Flogging the Quill

Linger for a Stronger Story

This post addresses the shortcoming that overdone brevity causes in storytelling. To revisit the sample paragraph from the last post, in this scene a teenage boy is approaching a girl’s home for his first date with her, and he’s never been there.

Her mother opened the door as he approached. "Come right in. Kathy isn't ready yet; it'll be just a minute.” He found himself in the living room with her mother, father, and little brother. He tried not to say much, passing the time, trying to get through the ordeal without coming apart.

This paragraph suffers from something that happens in my own writing, although not as skeletally as this example. Novelist Laura Kalpakian, in a manuscript development course I took from her, gave my storytelling high marks for dialogue, description, and pace—but didn’t get enough from my narrative about the characters to truly involve her. My narrative was simply too lean at times, and the story suffered for it. Her wise advice: “Linger.”

In this writer’s sample, his haste to get the boy and girl out the door and to their date caused him to miss opportunities to draw the reader into the boy’s story and build sympathy for his character, not to mention create tension and story questions about what’s going to happen. Anybody who’s been a teenage boy calling on a girl for the first time knows how tense the situation and the boy are. The narrative would be far better served with a brief scene instead of the telling done here. Here’s just one of the rich possibilities:

What kind of a look does the father give the boy (for he would do so, I’m certain), and what’s the boy’s perception/reaction to it? For example:

Kathy’s father lowered his bushy brows and gave Jimmy a look that made him feel like he was lying under an X-ray machine. He jerked a quick little smile and blurted, “Pleased to meet you, sir.” Then he realized how stupid that was because nobody had actually introduced them. The sweat under his arms cranked up to a slow drip.

All too quickly, they escape the girl’s house and go to a dance in the high school gym. There’s close dancing, she gives him signals such as pressing tightly against him while dancing, and he becomes highly aroused. When they leave the dance, the writer gives us this:

At twelve, he guided Kathy to their coats and out into the frosty October air. The car heater kicked in nicely as they drove down Main Street and into the countryside. The farms they passed were dark. Jamie turned down a gravel road and slowed.

The night is frosty, but what else is there when they walk out of that gym? There’s no tension or anticipation in this expository paragraph, but great opportunity to build it. Is there a moon out? Mightn’t he gaze at her face and have some romantic/lusty thoughts as he takes her to the car? If it’s like any high school dance I ever saw back in the day, there are kids outside, some smoking, some necking. For example:

At twelve, he guided Kathy to their coats and out into the frosty October air. Laughter and the sweet aroma of cigarette smoke wafted from three guys huddled beside a pickup truck. When Jimmy and Kathy passed a parked car with steamed-up windows, he heard thumping sounds from inside and the car rocked on its springs. He glanced at Kathy and found her gazing at the car. If only...

She looked up at him and grinned. She tiptoed and leaned against him to whisper into his ear, pressing her belly against his hand. “I don’t have to be home until one.”

Oh, man…

That little of description and action didn’t take many words, but you get a greater sense of place and time, and the sexual tension between the two is ramped up. As a result, the coming necking and petting when they park will be that much more meaningful.

The two things to keep in mind in spinning a tale are:
1. give the reader pictures, and
2. give those pictures in ways that characterize the players and advance the story.

Flat, postcard-like descriptions do not generate compelling storytelling. Make every picture rich with “story meaning” – character emotions and reactions to settings and happenings that deepen the reader’s understanding and connection.

Pease let me hear from you. Even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I’ll level a beady eye at it. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”

Don’t just describe, characterize.

Recently I did a sample edit for a writer who had a crisp, clean style but missed big opportunities to characterize through description. He gave me the okay to reproduce some of the material I commented on.

His was a coming-of-age story from a male point of view (I have a fondness for those, having written one) dealing with the angst of dating and boy-girling a few decades ago. A key early scene had the boy, Jimmy, going to the girl’s home for their first date. Jimmy had never been there, and had not met the parents. Here’s what the writer gave the reader:

Her mother opened the door as he approached. "Come right in. Kathy isn't ready yet; it'll be just a minute.” He found himself in the living room with her mother, father, and little brother. He tried not to say much, passing the time, trying to get through the ordeal without coming apart.

