Oops, I Did it Again

An interviewer from The Paris Review, (1956) asked Ernst Hemingway why he had to rewrite the ending of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied. They wanted to know, “Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?”

Hemingway answered: Getting the words right.

I love that. Getting the words right. What more is there, really? There is a reason I wrote a book called Mulligan Girl; I need mulligans. Lots of them. When it comes to my writing, mulligans mean revisions. Revision is something I practice daily. Maybe it’s the OCD in me, or maybe it’s because I never quite get it right the first time. Or the second. Or sometimes the thirty-ninth.

While much of revision requires lots of rewriting, even small changes can make a big difference. Here are a few common pitfalls to avoid when polishing those early drafts:

• Too much of this = lazy writing. Instead of telling the reader how your characters feel or look, show them: I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach, I felt icy tendrils stroke my spine. I felt the dog tug at the end of the leash. The feeling is implied. You can remove those words and end up with more active sentences (and more active verbs): The bottom dropped out of my stomach. Icy tendrils stroked my spine. The dog tugged on the leash.

A closely related problem is: ‘I found’. “I found myself watching the clock.” Unless you are on the verge of an epiphany, on autopilot, or your body has been taken over by alien beings, you probably shouldn’t ‘find’ yourself doing much. Just watch the clock.

• Extraneous words. These are words you can easily remove from a sentence without changing the meaning. My personal favorites are: really, even, only, just, that, actually, well, basically, finally, appears, exactly, almost, about and okay. These words can be meaningless. There is nothing wrong with them, per se, and I do leave some in for ‘voice’, but most are extraneous. Such as the 300 ‘just’s I revised from my last manuscript. Make every word count.

“I thought only of my yard just, steps away.”

‘That’ is so overused that it deserves its own example.

• Everybody’s got a big ‘But’. Yes, conjunctions have a function. Use too many, too often and they get annoying for the reader. ‘But’ is an easy trap to fall into. The same is true for yet, so, and, or, for and nor.

I waited a beat, but when it became obvious he had no intention of helping me, I left. Remove the conjunction and you get: I waited a beat. When it became obvious he had no intention of helping me, I left. Using a period instead of a conjunction helps vary sentence length too.

• Clichés. By very definition these are overdone. While clichés often roll off the tongue they can become part of the landscape. Does your character laugh like a hyena? Drip with sarcasm? Drown in grief? These examples are the tip of the iceberg in most writing. Do you really want to use a ready-made phrase instead of an original, memorable phrase in your manuscript?

• Words ending in ‘ly’ (i.e. adverbs). I’m an adverb lover. I also know there are many editors and agents in today’s world who hate them. In my own writing, I do my best to remove them all, then go back later and add them sparingly pepper them in --but only after I’ve scrutinized my verbs. Am I using an adverb as a crutch because I’ve used a wimpy verb? If yes, I try to fix that first.

• Meaningless or incorrectly used words: This can take the form of words that add no value or meaning to your sentence. My favorites are ‘little’ and ‘pretty’. Little, because if you’re using it to reference size, there are more original words. More often, ‘little’ is plain overused. If you have too many little teacups, little butterflies, little fingers, little aggravations, little problems, little birds…unless you’re writing about elves, you may want to rethink your word choice or nix the ‘little’.

‘Pretty’ is often misused to mean something other than ‘attractive’: pretty much, pretty scared, pretty heavy, pretty late, pretty hungry, pretty annoying. Just get rid of it already.

As for incorrectly used words, these can be humorous unless you’re the one using them wrong. This comes down to making the best word choices for every sentence, and making sure you understand the meaning of the words you chose.

There is a difference between latter and ladder, clamor and clamber, sorted and sordid, lightening and lightning, affect and effect, peak and pique. I follow an editor on Twitter (rantyeditor) who frequently posts about this sort of thing. The posts can be hilarious and eye-opening.

If you liked the Hemingway quote above, check out the book by Theodore A. Rees Cheney, GETTING THE WORDS RIGHT. It’s one of my favorites. Now, time to put my nose to the grindstone off to revise!

