Posted on - 4 Comments on Pet peeves on parade, part II: head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes…

Pet peeves on parade, part II: head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes…

Your eyes do not deceive you, campers: last post’s one-time venting of a professional reader’s spleen has transmogrified into a series. I’m inviting you to an all-you-can-eat buffet of ways to horrify our old pal, Millicent the agency screener (you know, the sweet lady who narrows the hundreds of requested manuscripts and tens of thousands of queries down to the handful the agent who employs her has time to read in any given year), her cousin Maury the editorial assistant (the fine fellow who performs a similar weeding function for an acquiring editor at a publishing house), and their aunt on the distaff side, Mehitabel, the veteran contest judge (the volunteer devoted to whittling the masses of entries down to a few finalists). Belly up to the bar, folks; there’s plenty for everyone.

Why devote a week or two to what are, frankly, pretty minor manuscript gaffes? We have, after all, spent a fair amount of time

Because these minor infractions are so common in submissions and contest entries that virtually anyone who reads for a living will cringe a little at the very sight of them. Their very ubiquity conveys the false — and, from a doe-eyed aspiring writer’s perspective, utterly unfair — impression that 90% of submitted manuscripts are, if not the same, at least similar enough in writing style that Millicent, Maury, and Mehitabel can feel justified in rejecting them within the first page or two.

Those of you who just cringed in your turn are in fact correct: if a manuscript or book proposal contains an abundance of these gaffes within the opening pages, most Millicents, almost all Maurys (Mauries? Maurizionis?), and pretty much every Mehitabel will just stop reading. That means, in practice, that no matter how marvelous pp. 3-257 might be, it’s extremely unwise for an aspiring writer to justify an unpolished opening with, “But the plot/writing/character development really springs to life on page 15!”

Why? Well, let’s just say that there’s a saying amongst those of us who read for a living: it doesn’t matter how marvelous the writing is nobody would stick with the manuscript long enough to read it.

Which is a pity, really: you wouldn’t believe how many promising novels have a great opening line buried around p. 4 or so. Or how frequently an exciting plot’s early pages are tangled up with backstory, rather than just plopping the readers down in the middle of the action.

But we’re not concentrating on those larger problems, are we? In this series, we’re focusing on the little things that might not trigger instant rejection on first sight, but cumulatively, add up to one grumpy Millicent, Maury, and/or Mehitabel, simply because they pop up with such frequency.

Why should you worry about what other people do on the page? Because submissions and contest entries are read back-to-back, that’s why. One never knows where one’s requested materials might fall in a reading queue, after all. Even if you are too savvy a submitter to indulge in some of these easy ways out often in your manuscript, if the last three — or thirteen, or thirty-three — Chapter Ones M, M, or M read all had a character roll his eyes on page 1 — when your protagonist’s fifteen-year-old casts his eyeballs heavenward on your page 2, it’s going to feel redundant to the reader, even if no one else in your book ever rolls his eyes.

Fair? Not at all. But a reality of submission? Yes. So may I suggest that if you are featuring a teenager within you first five pages, it might behoove you to keep his eyes focused firmly forward?

Trust me, any Millicent who reads either YA or Women’s Fiction all day, every day will thank you; eye-rolling teens are such a popular manuscript decoration that it’s positively a vacation to a professional reader when those eyes stay put.

It’s also quite a treat when characters don’t shake their heads, raise their eyebrows, furrow those same eyebrows, or nod several times per chapter scene page paragraph.

Yes, people do these things all the time in real life, but as actions go, they are not particularly interesting. Yet such phrases creep into manuscripts on little cat feet: these are such common actions that most writers don’t have any idea how often their characters perform them.

Trust me, Millicent is keeping count. So is Maury. So is Mehitabel. So are the doctors who take their blood pressure.

Yet they seem innocuous, don’t they? They’re just simple descriptive terms, after all — and isn’t the point of, say, the narrative portions of a dialogue scene to describe what the characters are doing when they are not speaking? According to that logic, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with an exchange like this:

“I’ll have to think about that one,” Thaddeus said, furrowing his brow. “Would you care for more tea?”

Janet shook her head over her stone-cold cup. “No, thanks. This is fine. But if we could get back to what we were discussing…”

He nodded. “Of course — how silly of me. You wanted to know about that tremendous secret that everyone in town has kept for the last forty-seven years.”

She nodded. “I’d be grateful for anything you could tell me.”

“Am I to assume that my fellow citizens have been — how shall I put this?” Thaddeus cocked an eyebrow. “Less than forthcoming?”

Janet nodded, relieved at last to have found someone who understood. She grinned at the old man. “You don’t seem to mistrust strangers as much as they do.”

He shook his head, chuckling. “Now, now. You mustn’t assume that everyone who sets fire to your rearview mirror is necessarily hostile to you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “But you must admit, hostility is a distinct possibility.”

He nodded. “It’s also possible that people here like you enough to want to warn you…”

Her eyebrows nearly hit her hairline. So she hadn’t been imagining it. “To get out of town?”

He shook his head. “Perhaps just to ask fewer questions,” he suggested gently.

In and of themselves, there’s nothing wrong with any of these individual uses of these common actions. Cumulatively, however, they get to be a trifle redundant — if not downright soporific.

To a professional reader, they are something worse: percussively redundant. Because their eyes are trained to ferret out word and phrase redundancy, all of these similar actions will just leap off the page at them. So rather than focusing upon the dialogue tucked between all of this head and eyebrow action, they will focus on the actions themselves.

Want to see how distracting that would be? Here’s that same scene as M, M, or M would read it:

“I’ll have to think about that one,” Thaddeus said, furrowing his brow. “Would you care for more tea?”

