask, "Does this word bring anything to the party? If I just yank that sucker out would anyone miss it?" you will find your prose hella tighter. Tex mentioned a book called The Ten-Percent Solution on self-editing that looks like it goes into that kind of thing in greater detail and I'm getting me a copy.

Of course, any stock phrases like 'of course' that you run across should get the same treatment.

I'd also suggest that you can save a lot of excess wordage by taking advantage of point of view. This story was written from the close third-person, where you write from inside the character's head. You have a habit of saying, "So-and-so thought..." We're in their POV. Nobody else is thinking. No need to specify who it is.

And for that matter, when you describe a sound? You don't need to say that she heard it, because that's how you perceive sound. If she sees it, tell us. That's interesting. Assume sounds are heard, sights are seen, sensations felt, ad nauseum.

Here's one that I do all the fucking time myself. You're describing something and you try and combine or triangulate descriptions to get greater effect -- "It was thus and such, it was this and that." It do not usually help. One clear description is best. Restatement is a form of hesitation.

And, finally, a word to the wise.

Yours,

Sean