Yoga Care for the Hands

You all have heard of the different forms of Yoga that provide a full-body and mind stretching and strengthening. This month I was introduced to a form of Hand Yoga, and I share it with you as a way to take a break and soothe those tired muscles and tendons in your fingers, palms and wrists.

Warm-up. Begin by "washing" your hands (no water, no soap, just skin-to-skin), rubbing them together, making sure you gently rub each finger along its length. Count 20 seconds to make sure you've spent long enough. Get everything nice and warm. Then begin the exercise.

Step 1. Place your hands in a classic prayer or honor position--palms together, fingers together, all fingertips pointed to the sky. Make sure that your elbows stick out and press your palms lightly together.

Step 2. Keeping the heels of your hands together, slowly open your hands, starting at the top of your fingertips, slowly down your fingers, finally opening the palm. The heels of your hand are still pressed together and your hands form a "V", your fingers curved slighty backward so you feel a pleasant stretch. After a slow 3 count, bring your hands together again slowly, palms first, then fingers, then fingertips. You are now back to the beginning prayer position.

Step 3. Still keeping the insides of your hands together skin-to-skin, simply spread your fingers so that they resemble a lady's fan, held at a right angle to your body. Give yourself a nice, gentle stretch in this position. Elbows remain sticking out.

Step 4. With your fingers spread, open your hands again slowly, this time starting at the heel of the hand, separating palms next, then fingers, until only your fingertips are touching. Now your hands form an open-air, curved roof.

Step 5. Keep your fingertips touching while you pull all your fingertips together. With your fingertips all touching in the center, your hands form the infinity sign, a figure 8 on its side. Other images are two bird beaks touching, a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, or a mask.

Step 6. Keep your fingertips touching and move your hand back into the open-air, curved roof position of Step 4.

Step 7. Close the space between your hands so that they again form the Lady's Fan of Step 3. Bring your fingers together to return to the beginning prayer position.

Repeat Steps 2 through 7 three times slowly and deliberately. Keep those elbows sticking out. After the final repetition, gently flick your hands several times as if you were flicking water off them. You're done!

Hand Yoga positions, called Mudras, are varied, and a quick search of the Internet retrieved many hand positions that you can hold for relaxing and healing.

Here's to Happy Hands!

Romance is Forever

Some of us here at Avalon write romance, so naturally we love a good love story. Recently I hosted a wedding shower in my home for the daughter of one of my neighbors. Giving a shower takes a lot of hard work, but all the work is worth it when you see the glow on the face of the soon-to-be bride.

On this particular Saturday I watched the bride-to-be and remembered how wonderful it felt to be in her place nearly forty years ago. Gulp. Did I actually write that big number? Is it possible to be married almost forty years? Even with that many years gone by, I can still remember the excitement and the anticipation of starting a new life with the man of my dreams. What would our future hold? Would there be children? Would we actually be compatible and be able to make our marriage work?

I guess I know the answers to those questions since we’ve made it together this long, but for the lady of honor last week and for all the young brides getting ready to take the next step, those questions are yet to be answered. The excitement and anticipation of the unknown makes a wedding emotional and hopeful, but it’s the working together of a couple throughout their marriage that makes that promise so beautiful.

In the romances that we write, we usually portray the couple before they’ve said their wedding vows. We let the reader see how they react to the obstacles that stand in their way, how they work through differences, and how they grow to accept one another along the way. In the end we bring them together in the hope of living happily ever after in our make-believe world. Just like in real life, we want our characters to be happy, but we have to make them work for that happiness or we don’t have a story that will get published.

In the end, both in real life and in our novels, we want a happily-ever-after romance that will bring tears of joy for couples who find the promise of love.

February is the month of love, but so is March, April, May and all the other months. Love is never ending. My wish for my neighbor’s daughter, for all the young brides this year, and for all our heroines we create is to find that love that lasts a lifetime.

