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Craft and Draft: The Most Important Tool of the Writing Trade

March 2, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

Writing advice tends to focus on ways to improve wordplay through seductive syntax, elegant editing, and creative applications of your personal brand of writerly insanity. The sentence sages of the internet kingdom give (and have given) solid suggestions for how to augment ideas and the words, and should be thanked and showered with gifts for their contribution to improving the stories of the writing collective. But even among such varied and abundant advice, I rarely see anyone transcend the theoretical, to advise to writers beyond the writing, to perhaps talk about some of the more practical aspects of being a prolific letter bender.

There’s one niche topic that seems all but wholly ignored, probably because it falls very low on the priority list of most writers who are investing free time to refine their craft. One niche topic that plays a role in everything you write, eventually. One niche topic that I, as a technical writer, hold very near to my heart:

Keyboards.

I know, I know, all that build up for keyboards? But belay your disappointment for a moment and think about the importance of that chained click-and-clack: even if you draft stories on paper, one day, sooner than later, you’ll have to transcribe that onto your computer to get it published. Your keyboard is your gateway to the written world, your concept manifester, your irreplaceable partner in the literary dance of life. The sooner you embrace your relationship with your keyboard, the sooner you’ll be a happier (and potentially healthier!) writer.

I upgraded my keyboard after fighting daily with a dying Logitech for a few months, and suddenly realized how much I’d been involuntarily handicapping myself by using a keyboard that didn’t work well, and didn’t fit my typing style. Since I starting smithing on my new board, not only can I write more quickly and accurately, but actually find I enjoy typing, to the point that I want to sit down and write simply for the satisfaction of feeling my fingers on the new keys. Like a new pair of running shoes, a new keyboard offers more comfort, fits your body better, and rejuvenates your mind for the tedious task at hand.

But before you just jump on Amazon and buy the prettiest little QWERTY out there, remember that not all keyboards are created equal, and just like shoes, you have to find the right fit. Fortunately, I’m about to condense 6 months of keyboard research into a single blog post, which should hopefully take some of the guess work out of choosing the right board.

To start, there are two types of keyboards: mechanical and membrane. Mechanical keyboards echo the earliest generation of computers; large, heavy, noisy slabs with that either very satisfying or very annoying plastic clatter. Membrane keyboards, the more modern of the two, are much more common, and nearly every laptop has this style hidden underneath its alphabetical layout. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but the decisions really comes down to preference and comfort.

Mechanical Motoring

Cherry MX Brown Switch

Partly due to their popularity with gamers, mechanical keyboards have seen a contemporary resurgence. They tend to be very easy to type quickly on, and include fancy, technical features like full N-Key rollover (a jargony way of saying that it will recognize all key presses even if multiple keys are hit at once; an advantage if you’re a very fast typist). These boards have an individual switch under each key that translates your keystroke to the computer as soon as the key is pressed. Most modern mechanical keyboards use “Cherry MX” switches, which come in a variety of colors.

These “colors” translate to different tactile feelings when you type; some are linear and need to be pressed all the way down, while others, like the “blue” switch includes a “bump” when you press the key, so you know when the keyboard has registered the letter. They also vary in terms of the force needed to push the key all the way down; a keyboard with “black” switches needs a surprising amount of downward pressure for each stroke, which may turn off writers with a lighter touch, who don’t (like me) attack their keyboards with much vigor.

The good news: there are many types of switches, offering varying levels of speed and comfort depending on your preferences. I won’t bore you too much with tje technical details of each switch, but if you’re curious, more information can be found here: Overview of Cherry MX Switches. If you’re curious about how the keys actually feel when pressed, visit a computer supply store that displays keyboards (read: not Best Buy). You can also buy a tester kit online.

Now for the practical stuff: as a writer, I found the linear black and clear switches too heavy/stiff for daily typing, and the blue too noisy. I found the red switches too flighty (leading to more mistakes the faster I wrote) and was thus torn between green and brown. I preferred the brown overall, for the tactile response and significantly reduced noise. I also find I have less tension in my hands and arms when typing on this keyboard. YMMV.

My new keyboard is mechanical, and I’m coming from a membrane style. I find that my writing is smoother, with fewer mistakes, and that I really enjoy typing on this thing. Several companies sell mechanical keyboards: mine is from WASD, but Das Keyboard, Razer, Logitech, and Corsair (plus a few others) also make variations.

Pros:
Fast, accurate typing
Heavy, so it doesn’t slide around on your desk
Satisfying key strokes that encourage more writing
Easy(ish) to clean

Cons:
Very noisy; not very good for writing in a quiet environment
Relatively expensive compared to membrane keyboards
Time investment needed to learn which switches you like best

Membrane Malleability

My old (and filthy) membrane keyboard. The membrane is beneath those dome keys.

A large portion of modern keyboards sit on top of a gummy rubberish membrane, which in turn sits on top of a circuit board. When a key is pressed, the membrane contacts the circuit board, sending a signal to the computer that translates it into a letter. Each key is not its own moving part, but instead a pressure pad that is part of the entire membrane. Where the mechanical keyboard provides immediate tactile response, a membrane keyboard provides very little (sometimes none at all). There are two sub-types of membrane keyboards: “flat” like the one on your microwave, and “full-travel” like the one on your laptop.

On that note: membrane keyboards are featured on almost all laptops (as the space and weight of individual switches would be cumbersome for the form factor). They tend to be very gentle on your fingers and hands, very quiet, and preferable for light typists. They’re pretty resilient, too, as the membrane acts like a shock absorber that can withstand a lot of daily use. Many people prefer membrane keyboards because they take next to no effort to type on, and over years of using them by default, they’ve adjusted to the relative lack of physical response.

Nearly every company that makes keyboards makes membrane versions, but some feature media keys (to control music and movies), and other gizmos, gadgets, and assorted colorful knobs. There isn’t much difference between the actual keyboards based on manufacturer (like there is with the mechanical switches), so you’ve got more freedom in terms of design and additional features.

Now that I’ve made the jump, I wouldn’t go back to a membrane keyboard unless I had to (like when using my laptop). That’s solely personal preference; I’m a pretty aggressive writer, and hit the keys hard and fast when I’m in the proverbial zone. I’ve obviously written many, many things on membrane keyboards and found them comfortable for a very long time, so don’t take me as a followable example. You do you.

Pros:
Quiet
Easy on fingers and hands
Relatively cheap

Cons:
Little tactile response can lead to mistakes in typing
Gets dirty very easily, and can be difficult to clean
Key replacement proves difficult without proper tools
Lightweight means it can slide around your desk

Advanced Keyboarding

Tweet me if you’ve got questions! @OliverJGray

Keyboards also come in variations of form factor. If you experience pain while writing, or never feel comfortable on a flat keyboard, several companies sell ergonomic keyboards that split the keys down the center, supposedly to improve hand placement and typing accuracy while reducing wrist stress. The traditional keyboard has 104 keys (including a number pad), but if space is limited, you can also buy an 88-key version that sacrifices the number bad for a shorter body.

