Posts Tagged ‘Melisa Michaels’

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

• The Apostrophe
• Phrase Matching
• Spelling
• Identifying Your Pronouns
• Being Consistent

The Apostrophe: When In Doubt, Leave It Out

The omitted apostrophe confuses meaning less often than the needless one does. If I write a note to tell you, “This is Janes dog,” you’ll likely know I mean to let you know the dog belongs to Jane. If I write instead, “Jane’s friend’s are writer’s,” and you know anything about the punctuation of English, you will be in some confusion as to what belongs to whom.

In general, the apostrophe means one of two things.

1. There is a missing letter where it is. For example, in “don’t” there is a missing “o”; in “it’s” there is a missing “i”: each of these is a one-word contraction commonly used to represent two words. “Don’t” means “do not,” and “it’s” means “it is.”
2. Something belongs to someone. For example, “Jane’s dog” means the dog belongs to Jane. “Fred’s house” means the house belongs to Fred (or at least that he lives in it). Apostrophe-S is used to indicate possession.

Unfortunately, number 2 above presents a problem when a thing belongs to a thing. If we want to say, “The box has its label now,” shouldn’t we use “it’s” to show possession? The answer is most emphatically no, we should not. “It’s” means “it is.” It never means “belonging to it.”

And here I present you with a writerly secret about apostrophes: if the reader sees none where there should be one, she will imagine you’ve dropped it by accident, and that the result is a typographical error (a “tyop”) rather than an indication of ignorance.

But if she sees an apostrophe where there should be none, she is unlikely to imagine that you added it by accident. Even if in this one case you really did hit that key without noticing, your reader is going to assume that you did it deliberately, in ignorance. It is a sad truth about readers. As a result, you’re much safer if you follow the apostrophe rule: when in doubt, leave it out.

Phrase-Matching

A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.

Luckily this rather daunting injunction is simpler than it sounds. An example from Strunk’s The Elements of Style:

Walking slowly down the road, he saw a woman accompanied by two children.

The word walking refers to the subject of the sentence, not to the woman. If the writer wishes to make it refer to the woman, he must recast the sentence.

He saw a woman, accompanied by two children, walking slowly down the road.

Strunk considers this example adequate, and perhaps it is. Even without an understanding of “participial phrases” and “grammatical subjects,” you should be able with moderate effort to extend this logic to other, similar sentences.

The next rule contains even more daunting terms:

Participial phrases preceded by a conjunction or by a preposition, nouns in apposition, adjectives, and adjective phrases come under the same rule if they begin the sentence.

If you don’t know what those terms mean, you should still be able to see by example what is meant.

Wrong: On arriving in Chicago, his friends met him at the station.
Better: On arriving in Chicago, he was met at the station by his friends.

Wrong: A writer of popular self-help books, they hired her to write their company manual.
Better: A writer of popular self-help books, she was hired to write the company manual.

Wrong: Inexperienced as he was, it sounded easy to write a book.
Better: Inexperienced as he was, he thought writing a book would be easy.

Sentences that violate these rules are often ludicrous:

Being weather-damaged and badly infested with termites, I was able to buy the house at quite a low price.

Wondering which way to turn, a bird soiled my hat.

As a writer of popular romances, his computer was quite fast.

Spelling

If your word processor has a spell-checker, use it. Be aware, however, that spell-checkers can only determine whether words are spelled correctly. They cannot determine whether the word in question is the one wanted. For example, had I written “they cannot determine weather the word … is the one wanted,” a spell-checker would not have flagged it because, although “weather” was quite the wrong word, it was spelled correctly.

It is therefore necessary not only to spell-check by hand, but also to know more than your computer does about which word you wanted. A hardcopy dictionary is essential. If you know there are other words that sound like the one you used, it’s a good idea to look them up, to make sure you selected the right one.

Did you say “they’re” or “there” when you meant “their”? What about two, too, and to–have you used the right one? Do you know how to decide which of “you’re” and “your” and “yore” you want? Depending on your regional accent, the words within these groups may sound identical. Have you really selected the correct one? Do you know how to tell?

A dictionary will help in every case. If you look up the word you selected and the meaning turns out to be quite different from what you intended, look up similar-sounding words until you find the one you wanted. You may be surprised how many words are commonly used incorrectly or mistaken for each other in speech.

Identifying Your Pronouns

Fred went to his brother’s house to get his hat.

