“[When XXX happens], you’ve got to reign them in.”

Unfortunately, it’s all too common a mistake. Sorry, no. You’ve go to rein them in. I suppose an argument could be made that you’ve got to rule them, and a rule is a reign, but it’s a pretty hollow argument.

Reign

1. period of rule: the period of time during which somebody, especially a king or queen, rules a nation
2. control or influence: the fact of being the dominant or controlling power or factor in something, or the period of time during which this dominance persists
3. rule a nation: to exercise sovereign power or a controlling influence over something, especially to rule a country as its king or queen

Rein

1. strap for controlling a horse (or another animal): a strap, or each half of a strap, by which a horse is controlled by its rider or by the driver of a coach or cart it is pulling
2. exercise of power: any means of guiding, controlling, or restraining somebody or something

(Definitions adapted from Encarta)

There are so many ways in which this book stinks that it’s difficult to know where to begin, so I’ll just jump in.

1. Dated research.
   
   There were so many references to the 1992 US presidential election, and to fashions and fads of the time, that I honestly thought the author was writing in his own past, and was striving (too hard) to establish the timeframe. But, no, the copyright date is 1993, and the book very likely was written during the election season.

2. “As you know, Bob…”

   If there’s anything that drives me nuts, it’s having the characters explain things to each other solely so that the readers can keep up.

3. Excessive character descriptions.

   Every time a new character comes on stage, we get two or three paragraphs of physical description, life story, political attitudes, and so forth.

4. Shallow characters.
   
   In spite of all that backstory. Perhaps he should simply have shut up and let the characters speak for themselves?

5. Plot twists that exist solely to let Deus ex machina reach down into the diorama and mess with things.

   The biker and the Mexican steal some cargo in a very opportunistic manner, but when it becomes handier for it to have been planned, well, then, that’s what it was. Don’t go back and fix it, just declare it planned.

6. Secrets. As in, hide stuff from the reader, as in:
   

   “Could you go to the home of the dead man and search for two thousand pairs of US Navy shoes?” Bobbie asked, and then she had a long conversation with Rojas concerning her investigation.

   After she hung up she dialed Fin’s number, but got his answering machine. She dialed Nell’s number and got another machine. She hung up and experienced the longest afternoon of her life. She called Fin and Nell no less than fifteen times, leaving several messages for each of them. The messages sounded progressively more impatient and more excited.

   Could we maybe be told what Rojas told her? No. Too much to ask.

7. Poorly written dialogue, part A: Bad dialect.
   
   One of the main characters is a Mexican citizen, but he speaks normal, idiomatic American English, with a normal American vocabulary and cadence. Replacing all of his “i” sounds with “ee,” and writing “joo” instead of “you,” doesn’t make him sound Mexican, it just makes him hard to read. I’ve read dialogue written by masters of understatement, where you can hear the music and rhythm of the voice, without any misspelled words. Here, the words are misspelled, but the voice still sounds like American English.

   Another main character is a biker/thug dude. (I did mention shallow characters, right? Yeah, there’s also a 45-year-old male failing actor/failing cop and a 40-year-old female failing cop worried about her age, and a peppy little high-school-cheerleader type with a blond bob and a big Colt .45 and a dapper white-collar-crime-boss and… It’s about as real as the characters in the Village People.) Anyway, the biker/thug dude reads his lines like he never quite found his motivation, and the director just said “Ok, well, throw in a cuss word now and then, and that will be good enough.”

8. But the absolute worst part, bar none, was “Poorly written dialogue, part B: Bad diction.”

   Every single time, throughout the book, that someone should say “should have,” “would have,” “want to,” “going to,” etc, we get “shoulda,” “woulda,” “wanna,” “gonna,” etc!

   Every single time. Yes, people sometimes speak like that, and yes, we sometimes need to write that, but not every time. Even if you were to argue that no one ever really enunciates properly, nonetheless, we should write as though they do in situations where we want the reader to assume the enunciation was normal (define normal as you will). Reserve shoulda coulda woulda spellings for when you want to say the the character is not enunciating. And lest you think I’m simply misreading, let me point out that the young peppy cheerleader chickie is a Navy (oh, by the way, “Navy,” referring to the United States Navy, is seldom capitalized in this book) petty officer, whose “over-formality” is pointed out to us several times, who habitually uses “sir” and “ma’am,” and she can’t say “would have” or “want to”?

   At one point, the petty officer and the aging cop/actor are getting drunk. We’re told repeatedly that they’re stumbling, that their chins are slipping off their palms and their elbows off the table. We’re told that they lose enough inhibitions that the petty officer is sitting in a man’s lap and being bounced “like a child,” yet their speech never changes!

And, what, you ask, does any of this have to do with self-publishing?

I suppose you’re sitting there thinking to yourself “So what? So that one author should have gotten that one book edited. So what does that have to do with me?”

Well, speaking of hiding things from the reader, I was being a little facetious with my title, because in fact, this book is “traditionally” published!