For the adventurous hipster, there are also other key layouts, including DVORAK and COLEMAK, all of which purport to be superior to the traditional QWERTY layout in terms of speed and accuracy (if modern typing lore is to be believed, QWERTY was actually designed to slow a writer down, as to not jam up the then completely mechanical type writers). I’ve only ever played around with DVORAK and abandoned it pretty quickly; it seems like a lot of work to erase QWERTY from my brain all to learn a completely new layout for a relatively minor bump in typing speed. Plus, the majority of the English speaking world uses QWERY, so you’d then have to play mental Twister anytime you needed to use a keyboard that wasn’t yours.

Virtual keyboards on phones and tablets add another layer of complexity to the puzzle; I, as a matter of preference, loathe typing anything on my phone. I even dislike sending texts. I sit there plucking at letters thinking, “this would be so much better and faster on my computer.” They do have the added feature of predictive text, which as we all known, can be a mixed blessing, and always seems on its worst behavior when you’re texting your mom or your boss. I know some people swear by Swype, and actually enjoy writing using the relatively new digital interfaces, so if that’s your jam, go for it!

You have a world of possibilities at your finger tips (ba-dum-ching) when it comes to selecting the right keyboard. I’m not suggesting any one way is the best, but I do implore you to consider the medium through which you forge your wordy worlds. A painter would painstakingly select her brushes and a soccer player tests many types of cleats before he plays in a game, so why would you not do the same for what is arguably, the most important physical tool for a modern writer?

If you’ve got any specific questions, either Tweet me at @OliverJGray, or leave them in the comments below. If you can’t tell, I’ve got keyboard fever.

Craft and Draft: Three Words You Should Snip From Your Vocabulary

July 11, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

(Warning: This post contains grammar, a substance known by the state of California to cause headaches and crossed eyes)

In the literary long game, few experiences rival that of learning a new word, feeling the thrill of pristine morphology rolling around on your tongue, turning your brain into a squishy grey beanbag chair, getting comfortable in a new heuristic home. Expanding vocabulary is the writer’s prerogative after all, as each new word tempers the steel of the already mighty pen, and makes each new piece of imagery that much more formidable.

Bolts of pure hypocrisy would strike me dead if I claimed not to enjoy the tantalizing tug on my line as a multi-syllabic monster sinks its teeth into my baited hook, but many of us get caught up in the default mode of “acquire,” and forget that not all words are created equal. Every word deserves a chance at a happy linguistic life, but we’d be duping ourselves to suggest that “rock” and “ruby” are contextual equivalents. Some words, despite their best efforts, just aren’t very good. Some words exist on a tier that need not be used, not because said words are incorrect, but because so many better words exist just a short climb away.

When I edit, the following three suspects are my number one targets. I will hunt them down, aim my find/replace at their built-in bulls-eyes, removing and rezoning them before doing any other serious rewriting. If you want to improve your writing, train your eye to notice these words, learn to hate their complacency and laziness, get angry when they clutter up your sexy soliloquy of Shakespearean sentences with their sorry, sad, simplicity. They’re not always the bad guys (as exceptions to my rules exist in this very post), but they don’t exactly have a great track record, either.

“Thing” (as a stand-in for a real noun)

“Thing” by definition, means “an object that one need not, cannot, or does not wish to give a specific name to.” Why would you ever want something with so little syntactic power in your writing? If you use the word “thing,” you’re basically admitting defeat, claiming that some object in your sentence is beyond the descriptive powers of your infinitely creative brain. You should not be OK with that. The word “thing” is an insult to imagination, a slap in the face of poetic license.

Most writers use “thing” when they’re unsure how to describe a noun, but never come around to fix it in edit. In 99% of cases, “thing” can be replaced by a noun that shines, brings delectable context to the sentence, and ultimately makes the whole piece more enjoyable for writer and reader. Consider:

I have a thing to go to later.

-versus-

I have a pirate-themed bluegrass and beer festival to go to later.

Don’t let “thing” bully you with its laziness. Your creativity deserves better. Watch out for his other slimy buddies, “stuff” and “something,” too.

Note: There are legitimate ways to use “thing,” especially when speaking in the abstract (see my hypocrisy in the next section), but it should never, ever, ever, stand in for a concrete noun.

“Boring” (as an adjective or subject compliment)

There’s nothing wrong with the verb “to bore,” especially the lesser used meaning that plays well with insects and power tools. If only we’d left this penetrating wonder alone, and not gotten so vernacular-happy with its adjectival form, “boring.” For shame, legions of internet commenters.

This may be part pet peeve, part personal preference, but no one should ever use the word “boring.” If you confidently state that you think an activity or event is “boring” I assume that your curiosity has lapsed into a coma, and the prognosis isn’t good. “Boring” suggests you’ve given up trying to learn, abandoned all hope in trying to figure out the nuance of why other people may find a particular thing enjoyable, and decided to subjectively relegate it into some bottom drawer, never to be bothered with again.

I think people use “boring” in two situations: 1) they don’t understand whatever it is they’re claiming is boring, or 2) they just don’t like it.

The latter is completely acceptable. But if you don’t like something, say you don’t like it. Don’t say it’s “boring,” because that’s a fundamental fallacy (as someone, somewhere, probably doesn’t think it’s boring).

The prior is completely unacceptable. New internet rule: you’re not allowed to call something boring until you fully understand it. If, after discovering all the fascinating minutiae, you still want to label something “boring,” go for it. But I’m willing to bet after experience and research, you’ll find that it isn’t boring at all, just maybe not your style.

Instead of writing “boring,” think about the emotion or feeling you’re trying to convey instead. What makes it “boring” to you? Is it confusing? Annoying? Vexing? If you replace “boring” with the underlying context of why you arrived at that descriptor, you’ll almost certainly have a better sentence as a result.

“Interesting” (as an adjective or subject compliment)

A complete one-eighty from the previous word, “interesting” is the flavorless lump of Subway bread of the linguistic world. “Interesting” means you found interest in something, which is about as generic as a word can get. Think about it; what does “interesting” ever really add to a sentence?

That’s an interesting sweater you’re wearing. This article on krill migration habits is interesting. What an interesting song choice!

The word means almost nothing. It adds no context, describes very little, and just sits there with a goofy look on its face.

You can do so much better than “interesting.” Get out there and date some fancier words, words with better jobs and better families, who really care about your writing and want you to succeed. Don’t get stuck in a rut of comfort with “interesting.” He’ll break your heart and lack the self awareness to even realize it.

As with “boring” consider what makes the topic interesting to you. Is it fascinating? Engaging? Joyous? Intricate? If you can dig deeper, past the perfunctory, you’ll find that you almost never need to use the word “interesting” because almost any other adjective would work better.

Maybe little snip?

Craft and Draft: Why Writers should Listen to Pop Country Music

July 18, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I know. You don’t like Taylor Swift. Keith Urban offends you on at least seven, different, personal levels. Rascal Flatts makes you want to get all stabby with the butter knife when their wailing interrupts your morning bagel-and-cream-cheese ritual at the local coffee shop.

I honestly don’t blame you. Country music is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I’ll be the first to admit that there is a lot of drivel dribbling out of Nashville. A veritable ice cream sundae of uninspired banging on the same three chords with some cheap-beer lyrics messily ladled on top. It’s pretty hard to get your brain around all that twang, especially when there is so much great music out there that could be filling our earholes with audio joy instead.