Whose hat is that? Can you tell from that sentence? I can’t: the hat could belong to either Fred or his brother, or even to someone else entirely. All we know is that it belongs to someone male.

Sometimes it feels awkward to identify a pronoun. In the above example neither “Fred went to his brother’s house to get Fred’s hat” nor “Fred went to his brother’s house to get his brother’s hat” sounds quite as satisfactory as the original. Yet you do want your reader to know just whose hat it is; otherwise she may fuss about it so much she doesn’t enjoy the rest of your story. Readers are like that.

The solution is to recast the sentence:

Fred went to his brother’s house to get the hat he left there the previous day.

This is still mildly ambiguous, but will be understood in context. The probability that it is Fred’s hat is increased.

Or if the hat belongs to the brother, you could say,

Fred went to his brother’s house to borrow a hat for the party.

It could be that Fred’s brother keeps a houseful of hats belonging to persons we have not met, but very likely he does not, and the hat in question actually belongs to him.

This sort of thing is important to the reader. If she is left in doubt as to whose a hat is, she will all too often keep worrying the problem long after a more rational being might have gone on to something else. What’s worse, she’ll bring it up again and again at the most inopportune moments, reminding anyone who’ll listen that she was left in doubt in the middle of your book (she may make it sound as bad as having been left without water in the middle of a desert) as to the ownership of a hat.

Far better simply to tell her at the first mention of it that the hat is Fred’s, or you may never hear the end of it. Nobody wants to spend her entire literary career worrying about Fred’s hat.

Being Consistent

Now that we have settled this pesky matter of the hat I feel comfortable mentioning that although the reader often seems to have only the frailest grasp of what’s going on and therefore needs every clue possible to stay abreast of the fictional situation, it is unwise to assume that he or she will overlook the smallest discrepancy in your logic.

Perhaps you think that the person who could not tell that was Fred’s hat you were talking about will not notice that Fred lived on Elm Street at the beginning of your novel and yet goes home to Ellis Street at the end with never a change of address mentioned in between. Not so. Readers will notice the oddest things.

If your protagonist puts down her blaster on page one, walks away from it, and yet has it handy in her holster to shoot another villain on page three, your reader will be testy about it.

If your protagonist has blue eyes and yellow hair on page forty-two, but has become a brown-eyed brunette by page ninety-eight, your reader will very likely be vexed.

There are a great many hazards in the path of a beginning writer that I have not even mentioned, and seemingly endless skills you will need to acquire. And when you have mastered them all, you will be left alone with that shockingly dense and perversely astute creature called “the reader,” who cannot be trusted to divine the ownership of a hat but will relentlessly examine your every apostrophe for its purpose, meaning, and needfulness.

That creature is the one to whom you are telling your stories. That is your audience, and it can be appeased only with the greatest of care and attention to detail. It will notice when you change tenses in mid-sentence. It will snarl when you change points of view without warning or explanation. It will show its teeth when you confuse it, and it will be easily confused … except when you want it confused so it won’t notice prestidigitation. Then it will remain steadfastly alert and attentive despite your best efforts to bludgeon it into insensibility.

That is the nature of the beast. Fortunately it is willing, even eager, to be amused. If you have done your research, mastered the tools of your trade, exercised all the skill at your command, and been consistent in your choices, you may please it.

Tags: beginners, Melisa Michaels, writing
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The Basics

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

As a writter, these sentences look odd to me.
This essay will be of interest to many writer’s and literary type’s.
I use to think things like this were a waist of time if you just want to write fiction.
Now I know that writers half to know there basics.

If you cannot find at least two errors in each of the above lines, this article is for you.

Those lines should read:

As a writer, I find that these sentences look odd.
This article will be of interest to many writers and literary types.
I used to think things like this were a waste of time if you just want to write fiction.
Now I know that writers have to know their basics.

We aren’t concerned here with flowing prose, glowing phrases, or any stylistic questions; before you worry about those things you need to know how to spell the words you want, how to choose from among similar words with different meanings, how to punctuate, and how to put the parts of a sentence together in such a way that the result makes sense.

Without this basic knowledge, not only will you have difficulty communicating, but you may produce unintentionally hilarious results. There are reasons for all the seemingly arbitrary rules of grammar and punctuation. Some of them can be dismissed once you know what they are; others cannot. To communicate what you really mean, you must know which rules can be safely broken; and to know that, you must know the rules.