Whoa! This is very speedy telling versus showing (I know there are times that telling is a good thing to do, but not in the opening of a story when you need to ground the reader in the characters and reality you’re creating.) Also, I know that in my autobiographical story it was extremely easy for me to unknowingly shortchange the reader because I saw scenes in their fullness so clearly that I often put down skeletal representations.

In the above scene, to begin with, for the reader’s sake the writer needs to insert a quick picture. I provided this example:

Her mother opened the door as he approached. She leaned out, a smile on her round face but a crease between her eyebrows, as if she had questions for him she didn’t know how to ask. She wiped a hand on a blue flowery apron and said, “Come right in…”

That’s just a quickie example, but note how description can both create a picture and simultaneously characterize the observer (Jimmy, in his reaction to the frown line) and the observed (the mom). This quick visual helps the reader and will not slow him down.

I felt the writer needed to set the living-room scene briefly, too—the look and feel of the living room could show a lot about the girl and her family, and the boy’s reactions to what he sees tells about him. As a way to look at describing a room through the character, here’s a description from my own coming-of-age novel when the protagonist first entered a home:

The dining area opened onto a living room. Somebody liked the same kind of early American furniture Jesse’s mother favored, right down to a braided oval rug in hues of brown. It felt like home…not that feeling like home was a good thing.

Very quickly, you have an idea of what the living room looks like and Jesse’s home as well.

Here’s another use of description from the sample where characterization could have happened instead. The writer describes Jimmy this way:

Jimmy was high-school skinny, that lean, still-growing time when muscles are tight everywhere and the sinews are loose and respond quickly. He wasn't tall, only five seven, but she was only five three and they appeared to be the perfect couple.

I like the writing in the first sentence, but these lines are clearly the author getting some exposition out of the way—I’m taken out of the boy’s head and made to feel distant from the scene. The phrase “they appeared to be the perfect couple” is clearly from another point of view entirely, since the boy can’t see what they look like together. I know it’s tough to describe a character when you’re in his point of view, and you don’t want to resort to the tired old idea of looking in a mirror, but there are ways to do it. For example:

Jimmy worried that Kathy would think he was too skinny, which his mother said was just because he was still growing, all sinewy with long lean muscles. But he wasn’t so worried about being only five foot seven–she was maybe five three, tops, and he thought they made a perfect couple.

As you can see, this gives a picture of them but characterizes him as well, and it comes from inside the character, not from outside, from the author. The reader not only doesn’t leave the character’s head, she is drawn more deeply into it.

Next post: while a novel should not be pulled along by a team of oxen, neither should it be rocket-propelled as in the first scene quoted above. I look at a couple of instances where, if this writer had lingered just a little, he would have crafted a more involving story.

Pease let me hear from you. Even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I’ll level a beady eye at it. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”

Using voices: 1st person, 3rd person, or both?

A writer asked:

“While I was writing my novel, I ran into an instance that really needed to be told from the POV of one of my secondary characters. The scenario in question would not have been witnessed by my primary character that was telling the story in first person. I started a new chapter, told the scenario in third person through another character, and returned to my first person narrative for the rest of the book. It was the only instance that my primary character wouldn't have first hand knowledge of events. The chapter was necessary to help fill in the holes leading up to a climactic event.

”My question is, would it be more important to maintain the first person POV throughout or mix it up on rare occasion for the sake of continuity in the story?”

I answered:

As a reader and as an editor, I think it would be terribly jarring to go along in first person for a number of chapters and then, having settled into the first-person mode and become deeply identified with the character, to be suddenly yanked from that "relationship" into something completely different.

Once I'd gotten over that disruption, though, I would expect a break like that to occur again, and a part of me would be anticipating it as I read. And that itch would never be scratched.

Were it me, I would strain every creative muscle to figure out a way to get that information into the story without breaking the first-person spell. There must be a way.

