Categories
Blog From the Forge

Consider Your Audience, But Write For Yourself

I had fun with Billy Wilder’s tips for writing in the last column, so I’m going back to that well one more time. Remember that Wilder, who died in 2002, won six Oscars.

1. The audience is fickle.
We’ve all heard the advice “Know your audience! Know who you’re writing for.” Well, Wilder seems to be saying you can’t always count on that audience. I would add that the only audience you can really count on is yourself, so write for an audience of one.

2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
This may be a natural extension of Tip #1. Wilder seems glibly to say writing
that grabs the reader’s mind and emotions (the throat) won’t be sabotaged
by a fickle audience. Intensity, drama, is important.

3. Know where you’re going.
I frequently advise writers who struggle with plot to write a draft of their
final chapter, then come back to where they felt lost and write toward that
chapter. It helps them know where they’re going.

4. Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
The more a reader can bring to a work, the more they will invest in it, the
more they will remember it. Wilder is telling us not to explain away the
subtleties of our work. Good writers find the sweet spot between obscurity,
on the one hand, and explaining, on the other.

5. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.
As applied to screenwriting, this tip has a quite different meaning than it
does in fiction. I’d say “voice-over” in fiction refers to the author’s use of
narrative voice, and it’s an extension of Tip #4. The setting and the action, including dialogue and thought—i.e., “what the audience already sees”—should
carry most of what the reader needs to know. An insecure author may be
tempted to use the narrator to explain what the author fears the reader won’t
understand.

Billy Wilder was a highly successful writer. And though he tosses writing tips out like peanuts at the zoo, I’m pretty sure he’d agree experience—hard work in The Forge—is the only way to make them stick.

Happy writing.

Categories
Blog The Whole Writer

Searches: Accurate, Comprehensive, and Quick

If you’re like me, you learned to do google searches by the hunt & peck method. And, that works fine. However, while I was hunting and pecking the other day, I stumbled on an article entitled Ten Tips for Smarter, More Efficient Internet Searching.

Let me mention a few of the tips. You may or may not know these, but I’m guessing that out of the ten tips in the complete article, you’ll find at least one helpful item.

1. First of all, you don’t need to use capital letters. You can search for the Village Writing School as:
  • VILLAGE WRITING SCHOOL
  • village writing school
  • village Writing School
You’ll get the same search results.
2. Second, you don’t need to use common words such as a and the.
3.  Usually, you can skip typing punctuation marks.

4. Drop the suffixes. If you’re looking for writers, just type in writer. Novelinstead of novels, search instead of searches.

5. Use the plus sign. If you need something specific, use several key words joined together with a plus + sign. While working on my memoir, I searched for other similar books by typing memoir + polio. By doing that, I discovered a list of specific memoirs gathered into one list. (Thanks to our new member, Mary Hutson, for reminding me of this helpful tip.)

If you’d like more tips on the essential art of internet searching, go to the complete article in Tech Republic.

Categories
The Merry Grammarian

Language from Across the Pond

Lately, I’ve noticed a trend in the manuscripts I’m editing: a little British spelling here and there. First came “amongst,” and then “towards,” and then three separate writers apparently preferred “grey” to “gray.”

Maybe it’s an homage to Downtown Abbey? (I miss it, too!).

Whatever is fueling this trend, it’s time to set the record straight. I like my tea and scones as much as anyone else, but the grammar guru in me must clarify why we writers can’t simply slip into British English whenever we please.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “Two countries, separated by a common language.” It’s a nod to the fact that though English is common to both the US and the UK, variations are everywhere – in spelling (grey versus gray), terminology (lift versus elevator), and even in punctuation (single quote marks in the UK versus double quote marks in the US).

Because there are so many variants, the grammar and style authorities have decreed that our style should be consistent. So we can write in American English or British English, but we must use that one format consistently throughout an entire piece. In other words, you can’t just use “grey” because it looks more interesting than “gray” if the rest of the piece is written in American English.

