Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Stylistic tics
In the best writing, the author disappears.
Not everyone would agree with this. The success and critical acclaim of authors like M. John Harrison, China Mieville, and Neil Gaiman would seem to argue otherwise. I appreciate what these authors achieve with their pyrotechnics, and I enjoy them (especially Gaiman) if I’m in the mood, but this is not the kind of writer I want to be.
I want my readers to forget I exist. Martin Cruz Smith is my role model, along with a slew of hardboiled novelists who put the story first and themselves last. I’m thinking about James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss), Jim Thompson, Harry Crews (A Feast of Snakes). Yeah, I could go on.
Invisible writing requires a vicious internal editor to seek out and eradicate all stylistic tics. You know about tics, right?
As I trudge through this monstrous manuscript, I’m learning to find and destroy my worst tics:
- Anemic sentences, thanks to dependence on ‘was’, ‘was (verb)ing’, and other abuses of the verb to be.
- Overuse of em dashes, semicolons, and ellipses.
- Poorly handled speaker attributions. I’m a saidist (my characters will occasionally shout, murmur, or whisper, but they usually just say things, and never ever ever do they aver, proclaim, hiss, or growl their sentences). Nevertheless, my attributions often suck.
Those are my primary tics. Have you found yours yet?
D.
About speaker attributions- (can you tell my tic is dashes and semi-colons?) if you’ve fleshed out you characters well enough the reader will be able to tell who’s speaking. An author in a writing class I attended said that most readers don’t even register the word “said.” Don’t worry about trying to gasp and mutter and exclaim, just write “said” and you’ll be fine.
That should be ‘your’ characters. I hate not having post edit buttons!
My opinion:
BEST: the reader knows who is speaking from context, an appropriate beat, or from the speaker’s characteristic style of speach.
NEXT BEST: said
Yes, ‘said’ is invisible, but if it is overused it soon becomes visible (at least it does to my eye).
And, yes, that comment editing problem is a bitch. Blogger wants us all to look like doofuses.
Repeating words. I’ll be writing along, thinking everything is perfectly original, and then suddenly I’ll notice I used “brightly” three times in the same paragraph. God knows how many of those I miss!
Hi Dave. I’d bet we all do that. For me, that’s one of the easier things to catch on the re-read.
One of my pet peeves: internal rhymes. It’s easy to catch yourself putting perfect rhymes into a sentence (like round/sound) but how about imperfect rhymes like sound/down? Those probably don’t bother many readers, but they bug me.
I like the word “webwork”, I’ve noticed. Three times in one paragraph is a little too much…