An alternative to strict first-person that could avoid a jolting disruption could be to establish occasional breakaways from the first person from the start. Perhaps a quick switch to an omniscient, godlike POV and then quickly back, in separate units. As I imagine it, the very first thing the reader encountered would be that omniscient storyteller giving a scene. That way, I wouldn't be surprised when it happened again. If that technique were established and maintained throughout the book, it might work.

A bigger, tougher question you’ve raised is this: if you absolutely have to break out of first person to get those story elements in, then maybe you shouldn't be telling all of the story in first person. I know well the appeal of first person storytelling--it seems so much more immediate and real. And I think it's a little easier to write, in some ways, too. That doesn't make it right, though.

Without a look at your manuscript, my advice would be to do one or both of these things:

1. dig deep for a way to get the information in through your first-person character and eliminate the third-person break-in.

2. consider writing the key protagonist in first person and include other POV characters in third.

3. or take a serious look at what rewriting the novel in third person would do for you. What other character or characters could have a continuing POV role that would deepen and strengthen the story? Readers are conditioned to expect that a character whose point of view they “inhabit” is an important character with a role throughout the story, and will be inhabited again. You fail that expectation at your own risk. The one exception I can think of is in a mystery/thriller/suspense novel in which the first point-of-view character is the victim. When the character is killed off, there are no worries about reader expectations.

Rewriting in the third person isn't easy to contemplate, I know. I resisted doing it for my third novel, a coming-of-age story. But when I tackled it I was very happy at how it opened up the story and ultimately helped me express important themes much better than first person had been able to accomplish.

The writer responded with this:

“Thanks for reconfirming my fears. For the first book in the series first person really seemed to fit. I just assumed that I would be able to carry it off through the whole series. I don't know if it is just the natural evolution of my writing skills or the wide-open nature of my topic, but I find that could be increasingly difficult to maintain first person. I should probably just bite the bullet and convert my POV. It would certainly give me a lot more freedom in directing the story’s flow; I just hate to lose that personal feeling of first person.

“I have a couple proposals out on it right now, I wonder if the editors would wince if I made a major revision like that, the proposals being in first person and the MSS arriving in third. Actually, one of them already has the whole enchilada. I guess only time will tell.

“Thanks again for the insight.”

My response:

I think anything you send out MUST be the best it can be--that's why I did wrote about finding expert "other eyes" that can spot trouble spots. Expert other eyes can not only see problems but help find solutions.

I would do whatever it takes to make the ms the best it can be. A good agent will respect the professionalism it takes to address a concern and provide a solution. Also, you already have the first-person version if that's what they prefer.

At least one commercial writer, James Patterson, in his Alex Cross novels, uses first-person chapters for his primary protagonist and third person for his bad guy. In my current novel in progress, most chapters have two points of view in them: the lead protagonist in first person and another character (either protagonist or antagonist) in third person. Since this pattern is established in the first chapter and there are clear breaks/transitions between the characters, readers are accepting the changes easily, and it gives me all the story freedom I want.

Pease let me hear from you. Even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I’ll level a beady eye at it. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”

Take a cue from Bush & Kerry -- spin characters to create tension.

Inundated with politicians’ distortions of each other’s words and positions this political season, I began to hate the idea of spin…until it occurred to me that spin is a terrific way to create drama.

Spin comes from agendas, the intentions of characters. When characters want something in every scene and words and actions are guided by conflicting agendas, you automatically generate tension, and characters fume with action and dialogue. Sol Stein, in Stein on Writing, uses the idea when he talks about the Actors Studio method for developing drama, only he calls them “scripts.”

For example, let’s say Faith, a compulsive gambler, is accused of murdering a sleazy bookmaker. Best friend Percy believes that Faith can do no wrong. Ingrid, the district attorney, believes Faith is a liar who will do anything to get rid of a staggering debt to the bookmaker. Percy and Ingrid share a goal: to learn the truth, but their views and agendas add spin…

Percy screeches his car to a halt in front of the brownstone. Faith had sounded frightened and desperate when she called. Rushing from his car, he finds her being led out the front door by the district attorney, Ingrid. He races up the steps to her.