But cast your prejudices about country music aside for a moment. While it may not be the height of melodic art, those guys down on Music Row understand the business. They get what makes a hit song, and why; all the minutiae that turns a regular guy with a hat and a guitar into a legend of Southern rock, or a baby-faced blonde bell into a stage-trotting goddess.

They’ve figured out what people want to hear, and the song writing reflects it. If there is any art in the industry, it is in the hearts and minds of the writers who, beyond all human belief, can still work the words “Georgia,” “redneck,” and “truck” into new songs in new ways. They use grammar to infuse the verses with freshness, even when the backing music is the same one-four-five progression we’ve been listening to since the Grand Ole Opry went on the air in 1925.

Let’s look at Tim McGraw’s 2009 hit, Southern Voice.

This song is the quintessential three-major-chord-progression that all new guitar/mandolin/banjo players learn: G, C, D. It’s plain vanilla ice cream, white bread, about as complicated as toast. But the writers (Bob DiPiero and Tom Douglas) manage to toy with the grammar of the verses, breaking/playing with some literary rules to great effect:

Hank Aaron smacked it / Michael Jordan dunked it / Pocahantas tracked it / Jack Daniels drunk it / Tom Petty rocked it / Dr. King paved it / Bear Bryant won it / Billy Graham saved it

The sentence structure is as simple as the chords: subject, past tense verb, direct object. But these sentences are perfect examples of the power and importance of the right verb; not only does each move the song forward with action, it’s also perfectly applicable to its subject. The historical subjects are allusions that build on the theme of the song (a single, unified “voice” of the Southern states) and give the reader (or listener) a concrete idea-cleat to attach their brain-ropes to.

The major rule violation here is the use of the abstract pronoun, “it.” In most other settings, this would be a no-no, as it’s an unqualified, unattributed object, which normally leaves a reader confused. But when the chorus comes in…

Smooth as the hickory wind / That blows from Memphis / Down to Appalachicola / It’s “hi ya’ll, did ya eat?” well / Come on in child / I’m sure glad to know ya / Don’t let this old gold cross / An’ this Charlie Daniels t-shirt throw ya / We’re just boys making noise / With the southern voice

…we see that the “it” actually refers to the eponymous “southern voice;” as if each sentence is a square on the quilt that makes up the culture of the American South.

Ever wonder why a song is so catchy? How it so easily grafts itself to your short term memory even when you actively try to force it out? Because it’s grammatically kickass, that’s why.

Not convinced that you should subject yourself to country music from one example? Then here’s another; this one form Jason Aldean’s Texas Was You.

This one’s chord progression is, you guessed it: G, C, D. It throws in a nice little E minor for spice, but it’s still as standard as it comes. But check out this gorgeous grammar writers Neil Thrasher, Wendell Mobley, and Tony Martin slipped into the verses:

Ohio was a riverbank / 10 speed layin’ in the weeds / Cannonball off an old rope swing / Long long summer days.

Tennessee was a guitar / First big dream of mine / If I made it, yeah, that’d be just fine / I just wanted to play. I just wanted to play, but…

Carolina was a black car / A big white number three / California was a yellow jeep / Cruisin’ down Big Sur.

Georgia was a summer job / ‘Bama was a spring break / I got memories all over the place / But only one still hurts.

The opening lines of all four verses are Subject, verb, subject compliment, a sentence structure that typically doesn’t move anything forward, as it’s only equating the subject to the compliment. The fragments that follow all support the initial comparison, building on the same image or metaphor established by the full sentence. It has an awesome effect in this song because it drops a declaration at the begging of each verse, confidently telling us what comparison Aldean is making.

It’s especially powerful when the chorus comes sliding in…

Texas was green eyes crying goodbye / Was a long drive / A heartache I’m still trying to get through / Texas was you

…and we get three more “to be” verbs, three more comparisons, showing us why he’s making all these metaphorical connections. The setup for the chorus is great, and proves that even generally inactive sentences/verbs can be used bring the hammer of theme down onto the nails of details in your writing.

I can provide other examples if people are curious, but popular country is full of songs that are captivating listeners with clever lyrics with even cleverer grammar. If you’re struggling with edits, or need examples of structure and verb usage, or just how to arrange written elements to get people interested, fire up some Eric Church or Dierks Bently and getcher country on!

“Bend those strings until the Hank comes out.”

Craft and Draft: Plotting Progression

May 20, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Do you remember the exact moment your pet turned from kitten into cat, or from puppy into dog, or from tiny goldfish to slightly less tiny goldfish? If you’re a normal human, probably not. Our brains tend not to notice small, incremental changes that happen over a long period because we’re only fed little pieces of information each day, and struggle to put all the puzzle pieces together to create a single image of the change. The only way we really notice the complete evolution is by comparing the present to the past using photographs or some other artifact, so we can make a direct comparison between mewling kitten and meowing cat.

Your progress in writing follows the same rules. You improve slowly over the course of many sentences and paragraphs written over many hours and many days, and you rarely notice any improvement as it is happening, even if it is relatively drastic. This is partly because of the natural functions of your brain, and partly based on how we’re told progress is supposed to work.

We are taught, through school and the visible success of public figures, that progress is a linear thing, a perpetually chugging and climbing train that always moves upward and forward, upward as we scramble up the Aggro Crag of our craft and forward as we hurdle over the obstacles of life and art, American Gladiator style. It makes logical sense that every word we write, every short story and essay we finish, moves us closer to our goal of becoming excellent writers. Every hour we put towards getting better actually makes us better. Practice, in theory, has a one-to-one progress pay off.

If we graphed the idealized form of progress, the purest, sweetest form of achievementitude, it would look something like this:

Pretty simple: as time stomps ever-forward, our skill inevitably improves.

But obviously nothing in life is idealized, not even our fantasies and dreams. Writing is a roiling, boiling witches brew of different techniques and skills, all of which need to come together to create a strong, compelling narrative potion. It requires a close eye on the cauldron and balance of the various ingredients – for these purposes grammar, imagery, dialogue, creativity, and structure – to brew up a tincture that readers will pick out from the other bottles on the shelf and actually want to imbibe.

And because these skills are not perfectly synonymous with each other, because they require different, often disconnected parts of your brain, because they may come naturally or not come at all, progress is never going to be perfectly linear. We’d like to think that each thing we write is still moving us forward though, so roadblocks in certain areas are just plateaus, times when we circle the wagons to weather the dust storm until we can sally-forth once again, all pen-and-paper manifest destiny like.

If we graphed a more realistic representation of progress, it would look something like this:

A little more complicated, but still manageable: time still trudges down his path and we still get better, but we have to take some detours and hang out in some places until it’s safe (or smart) to move on.

But naivety; I know you too well. How quaint to think we’d always be improving, never slowing or staggering or falling behind! For a long time this idea, the notion that progress could never be stopped, clouded my mind like a heavy early morning fog that had yet to be burned off by the heat of the afternoon sun. I wanted – expected – everything I wrote to improve upon the last thing I wrote. I lived under the impression that every essay had to out-do the last, every short story needed to be more and more nuanced and literary, that every metaphor had to transcend mere humanity and do a fly-by buzz of the god’s palatial manor up on Olympus.

