Crimes of Syntax

photo Alice K. Boatwright

I don’t know everything; in fact, sometimes I know nothing. Over the weekend I presented at the Write on the Sound Conference, a three day writer’s conference housed in a venue with a spectacular view of Puget Sound. My session was titled “Crimes of Syntax and How to Fix Them.” In my talk I used examples of my own wretched early-draft sentences for my YA novel-in-progress to demonstrate how revision strengthens the work. I gave the audience a brief background of my narrator, 19 year-old Michael, and his 18 year-old girlfriend Shelly. The participants agreed my revised syntax improved in each example. Then I showed them the following gem:

Original:

I think of Theo and Shelly alone in his apartment tonight. Those two have a history. She chose me, but she also said “this is where the heroine sets the hero free.” Does she want to be free of me? Are we just wandering atoms that attached, and will now disengage? Will she wait faithfully like Penelope, as I, Odysseus, drift alone at sea for the next five weeks?

I remarked the sentences in this are overwrought and melodramatic, and shared my revision:

My despair deepens when I imagine Theo and Shelly alone together for the next two days. Will they revisit their history? She had told me “this is where the heroine sets the hero free.” Does she want to be free of me? Are we like a rocket vaulting into space only to later split into separate components?

I clicked on a side by side comparison of the two, believing I had vastly improved my sentences. One woman raised her hand, and said, “If you were writing through an adult voice, this would be true, but your character is a teenage boy; his thinking at this critical juncture would be overwrought and melodramatic.”

I drew a quick breath and grabbed my chin. Holy crap, she was right. Why had that not occurred to me? Others chimed in, saying the melodrama added a touch of humor. One young man said the rocket image didn’t work nearly as well as the atoms, and they all agreed Michael would likely think of Odysseus given that he’s literary. Another woman suggested what may have bothered me about the original passage was the paragraph length and she suggested a spot where I could make a paragraph break.

As much as I wanted them to now rewrite my entire novel, it was ten minutes before lunch and I still had twenty more slides to show, so we had to move on. But my audience reminded me of a few things:

Years of writing, even having critical success, doesn't mean your next book is going to come more easily. In fact, it may be more difficult because you are competing with your best self.

Sometimes we grow too close to our stories to make critical judgments; we need a community of trusted early writer-readers who will provide objective criticism.

At a writer’s conference one’s audience consists of writers with varying skill levels. Even though I have more degrees than a thermometer, I always learn something new, or relearn something I already knew when I attend workshops, and often I learn these things from other participants rather than instructors. Students inadvertently teach if the teacher is willing to listen.

Which version do you prefer? My original, the revision, or something in between?

Happy Writing.

Revenge of the Bad Sentences

I’m revising a draft, 7^th draft to be exact, which means examining the details on the sentence level. The initial edit phase was more developmental, where I fleshed out scenes and moved things around. By the sixth draft I performed major surgery, extracted a few teeth, sucked out the fat (erroneous back story) and the manuscript is now thinner. At this point I’m stumbling my way line by line through myriad band sentences. Like this little gem:

Peri hands me a napkin and wipes her own hands.

What do I mean here? On what does Peri wipe her hands? Her dress? The grass? The back of her hand?

On the surface this sentence looks complete. It has a subject (Peri) a verb (hands) and an object (me.) The problem lies in the second half of the sentence. The subject is still Peri, the verb is wipes, but the object (her own hands)is too vague.

When I wrote it I pictured her using her own napkin, but I didn't mention this to the reader. It was clear as dry inside my head. Unfortunately most of you are not mind readers.

This is not the worst sentence I’ve ever written. Likely it’s this one from an early draft of my MFA thesis:

A seedless fruit, Columbus discovered pineapple on one of his many voyages.

What do I mean here? What am I implying? This gem gave one of my first readers quite a howl. I’m sure he still uses it as a slide in a lecture on bad sentences.

We all write them. Some of us are just better, or worse at it.

There’s even a contest for the worst opening line of a story.

 http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

Have fun creating your band sentences. Feel free to share some in the comment section.

Happy Writing.

My Verbs are Going Nowhere and Other Crimes of Syntax

"The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense." - from the Internet

    

 I constantly remind my students, “As a writer, your two new best friends are verbs and nouns.”

Verbs are the action words, they make your characters and settings move, and/or they create more clarity. But not all verbs are created equal, and some verb combinations do more harm. For example, the verb 'to be’ is the most overused verb in our language. (The critical reader will notice I used a form of it five times already in the title and passage. More on that later.)