Janet shook her head over her stone-cold cup. “No, thanks. This is fine. But if we could get back to what we were discussing…”

He nodded. “Of course — how silly of me. You wanted to know about that tremendous secret that everyone in town has kept for the last forty-seven years.”

She nodded. “I’d be grateful for anything you could tell me.”

“Am I to assume that my fellow citizens have been — how shall I put this?” Thaddeus cocked an eyebrow. “Less than forthcoming?”

Janet nodded, relieved at last to have found someone who understood. She grinned at the old man. “You don’t seem to mistrust strangers as much as they do.”

He shook his head, chuckling. “Now, now. You mustn’t assume that everyone who sets fire to your rearview mirror is necessarily hostile to you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “But you must admit, hostility is a distinct possibility.”

He nodded. “It’s also possible that people here like you enough to want to warn you…”

Her eyebrows nearly hit her hairline. So she hadn’t been imagining it. “To get out of town?”

He shook his head. “Perhaps just to ask fewer questions,” he suggested gently.

To a professional reader, these phrases are not merely word repetition — they represent a radical waste of page space. These actions may be an accurate reflection of what happened, but the point of a dialogue scene is not just to list every utterance and describe every action that might conceivably have occurred if this exchange happened in real life, right? It’s to provide an entertaining take on the exchange between two interesting characters by reporting only the character-revealing, plot-advancing, and/or relationship-illuminating details.

None of that eyebrow-wiggling and head-bobbing passes that three-part test, does it? None of those actions are especially character-revealing, plot-advancing, or relationship-illuminating. So what if we replaced it with actions that were — or simply eliminated the unrevealing activity? While we’re at it, let’s get rid of some of those unnecessary tag lines, shall we?

“I’ll have to think about that one.” Thaddeus fiddled needlessly with his long-dead wife’s bone china tea service. “Would you care for more tea?”

Janet took a mock-sip from her stone-cold cup. “This is fine. But if we could get back to what we were discussing…”

“Of course — how silly of me. You wanted to know about that tremendous secret that everyone in town has kept for the last forty-seven years.”

She gripped the armrests, shaking from the effort of not leaping up to throttle the truth out of old man. “I’d be grateful for anything you could tell me.”

“Am I to assume that my fellow citizens have been — how shall I put this?” He ran his fingertips skittishly along the curio shelf nearest to him as if he were checking for dust, causing the Hummel figurines of bland, blond children to rattle together. “Less than forthcoming?”

At last, someone who understood! “You don’t seem to mistrust strangers as much as they do.”

The ceramic children clashed noisily. “Now, now. You mustn’t assume that everyone who sets fire to your rearview mirror is necessarily hostile to you.”

“But how can you justify…” Suddenly, the world went blurry. Had he spiked her tea? She struggled to maintain her composure. “Hostility is a distinct possibility.”

He reached a blue-veined hand toward her — or was it three hands? “It’s also possible that people here like you enough to want to warn you.”

So she hadn’t been imagining it. Or was she imagining the fourteen old women who had sulk into the room, quietly menacing? “To get out of town?”

“Perhaps just to ask fewer questions,” he suggested gently, manually closing her eyes as if she were a corpse.

Quite a different scene, isn’t it? By minimizing the mundane and the too-common, we’ve freed up plenty of room for exciting new developments.

Let’s apply the same principle to another radically overused set of actions, looking at another — or, almost as popular, exchanging glances with her — in lieu of, well, doing something more expressive of character, emotion, or situation. A not particularly exaggerated example:

Spiro glanced at Tanya. She didn’t seem to be kidding. But it couldn’t hurt to double-check. “Are you kidding, Tanya?”

She looked him dead in the eye. “What do you think?”

He stared back, trying to read that mysterious expression in her eyes. “That you couldn’t possibly be serious. Pierrette is our friend.”

She just looked at him. The clock on the mantelpiece clicked fourteen times.

He averted his eyes. “Okay, so maybe she has kicked our dog occasionally.”

She grabbed his chin, to force him to look at her. “Have you seen Fido today? Or this week?”

Her gaze bore into him like a drill. He dropped his eyes. “No,” he whispered.

That’s quite a lot of eye activity, is it not? Too much, I suspect, for me to need to play with the typeface in order to show you how Millicent, Maury, and/or Mehitabel might respond to the conceptual repetition.

The redundancy is not the only reason that M, M, and M might respond to this passage negatively, however. Any other guesses?

If your hand instantly flew into the air, and you shouted, “Hey, the mere fact that this character looked at another does not tell us much about what said character is thinking or feeling — or, indeed, what our hero Spiro is reading into Tanya’s peepers,” I hereby award you the Self-Editing Medal of Valor with walnut clusters. Instead of showing us how it was apparent that Tanya was not kidding, or what the mysterious expression in her eyes actually would have looked like to a bystander, the narrative is simply telling us that these people moved their eyes around.

So like the head motions and eyebrow gyrations above, all of this eye-motion is taking up page space that could be devoted to more revealing activity. My editorial inclination would be to get rid of practically of it, especially if this scene happened to fall within the first chapter of the manuscript: at the risk of repeating myself (and repeating myself and repeating myself), since the overwhelming majority of aspiring writers seriously overestimate just how much meaning the reader can derive from the simple statement that one character looked at another, or that they looked at each other, a professional reader is likely to respond to even a little bit of unnecessary eye movement as if it were filler.

Again, I think we can do better. Take a gander:

Her tone betrayed not the slightest hint of humor, but it couldn’t hurt to double-check. “Are you kidding, Tanya?”

The corners of her mouth twitched. “What do you think?”

He had never been able to read past her poker face. “That you couldn’t possibly be serious. Pierrette is our friend.”

She merely continued cleaning her revolver. The clock on the mantelpiece clicked fourteen times.

Spiro’s guts twisted sideways. “Okay, so maybe she has kicked our dog occasionally.”