The easiest way to learn them is (this is the good part) by reading the sort of fiction you want to write. But you have to (this is the hard part) pay attention to what you read. For best results you need to read a wide range of works by a number of authors, carefully noticing their spelling, punctuation, and grammar. And you need some way of determining which one is right when you find two or more of them in opposition on a given usage.

A copy of Strunk’s The Elements of Style, read carefully and its lessons taken to heart, will help you avoid the most common errors. Between that and a few dozen of your favorite novels you’ll have the beginning of a good education in accepted usage. Later you may choose to disagree with Strunk on certain points: but until you understand what he instructs and why, any deviation from his rules stands a good chance of getting you in trouble.

There are, of course, other works on usage and style that you might choose instead of Strunk. I suggest this one because it is not only available free on the web, but very small and inexpensive in paperback form, relatively easy to find, and as uncontroversial as an authoritative work on a sometimes ambiguous topic can be.

As you may already know, even the experts don’t agree on some usages. This may sound as though it provides a ready excuse for any, er, let us say original usages you may introduce in your prose, but it does not. You will realize when you’ve learned the rules yourself that the astute reader can tell the difference between rules broken by choice and those broken in ignorance. The former sort may be innovative, imaginative, even brilliant, or only a careful rendition of some common oral tradition. The latter sort will seldom be anything but illiterate or amusing (or both).

Even to successfully render the careless speech of the streets into printed words that will “sound” to the eye the way the oral version would sound to the ear, the author must know precisely what rules are used and what rules are broken.

This is not to say that all this knowledge must be available on a conscious level, that you must memorize parts of speech and rules of usage and punctuation as children used to do in grade school. That might or might not be valuable. What is invaluable, possibly indispensible, is that you should pay attention to these matters, know what you’re doing, and deviate from the accepted norm only by intention.

If the only way you can be certain of that is by learning remedial English by rote, then do so. If you already have a sufficient understanding of the parts of speech (whether or not you know them by name) that you can grasp the purpose of the rules laid down in Strunk, then you probably have no need of remedial English.

In any case and no matter what you wish to achieve with your use of words, language is your only real tool as a writer. You would not expect to successfully construct a wooden house without first learning how to use hammers, nails, saws, screws, and other woodworking tools (and quite probably practicing with them on smaller projects before embarking on the house). You should not expect to successfully construct a work of fiction without first learning the written language that will be your tool.

Of course, we all speak at least one language, and it is perhaps not amazing that so many people imagine that qualifies them to write in their native tongue. After all, they’ve been speaking it since babyhood. They are surely intimate with it by now.

What this does not take into account is the many differences between a spoken and a written language. You have no need, for example, to understand spelling and the rules of punctuation in order to accomplish oral communication. When you say, “the bare bear threw the ball through the wall,” the person to whom you say it will very probably be surprised, but she should have no trouble understanding your meaning.

If you were to write, “the bear bare through the ball threw the wall,” however, your reader would have to do strong mental contortions to get any sense out of it at all. Perhaps you can see from this alone that intimacy with a spoken language is not sufficient for the writer.

Punctuation presents some of the same problems. In speech you know when to hesitate for a comma and when to come to a full stop for a period. You’ve no need to know when spoken words should contain an apostrophe and when not. The person to whom you’re speaking will determine your meaning from context.

If, however, you, don’t. Know where’ to put; punc’tuation, in your” writing: you’ll run into some serious difficulties right quickly; and while many’s the writer who can’t spell worth a darn, we almost all of us know that “spelling” is not spelled “speling” and that “writer” is not spelled “writter.” I am dismayed to have to tell you that a great many hopeful writers do not. Very likely they are able to pronounce these words correctly and so do not, in their everyday activities, reveal their illiteracy: but they are probably not competent to write marketable prose. They have not acquired even a cursory familiarity with their tools.

Written language is the tool of the trade. With skilled use of it you can work wonders, build universes, create gods if you like, and entertain thousands. Without sufficient understanding to enable skill, you will more likely amuse by accident than by design.

Melisa Michaels is the author of the science fiction novels Skirmish, First Battle, Last War, Pirate Prince, Floater Factor, and Far Harbor, the fantasy novel Cold Iron,and the mystery novel Through the Eyes of the Dead.

Tags: beginners, Melisa Michaels, writing
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Breaking Into Print: What Length Sells Best?

