Often you can just plunge ahead, note that it needs to be there and add it later, on the edit.
This wasn’t one of those.
It took me two WEEKS, but I finally got it.
Very small scene. Most people will never figure why it could give anybody trouble—but brother! Such a pain!
As a rule, the hardest scenes to write are the little ones that ‘direct’ a mood or opinion. This is why most people don’t understand the writerly rule “show, don’t tell.” What it really means is—take the reader on that mental trip: don’t just narrate it…TAKE him there.
I submitted a (perhaps too long?) comment, but it’s not showing up yet. I’m assuming it’s awaiting moderation. I’ve saved the text in case. The comment was in reply to Raesean’s question about file format and beta reader comments.
Had 3 in the spam filter… now cleared.
Sometimes it gets too helpful.
Yay, my comment did make it out of the filter and onto the previous page. Thank you. 🙂
@Raesean: A friend has commented on the 1st 3 sections of the novel and I find myself disagreeing often when he writes “why is she doing this?” and “So what did she think?” He also frequently doesn’t like my vivid language and tendency towards alliteration and animate objects. I’m too close to the writing right now to always know when he’s got a good point and when it’s a personal preference difference.
I’m touched by Asperger’s Syndrome; one of the “1 in 88” we hear about with some form of ASD. I’m working on a novel myself (not everybody with ASD is linguistically challenged), and tried joining a couple local writers’ groups. Neither turned out well, and I’m sure it was because of the Asperger’s. What you describe is something like my reactions to some of the writing from members of those groups. So my advice to you is, do consider the source. And always remember, you are the author.
Personally, I hate it when editors change words for synonyms, or punctuation reflecting my “voice”. “You’re the editor, not the author! Go write your own, your way!”
Heinlein had a big dustup with Herbert Gold about this. Gold changed a lot of the language in the serial version of The Puppet Masters. It’s all in grumbles From The Grave.
Sometimes the writer knows best what he’s doing and where he’s going, and if the editor isn’t ‘getting it’ you need a new editor or you need to beef up something prior to the point the editor was grousing about.
Also, making something ‘accessible’ for less skilled readers means more readers. Dumbing something down for unskilled readers loses you readers at the upper end of the scale. This is the eternal battle.
But in the theory that language is meant to communicate, it is useful to put in, near the beginning of a paragraph, (because your less skilled readers may not reach the bottom,) some simple statement that will let them get the gist of what follows. No, it’s not a ‘topic sentence,’ in that antique way they used to ask you to write paragraphs. It’s more like a guidepost to steer your readers onto your mental track.
Knowing when to paragraph helps, too, and a paragraph should happen any time the writer thinks the reader needs to take a mental breath and get a fresh thought on the topic. Readers read the first sentence of a paragraph, even if they miss the rest.
So the more often you paragraph (within sensible limits) the more you can steer the reader to the thoughts you most want him to catch.
What’s your position on when a character’s saying something that has two thoughts, two paragraphs? I’ve seen some styles where the closing quote of the first pararaph is elided. (I’ve so rarely gotten to use that word. 🙂 ) It seems you tend to ping-pong between characters, so I don’t notice it too much in your books.
Hmmm… this “guidepost lead” to a paragraph is not something I had thought of before. I will have to overtly look at some of my more dense, complex paragraphs and see if it helps. In writing non-fiction or giving academic talks, I often try to use clauses to give/clue in the uninformed about background knowledge without boring the informed with flat, declarative statements. Ex. “At Flodden — that worst of all Scottish losses to the English — Scotland also lost the best of its kings” to give background knowledge while making a point about the king himself. (Indeed, my novel’s premise responds to that historic statement with “but what if…?”). Artistically fitting in a guidepost lead sentence into a paragraph would be an interesting technique challenge.
I try not to do that, simply because the rule says do not close quotes, just put a second beginning quote. The ability of typesetters to screw that up is amazing; and readers don’t see it anyway. Make someone else interrupt the person to break it up and avoid that problem if at all possible.