“Have you seen Fido today?” Casually, she pointed the gun at him. “Or this week?”

“No,” he whispered.

See how much room eschewing a bare description of who was looking where when freed for more interesting activity? It also removed the hint of another extremely common Millicent-irritant, the glance into which the protagonist reads such complicated meaning that the reader is left wondering whether what our hero is actually seeing in those peepers is subtitles. Here, we see the phenomenon in a relatively mild form.

He stared back, trying to read that mysterious expression in her eyes.

Since we are neither shown what Tanya’s eyes looked like at this particular moment, nor told just how they evinced mysteriousness, nor even treated to an insight into why Spiro expected those baby blues to just blurt out — in Morse code, perhaps — what she is thinking, this statement would a little flat for most readers. If they were interested in the story, however, they might be willing to do the writer’s job, filling in what Spiro saw swimming around in those irises. But how likely are Millicent, Maury, and Mehitabel, who may well have been treated to dozens of pairs of mysterious eyes in the hours of reading prior to picking up your manuscript or contest entry, to be willing to guess?

Uh-huh. Admittedly, the annoyance of the implicit expectation that they will invest the energy in guessing what the author intended here probably won’t be enough to provoke M, M, or M to shout, “Next!” But if it’s the third or fourth common gaffe within the first few paragraphs, can you honestly blame them for assuming — perhaps wrongly — that (a) the rest of the manuscript must be peppered with such irritants and thus (b) the writing in the manuscript is not different enough from the other submissions the pro has read that hour/day/week to be exceptional, so (c) the pro would be entirely justified in not reading any more of it?

Okay, so it is possible to blame them. But it’s not impossible to understand why the sight of the 20th or 30th pair of hyper-expressive eyes in a single morning might render Nos. 21-30 more likely to be rejection-triggers than Nos. 1-5, is it?

Or that irises that shout entire sentences — nay, paragraphs — might be rejection-triggers even early in the day. Seriously, M, M, and M regularly read of eyes so eloquent that it’s downright maddening. Yes, eyes do tend to be expressive in real life, but how precisely would they convey a sentiment like this?

Clara shrank back, stunned by the intensity of Simon’s gaze as it tried to compel her to bend to his will. “Come to me,” it said, “and I will protect you from harm. Do not fear the Morrison brothers’ machinations; I will outwit them, for I love you as Shane Morrison never could. Only have faith in me, and I shall make sure everything turns out right.” He must be mad, insane, completely off his rocker to believe she would fall for him again.

I’ve read masters’ theses that advanced less complex arguments than these eyes are wordlessly conveying. What’s happening here, clearly, is not that Simon’s peepers have started flashing these sentiments, but that Clara is choosing to read volumes into an appealing glance.

So why not just admit it? Why not just show Simon’s facial expression, then allow Clara to get on with her mental gyrations?

Abruptly, Simon’s face became dead white, causing his overflowing black eyes to stand out against his skin like newsprint on a page. Clara shrank back, stunned by the intensity of his gaze. She knew now what dark bargain he was offering: protection from the Morrison brothers in exchange for her love. He must be mad, insane, completely off his rocker to believe she would fall for him again.

Noticing a pattern here? By avoiding the Millicent-annoying tropes upon which most aspiring writers rely, we open up the possibilities for showing, rather than telling, what’s going on.

These are not the only ways that those overtaxed body parts try M, M, and M’s patience, however. Perhaps the most provocative to the professional reader is that subset of irritants that not only suffer from overuse, but are internally redundant as well.

Like, say, the phrase she nodded her head. Pardon my asking, but what other body part could she possibly have nodded? Her spleen?

And what about that old standby, he shrugged his shoulders? In your long and doubtless eventful life, have you ever heard of someone, anyone, no matter how talented, shrugging a body part other than his shoulders?

Oh, you laugh, but try reading either of these phrases 50 or 100 times in a day. You would find yourself asking the question above through gritted teeth, too. Or perhaps crossing out her head so hard that your pen poked through the manuscript page.

Not all such phrases are so obviously redundant, of course. She pointed with her finger or he waved his hand are over-explanations, since pointing generally involves a finger and waving a hand. Yes, it is possible to point with a toe or wave an elbow. However, if one were to point or wave with a non-standard body part, it would be necessary to state explicitly which part is being used, right? If one just says she pointed at the ghost or he waved good-bye, any reader would assume that a finger and a hand were involved, respectively.

By contrast, M, M, and M’s eyes would skate tranquilly by characters that snap their fingers, tap their toes, crack their knuckles, or even shake their heads. It is possible to crack something other than a knuckle — a nut, for instance. And while tapping is generally the province of feet, it’s also possible to tap one’s fingers on a table, one’s fork against one’s wineglass to call for quiet, or a magic wand against a top hat to produce a rabbit.

But I’m over-explaining this, amn’t I? Let’s just move on to another way that fictional heads cause Millicent chagrin. See if you can spot it in its natural habitat.

Monique nodded. “Yes, I agree.”

Seth shook his head. “And I said no. I couldn’t disagree more.”

Betty shrugged. “Oh, I just don’t know. Or perhaps I simply don’t care.”

How did you do? If you were jumping up and down by the end of the second line, bellowing at the top of your lungs, “Hey, Anne, each of these paragraphs is conceptually redundant — in fact, multiply so,” I hereby award you the Self-Editor of the Week medal, complete with a bright red ribbon. The physical actions convey the same meaning as the dialogue, so technically, they are redundant.

Don’t see it? Okay, what’s the difference in meaning between

Monique nodded.

“Yes,” Monique said.

and

“I agree,” said Monique.

They all express the same thing: Monique is in agreement with whatever just passed. “So why,” Millicent, Maury, and Mehitabel wail, “does this writer need to tell me about it three times?