Faith’s dress hangs in tatters and a bruise swells on her cheek. She staggers, and Percy dashes to steady her. Holding one arm as Ingrid holds the other, Percy says, “My God. He tried to kill you!”

Ingrid shakes her head. “That’s what she hopes we’ll think, but I sure don’t see any proof of self defense.” She wrenches Faith’s arms behind her back and hobbles her wrists with handcuffs.

Poor Faith. Spin also applies to how characters interpret information. On the political side, your orientation will add spin to the words “stem-cell research” that turns them into anathema, nirvana, or something in between. Same goes for your characters. And if two characters have different agendas, think what that can mean.

Percy believes Faith is innocent and wants to protect her, Ingrid believes she’s guilty down to the marrow of her bones and wants to convict her. So here’s how those two characters spin (internally) the same input…

Faith’s determined expression wavered, then broke. “I’m guilty. I did it.”

Percy shakes his head. She’s lying. She must be covering for someone. “How can you say that, Faith?” He glances at Ingrid, who wears a smile that reminds him of a bear trap.

She says, “Because she’s guilty, guilty, guilty.”

Clearly, agendas that are at cross-purposes spin up terrific tension. So ask each character in a scene these two questions:
1. What’s your agenda in this situation?
2. What do you believe the other character’s agenda is?

Then let ‘em duke it out…and don’t let either of them win, at least not for a few chapters.

Please let me hear from you—even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I’ll level a beady eye at it. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”

Which POV is best for your novel—first or third?

A writer wrote this to me:

“What are your thoughts on novels that are told from a first-person POV?

“I have read novels where it seemed to make sense for the storyline to be told through the main character’s experiences, but then I have read others where I got the overall impression that the authors were just indulging themselves by living vicariously through their characters.

“Just wondering what your position would be on this one.”

In the hands of a skilled writer, I think first person is the most powerful technique for crafting a unique and fascinating individual. It’s magic to listen to the voice of Offred in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Genly Ai in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. But first person may not be the best way to tell a particular story. The primary reason for choosing a voice is to serve the purposes of story, the storytelling need. Which makes it most vivid? Believable? Deeper? Which approach reveals its true scope? Here are case histories from my own files...

My first draft of a highly biographical coming-of-age story was told from a first person point of view. Then I changed it all to third person (oh, thank you, computer geeks, for Search & Replace). Why? A little hottie demanded to be heard from. Lola, the girl to the story’s boy, had a story that needed to be heard, that would enrich and deepen the boy’s. I couldn't do that in first person unless I shifted from one character's first person narrative to another's, and I wasn't comfortable with that. Although Sol Stein and others do that kind of thing, I thought it could be confusing in my hands. Changing close to half the novel to her point of view and shifting everything to third person seems to be working--that novel is now being shopped to publishers by my agent. (The Summer Boy*)

My speculative thriller (We the Enemy*) is told in fairly close third person, with five points of view. There was never any question.

And then there’s now. I sure didn’t start out intending to, but I’m using both first- and third-person voices in my current novel in progress. I started with first person from the primary male protagonist's POV. Not satisfying. Then third person from his POV. Nothing sparked. Belatedly, I realized that the story was really that of the principal female protagonist. And that I wanted to hear it from her lips—first person. I tried it, loved it, and we’ll see how I do in a few months.

In this novel, the reader inhabits three other key characters as well, but always in third person. That, in my thinking, helps the reader keep focused on "whose story is this?" in a multi-POV work. (More than anything, though, I think love “hearing” the story in the character’s voice.)

The reason for any voice choice should arise from the nature and needs of the story to be told, I think. But how do you know which one to choose? And what about omniscient and second person?

Ah, now there's the art of this craft.

Pease let me hear from you—send a comment. Even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I’ll level a beady eye at it. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”

* The Summer Boy and We the Enemy are represented by TriadaUS.