But that is as improbable as it is impossible. We are hard-wired to want to always improve, but if you obsess over what is in practice an unachievable goal, you’ll never actually write anything, stuck the underworld on the quest for unending improvement. You will write stuff that just isn’t very good. You’ll backslide, your words will fail you, you’ll have some pieces that instead of ringing out into the world with the flair and revelry of a triumphant trumpet, will slither out and drop onto the ground with an unsatisfying and sort of disgusting plop.

You’ll find that the train of climbing progress is actually a roller coaster, and at any moment the bottom might drop out, sending you screaming down the rails into a valley of meh. Sometimes you’ll write a thousand words and the only improvement is a single adjective clause tucked away in some otherwise uninspired paragraph. Sometimes you’ll have a fresh, invigorating idea that ends up ruined by your poor execution. Progress isn’t always upwards, but that’s OK. You can learn just as much from your not-so-good writing as you can from your really good writing. The point is, you’re still writing.

If we graphed the ups and downs, the cheers and jeers, the flourish and the plops of how we really grow, it would look something like this:

Now it’s looking more like a true writing process: when your dialogue is near perfect, your imagery is like, something grey or something? When your creativity is soaring, your grammar might be guttural Cro-magnon pseudo-speak and your structure might be reminiscent of a 3rd grader’s finger painting. You’re still technically improving, but sometimes only in one area, sometimes moving downwards before upwards, but still forward, as each new lesson, good or bad, teaches you something new.

This all dances around the idea that we are humans (not robots who can eat and survive on graphs alone) and our moods and wants and emotions all play into how we create. All of these skills are completely dependent on how we employ them, how we glue them down on the construction paper and arrange the colorful shapes, which is in turn dependent on our confidence.

Confidence, even using bold and headstrong people as examples, is nigh unplottable. The data for such a thing isn’t made up of numbers that can be understood by anyone in any real way. It’s like a taco made of paperback books or a cupcake baked with broccoli inside and frosted with hummus. It’s outside of our normal brain bubbles. It’s all very non-Euclidean.

But, since I’ve got this graph theme going, I tried anyway. If you added human confidence to this whole progress thing, it would look something like this:

Regardless of your actual progress, you’re constantly fighting the growth and maturity (or lack thereof) of your confidence. Each success boosts and sends the orange line twirling skyward, like a model rocket at full blast, bumped slightly off it’s trajectory. Each rejection and stream of mean comments causes the rocket (and orange line) to smash into the ground (or X-axis) at full force, trying to burrow into the ground to hide from the negativity. Confidence in your art is the one ingredient that can make or break the literary meal, as it effects every single aspect, down to how you cook it and present it to your diners.

Progress can be so intangible, so caught in the fishing nets of practice and skills and self-doubt, that we can’t even see it as it creeps into our brain. It is important to take some time to track your progress, either with spreadsheets or a notepad or an abacus or something, so that at intervals you can take a break and actually look at what you’ve accomplished and how much you’ve improved.

Progress is slow going and often painfully roundabout, and yet we’re taught to think it’s a straight arrow-shot to fame and fortune. We’re conditioned to think that achievement is positive and should be celebrated, while failure is negative and should be shunned. But that’s just silly. No one could possibly live up to the expectations of winning or succeeding at everything they do, every time they do it. And if they somehow could, via a pact with some ancient evil or a old, bored Djinn, I’d say they were actually missing out on the lessons that can be taken away from doing something wrong.

Don’t be upset if your progress slows or stop or goes backwards, or even if you can’t even see any progress for a while; that is completely natural. The only thing that will actually hurt your ultimate progression is to quit completely. If you stop writing, you stop learning – from the wins and the losses – and soon enough, your graph will be blank.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a ton of squiggly, messed up lines that show I’ve tried, than no lines at all.

Craft and Draft: Metaphor Galore

April 15, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

If I put you in a dark room with a lone chair in the middle, made you close your eyes and just listen to random people speak, you could tell me a ton of information without much effort: the sex of the speaker, their rough level of education, the region they’re from, the mood they’re in, where they are in relation to you, and lots more.

Aside from touch, our voice is one of the only ways we can connect to another person; the sound waves of our speech bouncing and rebounding, pooling in their ears where they can physically process the meaning of the message. We connect a lot of emotions and meaning to a voice and revere its power through things like plays and songs.

Some voices are soft and gentle, like your mother waking you up for your first day of elementary school. Other voices are harsh and cruel; an angry drill instructor, an unscrupulous calculus teacher, a dictator with a tenuous grasp on his rule. And yet some are irreverent and silly, some spiked and drunken, some magical and lilting and full of poetic grace.

A writer’s voice is the same a spoken one; it is personality on the page, how you sound to your reader. When you write something, it’s like a text recording of your voice, packaged up on pages, sent direct-download to the media player in your reader’s brain.

The term, “voice,” gets throw around a lot: “you need to work on your voice,” or “your voice could be stronger here,” or “her voice is so clear and consistent in this piece!” But what is a writer’s voice? How can it be defined and caught and kept in a jar of formaldehyde for dissection and study?

An oversimplified answer is that your voice is a combination of your day-to-day personality, your diction, your attitude towards the subject (or tone), and most importantly, metaphor.

What, metaphor?

Yep, metaphor.

Metaphor Galore

We all know what a metaphor is, right? A comparison of one thing to another, tangentially disparate thing in an attempt to create an image or elicit an emotion or make someone laugh. They use imagery and creative language to cause your reader to create a visual comparison in their mind like an LCD monitor with a slide show of your story. Did you picture a TV in someone’s head just now?

Just in case you’re not familiar with metaphor, here’s one: “He wrote with the abandon of a drunk sea captain who knew that this night, in this storm, the sea would finally drag him home.”

Yay, metaphor: making writing and language more than just communication since 600 AD.

But what makes metaphor special, other than it’s ability to conjure images better than Dumbledore, Gandalf, Merlin, and uh…Willow?… combined?

Metaphor is Unique to You

I’m going to give you a present. It’s a big brown burlap bag full of potential metaphors. All yours. For free. You can thank me later.

When you go to create an image via metaphor, you’re bringing all of your collective knowledge about life with it. You have forged connections between ideas in your brain that are as unique as your fingerprint or the first dainty flake of an incoming blizzard. When you compose a metaphor – a good, strong, bold metaphor – there is a very good chance that nothing like it exists anywhere else in the written world. It sounds crazy, but that’s the power of the sprawling, near-infinite universe of English.

Do you ever notice yourself, mid-story or essay, making very thematically similar comparisons? I for one am guilty of writing a lot of metaphors about battle, chivalry, and ancient lore. That’s because those are the things I like, the things I’ve exposed myself to over years and years of reading and writing and pop culture. My metaphors are Tolkien and George R. R. Martin and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. They are SyFy channel and Star Wars and a huge unsorted bin of Lego bricks.

Food writers may make a lot of cooking and eating metaphors, relying on smell and taste to create their imagery. Sport writers may use a lot of athletic and physical terminology. How you create a comparison is going to be built, nay forged, from what you do in life and what has slowly seeped into the crevices of your brain, consciously and subconsciously.

And this is the greatest thing ever for you as a writer. It gives you license to embrace all that weird, counter-culture stuff you’ve been so greedily imbibing, an absolutely acceptable (probably even encouraged) environment to write quite literally, “what you know.”