Seat of the Pants Writing--Elisabeth Rose

I’m not a planner or a plotter. I start with an idea or maybe a character and head off into the mist. Sometimes it’s a concept that interests me, a ‘what if that happened?’ or a ‘how would you cope if?’.

This method of working terrifies some writers and is an oft raised topic at writing group meetings and of 'how to write' articles. Beginner writers always want to know which way is the best. The answer is of course, “Your way,” with the proviso that you’re getting results using your way. If not, try something different.

The problem with the ‘pantser’ method ( mine) is that there come moments of nothingness in the brain. The ‘what happens now?’ moments. These moments can stretch into days but having finished a lot of books I know my process and it doesn’t worry me. Plus the fact I don’t have deadlines looming helps a lot. Even though I’m not actually putting words on the page ideas are churning in my head. Possible conversations or scenarios, perhaps a new character or an event to move things along. Sometimes the plot needs something dramatic like an accident, or a character needs to take decisive action. Rereading the entire manuscript puts the dramatic arc into perspective and I can see where things start to go flat, where a character needs a kick up the bum, so to speak. If necessary I go back a way and change a reaction, sometimes the point of view, or cut stuff out and take another turning.

Because my romances are character driven, I also discover that my characters can talk their way into a conflict and tension emerges where there wasn’t any because I allow them to be themselves. I let them talk rather than force them to conform to a preconceived plan. Of course they already need to have fundamentally opposing views or it isn’t conflict but contrived, petty squabbling.

For example in my current story the heroine and hero are having lunch together in his house. She’s his gardener, a thunderstorm starts and he invites her inside. They don’t know each very well yet but have an unacknowledged attraction. He’s an over protective single father, she’s from a messy, loving, rough and tumble extended family including her niece and nephew, but is the one responsible for running the whole show, holding everything together. I wanted them to talk to each other alone for the first time. They already know they have completely different ideas about parenting and the children don’t get on with each other. He’s artistic and sophisticated, a professional, French trained Russsian classical musician, she’s an outdoors girl, a manual worker albeit with a degree in Horticulture.

Things are going along nicely, both acutely conscious of how attractive they find the other but convinced it’s one sided and hopeless because their lives are so different. It’s all very polite and rather awkward until, responding to a remark of hers about how she’s worried about her father’s health, he says he thinks she perhaps has too many responsibilities—running the gardening business, a father with heart problems who should retire, acting mother of her niece and nephew, running the house. ( And he doesn’t even know about the stroppy old grandmother who phones all the time to complain about stuff.)

My fiercely independent heroine who is constantly worried about all those things becomes very defensive saying, “What do you suggest I do? Walk out on them all?” He has no ready solutions and suddenly up goes the tension between them and the gulf widens.

Part way through that scene I was wondering if he was going to succumb to temptation and kiss her. So did he. And she was wondering what he’d do if she put her arms around him. They both resisted for very different but valid reasons.

Now kisses are highly unlikely and I can’t wait to see where they go from here, let alone how they’re going to end up together.

Author Branding

In anticipation of updating my website (www.JeanCGordon.com), I'm thinking about how to brand myself. BFS, my critique group, says that one of my strengths is my portrayal of small-town life in the twenty-first century. If you read my books, you know most of them are set in very small towns in Upstate New York. The exceptions: Mara's Move takes place mostly on a cruise ship and the other book in that series, Candy Kisses, is set in Albany. For me, Albany is the the city. But friends from other metro areas tell me Albany is a small for a "real" city. The students at the state university do call it Smallbany. But I digress.

As a start on my branding, I've come up with a list of branding tags. I have two that I like best. But I'm not telling -- yet. Here they are:

• Celebrate Love -- Small-town Style
• Celebrate Love -- Pure and not so simple
• Celebrate Small-town Love -- Pure and not so simple
• Celebrate Small-town Love -- Sweet and not so simple
• Celebrate Small-town Love -- Sweet but not so simple
• Celebrate Small-town Love -- Twenty-first Style

Or I could substitute Romance for Love in any of them.

What do you think? I let you know what I decide.