Keyboard Grunge, Anne Rice, and the Light of Other Eyes

The amount of grunge that had built up on my 4-year-old keyboard finally flagged my attention. Dingy gray soiled the sides of the keys, between the keys, and even the tops. Sound familiar?

That grunge, it occurs to me, is like the congenital flaws you can find in any novelist’s work (including, dang it, mine). Grunge is missteps a writer takes—or steps he fails to take—that go unnoticed and accumulate, dimming and diminishing the narrative.

I got a bottle of cleaner and a paper towel, sprayed, and wiped. Back-lit as the keyboard was by my monitor and a lamp at one end of my desk, it looked fine. This effort, I later learned, was the equivalent of self-editing. I got the obvious stuff, but missed deeper grime because I couldn’t see it. Not enough light from the right angle.

Later, going to open Stein on Writing for a refresher course, I found that my lighting was terrible for reading because it came at me from the front. So I positioned a desk lamp for backlight. Which cast a front light on the keyboard. It revealed that my keyboard fairly dripped with grunge I’d missed.

Not only did it cover the sides of the keys, some scum still discolored their tops. Nasty. I went to work with cotton swabs, cleaner and a fresh paper towel, performed the equivalent of a rewrite after a professional edit, and now write this on a clean keyboard. That desk lamp was like an editor’s mind, revealing unseen grunge that gums up and weakens narrative.

I’ve learned (resentfully, because the learning curve seems to have no end) that I need independent, story-smart eyes to shine a revealing light on my fiction from a fresh angle.
Generally, my stories are seen as having involving plots, excellent pace, vivid action, and strong writing…plus big fat voids where I have not done enough with character motivation or revealed enough about characters to make them emotionally involving. It’s not that I can’t do those things, but I just fail to see that some wavelengths are missing. My deep inner knowledge of characters fills in the missing parts of the spectrum, backlighting the narrative so that I cannot perceive the lacks…the weaknesses…the grunge.

Some writers, especially hugely successful ones, adamantly blind themselves. Anne Rice recently stated in a posting on Amazon.com that she refuses to allow an editor near her work. She defends her practice because she has worked so diligently on her art, writing of how she polishes every word. She wants no alien influence to besmirch her prose. I think Anne is mistaken on a couple of counts. The first is to somehow link an editor’s critique as a mandate for change that will corrupt or lessen her art.

Light only reveals. An editor can only observe and remark upon weak spots, hopefully with educated, empathetic eyes that reveal grunge the writer no longer sees. It’s up to the writer to clean it up. Or not. Anne doesn’t have to do what an editor says…but the light might show her where grunge has crept in, unnoticed but nonetheless there.

I’m a fan of Anne Rice, and enjoyed hugely The Witching Hour and The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. Fascinating works of imagination. I suspect those books had editorial participation because they are not burdened by the muddiness and wandering I see in her later works. That’s her second mistake—her editor-free narratives have moved me from enthusiastic fan to a maybe-this-one-will-be-worth-it reader to a former fan no longer willing to expend the funds or time on her books. We both lose.

I came across the following post on a blog by a fellow named Trent. I quote his quote of Anne Rice’s misunderstanding of what a good editor does, and his response.

Anne Rice: "When you take home a CD of Pavarotti or Marilyn Horne, you don't want to hear another voice blended in. I feel the same way about Hemingway. If I read it, I don't want to read a new edited version."

Trent: “Ah, but if the conductor notes that Pavarotti has sung the wrong note or key in rehearsal, should the conductor not inform Pavarotti of the mistake? A good editor informs writers of troublesome errors, worthless tangents, unnecessary repetitions--small and large--and so forth. The voice is not to be tampered with--unless it's off-key or otherwise problematic and inconsistent.”

But it wasn’t successful writers such as Ms. Rice who got me to thinking about writerly grunge. They’ll get along fine (the money-in-the-bank thing). It was the rights postings on Publishers Marketplace made by unrepresented authors. I read the proffered samples and see promising writing tainted by grunge, some of it subtle, some of it obvious. For practiced readers (for agents and editors make that “jaundiced”), those samples foreshadow manuscripts marred by shortcomings—and not worth following up. Backs will be turned.

