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The Writing Coach: Don’t Be Fixin’ to Get Ready
Editing one’s own writing can be a journey of self-discovery, especially when one edits a fantasy series of over two million words. In that much writing, one is bound to find evidence of one’s writing and thinking foibles. I found two bits in an earlier round of editing, and now I have found another. My character never does things. Instead, he starts to do things.
I started distributing money . . .
No, no, Jack, distribute the money. Don’t start to do it.
Now, I am a Southron, and fixin’ to get ready to do something is not unusual for me. And since my character is not a Southron, I can’t have him fixin’ to get ready. Instead, he starts to do things. But about a million-and-a-half words in, I decided maybe he ought to do things rather than starting to do things. Thus I am editing out many of these starts or false starts and simplifying down to have my character do what he’s supposed to do.
In the current volume I am editing, which has a bit over 110,000 words, I have some version of the word “start” 219 times. I bet I don’t need more than ten of them. The rest are all fixin’ to get ready. And I’m fixin’ to get ready to purge them.
The others started bringing their contributions in and setting them on the table.
Or maybe the others brought their contributions in and set them on the table. That’s one more writing habit to be paranoid about for me. No more fixin’ to get ready or its non-Southron equivalents.
How about you? Have any foibles to add to my writing paranoia list? Notice any of your own bad habits? Have other tales of writing discovery or insights into the human condition?
Published in Work and Hobbies
I mean, sometimes I think I have a tendency to dilute the impact of my sentences by adding superfluous subjective qualifiers like “I mean”, “I think”, or ” I have a tendency to”.
I do it to weasel in case it turns out to be wrong.
Well done, I must say.
Weaseling out of things is what separates man from the animals. Except the weasel. Despite that noble goal, in most sentences “I think” can be assumed.
So too.
My sentences run on and on sometimes. I try to get too much information into the beginning. I’ll rearrange a sentence without noting that I’ve changed (or need to change) the tense of a verb.
Arahant is Ricochet’s finest writer of fiction, so anytime he does a post on the craft of writing it’s well worth joining the conversation!
One thing he’s great at–and I’m not–is consistency of viewpoint. When I’m writing a Ricochet radio script, it often drifts from first person to third person and back. Sometimes nobody cares and you get away with it.
It’s a simple question, really: who is telling the story? The main character or an omniscient narrator?
One difference between “starting to” and “doing” is that “starting to” allows for writing in something that happens while the “doing” is being done. Otherwise, you’ve in effect jumped already to completion and excluded the possibility of anything happening in the meantime.
Unless you go to an “unbeknownst to me…” or something.
The Great Train Robbery (1903) made film history by cross-cutting, the simple cinematic device of having two things going on at the same time.
Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) was one of the earliest mainstream films that kept jumping back in time. You saw a robbery in progress, then jump back earlier in the day to pick up a different character’s thread. Almost 40 years later Quentin Tarantino revived the style.
Rod Serling used to dictate Twilight Zone scripts into a tape recorder, a relatively new aid to writers at the time, and his secretary would type the dictation into a screenplay format for editing. It’s efficient. But it had the side effect that all of the characters, male and female alike, sounded like Rod Serling arguing with himself.
Yes, viewpoint is very important. It can also allow one to use some characters as unreliable narrators.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .
Little did he know . . .
I’m pretty good at purging “actually” from early drafts.
(Did I mention perentheses? Terrible habit.*)
* More convenient than footnotes, though.
It’s more of a verbal tick, but “probably” creeps into my writing, too. Likely an occupational hazard for an economist. But when I was finishing my dissertation, Ms Skinner went back to work, and I took primary charge of two-year old Hurricane Annie. We had a symbiotic relationship, I would write nonsense on one side of the page, and after the next edit, she would write nonsense on the back in crayon. She was a verbal kid, and had a vocabulary that included some multiple-syllable words.
I was teaching a couple of afternoon labs, and our church ran a “parents day out” program for a couple of hours two afternoons a week, that coincided nicely with my teaching, so I’d drop her off before and pick her up right after. One day I was standing in the hallway with a few other parents waiting for three o’clock pickup time. At three the first parent walked into the classroom and I heard an excited little boy yell, “That’s my mommy!” The next couple of parents walk in. And were greeted with the same cry. I walk in and, Hurricane Annie, following her classmates’ lead yells, “That’s probably my daddy!” The room got quiet, and several caregivers and moms were giving me a quizzical grin. I turned a couple shades of red, and got out as quickly as I could. In my defense I was writing about probability theory, urn and coin-tossing problems, and working through some Bayes theory. But decided right then that I probably had developed something of a probably-patois, sort of like Tom Wolf’s “eff-patois,” and I needed to be more definitive in my declarations. Perhaps.
I’m starting to agree with you.
Yes, it is. And wonderful story well presented.
Reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” out loud to our children did more for my writing than any other single exercise. Doing so caused me to read my own writing out loud. Which caused me to notice my tendency toward run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses. My writing was legal documents and legal advice, not fiction. Short clear sentences are still most likely to be understood by the reader.
My bad habit is a character starting a sentence with “Anyway,”. Sadly, I often have several charcters doing this, resulting in them all sounding the same. I curtail this by searching for all the “anyway”s and removing most of them.
The same goes with the word “that”. Often times, it’s unnecessary, and many times only used to pad the word count.
I also find the more I have an adult beverage while writing, the more pornographic my love scenes become. Go figure . . .
I don’t even drink. Maybe that’s why most of my love scenes are merely implied.
I understand “fixin’ to” to be a response when asked if you have done something. The answer is, “I was just fixin’ to.”
True, Or, “I’m fixin’ to get ready to move on that any moment now.”
I should say here that “fixin’ to get ready” is a bit less urgent in nature than “fixin’ to” alone.
I’m not a writer, but I often catch myself saying, “I’m going to go to bed” or “I’m going to go to the store.”
Just like the episode “a World of His Own.”
That was a great show. Larry Storch, right?
I learned it “a-fixin’,” “a-goin’,” etc.
Yep. That’s the even less urgent and more syllabic version.
My mother in law used to say “we’re ready this time” meaning another civil war……the South shall rise again!
This is a great topic, Arahant, thank you for writing this.