This book, Finnegan’s Week, was written by Joseph Wambaugh, published by William Morrow and Company, and presumably was edited by someone.

So there you go. That’s the famous gatekeeping value of the corporate bulwarks of publishing, keeping the poorly-written stuff off the market in order to protect the value of all that machinery they sit on, that we need access to so badly in order to publish our little attempts that we’re willing to jumps through the irrelevant hoops of the query/conform/requery pablum-grinding process in order to get our chance at fifteen seconds in the sun.

At least it was free, from Michael’s Books.

• They are a couple.
• It is a retreat for couples.

In others, you cannot:

• I will list a couple of examples here.
• She has a couple of books in her house.

Here’s the key: replace couple with pair, and see if you need of:

• They are a pair.
• NOT: They are a pair of.
• It is a retreat for pairs.
• NOT: It is a retreat for pairs of.
• I will list a pair of examples here.
• NOT: I will list a pair examples here.
• She has a pair of books in her house.
• NOT: She has a pair books in her house. (We’ll disregard the fact that “couple” in this usage was probably not meant to be literal.)

End o’ the rant. Please carry on.

To the first, I say that if teh is a perfectly valid way to spell the, then so is xdz. If there is no “correct” spelling, then how can any spelling possibly be incorrect? If there is no “correct” syntax (the branch of grammar dealing with the construction of sentences), then “He threw the ball to her” and “He threw her to the ball” obviously mean exactly the same thing. Yes, language changes. Words are made up, every single one of them, and there is nothing in life that says we’re done doing that. Words will be made up every day in every language, words will change meanings, words will change spellings. But unless and until a new spelling or meaning ceases to be seen as sub-standard, then if you use it, your writing will be seen, by extension, as sub-standard. If that’s what you want, that’s fine by me.

To the second group, the ones asking what diction is, I say this:

Diction (as in dictionary) is word choice.

Stories are made up of words (and words inherently tell, they do not show, but that’s a different rant). Word choice may very well be the single most important tool an author has available. One of the most memorable assignments from all of the creative writing classes I ever took (all of which were in high school – all my post-secondary education is in industrial design and manufacturing technology) was this:

• Pick a story from today’s news. Pick one for which you can see a “pro” side and a “con” side, such as a report of an alleged crime, in which you can assume guilt or innocence.
• Get out your trusty thesaurus and change the article. You’re going to do this twice, once making the article strongly “pro,” and once making it strongly “con.”
• You’re going to do this solely by replacing words with different words, words listed as synonyms of the word you’re changing.

Do not add or subtract anything, do not use any scare quotes (the “alleged” suspect, etc), don’t use any antonyms. Replace every word you think needs to be changed, but only with a synonym. You might be amazed at how differently you look at words (and at the news stories you read) after trying this a few times.

The word you’re looking for isn’t just different.

It’s the right word. There is one perfect word for the use you have in mind. There are a bunch more that are close enough and will work, and there are a bunch of choices that are just plain wrong, synonym or not. You can’t just change words because they seem too simple, or too common, or too over-used. Pick a register of diction and use it, at least for that one character, or that particular encounter, or whatever. When a character says “Put on your trousers,” we get an entirely different resonance than if the character says “Put on your pants.” The words themselves carry different denotations and different connotational clouds, and the use of a particular word also says something about the character.

So watch your diction!

Further reading:

How to Write Badly Well, 11 Jan 2010

There’s No Such Thing as a Synonym

I can’t tell you how much I hate it when an illogical, inaccurate phrase becomes a common saying, or acts as a phrasal template for all sorts of things, as this one does. (And let’s not even go into that whole glisters/glistens/glitters thing, ok?)

• All men (women, people, cars, bloggers, little green men with pink polka-dots) are not equal.
• All trees are not oaks.
• and yes, All that glitters is not gold.

The fact is that some things that glitter are gold. Some trees are oaks. Some members of whatever set you cite in the first case will be equal in whatever way you are talking about, and as long as that is true, then it is simply logically false to state that the opposite is true.

If: ALL trees are NOT OAKS (that is, all members of the set of all trees are members of the set of things which are not oaks)

Then: NO trees are OAKS (that is, no members of the set of all trees are members of the set of all things which are oaks)

Simple logic dictates that the form of the phrase should be “Not all that glitters is gold.”

He’s studied the Rules extensively, not so that he’ll know what to do and what not to do, but so that he’ll know what to do openly and what to sneak around at.

–The Bumbler’s Apprentice, Other Loves

“The Rules of Drafting,” the teacher writes across the top of the board, in large squeaky letters. Underneath, he writes “1” like he’s starting a list. He circles it, but he doesn’t actually list anything for “1.” Instead, he turns to the class and asks us to guess.