Every novelist owes it to herself and to readers to find other eyes, knowing ones that can see the grunge. Unless you’re very lucky in whom you know, that probably means an independent editor. Yes, an editor costs, but what is the cost of backs being turned on your writing? At the least, you can check out editors who will consider doing a free critique of a sample…but ONLY if you are willing to follow up with an order for an edit if you are convinced you need one.

Or find a critique group with fellow novelists whose writing you like and respect. Reader-friends may be able to give you good input, though in my experience even other writers, if not novelists, don’t know how to address the deeper craft insights a novelist really needs.

Don’t settle for admiring grungy work through me-colored glasses like Anne Rice, find other eyes—you’ll see what I mean.

Pease let me hear from you—send a comment. Even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I’ll level a beady eye at it. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”

Rejection: it's about the pumpkin.

"He trashed my novel" is what a writer said to me about an editor he’d paid for a critique. He felt badly about it. Sure he did, considering how much work and heart goes into writing a novel. Then he paid a second editor to edit his book. She started but soon declared that she couldn’t continue with it. The writer was feeling defensive and picked on, so I volunteered to take a look at a sample.

Well, I did, and I’m now trying to figure out how to deliver an honest critique in a way that won’t make him feel “trashed” again. I’m a novelist as well as an editor, and I feel strongly that I should help him understand the shortcomings in his narrative. But it’s a form of rejection,  hard to do and hard to take.

I’ve been on the receiving end of bad reviews from agents and critique group members, and I’m sure of one thing: we—writers, editors, and agents—need to do a better job of give and take.

Writers need to understand that rejection is not about THE PERSON. Nope. It’s about THE WORK. If you grow a pumpkin that turns out undersized and someone points out that fact, it's not personal, it's about the pumpkin.

To take rejection personally is to miss an opportunity to be saved from a mistake. I was in the ad business for a ton of years and everything I did was critiqued with close, hard looks because money was riding on every idea, every word--and the same is true in publishing. I learned a lesson that has served me well—if someone questions (i.e. rejects) my work, there’s a 50% chance I’m right…and a 50% chance I’m either partially or totally wrong.

On the flip side, surely there’s a way to for agents and acquisition editors to do a better job with rejections. Yeah, a pre-printed rejection note saying that even though the work was interesting it just didn’t fit our needs may be an innocuous white lie intended to decline without rancor, but neither the writer nor the rejector have been well served.

If the writer learns something about real deficiencies in his submission, then there’s a chance revisions will be made that make the next submission that much closer to professional. That’s good news for the agent/editor—the more professional the work they see, the better the quality of the projects they represent/publish.

So how about a checklist designed to give sincere feedback, even if it is coming from a harried assistant who’s had only time enough to look at a query letter and five pages of manuscript? It would only take seconds, yet could help both sides.

Help me make up a checklist. Think of shortcomings that it would help a writer to learn about. For example, what if the agent/assistant/editor could check one or more items such as:

___ For me, the grammar in the submission did not reach a publishable level.

___ For me, overwriting (too many details/adjectives/adverbs) robs the work of pace and tension.

___ I don’t believe that I can sell this story/topic.

___ I felt the pumpkin was too small for our customers.

Send me suggestions for more input items. Let’s put a critique sheet together and post it for agents and editors. Please send your ideas.

Also, I’m looking for good flogging material, so email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”

Kudzu Writing--Attack of the Killer Verbiage

It's understandable and forgivable that the work of beginning writers is frequently bloated with overwriting, the bane of pace and tension. For example…

He tasted her in his mouth. (Where else would he taste her?)

Her heart clenched in her chest (Better there than in her purse, I guess.)

What pains me are far worse examples in published novels. Take the following trudge from The Experiment by John Darnton.