The more unique the connections you’ve made between ideas, the more vivid and confident your imagery, the more your voice will boom out from the flat ink of the page, invade your reader’s head and keep them thinking about your work long after they’ve closed the book.

So go, be free, play word and idea association with yourself like a raving vagrant. Take chances are trust in your own skill that the images you create will work. If they don’t, if your imagination ran a bit too wild-pony-on-the-loose, don’t worry. You can always fix them in edit.

Better to have written a wild, never-before read dream than a boring, expected plunker.

"A great metaphor is like a white squirrel: rare, worth crawling through your yard with a zoom lens to see." -Oliver Gray (copyright right now)

“A great metaphor is like a white squirrel: rare, and worth crawling through your yard with a zoom lens to see.” -Oliver Gray (copyright right now)

Craft and Draft: Imagine all the Imagery

April 8, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

In his post-Beatles solo adventure, John Lennon wanted us to imagine, to cast our brains out across the ethereal philosophical planes, to conceptualize a world with no hate or fear or hunger. His aims were admirable. He just wanted us to have some perspective.

But ultimately, aside of the haunting C-major-to-F Steinway piano riff, it wasn’t very effective at getting anyone to imagine anything concrete.

At least not in terms of writing.

It’s odd, because Lennon wants us to “imagine,” or to caveman it down a bit, “think of pretty pictures.” The word imagine (and imagination) contains the word “image” suggesting that to imagine something is to conjure up a relevant image in your mind. What words does he use to tell us how to create the images he’s trying to evoke?

“Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world”

Nice sentiment, but there is nothing in those lyrics for me to picture. How do I picture greed? Maybe a fat king in front of a huge feast, grease from the chicken he’s eating dripping into his brown beard while his people, ribs poking through grey flesh, starve in the streets? Maybe a robber-baron circa 1880 sitting in his plantation-style mansion feeding crisp twenty dollar bills to his perfectly bred English mastiffs?

Greed (and need and hunger and possessions, and the whole song) is an abstract. Lennon wanted us to imagine all these things as he was imagining them, but without the specifics, I’m left having to do all the mental work myself and even worse, may be picturing something completely different than (or unrelated to) his original intentions.

Imagery innervates your writing, takes it beyond yawing generalities and into the visceral, blood-soaked details. It is how, using your words and syntax and imagination, you create the world of your story in your reader’s mind. It engages all of the senses: vibrant, blinding colors; pungent, wafting smells; coarse, sandy textures; plunking, rolling sounds; sweet, buttery tastes.

If you try to tell a story using only generalizations and abstracts, you’re not only making your reader do all the hard (and fun!) work for you, but you’re leaving sperm-whale sized gaps in the mental images of your characters, settings, and scenes. You’re giving your reader nothing to inhale, nothing to shove into his pie-hole, nothing to see or feel or experience. Abstract writing feels very surreal, detached from the reality we know and love and understand.

Let’s go bounce the big red rubber ball of figurative language.

Cliches are old hat

I’m sure everyone has heard the “no cliches!” rule about four hundred and twenty six thousand times by now. It’s a simple one and easy to parrot, too: “Don’t use cliches! Cliches are bad! Ew, you hung out with a cliche? So gross.”

But why? Sure, the language is expected and tired. But is that really why we avoid using them?

“Nope,” says Oliver.

You should avoid cliches because they don’t actually cause your reader to think. Cliches are hollow. If you shoved a screwdriver into the seam of the cliche and cracked it open, you’d find nothing but some sad looking termites and a bit of old straw.

A cliche was born unto this world not-a-cliche. It was once a clever little unheard metaphor, flung wildly from the lips of some mirthful young dandy. But it was so clever that it was adopted into the lexicon of public discourse. The gears of time ground its meaning down to nothing, a nub of mental association, nothing clever or fresh about it.

A cliche, even one packed with specific images, has lost all of its power to spin up the imagine-engine of your mind. When someone says, “he really nailed it!” does anyone ever actually picture a hammer striking the blueish-grey metal head of a pristine nail, driving it into the oak with such force that tiny fragments of wood fly off like tiny forest fairies fleeing for their lives?

Nope. They just think, “Oh, he did that pretty well.”

This is why you can use cliches, if you rewrite them in such a way that makes your reader stop and actually imagine what you’re saying. I do it all the time and will defend to the death my own right to do that thing I want to do because I think it is fun.

I’ll show you how to tell me how to tell me how you’re showing

The piece of advice I’m sure you’ve heard even more times than “Cliche? Run away!” is “Show, don’t tell.” It’s another easy one to regurgitate into the awaiting mouths of nutrient-starved writers, but it is often misunderstood.

The idea is that you need to show an emotion or character trait or some other important facet without just telling your reader explictly what that thing is. It’s the difference between, “Carol fidgeted, her eyes darting towards the door ever few minutes” and “Carol was nervous.”

What makes the first one showing and the second one telling? Images. Imagery. Figurative language. Pictures drawn with words and forcefully placed into the reader’s brain through his eyeballs.

It’s that simple. Showing comes down to using effective imagery in your writing. There are no other magic methods or secret spells or ridiculous riddles. If you’re getting a lot of feedback saying, “show, don’t tell!” with no other qualifications, re-interpret that as, “I couldn’t really picture this correctly, and it gave me pause.”

When you start replacing abstracts and generalizations with concrete images that your reader can easily turn into a video of the action in their head, the problem of showing verses telling suddenly, as if by some divine writing miracle, disappears.

Costumes and props

If you could wander backstage before a Broadway play and pick through the meticulously prepared racks of costumes and props, you’d probably get a good sense of what the play was about well before you sat down in your seat. The style of costumes would probably give you a rough time period and the various props could easily inform what action was going to take place. If you found a bunch of long, tatty jackets, some battle-worn sabers, and some early flint-locks, you’d be bracing for nine straight hours of Les Mis.

Your imagery, out of context, should do the same. If I randomly shoved my hands into your story and pulled out some figurative descriptions, I should be able to construct an idea, or at the very least some kind of tone.

For example, if I find “boisterous spiky-haired New Jersians” I’m going to assume you’re writing a contemporary reality TV pilot. If I find “rain slicked black boots” and “mud and blood caked overalls” I’m going to think you’re writing a rural-murder-mystery (Dallas meets Conan Doyle, perhaps). Your imagery should be appropriate to the context of the story. It should always bring the reader in closer and never cause them to pull back and wonder why that image is in this story.

Your imagery also lugs a ton of context around in its purple Jansport backpack. When I mentioned some props and Les Mis, you probably automatically filled in the beards and hats and booming musical numbers. Our shared human experience fills in a lot of contextual gaps for us. A sword is also violence and power and authority. A cigar is not always just a cigar.

Beta Test

We dwell so deeply in our own minds that sometimes it is easy to forget that your tiny slice of the world as interpreted through your subjective view of the electromagnetic spectrum might be very different from someone else’s. An image you materialize with your power-packed science fingers might not make as much (or any) sense out in the honest, flaw-finding daylight of public view.

It’s good to take chances with your imagery – I encourage you to imagine huge, extreme, absurd – but it’s also good to have a straight-man hiding somewhere who can bring you back down and say, “while ‘the flower petal honed to razors-edge by the sperm-rain of a vengeful Grecian god’ is…interesting…it may not test well in your market.”