To be clear, let’s conjugate ‘to be’:
Simple present :

I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, they are,
and
Simple past :

I was, you were. He /she/it was, we were, they were

(I know most of you know this already, but I once had a junior in my AP class insist ‘I am’ and ‘she was’ aren’t from the verb ‘to be.’)

Contemporary writing requires a more active tense of the verb: I have already discussed crimes of passive voice (). This relates, and goes a step further.

http://laura-moe.blogspot.com/2011/03/this-blog-was-written-by-me-and-other.html

Let’s look at an example of a beige sentence.

He was sitting by the window and he noticed a girl who was running with her dog. They were frolicking in the yard.

Grammatically, the sentence is correct. But read it aloud and the words get stuck on your tongue. It suffers from too many auxiliary verbs. An occasional use of this form is okay, but when you load an entire paragraph with to be verbs, the writing suffers in many ways.

Was sitting, was running, were frolicking all use ‘to be’ as helping verbs. But the verbs don’t need help. If you rewrite the sentence by crisping the verbs, and using a non-essential clause, the sentence smoothes out:
BETTER
He sat by the window and noticed a girl and her dog, running and frolicking in the yard.

The diction is cleaner and moves the reader into more important aspects of the manuscript. The non essential clause provides additional detail, but does not make the sentence more or less correct. Yes, again I used a form of to be. Sometimes it's necessary. Most of the time you can find a better verb or form.

Here is another example of bland prose:

He was sitting next to the TV. His dog was at his feet and he was sipping coffee. He was surprised at what came across the screen.

Is the dog drinking coffee or the mysterious He? And what was the dog doing at his feet? The reader is supposed to see the man is excited by the TV, but the action is too static from lack of tension and abstract, vague imagery.

BETTER.

Cal sat adjacent to the TV sipping a cup of coffee; his dog Max lounged at his feet. Cal just about dropped his coffee when he saw his wife's face come across the screen.

Notice how the reader becomes slightly more engaged by the activity and specific detail. The verbs are active. But do we care enough to keep reading?

Active verbs create tension. A good verb simplifies, clarifies, yet also provides more complex dimensions.

BETTER YET
As Cal sipped his coffee in front of the TV and Max lay at his feet, his hands trembled when he saw his wife’s face on the screen.

In this case we get a mental movie of the action, and dramatic tension. The reader wonders why do his hands tremble?
something is not right with Cal’s wife’s appearance on TV.

Assignment:
Go through a beginning of one of your manuscripts and circle how many to be verbs you have. Try substituting a more specific verb, or rewrite the sentences to pare them down.

An easy way to find them using Word is to click on FIND and type in various forms of ‘to be’, (was, is, were, are,) Mark these on your hard copy of the draft so you can substitute better verbs.

Pay attention to your syntax.

For a detailed explanation of verb functions, see http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/verb.htm

Grammar Bytes, is phenomenal. Since the inception of a whole language approach to English, grammar is rarely taught in schools any more. Diagramming sentences resembles math problems, but if you want to appear as an intelligent life form, grammar is a necessary evil. This site provides crucial information and exercises to strengthen your syntax.



Happy Writing.

Spying on the World from the Inside Out

Today I bought another book on sentences (see previous blog post), a craft book,  and yet another thesaurus. Does that render me a nerd? Yeah. No doubt. But the thesaurus (The Concise Roget’s International Thesaurus) is divided into Categories and has a section on phrases. How cool is that? A steal at $7.99.

 

As my friend (and fellow nerd) Amy Gibson points out, “Nerds are the new COOL.”

I teach writing, so books on sentences are imperative. This one, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, by Howard Fish, is a slim volume that feels good in my hands, and contains poem excerpts in the epigraph. I have only read Chapter One, but already I am a fan. Fish quotes good sentences from books and movies, and even one from a child’s essay. “I was already on the second floor when I heard about the bat.” What a great opening sentence. It contains location, mystery, and a hint of danger. The reader wants to know what happens next.

 

Fish’s premise is that by analyzing good sentences one can learn to write well. At the end of the first chapter he provides a formula for analyzing, writing and reading sentences:

 

Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation.

 

He e equates sentence analysis s with analyzing works of art. When one becomes closer to art, and analyzes it, one appreciates art at a deeper level.

 

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

The above quote comes from the third book I bought today (recommended by Maria Popova of www.brainpickings.org, which if you are not following her on twitter and Facebook, you should be.) It is called How to be an Explorer of the World by Keri Smith. The book is placed in the arts section of the bookstore, yet many of the suggested explorations are easily transmitted into writing assignments, for example exploration # 2, Experience collection. Smith suggests keeping a log of things you notice on your travels and experiences.  As a writer and teacher, this gives me an idea to have students take brief filed notes during a set time period. What one notices creates “telling details” usable in writing.