The scene: the female protagonist enters a darkened bedroom. In the bed sleeps a man who she assumes is her love interest. Minutia spreading like a blanket of Kudzu, Darnton writes…and writes…and writes…

She thought that perhaps she should try to take a nap, too; the trip home had exhausted her. She walked around the bed, sat in a chair and unstrapped her shoes and took them off, placing them to one side. She stood up and unzipped her dress, letting it fall to the floor in a heap and bent down to pick it up and drape it over the back of the chair. She slipped her thumbs into the waist of her panties and slid them down her legs, placing them over the dress. Then she unfastened her bra and placed it on top. From the bed, she heard his breathing shift as he moved to a different level of sleep.

She walked to the right side of the bed, lifted the sheet and slipped underneath, pulling it up to her chin. The cotton felt cool to her skin.

Does the word "turgid" come to mind? If not, see a therapist immediately. Trust me on this: the entire purpose of this passage was to get the woman into the bed. Her method of disrobing had absolutely no bearing on anything that had gone before or anything that happened afterward.

It didn't matter that she walked around the bed. Or sat in a chair. Or where she placed her discarded shoes. Or what she did with her dress or bra. Nor did her panty-removal process have any bearing -- the person in the bed was asleep, and there was no sexual intent to the scene. And it didn't matter which side of the bed she got into, either. Don't get me started on other deficiencies in this poorly written dawdle.

When it comes to description, I'm with Stephen King, as expressed in his On Writing. To quote from his book…

"Look -- here's a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot upon which it is contentedly chewing. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8."

As King points out, the paragraph doesn't tell us what the cage is made of. Wire mesh? Steel rods? Glass? It doesn't tell us because it doesn't matter. Whatever the reader "sees" allows him to visualize the rabbit inside and the most important story part of the description, the number on its back.

King says that good description makes the reader a participant in the story. Exactly right. Crisp, tight description lets the reader fill in the details, especially if they don't matter to the storyline.

In the above example from Mr. Darnton's book, all that verbiage boils down to this:

Exhausted by the trip home, she thought she should try a nap. She undressed, slipped underneath the sheet and pulled it up to her chin, the cotton cool on her skin.

Here's a technique that might have helped Mr. Darnton avoid his logorrhea -- read your narrative aloud. If, at some point, you detach and drift, your voice a drone in the background while your mind searches for something interesting to think about, your narrative has been binge expositing, and you need to apply the cure -- vigorous exercise of the delete key.

Please let me hear from you. Even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I'll level a beady-eyed editorial glare at it. If it's from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a "private reading."

Tags: a game some writers shouldn't play

"Please don't do that," he articulated.

"What?" she interrogated.

Okay, perhaps that's a touch broad. But how many times have you seen dialogue tags like the following…

Melissa turned to Irving. "Why don't you zip up your pants?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Air conditioning," he replied.

What's with "she asked" and "he replied"? A question was clearly asked and a reply clearly uttered and the reader damn well knows what they were. Yet "she asked" and the ever-popular "he replied" clog thousands of pages like bad verbal cholesterol.

When it comes to dialogue tags, a couple of clichés should be applied:
1. Less is more.
2. KISS -- Keep It Simple, Stupid

Tags can tangle dialogue and slow its pace; their absence can smooth and accelerate it. Rarely is there a need for a dialogue tag other than "said." Even with a question. For example, there's no need to use "asked" or "interrogated" or "queried" if you write:

Farnsworth said, "Where do you think the monster has hidden?"

The reader understands that Farnsworth has asked a question. That's what question marks are for. To add tonality, use description and action, and remove the "said." For example,

Farnsworth's voice came from under the couch in a whispery hiss that ended with a sob. "Where do you think the monster has hidden?"

To illustrate minimalizing dialogue tags in a scene, here's an excerpt from a novel of mine, We the Enemy*. In the scene Marion Smith-Taylor, the U.S. Attorney General, is calling her office from out of town. See what you think, tag-wise.

Marion checks her watch. Time enough for one last hail-Mary call -- she fishes her cell phone from her purse and auto-dials her office.

Suzanne Fisher answers. "Ms. Smith-Taylor's office, how may I help you?"