Test your images with readers who challenge your ideas and ask you to explain them. If you can’t explain them quickly, or at all, chances are it’s not a good image.

After you’ve wrangled your first draft, after you’ve fixed the glaring typos, after you’ve accepted the death of your favorite character, scrutinize your writing, search every clause for abstracts and non-concrete ideas. Replace them with images – as strong or weak as appropriate for their place in the story – and make your writing delight all your reader’s senses, not just her mind.

“Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Craft and Draft: The Diction Affliction

March 28, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

If I called a very talented but very socially awkward artist a “freak” how would you feel?

What if I called the same person “avant-garde” instead. Do you feel differently about them now?

And if I called them a “savant” or a “prodigy” or “off beat” do you change your opinion of what this person is like?

Our words carry context and power beyond their basic definitions. We’re consciously choosing word after word after word as we write, words that have long, complicated histories and cultural nuance, words that can mean so much or so little based on the context provided.

Enter diction.

The French call it “le mot juste” (translated to “the right word”) but for us unilingual English people, it’s just “word choice.” Diction helps dictate the tone of your writing, informs the reader of your intentions in the piece and your attitude towards the subject and audience. Good diction moves the narrative along naturally and adds meaning through individual words while shitty diction screws with and trips up a reader who is confused over how and why a certain word was used.

Do you see how dropping in the words “shitty,” “screws with,” and “trips up” in that last clause changed the tone of my writing? I suddenly went from relatively proper to lowly colloquial. One word can change a writer’s tone immediately, even throw an entire paragraph off its intended course.

Being a good writer is synonymous with picking the best words to serve your story. Good diction (and good writing) means the intentional and deliberate selection of the right words in the right places, choosing concrete specifics over bland abstracts.

So how can you employ correct, conscientiousness diction?

You have to embrace words, make love to them with your brain, let their timeless beauty overwhelm your emotions, merge with and tickle your soul in all the best spots. You have to find joy and energy in the way certain syllables so delicately roll from your tongue or pole-vault off the page into your eyeballs. You must adore words to the point where your immediate family finds it very, very annoying.

But that’s not weird because we’re writers, right? Right?

Diction-ary Definitions

There are two ways to define a word: denotation and connotation.

Denotation is the dictionary definition of the word. The good old fashioned, “let’s argue over what this word means after 5 glasses of pinot on Thanksgiving” definition. The denotative definition includes all official variations of a word including noun, adjective, or adverb forms, if applicable.

Connotation is any alternate meanings of the word that you won’t find in any dictionary, even the OED. Colloquialisms, cultural references, slang. These are the definitions that people try to use in Scrabble to justify their nonsense 85 point word. These definitions are loaded with meaning and can connote a time period, regional location, or societal bias when used correctly.

The word “pop” is a great example. The denotative definition means “to make a short, quick, explosive sound.” The connotative meaning could be a reference to carbonated sugary beverages in you’re from the Midwest, or a reference to popular trends in music or literature or film.

Connotation also carries with it certain ethical or moral weight, steering your reader in a certain direction based on the words used to express the ideas. Consider the word “unemployed” verses “jobless” verses “vocationally challenged.” Compare “drunken pirate” to ” nautical rum enthusiast.” Word choices can change the ethical impact of writing by letting the reader know what the writer thinks about the topic, and probably where he’s going to take the argument.

Always make sure you know what a word means before you use it. If you’re not sure, look it up! A careful reader will immediately notice a glaring malapropism and you’ll lose valuable writing-cred-points. Make specific word choices, not pacific ones.

Be careful with connotation. Some connotative meanings may seem obvious to you, but may alienate or confuse a reader from another area/country/generation. Some might even offend a reader if you didn’t know that a certain word is used derogatorily in another culture.

High, Medium, Low

Diction can also be measured, sort of.

High diction is sophisticated and erudite, packed with Latin-based words, complicated grammatical structures, many-syllable words, and educated allusions or references. This style of writing lends itself perfectly to academic, medical, or scientific journals, but tends to alienate (and generally piss off) other audiences.

Low diction is conversational. It can be silly, simple, to-the-point, and uses smaller words. This style is good for addressing general audiences but tends to be too casual for intelligent readers who often read to learn and experience new things.

Medium diction is balanced. Zen writing. A Libra’s preferred state. A combination of high and low; enough high to entertain or teach or impress a reader but enough low to keep them comfortable and not overwhelm them with stuffy stuffiness.

It can be very difficult to strike an effective balance in your word choices, but if you can (through lots and lots of practice), it ultimately strengthens your writing in ways you may not have though possible.

A writer like David Quammen couldn’t possibly write the type of science-narrative he does without smacking his high diction over the head with a fish sometimes to bring it low. He find the perfectly smooth travel lane between the fast (of readability and enjoyment) and the slow (of of highly technical science) and takes you for a joy ride you didn’t expect, all because he balanced his diction.

Decidedly Dictative

Words are the Lego bricks of our craft (and grammar is the little colorful instruction pamphlet). It’s up to you to know what each brick looks like, sounds like, smells like, and tastes like. You can forge phenomenal creations if you place the right bricks in the right order at the right time.

Your words are the only way you can connect to your reader, so make sure you’re meaning what you’re saying when you’re saying what you mean. Get to know your favorites. Read about them, study them, discover all their meanings. Add more and more words to your arsenal until you’re overflowing with worldly wordly weapons.

And when you’ve got an impressive collection, use them, often and deliberately to great effect, to create characters and turn phrases and spout silly irreverent witticisms.

You’re going to spend a lot of time alone with words if you’re going to make this writing thing happen. Might as well be BFFs.

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.” “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!” – Lewis Carroll

Craft and Draft: Sheet Music

March 21, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

There are only two universal truths in life: cookies and music.

Can you think of someone who doesn’t like cookies? Someone who openly acknowledges that in the nearly infinite variety of flat, round, sugary treats available they don’t like a single type? They can dismiss, with a condescending wave of the hand, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, white chocolate macadamia, shortbread, or cranberry almond? I submit that even if a person claims to not like cookies, they just haven’t met the right cookie yet.

The same principle can be applied to music. I’ve met a whole random smattering of people in my time on this floating rock, and not one of them disliked music. Sure, some people don’t like certain kinds of music, and some people only like music when they are in certain moods or in certain places or with certain people. For some, music is rich 72% cocoa dark chocolate, only to be savored on the most hallowed occasions. But, when all the cards are down, the dices thrown, and the cliches overused, every human on this planet has some connection to and appreciation for music.

It’s not just because music is fun or empowering or energizing. It’s because music is woven into the textiles of our existence. The piping patterns of song birds that wake you up on a sunny spring morning, the repetitive roar and cascading Doppler shift of passing rush hour traffic, the unrelenting pulse of your heart pushing blood through your veins with every pump. Music is the tangible manifestation of the very reverberations of the universe, the vibrations and rumblings and bouncing atoms that give us physics and math and beauty through art.

Everything has a level of musicality to it, including your writing. It can be labeled with things like “cadence” and “meter” and “flow” but it really amounts to a lyrical quality, a quality that animates your writing and makes it move across the page like an inken inchworm. If you want your writing to be really effective, it needs to come alive in the reader’s eyes and ears and mind.