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

Written by Melisa Michaels

There’s a lot of advice floating around as to how best to achieve those first sales. Some say you should write short stories to break in. Some say better yet, write short-shorts since they take less time. Some say forget the short stuff: the real market is novels.

The answer that is right for you depends on your ultimate goal. If you just want to see your name in print, the quickest way might be to rob a bank. If you want to see your work in print, the quickest way might be to write for fanzines or other small magazines that pay in contributors’ copies. If you want to build a career, forget quick ways. There are none.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, you can probably do it if you try hard enough. With a modicum of talent and a whole lot of work, you can learn your craft and begin to make those first sales.

But What Length Will Sell?

The answer to this question is simple: what will sell to the real paying markets is the best work their editors can find that matches their editorial guidelines. Yes, they may more often have room for one more short-short than for another novella. Yes, you might therefore be able to sell three good short-shorts while remaining unable to sell one good novella.

Unfortunately that does not mean it’s a good idea to concentrate on short-shorts to the exclusion of novellas (or short stories, or novels), if what you want to do is build a career. You can’t learn as much writing short-shorts as you can writing short stories: there just isn’t room in a short-short for the kind of world-building, character development, plotting, etc. that are essential in longer works.

If you have a brilliant idea for a great short-short, by all means write it. Study the markets and get it in the mail to an editor who might like it. Then write something else. If you mean eventually to write longer works, start now.

But don’t start with the first book of an endless series in which the individual novels don’t stand alone: that will be no more useful to you than short-shorts. Works at either end of the length spectrum will teach you the least. Settle somewhere in the middle if you can, where you have room to develop all the skills you need as a writer, but where you also have some boundaries.

Short stories are adequate to develop basic plotting skills, and they will teach you word-management: you won’t have room to waste any. Novellas and novelettes will help you hone your plotting skills, world-building, and character development. Novels will give you room for more complex plotting, sub-plots, and all the skills required for the shorter works. Any length will give you practice in pacing.

Yes, But Which Length Should I Write?

I’ve been avoiding the real answer because it will almost certainly disappoint.

You must write your story just the length it needs to be.

In the final analysis, the best length to write is always the length the idea requires. Begin at the beginning and write until you reach the end. If you really want to be a good writer, don’t worry about markets until after the work is written. And don’t worry about wasting time writing some “wrong” length: no time spent writing is wasted. Not if you are writing to the best of your ability, working at it, and learning. In that case every hour spent writing is an hour spent honing your craft.

Okay, Then What’s the Secret to Making Sales?

Hard work. That’s it. That’s the secret.

The learning and honing process is unending. There will never come a day when you can say, “That’s it: I know all there is to know about writing and can sell my work from now on.” Very likely the best you’ll be able to say is that you’ve done your best, that the current work is finished, and that you think it may be marketable in its present state. (You’ll also know at that point how long the work is.) Good. Study the markets again, send it out, and start another.

Unfortunately when you’ve finished the next piece you may have learned enough to realize that the previous piece was not quite as good as you imagined at the time. Get used to it: if you’re good and work hard at this business, that will become a familiar sensation. It means you’re doing something right. You’re learning.

I Still Don’t Know Whether to Write Short Stories or Novels

One of the things you will learn to judge as you go along is how much room an idea is going to require to be told the way you want to tell it. You will learn to know the idea for a short story from that for a novel before either is written; and the idea for a short-short from either of the others. Novellas and novelettes are more difficult to tell from novels in the raw idea form, but you’ll know the idea for either from that for a short story or a short-short once you’ve had some practice.

Even then it should be your need, not the market, that determines which you choose to write. If you have an idea that is going to require a six hundred thousand word manuscript to do it justice, it would probably be best to put that one aside till you’ve made a name for yourself since really long novels are a greater risk for the publisher and therefore harder to sell; and if you happen to have an idea that’s going to come out just the length needed by one of the better-paying markets it would do no harm to give that idea priority. But for the most part, if your goal is to build a career by becoming the best writer you can be, it is wiser to concentrate on what you need to write than on what you think will sell.

But You Haven’t Told Me How to Break Into Print

Yes I have. There are five steps to the process, and each is crucial:

1. Write.
2. Study the markets.
3. Send out your work.
4. Write.
5. Write.

Tags: Intermediate, Melisa Michaels, Michaels, writing
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