Trust me, once will suffice. Characters who nod while saying yes, shake their heads while saying no, and shrug (their shoulders, no doubt) while expressing factual doubt or indifference are a notorious professional readers’ pet peeve.

“What’s next?” Millicent and her relatives demand wearily. “Characters who walk with their legs, put shoes on their feet, and don gloves on their hands? Alert the media! Next, you’ll be astonishing me by depicting characters clapping hats on their heads, wrapping belts around their waists, and wearing rings on their fingers instead of the widest part of the arm.”

Have a bit more faith in your readers’ intelligence, especially if that reader happens to do it for a living. Narratives that explain more than necessary, or that over-make their points, can easily seem as though they are talking down to their audience. Just as a mystery-solving protagonist will come across as smarter if she figures out what’s going on without needing every relevant puzzle piece handed to her along with extensive explanation, so will the narrative voice seem smarter if it does not explain the obvious.

Have I made that plain? Please shake your head, say, “No,” and respond negatively, if not.

And please bear in mind while you are reading your work IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD: just because all of the phrases I have mentioned today are in common usage doesn’t mean that they will necessarily work well on the page. Professional readers like Millicent, Maury, and, to a lesser extent, Mehitabel are trained to zero in upon redundancy, both literal and conceptual.

They’re not going to be impressed by your stamping your manuscript over and over again with the same phrases, no matter how common they are in everyday speech. Minimizing your narrative’s reliance upon typically overused phrases and unnecessary explanation will not only help you steer clear of these common pet peeves, but also free up precious page space for your one-of-a-kind quips, vivid descriptions, and evocative phrases.

In other words, to unveil your good writing. And if that doesn’t cause you to cheer, “Hooray,” I’m not sure what will. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 20 Comments on Phrases an aspiring writer should not touch with a hundred-foot pole

Phrases an aspiring writer should not touch with a hundred-foot pole

Can we talk?

Actually, I’ve been meaning to bring this up for quite some time now, but the moment never seemed quite right. You were gearing up to send out a flotilla of queries, perhaps, or were intent upon getting a submission out the door. Maybe we were all focused upon how to prep a writing contest entry, a verbal pitch, or a synopsis.

In short, there always seemed to be something more pressing than having this painful discussion. But as your writing advisor and, I’d like to think, your friend, I just can’t stand around and watch you hurting yourself any longer without saying something. I say this with love, but you’ve been engaging in self-destructive behavior, behavior that is making it harder for you to land an agent, get published, and get your good writing in front of the readership it deserves.

Oh, I see you roll your eyes. It’s easy, isn’t it, to blame a system stacked against the new writer? But this is something you are doing to yourself, I’m afraid, something as lethal to your manuscript’s marketability as taking a match and setting it on fire instead of mailing it to the agent who requested it.

I refer, of course, to the average aspiring writer’s addiction to sending out requested materials without taking the time to proofread them — or having someone else proofread them.

I’m not even talking about the to-my-mind deplorable practice of submitting those pages before reading them IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD — although as I may have mentioned several hundred times before in this very forum, that’s the single best way to catch typos, dropped words, logic problems, half-revised sentences, and the fact that your protagonist’s hated coworker was called Tisha for the first 57 pages, Patricia in Chapters 4, 8, 17, and parts of 24, and Trish for the rest of the book. I’m talking about just assuming that a quick computerized spell-check will be sufficient because, hey, you’ve got a busy life.

Or, as is common with contest entries that need to be postmarked by a certain date and time, performing it when one is so tired that one inadvertently hits the REPLACE ALL button instead of IGNORE ALL. The result: 300 pages in which political coalitions are invariably described as political cotillions, leaving the poor judge in that historical fiction contest to wonder why nobody ever seems to be dancing.

Or, even more common, dispensing with even the computerized spell-check in your eagerness to get the pages a real, live agent has requested sent off before another sunset has passed. Never mind that Millicent the agency screener is unlikely to have any sympathy whatsoever for your unfortunate habit of consistently mistyping receive with the e and the i inverted, or the fact that somehow, you missed the day of English class when the difference between there, their, and they’re was clarified beyond any risk of future confusion. You had been working on that manuscript for years — you simply couldn’t bear to wait the additional few hours it would take to proof those requested pages.

Oh, it’s all quite understandable. Speaking as someone who reads manuscripts for a living and has served as a writing contest judge, however, it’s also completely understandable that a professional reader might reject those pages on the basis of all of those typos alone.

Yes, you read that correctly: it’s not at all uncommon for a professional reader to stop reading at the second or third typo, skipped word, or grammatical problem. So if you are not routinely proofreading your work before you submit it or enter it in a contest — or having some sharp-eyed soul do it — you may well be dooming your manuscript to rejection.

So I ask you: what are you actually gaining by not taking the time to make sure that your pages are clean?

A clean manuscript, for the benefit of those of you new to the term, is industry-speak for a manuscript completely devoid of misspelled words, grammatical gaffes, dropped words, incorrect punctuation, logic problems, formatting errors, clichés, or any of the many, many other small errors that make those of us trained to read for a living grit our teeth because we see them so very often. Indeed, Millicents and contest judges are often specifically instructed to consider seriously only clean manuscripts.

What happens to the rest, you ask with fear and trembling? They are subjected to the most common word in our Millie’s vocabulary: “Next!”

Why? Well, several reasons — and far better ones than you might expect.

The first and most straightforward: if a manuscript is riddled with errors, some luckless soul is going to have to fix them all before an agent could possibly submit it to an editor with any hope of placing it successfully. The same holds true for a submission to a publishing house: copyediting is very time-consuming and costs real money. And few literary contests will want their good names sullied by awarding top honors to an entry that looks as though the entrant conceived of it 24 hours before the contest deadline, typed it with fingers blurring across the keyboard, and ran panting to the post office three minutes before it closed.