Well, it’s a first-year drafting class. There aren’t many guesses. Twenty students, all boys. The girls are all in home-ec. Yeah, I know, but this is many, many years ago. To give you an idea how long ago it was: you had to have a slide rule to take the class. What? Yes, I’ll wait while you go google “slide rule.”

Oh, good – you’re back. You know what a slide rule is now? Cool. My chosen career path being what it was (industrial design), I thought “Well, I’d better get a good one. I’ll need it all my life.” So I blew about four week’s pay from a part-time job on a used fourteen-inch, 32 scale, K&E Log Log Duplex Decitrig. Several years older than myself, it was made of laminated bamboo, with ivory faces (yeah, the elephant stuff – this was a long time ago), and a rock crystal cursor with an adjustable hairline made from a single strand of a horse’s tail. By the time my high school career was over, it wasn’t worth five bucks, shot as dead as any crippled horse by a smart-aleck upstart called the HP-35.

Back to the drafting class. There were three of us who had taken similar classes before, and we offered our guesses as to the “First Rule of Drafting.”

“Always use the alphabet of lines?” asked the boy on my left.

“Not it,” said the teacher.

“Use the proper tolerances on your dimensions,” said the boy to my right.

“Not it,” said the teacher, but he hiked one eyebrow up above his scalp a foot or so, which we were to learn meant he was impressed.

“In the beginning was the centerline,” I said, cribbing from last year’s teacher, three thousand miles away.

He just points at me for a good five seconds, his eyebrow hovering up there like magic.

“No,” he says finally. “But that’s a good one. I’ll make that number two.” He turns to the board and writes “Anytime anything can be gained in clarity by breaking any of the rules of drafting, including this one, break it, but only when there is a gain in clarity.”

Drafting, he explained, is communication. You are creating a set of instructions and directions. In all communications, clarity is paramount. The rules exist to provide clarity, and nine times out of ten, clarity will be best served by obeying them. But when the rules stand in the way of clarity, go around them.

My career path turned out to have a good many more speed bumps and u-turns in it than I had expected, but it did eventually come back around to drafting and industrial design, and I never forgot the “First Rule of Drafting.” Somewhere along the way, I lost my slide rule and gained a scary understanding of such new things as personal computers, MS-DOS, and linear track drafting machines. Then another upstart called AutoCad killed off the linear track. I acquired some advancements to my education, and I ended up in charge of a network of some pretty high-powered machines, but I never forgot that rule and that floating eyebrow.

Through the processes of interviewing and hiring, I discovered that the truly excellent drafter always looks like he’s obeying the rules, even when he isn’t, because the rare violations are so necessary and the need so obvious that the violation becomes its own kind of obedience, obedience to the higher goal, clarity. This philosophy carries over into other aspects of the drafter’s professional life, including résumé writing.

I never had to advertise an opening. In a typical week, I might get twenty résumés, of which I’d toss at least nineteen. I’d scan them in seconds, looking for mistakes. I didn’t care about schooling, or work experience, or references. Not first. You want me to hire you, you want me to sit you down in front of my computer, and give you the big bucks to crank out communication documents for my bosses, but you can’t take communication seriously enough to see to it that your own résumé is correct?!

So what’s my point, you ask.

Why am I dragging in all this stuff about drafting? Because drafting is communication. And so is writing. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, it has to begin with you. Take yourself seriously enough to learn the craft, and to hone it every chance you get. Learn the rules, and learn when to obey them and when breaking them will better serve your purpose.

There are any number of good reference books. Many of them can be read online, and all of them can be purchased with a mouse click and a piece of plastic. Failing that, ask someone. Ask someone, if you need to know whether to say its or it’s, who’s or whose. Ask someone, if you need to know where the apostrophe goes (or if it goes) in a given contraction or possessive. Ask about grammar, syntax, spelling, diction, anything. If you’re embarrassed about asking your friends, then email me. I’ll keep your secret, and I’ll help you become a better writer. And if I don’t know, then I’ll ask someone, and I’ll pretend it’s just for me.

Every piece you ever write, online or off, story or post, comment or novel, is your résumé. Every single time you fail to capitalize, every single wrong word, every error of grammar, is another reader lost.

Fiction’s forgiving. You can do all kinds of things and get away with it. You can always claim it’s character voicing, at the very least. But you see, you have to look good doing it. If your writings look like the scribblings of someone who doesn’t know the rules, or who doesn’t care about them, then you can’t expect respect.

Here’s a hint, a general rule of thumb: if you’re not reading at least a couple of hours a day, you’re probably not taking your craft seriously enough. Just from where I sit, without even moving, I can see two dictionaries, the best thesaurus ever published, seven books on writing, four novels, and a book of short stories. That’s just the stuff that’s piled up in here since the last time my wife got after me about getting my stuff off the kitchen table! Each and every one of these is a way for me to learn, a place to see rules being followed and rules being broken, a place to hone my craft on the mistakes and successes of others. Build your own pile, and plow it assiduously, and you can’t help but improve your writing.

Read. Write. Repeat.