Just like music, writing needs some structure to be pleasing to the ear. How can you turn your page of prose into a sheet of symphony?

I’m glad you asked.

1. Listen to music (with lyrics)

This seems so obvious that it’s kind of insulting I’d suggest it. But I’m not suggesting you just throw on some trendy-ass noise-canceling headphones and casually listen while you type. Like you’d closely read a piece of literature to see how the writer crafted his tale, listen to the music with an attentive ear. Listen for the chord changes (you’ll ear little shifts in notes at specific, timed intervals), listen when the singer transitions from verse to chorus. Listen how the notes change to create harmony and how the lyrics are used to build up to an important moment in the song, like the breakdown or the bridge.

Songwriting is poetry set to music, and is a great example of writing trimmed down to its most lyrical elements. By analyzing the music you listen to, you’ll start to absorb good timing, great meter, and amazing transitions from one section to the next.

2. Vary your sentences

There is a lot of grammar behind sentence variation (I’ve bored you guys with enough of that recently), but it has a more practical purpose than just syntactic complexity. Varying your sentence length – from quick and dirty short sentences to drawn-out and obtuse long sentences – adds fluidity and organicness to your writing. It keeps the reader moving, guessing what form you’ll use next, and makes reading your writing entertaining and engaging.

Variation can encompass length, style, diction, and doesn’t necessarily mean you have to write completely different sentences all the time. The beginning of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony (arguably one of the most iconic pieces of classical music ever) repeats the same 4-note pattern, over and over again. And yet it works and we love it and it sticks in our memory because it’s different variation on the same theme. Chord changes within songs are related to each other, but are variations within the key of the song.

Apply the same to your words and sentences and paragraphs. Variation is music is titillating writing.

3. Build patterns

Beethoven used patterns to establish theme and expected rhythm, but do you know who else did (and does)?

Birds. Whales. Crickets. The ocean. Your heart. Your lungs.

Grammar defines the patterns we expect in language: subject, verb, direct object. Music defines the patterns we expect in song: verse, chorus, verse. Our brains are built to recognize and appreciate patterns. It’s what separates us from computers. Well, that and skin and organs and hair and stuff.

As you’re writing, notice the patterns you’re creating. Are you opening with short sentences followed by longer ones? Are you using generalizations then following up with specific examples or anecdotes? Are you always concluding or transitioning with some sort of fragment or quick tie-up? Are you using a lot of rhetorical questions?

Patterns may not be as obvious and repetitive as an ABAB rhyme structure. Sometimes they’re more subtle, and manifest in parallel grammatical structures or similar messages or repetitive words. But it’s important to recognize that a reader expects some sort of pattern to your writing, a rhythm or marker that lets them know where they are and where they are going.

When you explicitly use certain patterns in your writing for emphasis and effect, you start to really bring your writing voice to the front of the page.

4. Have a conversation

When a band plays, it’s not just 5 or so instruments playing their individual parts, hoping it all syncs up and sounds pleasant or right. It’s the guitar talking to the keyboard, the keyboard flirting with the drums, the drums making fun of bass. The music of each part is working together in real time – almost as if they’re having a conversation – to create a complete dialogue within a song.

When you write, imagine that you’re orating the story. Imagine that your average reader is right in front of you, staring at your expectantly, and you have to clearly enunciate each sentence, adding the proper intonation and weight to the appropriate sections. Write as if you want them to “ooh” and “ahh” when you reach the end of each paragraph because it makes their ears all giddy and blissful. Like, y’know, music.

This is not to say that you should literally write like you speak. That would be a disaster of “ums” and “likes” and “yea, so.” Good writing captures the flow and elegance of practiced speech and cuts out all of filler crap that we use when chatting about March Madness brackets with our coworkers. Your writing should read like it is being spoken, contain all the delectable nuance of a practiced speech and a Broadway play. It should flourish when read out loud, so that it is flourishes within your reader’s mind.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” -Nietzsche

Craft and Draft: Frag. Ments.

March 14, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Not all sentences are privileged enough to grow up in a warm, loving home with supportive clauses and structured guidance. Some are forced to grow up on the syntax-streets, forced to figure out this crazy grammatical world with nothing but their guile and wit.

Sometimes these sentences don’t learn the rules, never understand why they should fit some mold invented by a system that abandoned them. They grow up functional, sometimes even beautiful, but ultimately incomplete, lacking in something baser, something important.

These sentences are the lost souls of the written world. They are the broken. They are the fragments.

A fragment, grammatically, is a subordinate clause turned into a full sentence. Think of it like a sandwich. A normal sentence is bread, meat, tomato, lettuce, mayo. A fragment is two slices of bread that someone is trying to pass off as a sandwich. It can contains nouns and verbs and prepositions and clauses, but is always missing a main subject (lunchmeat and veggies).

They should sound/read weird to an trained ear/eye, because they are not complete thoughts.

A fragment, practically, is something like this: “He stabbed blindly at the shadows in the alleyway, fear guiding his hand. A slash of luck, a jab of hope. He prayed to be the one who got out of this alive.”

There are no rules for fragments. No real, official, decided upon rules, at least. Some people say to use them as you see fit, wherever you see fit. Some people say to avoid them entirely. Many agree that they’re fine as interjections. Others say they shouldn’t be relied upon to convey important information. Other others say that should only be used to convey important information.

There should really be some rules.

Oliver’s Fragmentation Rules:

1. A fragment should have a direct relation to the sentence before it

A fragment is an innately odd structure to read, so it needs to have a strong relationship to whatever it is modifying for the reader to make sense of it. Trying to tie a fragment to a sentence earlier in the paragraph may confuse your reader and cause them to stop their forward progress to go back and figure out what you’re talking about. Trying to reference a sentence that comes after the fragment is equally confusing, as you’re trying to connect to an idea that hasn’t happened yet.

Like a resumptive modifier, a fragment should “resume” the thought, verb action, or direction of the sentence directly before it. Unlike a resumptive modifier, it doesn’t need to mirror the noun or adjective that ends said previous sentence.

“Oliver wrote into the night, his fingers flailing wildly over careworn keys. Wrote and wove those stories that refused to stay trapped in the prison of his mind.”

I’m referencing the main verb of the previous complete sentence, so my fragment makes sense and adds context/new information that the reader can quickly assimilate and understand.

2. A fragment should be used intentionally

A fragment is nothing but a normal old subordinate (dependent) clause, which means that it could easily be attached to and made part of a traditional sentence. Most of the time, you want your subordinate clause to be part of the main sentence, for simplicity’s sake.

But sometimes, for effect, you want that clause to stand alone. Carry its own weight. March on defiantly.

Fragment time!

Syntactically, they are quick and shattered, making them great for conveying panic, stream of consciousness, or frenetic movement. If you’ve got a character who is freaking out because he just witnessed a giant squid-crab eat a nuclear submarine whole, using fragments can syntactically support the action of the narrative. If you’re writing an essay where you are recalling some distant, fading memories of your childhood, using fragments can recreate the jarring phenomenon of trying to rebuild a scene from memory.

Fragments are great, but make sure you are using them intentionally for effect, and not just because you’re not sure how to include the information in the sentence. There is nothing worse than an unintentional fragment in the middle of an otherwise perfectly fluent sentence.