Nobody, but nobody, likes to read a first draft. And I say that as a writer who once actually did pull together a literary contest entry — the first chapter of a book, synopsis, and entry form — in 23 hours and 32 minutes.

I won, too, despite the never-sufficiently-to-be-deplored typo on page 17. Do as I say, not as I did.

Why? Well, to a professional reader — like, say, Millicent, her boss the agent, the editor to whom the agent might conceivably sell your book, or a contest judge — all of these seemingly little writing problems are not merely the hallmark of a writer in a hurry or easily-fixed trivialities that merely mar the surface of the deep, deep pool that is a brilliantly-written story, annoying but not particularly important. They are a sign that the writer is not professional enough to realize that this is an industry in which spelling does in fact count.

Or that presentation in general counts. One of the hallmarks of an aspiring writer who has yet to learn much about how publishing works is an apparent belief that agents and editors sit around all day, casually reading through submissions and acquiring any that happen to catch their fancy.

“Oh, this writer has promise,” these fantasy pros murmur over their snifters of warm cognac as they leisurely turn pages, perched on intricately tufted chaise longues. “He can’t spell, but that’s easily fixed at the editorial stage. I’m so fascinated by this story and the voice in which it is written that I’m just going to ignore the fact that the writer clearly didn’t bother to read his own book. I’m going to read it until the very last word of the very last page before I make up my mind about it, but I have a strong feeling that the answer is going to be yes.”

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but that’s simply not how professional readers operate: they just don’t have time to read every submission in its entirety. Nor could they possibly take on every writing project that tickled their fancy. An agent or editor who routinely embraced projects without thinking about her ability to sell them would soon be out of a job, after all.

As a direct result, the fine folks who work in agencies and publishing houses look first for reasons to reject manuscripts, scouring each line for problems. Only those submissions that pass this scrutiny for hundreds of pages stand a chance of getting picked up. Even setting the bar this high, a well-respected agency or contest will still receive so many perfectly clean (or nearly so), nicely-written submissions that they can afford to reject everything else.

I sense some trembling hands tentatively raised out there. “What do you mean by scouring each line?” some of you quaver, thinking perhaps of that writing sample you entered into that online submission form without proofreading. “It would be impossibly time-consuming to read an entire manuscript that closely, especially with the high volume of submissions the average agency receives. Why, the only way they could possibly pull it off would be to stop reading when they encounter a problem, and move on to the next one.”

That’s precisely what they do. Oh, not necessarily at the first problem, but certainly before the fourth or fifth.

Was that great whooshing sound that just deafened us all the result of half of you gasping as you frantically tried to open your manuscript files to begin revising them? A clean manuscript suddenly sounds like a very, very desirable thing, doesn’t it?

That’s a smart orientation. The competition for those very few client openings at agencies — and even fewer new author openings at publishing houses — is unbelievably fierce, far too fierce to expect a charitable reading.

Millicent forms the first line of defense — I feel you cringing, but that’s how agents and editors think of her — against the blizzard of submissions battering against their mailroom doors. Even an agent unusually hungry for clients usually can take on only three or four a year. That means, in practical terms, that for every submission she approves, there are hundreds she or her Millicent must reject.

The same holds true for queries, of course. Except that for hundreds, substitute tens of thousands.

Fortunately for Millicent (but unfortunately for writers), most submissions honestly are self-rejecting. How so? Well, one of the most popular methods is by combining improper formatting with a few typos on page 1.

You know, the sort of thing that the combination of a little research into how the publishing industry works and a few minutes of proofreading would easily have caught. To Millicent, a writer who hasn’t put in the time to do either isn’t ready for the publishing world. The hypercritical way that professional readers scrutinize manuscripts might kill him.

Which is to say: a savvy writer expects her future agent and editor to expect a completely clean manuscript every time. Yes, even when the writer has only three weeks to revise the last quarter of the book because a new editor has just taken over the project from the acquiring editor, and the newbie has some exciting new ideas about plot resolution.

Oh, it happens. To an agent, a good client is a flexible client.

Which brings me to another excellent reason Millicent is specifically trained to regard a clean manuscript as the minimum requirement for serious consideration: a client who does not proofread (or possess the skills to do it well) is inherently more time-consuming for an agency to represent than one who habitually produces clean manuscripts. While an established author can get away with being high-maintenance, one trying to break into the biz for the first time cannot.

Oh, an agent expects to hold a new client’s hand a little; submitting to publishing houses can be a long, drawn-out, and extremely stressful process. But if that client cannot be relied upon to provide the agent with clean pages, who is going to end up proofing them?

The agent, that’s who. See why she might instruct her Millicent to select clients likely to spare her the trouble? Or why if the writer hasn’t bothered to read this manuscript, why should I? is such a common mantra amongst professional readers?

Or, to be blunt about it, why I saw fit to stage an intervention for those of you who aren’t already scrutinizing your submissions to prevent them from falling into this most common of self-rejection pitfalls?

To be fair, though, not all rejection-triggers would necessarily turn up in a quick proofreading — or even when reading a manuscript IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD. Often, for instance, writers new to the game will miss another of Millicent’s pet peeves, the use of clichés.

Or, an even surer professional reader-annoyer, the misuse of clichés.

That caused some of you to do a double-take, didn’t it? “But Anne,” you cry, rubbing your sore necks, “isn’t a misused cliché not a cliché, by definition? Doesn’t it at least have the charm of surprise?”

Yes and no, in that order — to professional readers, at least. Allow me to explain.

Since so many aspiring writers are under the mistaken impressions that (a) dialogue in a book should read precisely like conversations in real life, despite the fact that most real-world conversations are so repetitious that they would plunge readers into profound slumber, (b) a narrative voice should sound like the way someone might actually talk, regardless of whether the narration is in the first person or not, and/or (c) an essential tactic for achieving either (a) or (b) is to incorporate those pat little catchphrases most speakers use into one’s writing, discovering clichés on the submission page is the norm, not the exception.