Or interrupt it with some “business” by the speaker. e.g., describing an expression or a movement or a change in tone of voice, or such like. I’ve used that trick to good effect. It breaks up the piece of dialog in a natural feeling way.
Speaking of “ping-pong” dialogue, don’t know if anybody is familiar with Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books, but one of the ways they have of telling if a person is “real” or a character from a book who’s escaped into the real world is they can’t follow a “ping-pong” conversation where the speakers are not identified, whereas a real person can. I would describe Fforde’s Thursday Next books and the “spin-off” Nursery Crimes books as “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” for English majors. I think they’re hysterical, myself.
Typesetters? Didn’t they go the way of lead type and linotype machines? Isn’t the majority of the text done by the author’s typing, and “digital compositing” amount to little more than font selection, margination and pagination?
Oh, to a certain extent…they’re now ‘users’ of computer programs. But books are not laser-printed. The copyeditors now increasingly use computer mark-up—as of this last year, at DAW; and I do my counter-check on computer, as of this last year. And the file then goes to the book designer, who PROBABLY enters it as a file modification; and then it goes to the printer, who, yes, has software—at last report a software that nothing much these days talks to, but there are conversions; it talks in printer code, which gets the file ready for printing and a galley print is how you spot final errors. It’s no longer ‘inserts must match the space created and include kerning’ —they’re pretty liberal with inserted or dropped lines—so long as they don’t change a page count or chapter placement. Then it goes to the big ‘bedsheet’ presses, which probably haven’t changed since Victoria was queen. In the 1960’s four of these monster presses, running day and night, handled all paperback printing in the USA.
Er, not quite. Somewhere in the process, the typesetter’s job of proper typography is supposed to come into play. There used to be a typesetter who composited manuscript text into galleys. Now, though, it’s generally one of the jobs of the designers in the graphic design / publication design department. It’s their job to take the raw text (or basic styled text), apply more expert styles, and go through both automatic search-and-replace and manual adjustments to get the text to professional quality typesetting. They do fiddly stuff with adjusting word and letter spacing, leading, f-ligatures, proper punctuation marks, and various arcane things too disturbing for the uninitiated. 😉
That said, it may be done at another step in the process, though it’s the designer’s job to check these. Also, these days, a lot of things that were once handled by various people during a multi-stage process now are done by only a few people, meaning each person must wear multiple hats. In days of yore, the typesetter got the type ready, it wasn’t up to the designer except to be sure there wasn’t something that needed to be redone.
BCS, who has worn that computer typesetter’s hat and a few others. 🙂
What BCS said (another former typesetter here. Had to do SOMETHING with that Fine Art degree!)
These days, too many publishers mistake spell-check for editing and copy-checking. We might be making progress in that direction, but grammar and homonyms are apparently still arcane devices to many software programs.
“Grammar”, sez you? Lemme go talk to Sam and Huck about yer grammar. 😉 I sez what I wants ter say most times!
Unless you culture is like that of the Navajo, that will happen anyway. I lose some of my best thoughts that way, and gain unexpected ones.
Thank you all for excellent suggestions on beta draft format for readers; confirmation that writers should not “poison a reader’s mind” with upfront questions and the really useful summary list of what areas readers should direct their general comments on, also the wise advice one may need different readers for different aspects of the work. I heartily agree on using a .doc and not newer .docx format (and the rich text format suggestion is very useful too. I’m not certain I can access the writeable Adobe Acrobat format easily enough but it sounds tempting for those who can). BCShip’s detailed list is very handy and welcome.
The praise of TracChanges shocked me because I despise it and far prefer putting my own edits of group documents in an alternate color, but it just occurred to me I have mostly experienced this bane of the MSWord world in the context of line by line, “group edit” of documents and you all are (thankfully) recommending that beta readers primarily limit themselves to comments, not rearranging the writer’s actual words, which would make the TracChanges page look very different.
I’m going to save all the suggestions in a separate file on my computer, so I can check back on them without having to burrow deeply into the blog. I welcome any more if I am not overly directing the flow of the comments.
