a place of our own“Sit down, and I’ll make you an ass whooper.”
“Thanks! Those are the most gorgeous cookies.”
“But they’re fattening.”
“Oh, I’ll do some jump rope later.”
“Things like this are so much easier here than back at the apartment.”
“It’s wonderful to have a place of our own.”
“It’ll be even better when we get some furniture. I would so love a bookcase.”
“The sofa will do for now.”
smooth as a sunsetUnderneath the fancy bustle, her naked bottom was small. Her inability to afford surgery to augment it drove Shirley to clench her fists and stomp her feet in frustration. She was too young to produce movies, which was her life’s ambition, and this led to more frustration.
“Why did I ever move to Hollywood?” she wailed.
Shirley’s moment of self-doubt was interrupted by a loud knock at her door. It was a truck-driver bang, she thought, but when she opened the door she found not a truck driver, but the President of Midnight, Mink McGee, with his pale, pale skin and his auburn hair as smooth as a sunset. The look in his deep blue eyes told Shirley that Mink did not find her naked bottom too small.
Wes Anderson says details are what the world is made of, and his logic is difficult to dispute. They’re certainly the constituent particles of a story, and also of the manuscript that conveys it. Subtle changes of phrasing have a strong impact on the flavor and fluidity of prose. Little things matter.
Consider:
It was clear that no one else knew the secret.
As opposed to…
It was clear no one else knew the secret.
Or, more to Ernest’s liking:
No one else knew.
Which one is best? The only honest answer to that is the unhelpful “it depends,” but a reliable guideline is to use the fewest words that support the message. Arguably, that something’s clear can go unstated. So, the first two drafts might be burdened with superfluous observation. But the ultra-terse third variant might throw readers for a POV loop because it feels like direct thought. Cultivate a strong sense of the style and voice you’re working in, and pick your cuts accordingly.
When it’s time to stomp the weasels, you’re faced with such choices over and over. Every sentence could potentially be a different sentence. In fact, many alternate selves haunt each one. And these are important choices.
How you tell it is every bit as important as the tale. Stomping weasels with a partner will show you whether you’re in sync about the how of your storytelling. You’ll be lulled into thinking the process is purely mechanical, but certain blatantly extraneous words will be sacrosanct in your partner’s sight. And your partner will blithely suggest trimming your favorite verbiage.
Don’t be too eager to appease each other when these disputes arise. Talk them through, and read the passages aloud. These snags are clues to the nuances of how we each interpret language, and exploring them will help you converge on a voice that truly reflects you both.
Do you have them memorized?“Do you have them memorized?” Zelda asked Lorenzo, prompting him to glance up from her breasts in embarrassment. Decades of gravity tugging at her cheeks had made her countenance sorrowful and her pants ill-fitting, yet had somehow left her bosom unravaged.
Lorenzo lifted the tent flap to peer outside, and decided it was safe. But after two strides, a pale glow rippling above the strongman’s skin told of his miscalculation as he suddenly froze in place.
“By the crossed eyes of the Jumbo! I am captured!”
Zelda poked her head out of the tent and immediately saw the culprit: a force-projecting depantser, which she recognized by its vermilion tailfeathers as the animal disappeared into the forest. Lorenzo would be fine in a moment, but his pants were gone forever, added to the depantser’s hoard. As Lorenzo blushed, Zelda imagined the cave, filled with great plaid bags of trousers.
bonus points for using them in order!
Is it a sea dragon?“There will be no tribunal, Humpries,” Abercrombie said as he dropped the feather in the sand where it joined the coagulating pool of the fortune teller’s blood. “You will be banished and I will simply hire another troupe of acrobatic midgets to take your place.”
Humpries wobbled on his spindly legs. He hadn’t expected to be caught in the act of murder. He had expected time in which to cleverly stage the scene so that the superstitious carnies would all wonder aloud, “Is it a sea dragon? What else could have done this?”
But instead he’d been found out. Humphries couldn’t bear the thought of banishment. He felt that he could already weep from loneliness as he watched Abercrombie stalk away across the beach.
Perhaps, thought Humpries, the sea dragon could leave two victims…
Our process is now firmly established and fairly predictable. But every book is different. And when you forget, they remind you. Just when you think you know what to expect, it’s back to the drawing board.
The later stages of revision, for us, include deweaseling and line editing. Both are fine-grained views of the text, and we’ve discussed the possibility of combining them so we can save ourselves one whole pass through the manuscript. So far, at least, we feel it’s worth the additional time to do it in two passes because they’re really not all that similar, mentally. It’s beneficial to look at every sentence several times, in different lighting.
When we went through this process with the Music Novel we trimmed out a significant percentage of the words. Now, we’re going through it with the Science Novel and finding that those results are inapplicable. There are fewer weasel words in it to begin with, apparently. The line editing is also much more challenging, and it’s leading to more… negotiations than last time.
All authors see changes in their style over time. More practice should mean cleaner, crisper writing at each stage. When two people write together, their combined experience is reflected in the manuscript. What Kent and Jen have found is that they can each now “do the voice” whereas in the early days they had to go over each other’s work to bring it into line. Interesting that this maturation seems to be leading to new difficulties during revision.
Overall, though, it’s a huge win. We might be finding issues in our workflow that weren’t there before, but we’re also getting from concept to completed draft to polished manuscript with much less effort and in far fewer iterations. Working well as a team has a lot to do with that.
civilians were too nervous to stick aroundThe Overseer came to my section today, on his Knucklehead. I noted how strange and stiff he sat as he rode past me, and how his eyes roamed every inch of me. Instantly, I was chilled to the bone. Roxie nudged me under the table and, having nothing better to do with her time, suggested we work a little congealed bacon grease into our hands. I returned her smile, but inside, my troops were frantically digging trenches. My inner civilians were too nervous to stick around.
embraced this tree and weptThree years ago I ran into this forest, embraced this tree, and wept. Three years ago I caught my boyfriend Larry screwing around with the girls from the nearby private academy. Three years ago I got so mad that the power of my fury was great enough to make rocks fry eggs in a 2 meter diameter circle around me, but when I opened my mouth to give Larry “The Boot,” as they say, something froze me before the sound left my tongue. I have spent the past three years trying to figure out why I couldn’t tell Larry off, and I have concluded that it was possibly due to the polka-dot bow tie he was wearing.
bonus points for using them in order!
Writing collaboratively with your spouse can be a very rewarding experience. We’ve talked numerous times about how we do it. I won’t bother with links, because it’s the topic of, like, nearly every Friday post.
There are times, though, when being married to your coauthor isn’t great for the project. One of the best things about having a writing partner, being able to cover for each other, becomes infeasible — if not impossible — when dealing with certain interruptions.
For instance, we recently celebrated our anniversary. Yay us! But that meant that we both took time away from working on our fiction at the same time. We also recently took our son on a college visit. Again, yay family time! Yay smart kid! And again, the manuscript sat idle.
Birthdays, vacations, anniversaries, family outings, weddings, medical emergencies. When you’re married to your writing partner, life hits you both at the same time. You need to accept that there will be times in the life cycle of a manuscript when neither of you is able to advance the work. In our partnership it’s Jen who feels stress when the project sits idle for too long (“too long” being a very relative term). Luckily for her she has Kent to talk her down and dive in with her when it’s time to get back to work.
I have been pregnant for five daysA midnight spot check revealed Denise carrying a white dove and a green hat. When asked to explain herself, she said, “I have been pregnant for five days. He slung the towel over his shoulder, and I heaved him over a hip, and that was all it took.”