Because writers who embrace (a), (b), or (c) believe — and with some reason — that there is inherent virtue in echoing everyday speech, they usually don’t think of these common phrases as clichés. Let’s take a gander at a few dozen of them in action.

Jeremy strode through the door, bold as brass. “Hey, Mom. It’s raining cats and dogs out there.” He mussed little Tad’s hair as he passed; the boy was glued to the family’s pride and joy, the new black-and-white TV. “Hey, shrimp. Where’s the beef?”

“Blow it out your ear,” Tad snarled without taking his eyes off the nine-inch screen. His Davy Crockett cap had slid off his head onto his cowboy suit. His discarded hula-hoop rested on top of the crumpled Twister set and a signed photo of Marilyn Monroe. “It’s almost Howdy Doody time.”

Betsy rolled her eyes, gritted her teeth, and shrugged her shoulders. Playing host family to a time-traveling teen from 1984 wasn’t as easy as pie, despite what the brochure had promised. But then, you couldn’t believe everything you read. Let the buyer beware. “Does that mean it’s time to put on the feedbag? I’ve been slaving over a hot stove all day, waiting for you to traipse through that door.”

Jeremy had already tuned her out: his Walkman, whatever that was, was turned up too high. One day, she was going to smack him upside the head and give him a piece of her mind.

“You’ll go deaf from all that noise,” she shouted at him. “And don’t sit so close to the TV, Tad; you’ll ruin your eyes. My goodness, if I had a dime for every time I’ve told you…”

Jeremy rolled his eyes like James Dean, as all the kids seemed to be doing these days. He seemed to expect the world — or at least his supper — to be handed to him on a silver platter. When she was a girl, walking to school through three feet of snow, year in, year out, rain or shine, come hell or high water, without fail, her mother would have given her what for if she had flounced into the house like a movie star. Just who did he think he is?

“Just wait ’til your father gets home,” she muttered under her breath.

Granddad shuffled into the kitchen, shoving his false teeth into his mouth and clutching his low-hanging pants. “Is dinner ready yet? I’m starved.”

She sighed, mopping her weary brow. “There’s only so much I can do. I only have two hands. I do and do and do for you people, and this is the thanks I get. A woman’s work is never done.”

The old man caught sight of Jeremy. “Looking sharp, kiddo.” When the boy did not respond, Granddad lifted a speaker from his ear. “Think you’re the cat’s meow, don’t you, you young whippersnapper?”

“Hey, chill.” Jeremy took off his headphones before the old man messed up his ‘do. “You look mahvelous.”

“Marvelous,” Betsy corrected under her breath. “I have such a headache, Dad. The kids have been running me ragged.”

“You think you have a headache? Back in my day, we had headaches.” Granddad peered through the window. “‘Bout time we had some rain. Sure do need it.”

“We sure do,” she agreed, mopping her brow, nodding her head, and nervously playing with her apron while the clouds rolled by. It looked like stormy weather. Still, she could look for the silver lining and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. “I’ve been worried sick about Jeremy. Could you find out where he has been while I set the table, since I don’t have a daughter to do it for me, and I can’t ask either of the boys to do it in this time period?”

“Boys will be boys.” Granddad shuffled back to Jeremy. “Where have you been, son? Jitterbugging at the malt shop to that newfangled rock-and-roll?”

“You should come with me sometime, Granddad. We are two wild and crazy guys.”

Tad’s curly head popped up behind the couch. “Isn’t that misplaced cultural reference from the 1970s?”

“Mind your own business,” Jeremy growled. “Sometimes, you just gotta say…”

Had enough? Millicent has — and did, by the middle of the second paragraph.

Stock phrases are problematic on the page for much the same reasons that standard polite exchanges are. They’re predictable, and because everyone does say them, a character’s uttering them does not reveal anything about his emotional state, mental gymnastics, or even the situation at hand. (Sorry — once one starts generating hackneyed phrases, it’s hard to stop.)

Oh, hadn’t I mentioned that polite chitchat is also a common type of cliché? Because literally anyone might say these phrases, they are the opposite of character-revealing. Take a gander:

“Why, hello there, Gladys,” Ambrose said. “How are you today?”

“Fine. How are you?”

“Fine. How is your husband, Terrence, and your four children, Maude, Eleanor, Franklin Delano, and Frances? All well, I trust.”

“Yes, fine. How’s your cocker spaniel, Macguffin?”

“Oh, fine, fine. Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

“Very. We could use some rain, though.”

“Sure could use it.”

“Sure could. Ah-choo!”

“Bless you.”

“Thank you.”

“May I hold the door for you? Ladies first.”

“Thanks. Watch out for that puddle.”

“I appreciate your telling me. I wonder how it got here, considering that we haven’t had any rain. O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!”

“And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Ambrose, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come, here, as before, never, so help you mercy, how strange or odd soe’er I bear myself, as I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on, that you, at such times seeing me, never shall, with arms encumber’d thus, or this headshake, or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, as ‘Well, well, we know,’ or ‘We could, an if we would,’ or ‘If we list to speak,’ or ‘There be, an if they might,’ or such ambiguous giving out, to note
that you know aught of me: this not to do, so grace and mercy at your most need help you, swear.”

“Whatever you say, Gladys.” Ambrose tipped his hat politely. “Have a good day.”

“You, too, Ambrose.”

Okay, so I got bored enough to throw a twist in there. But see how stultifying all of that politeness is on the page?

Once again, I spot some timid hands in the air. “But Anne, isn’t this just what nice people say? And if I want the reader to like my protagonist, don’t I need to show that he’s polite, rather than telling it by some such statement as Nate was a polite guy?”