In re Track Changes versus color versus line-by-line —
I’ve seen Track Changes do odd things sometimes and I’ve seen beta readers and authors ignore it or not know how to use it.
Heck, if it bothers you, then do something which works better for you. 🙂
One option is to create a new Paragraph Style in the Styles and Formatting list. (As someone with publication / design experience, stylesheets are your friends.) Call the new Para Style something like BetaJohn, BetaMary, etc. and you can set up more than one, or simply BetaReader, and set color, font and so on to show at a glance these are notes. Then make sure beta readers know when they insert a new paragraph, use that style. It is also possible to create Character Styles for words and phrases within a paragraph. Be aware Word and other programs do strange things when exporting Char. Styles, but they are useful. A Char. Style would be for inserting a beta reader comment within an author’s paragraph.
Yes, to me, inserting a bunch of comments straight into the text, even line-by-line, is messy and tends to get confusing. My preference is to markup within the text as little as possible, and put comments elsewhere, say as endnotes.
I recall seeing one older version word processor where one could insert notes as though they were sticky notes or marginalia, which to me was very handy, but the people I was working with didn’t “get it,” using that confused them or they didn’t know how to use it, so we went back to notes within the text.
Re Acrobat, I have very mixed feelings there. Too many frustrations with early versions that converted way too much into images instead of text, and so on. And with Adobe, the price and killing off Freehand in favor or Illustrator. — But Acrobat is used as a tool for markup and production as was noted.
So try things out and use what works best for you. 🙂
To me, it points out the need for better ways of marking up editing changes and group work.
And…I wish WordPerfect had a Mac version again. (They tried one, many moons ago, and stopped it.)
I think I’m doing something like Raesean does. I put notes to myself, even/especially references to “canon”, right in the text (on separate lines/paragraphs), but I use a different text style, “Normal text 2” IIRC, with a different font, dark blue text on a medium light grey background. When I’m all done and I want “clean copy”, well, I’m not quite sure how to remove those comments once and for all, but I know it’s easy to scan for the lines with the grey background, highlight and delete them forever.
Re: PDF’s
I try hard not to pay for software, leading me to build my own Linux systems. I’ve never had R/W access to PDF files, though there may be some FOSS PDF packages that have it. PDF was intended as a printer ready format rather than word processor, so I tend to leave it at that.
I find Word Perfect’s Compare function serves me well to tell changes between two files. I can also upload any galley which come in as Word files and get the original file, and have Word Perfect tell me, in specific, every comma and dot that’s been changed.
PDF is kind of nice, but it does have its problems. It doesn’t play well with others: if you try to cut from a PDF, you lose or mangle formatting, at least on Windows. It is possible to create files that take a completely unreasonable amount of CPU power to render; I’m not quite sure what people are doing to create these files, but taking seconds to render the next page and not being able to scroll smoothly are unreasonable. Also, PDFs are extensible, which sounds good, but means they can contain anything, including malware (see Wikipedia). I think these factors are why Firefox and Windows 8 have their own PDF rendering programs.
Hmm. Sounds like I’m the only person who likes pdfs. I’m working on a Mac, so maybe that makes a difference. I also do extensive marking up on my critiques (for instance, I marked up a friend’s mss, and he was using ‘um’ to indicate realistic speech patterns of teenagers, and I finally started circling them when I realized he had 20-30 ‘um’s per page. A lot easier using a pen on a tablet and just drawing little circles than to place a cursor and insert a comment over and over. ) But I bow to the majority! 🙂 And I admit pdfs take forever to print. And cutting text gets dicey. But I don’t do either of those things, so…
Well, if it works for you and your clients and boss, then it’s useful.
I wish the editing markup tools worked more like that, as though each person’s editing comments went on a separate layer with the author’s original on the bottom layer, something like layers in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Freehand. Yes, being able to circle something, draw arrows, add a sticky note for production or the author or the graphic artists…very useful.
Oh, and Tom and Huck or George and Lenny, for instance, are good examples of where that editor needs to understand the writer’s style. Those would not be the same books if everyone spoke perfect English in them.