Marion pictures Suzanne, not in one of her office outfits but in her pale blue robe, blond hair tousled, fair cheeks flushed. If Marion had her druthers, Suzanne would be helping her to a tumbler of Scotch -- but that will have to wait until she's home. "Hi, it's me."

"I was just thinking about you."

That's one of the things Marion loves about Suzanne -- no coy games, she just says how she feels. "Me, too. Listen, they're about to get here. Have you got anything on Joe Donovan?"

"No word."

"Damn." She's been praying her missing agents would report in so she could go into this meeting with good information. "If you hear from them in the next hour, call." After that, she's stuck.

"I will."

Marion hopes she'll have a little luck on the other front that gives her sleepless nights, Oregon's constitution-busting new statute. Way under her radar, the so-called "Allies" in Oregon had gotten over 150,000 signatures on a "Truth for Justice" initiative -- twice what they needed. Oregon voted it into law and now its courts were forcing people to testify against themselves despite the protections of the Fifth Amendment.

Marion says, "Connect me with Tiffany, okay?" If anybody can figure out a way to quash the Oregon law, it's the Justice Department's top legal researcher.

"Will you be back in time tomorrow for a quiet little supper at Angelo's?"

A candlelight dinner with Suzanne at their favorite restaurant sounds perfect -- if only she was there now. "Should be. Make a reservation, eightish?"

Marion hears the smile in Suzanne's voice. "See you there. I'll get Tiffany for you now."

Pacing, Marion gazes out a grimy window. A pigeon lands on the ledge and stares back at her. A husky voice comes from the phone. "Tiffany Horowitz."

"Marion here, Tiffany." She resumes her pacing. "How are you doing on that crazy Truth for Justice statute?"

Thirteen speeches from three different characters and one dialogue tag.

Enough said?

Email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I'll level a beady eye at it. If it's from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a "private reading."

* We the Enemy is represented by TriadaUS.

A DaVinci Dumbness: the importance of continuity.

Congratulations to Dan Brown for becoming a much richer man due to his thriller, The DaVinci Code. I helped pay your royalties. Hats off, and I'd love to be in your shoes.

But Dan, would you please engage a competent editor for your next one? The blunder that stubbed my mental toe on page 3 robbed my read of a lot of pleasure…for the rest of the book, part of my mind's eye was diverted from the story to the writing. (And it wasn't all that happy with what it saw.)

Here's the goof. In the prologue, Louvre Museum curator Jacques Saunière is shot and falls to the floor, mortally wounded. But he has to try to warn others about the attack. So this happens…

Staggering to his feet, he pictured his three murdered brethren. He thought of the generations who had come before them…of the mission with which they had all been entrusted.

An unbroken chain of knowledge.

Suddenly, now, despite all the precautions…despite all the fail safes…Jacques Saunière was the only remaining link, the sole guardian of one of the most powerful secrets ever kept.

Shivering, he pulled himself to his feet.

Ouch. First he staggers to his feet and then, just three paragraphs later, pulls himself to his feet. But, you see, he was already on his feet.

The problem with such a goof, especially right at the front of the novel, is that the author's credibility is called into question. A shaky author's hand is revealed, taking the reader out of the story. The spell is broken and, for me, never quite mended. I know, picky, picky, picky. But I'll bet I'm not the only one.

How many people read that passage and missed the mistake before the book was published? Even afterwards, it's apparently non-apparent -- I mentioned this gaffe to a sharp-eyed writer/editor who'd read the book and she had missed it.

I'm surprised by how often I come across similar continuity problems in the works I edit. I wonder why they're there -- if I can hold enough of an entire novel that I didn't write in my head to catch them, surely the author can, right? As Mr. Brown shows us, evidently not (having said that, God help me if anybody ever catches a continuity lapse in one of my novels). Now that he can afford an editor, I hope he involves one before the next book comes out, if for the sake of continuity alone (don't get me started on characterization or mechanical plot devices).

Dan, I'm available, and a very writer-friendly editor.

Did anyone besides me notice Mr. Brown's little slip? What do you think?