If you really want to induce Millicent to like ol’ Nate, I would strongly suggest that you do neither. Most readers will come to dislike a protagonist who bores them, not matter how nice his words or actions are. Since Millicent is paid to get bored a whole lot faster than the ordinary reader (see earlier comments about weeding out as many submissions as possible), her threshold of impatience with nondescript polite conversation is exceedingly low.

I wouldn’t push it. Instead, why not have Nate win her heart by doing and saying unexpected kind things?

“Okay, Anne,” those of you prone to flinging your hands skyward concede reluctantly. “I can see why I might need to trim both the stock phrases and purely polite exchanges. But weren’t you going to tell us about misused clichés?”

Ah, yes, I was, campers; thank you so much for reminding me. And how’s your mother doing?

No, but seriously, folks, while stock phrases bore professional readers, misstatements of these same phrases tend to drive Millicent into apoplexy. While such clichés as it’s a dog-eat-dog world, take another tack, and I couldn’t care less often — and incorrectly — turn up in conversation as it’s a doggie-dog world, take another tact, and the irritatingly immortal I could care less, the only reason to use the incorrect versions on the page would be to make the character saying them seem ignorant, right?

Right? Anyone out there?

Even ironic use is dangerous, though: because Millicent sees these misstatements so often, she’s likely to have a knee-jerk reaction to their appearance. And it’s hard to blame her, isn’t it? Not only do these phrases imply that the writer has a rather poor ear for dialogue, but even had these tropes been rendered correctly, they would still be hackneyed phrases, and thus unoriginal.

Call me zany, but don’t you want Millicent to judge you on your writing, rather than someone else’s?

Then, too, misstated clichés often reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of the original. What would a doggie-dog world look like, anyway? Why bother to mention that someone could care less than he currently does? And while taking a different tack while sailing makes some sense as a metaphor, what would taking a different tact involve? Diplomacy in another language?

My favorite example comes by way of a roommate of mine in graduate school, a young lady who had grown up without a television in the house. She loved stock phrases, but she was perpetually getting them wrong.

“What do you mean, you wouldn’t touch it with a 100-foot pole?” I would cackle. “The standard length is ten. How would you even lift a hundred-foot pole?”

She was also prone to misapplying such metaphors. “I can’t find my keys,” she would say. “They’re like a needle in a haystack.”

“I wish you would tell me how,” I would say, lifting the sofa cushion under which her personal items so often worked themselves. “Not everything that’s lost is like a needle in a haystack, you know.”

She would look perplexed. “It isn’t?”

Okay, so perhaps there were some undiagnosed mental health issues involved. But you see the point, right? A misused familiar term may well produce a laugh, but even if you are writing comedy, you might want to use it sparingly. In submissions, misappropriated clichés often result in bad laughter, a chuckle at the expense of the story, a giggle that the author did not intend.

Now that you know what such misstatements look like individually, let’s revisit our first example, so you may see how and why they might annoy Millicent on the page.

Jeremy scrod through the door, bold as copper. “Hey, Mom. It’s raining cats and ducks out there.” He missed little Tad’s hair as he passed; the boy was taped to the family’s pride and happiness, the new black-and-white TV. “Hey, petunia. Where’s the mutton?”

“Blow it out your nose,” Tad snarled without taking his gaze off the nine-inch screen. His Daniel Webster cap had slid off his head onto his sailor suit. His discarded Pet Rock rested on top of the Pong remote and a signed photo of Theda Bara. “It’s almost time for the Miniskiteers.”

Betsy rolled her mouth, gritted her ribs, and shrugged her arms. Playing host family to a time-traveling teen from 1984 wasn’t as easy as cake, despite what the brochure had promised. But then, you couldn’t believe everything. Let the biller beware. “Does that mean it’s time to don the fedbag? I’ve been praying over a hot stove all day, waiting for you to lapse through that door.”

Jeremy had already turned her out: his Walkmen, whatever they were, were turned up too high. One day, she was going to smack him beside the head and give him a place of her mind.

“You’ll go deaf from all that sound,” she shouted at him. “And don’t sit so close to the TV, Tad; you’ll ruin your posture. My goodness, if I had an orangutan for every time I’ve told you…”

Jeremy rolled his cigarette like James Dean, as all the kids seemed to be these days. He seemed to expect the world — or at least his supper — to be handled to him on a silver plate. When she was a girl, walking to school through three inches of snow, year in, bear out, rain or more rain, come Milwaukee or high water, without failure, her mother would have given her what for it if she had flounced into the house like a movie preen. Just who did he think he could be?

“Just wait ’til your father gets here,” she muttered under her breath.

Granddad snuffled into the kitchen, shoving his false teeth into his and clutching his low-hanging tie. “Is dinner prepared yet? I’m staved.”

She sighed, mopping her weary hair. “There’s only so many I can do. I only have two hand. I do and do and do and do and do for your people, and this is the thanks I git. A woman’s work is never down.”

The old man caught sight of Jeremy. “Looking bark, kiddo.” When the boy did not respond, Granddad lifted a speaker from his ear. “Think you’re the cat’s leisure suit, don’t you, you young whipperstinger?”

“Hey, take a bill pill.” Jeremy took off his headphones before the old man messed up his ‘roo. “You look mahvelous.”

“Marvelous,” Betsy corrected under her breath. “I have such a backache, Dad. The kids have been running me rugged.”

“You think you have an ague? Back in the day, we had agues.” Granddad peered through the window. “‘Bout time we accumulated some significant rainfall. Sure do need it.”

“We sure do,” she agreed, mopping her blow, nodding her head, and nervously playing with her ape while the clouds rolled near. It looked like stormy seasons. Still, she could look for the silver pining and the pot of gold at the end of the rainblow. “I’ve been worried ill about Jeremy. Could you find out where he has been while I set the table with silverware, plates, and gasses?”