3. A fragment should not be an aside

If you haven’t noticed, I love asides. They are a great way to express an opinion (or interject something new!) without going on a rant. They tend to break the fourth wall which can be good or bad, depending on your format and genre.

Fragments however, do not make good asides. An aside tends to be non sequitur (which translates to “it does not follow”). If you turn a fragment into an aside, you run the risk of changing the focus or message of a certain section of writing.

A fragment reads as if it is part of the main-line narrative, unlike a phrase set off in parentheses or in between em dashes. This will cause your reader to view it as part of the whole (not just added on information) which might stop them dead in their mental tracts if it takes them out of or away from whatever scene they were reading.

Leave the asides to their little parenthetical prisons. Fragments should be free.

“We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks. That’s what connects us–that we’re all broken, all beautifully imperfect.” -Emilio Estevez (yes, really)

Craft and Draft: Resumptives and Summatives and Appositives, oh my!

March 4, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Bust out those style guides, argue over those serial commas, and question the legitimacy of those split infinitives, because it’s National Grammar Day!

After Halloween, my birthday, National Hat Day, National Homebrewing Day, National Wizard Day, and National Drink Beer and Play Video Games All Day Day, National Grammar Day is my favorite. To celebrate the wonders of this syntactically accurate 24-hours, I’ve decided to talk about three of my favorite grammatical tools:

Appositives and resumptive and summative modifiers.

I normally don’t go for such low-hanging Oz-born fruit in my post titles, but for once, comparing these three constructs to lions, tigers, and bears is actually appropriate. I mean, not directly appropriate, as they’re not technically dangerous apex megafauna, but pretty indirectly appropriate as they are powerful and should be treated with respect.

These three are some of the best spells in the grammar-wizard’s tome of arcane writing knowledge. They are also three of the most challenging to master and use correctly. They help embroider and embolden your prose with more eloquent definition of your subjects, and can add lyricism and emphasis to your writing that phrasing and branching may not.

Much like parallelism, modifiers can transform stumbling, unnatural writing into flowing, organic writing with a few flicks of the predicate and shakes of the subordinate clause.

In Apposition to

Outside of our little grammar bubble, the word “appose” (similar in definition to, but not to be confused with “oppose”) means “to place in juxtaposition or proximity.” When inside said grammar bubble, apposition is the idea of placing one noun next to another to “rename” the first noun.

In practice an appositive is like a fancy adjective, with which you describe specific qualities of your noun, using another noun. For example:

“Oliver, a guy obsessed with wizards, wrote a book about ancient magicks.”

The appositive in the sentence above provides additional, specific knowledge about the main subject and has another noun (or nominative clause) that could theoretically replace the original noun.

An appositive cannot rename a noun that is somewhere else in the sentence:

“Oliver wrote a book, a guy obsessed with wizards, about ancient magicks.”

In this case, my appositive follows the noun in the direct object position (“a book”) which makes it sound like it is renaming the book. This sentence doesn’t really make any sense (unless the book is alive and sentient and really into wizards and wizard culture and HOLY CRAP awesome short story idea).

An appositive always renames the noun that precedes it and is always another noun or noun clause.

In addition to basic renaming or specification, appositives can put on some fancy-ass pants, and rename a subject more than once to create a very rhythmic effect:

“Oliver wrote a book, a treatise on men of mystery, a tome that would bridge a gap between science and spirit, a collection of words woven with the sinew of sorcery.“

Appositives are like grammar-guitar solos in the middle of your sentence-songs. They’re in the same key, but give the main melody a little variation and a lot of vivification.

Resuming Resumptives

I think, in all the untamed wilds of the grammatical jungle, that resumptive modifiers are my favorite tool. Don’t tell the adjectival clauses though, it’d break their little nonrestrictive hearts.

The resumptive modifier is exactly what it sounds like; it “resumes” a sentence where it left off, creating an echo-like effect for the end of your original sentence. It shifts the emphasis of a sentence from the main verb of the subject, usually to whatever information is found in the object position:

“And so she wept for his soul, a soul forever doomed to read about, talk about, and be in the company of wizards.”

Where the original sentence would have been focused on her weeping, the resumptive modifier makes the sentence more about his soul. This is a great tool for opening, transitioning, or closing a section where you really want to leave the reader with a clearly defined point of focus.

You can also chain resumptive modifiers together, or repeat an idea to branch into another, tangentially similar idea:

“And so she wept for his soul, a soul turned malignant by years of abuse, abuse of dark magic that should have been left interred.” (Chained resumptive modifiers can make a sentence pretty dense, but pack an amazing syntactic wallop and carry a ton of information in not a lot of words.)

“And so she wept for his soul, a soul entwined in distant lore, a soul that wandered a shadow world of near-forgotten ideas, a soul that had little hope of ever finding the light of tangible reality ever again.” (the resumptive is repeated to add to the idea of this weird guy’s soul)

While resumptives are awesome, they still have rules. To create a resumptive modifier, your original sentence must end with a noun or an adjective, and the section that follows must include (or be) a subordinate clause. The modifier would be incomplete or not make sense otherwise:

“And so she wept quietly, quietly as to not disturb her brother.” (Resumptives with an adverb are redundant as you could just take one out and have the exact same sentence)

“And so she wept for his soul, a tired soul.” (No subordinate clause is also redundant, as you could just include the adjectival information in the original sentence)

For effect, it is still possible to use these forms, but know that if you do you are breaking a grammatical rule and some readers may find this wording garish or silly or just plain pointless.

Summarizing Summatives

If resumptives resume, then summatives…?

Summarize. You win one million SAT/GRE vocabulary points.

Unlike a resumptive, which only modifies the previous noun, a summative modifier sums up the entire independent clause of a sentence with a single noun (or nominative clause). A summative modifier is a perfect tool to nudge your reader into believing something about your sentence without beating them over the head with, “HI THERE READER PERSON, THIS IS WHAT THIS SENTENCE MEANS AND WHAT YOU SHOULD TAKE AWAY FROM THE STORY.” It’s more subtle and sneaky, and when pens are down, better writing.

For example:

“The wizard lost the battle, a defeat that would mark the beginning of his end.”

You’re very slyly giving your reader supplemental information without having to break it into a separate sentence. This improves the flow and let’s the reader draw the conclusion you want by providing literary breadcrumbs. This has the added effect of naturally “rounding out” an idea, making it a perfect way to end a chapter or section.

Just for fun…

…let’s use all three tools in one sentence:

“Hadrax, a red robed silhouette on the horizon, began to wave his hands, a signal to those below that meant incoming fury, fury that came from a wizard pushed too far for too long.

I’ll include my usual grammatical tools disclaimer: these are great, amazing, wonderful, lovely, super effective constructions, but be judicious. They are very fun to write, and very easy to get carried away with. An entire paragraph of resumptive modifiers is going to be dense and confusing. An entire section of summative modifiers may make your reader feel like you’re spoon-feeding them too much information. Too many appositives and your reader won’t know which descriptor is most important.

Use sparingly, parental guidance recommended, caveat emptor, et cetera, et cetera.

I wasn’t kidding. The first step is admitting you have a problem and then writing about it.

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