 

Your exercise today is from Smith’s book: Sit in a chair and quickly, without censoring, write down ten things you notice around  you hadn’t seen when you first sat down. Use those ten things in a poem or story.

 

Happy Writing.

Your Job As a Writer Is Making Sentences

If you are on twitter and you don't follow Maria Popova, shame on you. Her feed, brain picker, is rife with essential information. Check her out. http://www.brainpickings.org/

Recently she posted a piece about a book called Several Short Sentences About Writing, by controversial New York Times editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg.

His premise is if you master writing good, concise sentences, you can write anything in any genre.

"Writing short sentences restores clarity."

As a writing teacher, I preach clarity as the number one goal in writing, so I am with him on that piece of advice.

"Know what each sentence says, what it doesn't say, and what it implies."

In this vein, using the precise word is crucial. The car moved down the street has an abstract implication. The clunker rattled down the street has a more specific image, and it implies the driver  might also have money problems.

“There are innumerable ways to write badly,"  All I have to do is look through drafts of my own writing to confirm this.

"What you don't know about writing is also a form of knowledge, though much harder to grasp." This seems counterintuitive. But good writing is exploring what we don't know and applying what we do know. To write well you need to widen the lens beyond your familiar world. Explore unknown worlds. Take risks. I often give an assignment  where students are required to go outside their comfort zones. If you are afraid of heights, go ballooning, or if you hate crowds, go to Walmart on the first of the month. Observe, take notes. You will be a better and a more interesting person.

"The only link between you and the reader is the sentence you're making,"

 related to, " knowing what you've actually said is crucial."

Like Orwell ,Klinkenborg advises us to break the rules for the sake of the sentence, for rhythm . He also makes a case for there being no correlation between sentence length and intelligence on the part of the writer. An astute sentence can be written using simple diction.

Writing short sentences will help you write strong balanced sentences of any length." He asks the reader to recall early kid books where the language is compact, but not necessarily choppy. But the syntax was clear. Writing for children is deceptive; It's harder than you think because your audience is more discriminating. Younfg readers demand a rhythmic sound pattern to text.

"Read like a writer." Writers pay attention to the words, and the syntax. Writers also question the text, respond to it, (as I am doing now by HIS work).

 Read like a writer you can write in any form

My friends who teach Lit wil not agree, but Klinkenborg argues against trying to find meaning in sentences.Not to over analyze and intellectualize.

  

“Know how to detect what interest you.”

Second to clarity, another essential key to good wri9ting is passion. If you have no passion for your subject, be it poetry or prose, your writing will be beige.

We can all witness the same scene, but  each of us pulls out the details that interest us. For example, I am drawn to faces. If I were to witness a bank robbery, and the suspect is not wearing a mask, I would pay attention to the perp’s features, hair color, and expressions.  A fashionista might describe what he or she is wearing. A musician will pick up the tone and notes of the robber’s voice, a podiatrist will notice how he walks, and a tattooist can describe the  body art.

Good Writing is layering good sentences or lines of poetry on top of one another. Consciously.

Essentially Klinkenborg is saying as writers we should suffer over the words.

I don’t agree with everything Klinkenborg says in this book. He gets fuzzy when he reflects about “You can start anywhere and there is no order”, and “The obsession with transition negates a basic truth about writing: you can get anywhere from anywhere.” Only experienced writers can get by with taking weird tangents off the paths through a story or essay. I believe in transitions. Developing writers like high school and undergraduates still need a framework.

The book uses a meditative, mantra-like repetition that I find annoying, as if he has to remind me what I have already read. Makes me feel brainwashed.

Overall the book offers good advice, albeit in a repetitious, hypnotic, non- linear structure. He wisely advises possessing good grammar

 I agree that "good writing is significant everhwere,"

“Writing doesn’t prove anything, and it only rarely persuades. It does something much better. It attests. It witnesses. It shares your interest in what you’ve noticed.”

And speaking of sentences, check out these gems:

 http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2012win.html

 EXERCISE:

Try to write a worse sentence than one of these. Intentional bad wiring can be just as difficult as good wrong, but it's so much fun.

Here is an example I wrote waiting for the doctor in a cold exam room.

It was so cold, icicles formed on my fingernails, resembling glass shards from a windshield after a highway crash in the rain on a cloudy Friday afternoon during a thunderstorm following an endless heat wave of ninety plus degree temperatures where we all felt like melted cheese over fries.

 

Happy Writing.