“Boys well be boys.” Granddad sniffled back to Jeremy. “Where have you been, son? Jitterbeetling at the salt shop to that newfinagled bock-and-roll?”

“You should come with me sometime, Granddad. We are two wild and lazy guys.”

Tad’s curly head popped up behind the couch. “Isn’t that misplaced cultural reference from the 1970s?”

“Mind your own bees’ honey,” Jeremy growled. “Sometimes, you just gotta say what the Buick…”

Have I made my point yet, or do I need to keep greeting that red horse?

In the days to come, I shall be going over more seemingly small Millicent-irritants. Not the big stuff, mind you, but the tiny, niggling narrative choices that make her teeth…well, I was going to say grind, but that would be a cliché. Once you are aware of precisely how and why these tidbits annoy the pros, you may keep an eye out for them while you are proofreading.

That’s while, right, not if? Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the premiere of Author! Author! Interviews: a chat about literary fiction with Bellwether Prize winner Heidi Durrow

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the premiere of Author! Author! Interviews: a chat about literary fiction with Bellwether Prize winner Heidi Durrow

Welcome back, campers! How was your week? Mine was, as predicted, hectic, but the niece is married, the dishes washed (no mean feat, considering the family produced a five-course sit-down dinner for the wedding reception), and we are now living on leftovers.

How stressful was it all? Well, let me put it this way: my doctor offered to write me a note to excuse me from all of this ostensible frivolity.

But off with the shackles of the past — on to a monumental new development in the ever-evolving Author! Author! community offerings. Today, I am delighted to bring you the first in what I hope will be may in-depth conversations with wonderful recently-published authors about not only their books, but also the art and craft of writing itself.

You know, the kind of chat that writers find fascinating, but disillusions non-writers and those who would prefer to believe that good writing simply falls from the heavens into the author’s mind, with no actual work involved.

In this series, I’m going to be talking with these authors about the actual work of writing. I’m very excited about this, not only because I suspect that these conversations will prove inspirational and educational to members of the Author! Author! community — and to that end, please feel free to post questions and comments; I shall forward them to the authors — but also because, frankly, when a book comes out, 99% of interviewers will ask precisely the same set of questions.

All of us who read author interviews are familiar with the standards, right? So how did you get the idea for this book? Is this novel autobiographical? How did you get started writing in the first place? Did you always want to be a writer — as opposed to, say, a fireman? Are any of the characters based upon real people? What’s your next book about? No, really, what part of this novel is based upon real life?

It’s all fun and interesting for the author the first dozen or so times, but after that, one begins to feel that one’s part in the interview process could very adequately be played by a tape recorder. Nor is this phenomenon new: I spent a large part of my childhood and adolescence helping science fiction author Philip K. Dick prepare for interviews — oh, you thought that established authors didn’t rehearse? In what sense is an author interview not a public performance? — and believe me, in any given year, we could count the original questions interviewers asked on the fingers of two hands.

Believe me, we longed to be able to start counting on our toes.

So part of my goal in this interview series is to allow good authors more latitude than they are generally allowed in literary interviews — because, let’s face it, what is likely to interest other writers about a book is not necessarily what will fascinate other readers. These interviews will be by writers, for writers.

Are you picturing yourselves chatting with me when your first book comes out? Excellent — you’re in the perfect mindset to enjoy my January 11, 2011 conversation with the exceptionally talented Heidi Durrow, author of the recent literary fiction debut, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, now available in paperback.

If Heidi’s name sounds familiar, you’ve probably either been perusing Best Books of 2010 lists or were hanging out here at Author! Author! in recent months. For those of you who missed my glowing tribute to what I consider the best debut of last year, allow me to introduce you to a writer I believe is going to be remembered as one of the greats. Take a peek at the publisher’s blurb:

Take a gander at the publisher’s blurb:

Durrow book coverRachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop.

Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African-American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It’s there, as she grows up and tries to swallow her grief, that she comes to understand how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might be connected to her own uncertain identity.

This searing and heartwrenching portrait of a young biracial girl dealing with society’s ideas of race and class is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. In the tradition of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John,Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, here is a portrait of a young girl—and society’s ideas of race, class, and beauty.

The book has developed something of a cult following amongst lovers of serious literary fiction. How much do its fans respect it? Well, let me put it this way: when I first discovered the novel in a wee bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky, the clerk nearly knocked me over, so eager was she to rush to my side to recommend the book.

Apparently, that enthusiasm was catching, for by the time my plane was over the Rockies, heading home to Seattle, was already raving about the book to everyone in the seats near me. Flight attendants will remember that as the time two of them sidled down the aisle to ask, “Um, why are all of you talking about falling from the sky? Flying is perfectly safe, you know.”

The intriguing mystery of just how and why an entire family fell from a Chicago apartment building’s roof — yes, veteran interviewers, based upon a real-life incident — may be the unusual premise of the story, but the core of the writing is centered upon the growth and development of incredibly real-feeling characters.

As I mentioned before, Heidi pursued character in a completely original manner, calculated to delight those intrigued by the interesting use of language: via punctuation in dialogue. THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY depicts social class and intellectual development through such subtle nuances in the characters’ speech patterns that at first, I kept having to re-read lines to make sure I was not imagining it.

I wasn’t; it’s one of the most brilliant uses of dialogue I’ve seen in years. (And trust me, I read a lot of dialogue in any given year.) Join me, please, for a discussion of it, conducted at the ever-fabulous Third Place Books, just north of Seattle.

A quick technical note before you click on the video: my apologies for the background noise; the Author! Author! staff did not realize that the microphone would pick it up so well, or that it should have been placed a trifle closer to Heidi. Turning up the volume on your computer before you start watching might prove helpful.