Here are a few other common British-isms that tend to slip into American-English manuscripts, per the Chicago Manual of Style:

  • Amidst and amongst: These are both the British spellings; the preferred American forms are amid and among.
  • Directional words such as backward, forward and toward do not take the terminal –s in American English. In other words, in the United States, we go toward something, not towards it.
  • Travel is the same in Britain or America, but variations on the word are different: Travelled versus traveled, travelling versus traveling, traveller versus traveler.
  • And of course, there are all those infamous –ou words: colour, flavor, humour, labour, etc. In American English, there’s no extra “u” – it’s just color, flavor, humor, and labor.
Bottom line? If your heart yearns for castles and moors, then go ahead and write in British English—just be consistent. Otherwise, resist the urge to add a splash of British sophistication, and embrace your American prose.

Cheerio!

Categories
Blog From the Forge

Trust Your Instinct

Here are five tips for writers from screenwriter Billy Wilder, who died in 2002. Wilder won six Oscars and was one of the most admired writers in the business. These tips were aimed at writing screenplays for movies, but if you are familiar with the three-act structure in fiction, you will see how they apply to fiction as well as they do to screenplays.

  1. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character. The key issue Wilder addresses here is “character arc,” which simply means the trajectory of development your character undergoes. All the actions of your leading character should clearly contribute to his or her line of development, and that line of development should be coherent and seem inevitable.
  1. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer. Your plot points, those major incidents that are turning points in a story, may look quite different in different genres. The plot points in a literary novel might indeed be quite subtle, but in most genre novels, they are more prominent and fall in predictable places.
  1. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act. “Setup” is a key idea here. Everything that happens in the third act should be predicated on what happened in the first. Getting this thread of causality right is usually a matter of revision, going back in the later drafts and making sure you have what you need in Act One and then refining how it plays out to the end.
  1. The event that occurs at the second-act curtain triggers the end of the movie. The plot point at the end of Act Two is the catalyst that leads to the big climax in Act Three. You might say it’s the point of no return. After it, the leading character is committed to a course of action that makes the climax inevitable.
  1. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then –that’s it. Don’t hang around. Once your catalyst kicks in at the end of Act Two, it’s a dead run to the climax. Again, this is more prominent in genre fiction than in literary fiction. In writing a thriller, romance, or mystery, this final section has to sustain the intensity, and when the climax happens, Wilder says, wind it down and get out.

Here’s a final thought from Wilder that’s worth keeping in mind in all of this:

Trust your own instinct.
Your mistakes might as well be your own,
instead of someone else’s.
Categories
The Merry Grammarian

Chasing the Grammar Ghost

My sister gave me a fantastic present for my birthday last month: A T-shirt that says, “I hope I can still correct people’s grammar when I’m a ghost.”

I laughed, and then asked her where she found such a thing. As it turns out, grammar-related novelty items—T-shirts, mugs, joke books, hats, bookmarks, posters, pillows, even socks—are for sale all over the Internet. They’re funny and varied, from puns about punctuation to jokes like the one on my T-shirt.

The fact that there’s an entire cottage industry dedicated to grammar puns says something interesting: there are a lot of people out there who care about good grammar.

And it’s not just the obsessive amongst us. Studies show that people do actually judge us on our grammar skills—even if they aren’t necessarily good at grammar themselves.

Bad grammar in a cover letter or email can cost you job opportunity. Poor grammar in an op-ed piece or article can cost you your credibility. Query letters or manuscripts riddled with proofreading errors are likely to be red flags for agents and editors. Even a social media post with poor grammar will make people cringe.

Is it fair that people judge you for your grammar? Maybe not. But since the reality exists, why not take a few minutes to brush up on the grammar questions that you’re not certain about?

I find that pretty much everyone has a secret grammar question they want to ask, but are too embarrassed to do so. There’s a mentality out there that we were supposed to have mastered all the grammar rules by tenth grade or so, but the truth is, hardly any one knows all the rules. (Okay, maybe Strunk and White. But the rest of us mere mortals most certainly have a few gray areas). Instead of letting that grammar ghost haunt you, lay the issue to rest once and for all.

I’d like to invite you to send your grammar questions my way. From punctuation problems to commonly confused words (like that pesky affect and effect), send your queries via vwswriters@gmail.com and I’ll get you squared away.

And I won’t tell a soul it came from you.