The Story Polisher is a collection of tips for improving your prose. Most posts highlight common problems that I've seen in ten years of editing stories, and include both bad and fixed examples. Topics cover everything from word choice and punctuation usage to sentence construction and tense errors. If you're new here, I recommend starting with The Purpose of the Polisher and Purple Prose vs. Window Prose.
I do not actively update The Story Polisher anymore; once I ran out of fresh topics to address, I saw little use in dragging things out further. But I hope these tips can be useful to you! For more of my projects, including my stories and Star Wars podcast, visit WriterintheHat.com.
The Story Polisher
Tips from an editor on avoiding common writing errors. No longer updating, but the advice will never go out of style.
Monday, February 3, 2020
Monday, February 29, 2016
Danny Potter On Writing and How the Brain Works
I recently attended Life, The Universe, and Everything, a writing symposium in Provo, Utah that focuses on speculative fiction in particular. I had the privilege of sitting on a few panels there and of giving a presentation on the sorts of things I've covered here on this blog.
My friend Danny Potter, meanwhile, gave a presentation titled "10-ish Things About the Brain Every Writer Should Know." He discussed how the brain works, how it handles information, and how writers can organize their writing to take advantage of the mind's ingrained processes and better communicate with their readers.
Now let me tell you—if you're a writer (which I'd wager you are, since you're reading my blog), then this presentation is solid gold. It is packed with useful information that you should know. And that's not just my bias as Danny's friend speaking; his presentation was so well-attended that they had to turn people away at the door because the room was out of standing space.
Why am I telling you this? Because someone recorded Danny's presentation, and he has now posted it online in its entirety for your edification and enjoyment. Just click on this here link to go watch it. You'll be glad you did.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Timey-Wimey Tenses: Past-Tenseception
Finding the most efficient order in which to tell a story
can be a tricky process. Sometimes, a perfectly linear narrative storyline will
suffice—the story begins, progresses through a series of events, and then comes
to an end. More often than not, however, your narrative will have important background
information: events that happened before the book itself began that are
important for understanding the plot. Some stories have only a little background
information to be worked into the narrative; other stories are made up of fifty
percent or more backstory.
When the characters learn a backstory that they didn’t know,
it is usually easy to work into the narrative—the audience learns it in the
same manner as the characters. Luke finds out that Darth Vader is his father,
he wants to find out how this could be true, he asks Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan tells
him (and us) the backstory. Simple as can be. Other times, however, the
characters already know their backstories, and your task as an author is to
find a smooth way to inform your audience of the information.
The problem that often arises with backstory is one of
tense: if your story is already written in past tense, then how do you relate
information that is even more past
tense?
Because it's timey-wimey and past tense within past tense! Eh? Eh? |
Past Perfect Tense
The answer lies on our list of the sixteen different tenses in English. Most stories in past tense employ the “Past Simple” tense (Freja picked up the gun and pointed it at the guard). In order to
relate events that happened before the current narrative, you simply need to
switch to “Past Perfect” tense—it’s the tense that uses the word “had” a whole
lot:
Freja studied the
ramshackle warehouse from the pub across the street. There were no signs of
activity around it. But she had visited every other building on the
list, and had found nothing.
If this wasn’t where the cultists were hiding, then the list was wrong.
Most of that paragraph is written in past simple tense: “Freja studied,” “There were,” and “This wasn’t.”
But that third, highlighted sentence is relating events that happened before the rest of the paragraph, so it
uses had to drop into past perfect tense—even further in the past
than the rest of the story.
Many writers forget the hads,
leaving background events in the same tense as the rest of the narrative, like
so:
Freja studied the
ramshackle warehouse from the pub across the street. There were no signs of
activity around it. But she visited every other building on the list, and found
nothing. If this wasn’t where the cultists were hiding, then the list was
wrong.
See the problem? Now there’s nothing in that third sentence
to indicate that those events happened before the rest of the paragraph—it almost
sounds like Freja sat in the pub studying the warehouse, left and visited a
bunch of other buildings, and then returned. Readers would probably puzzle out
what the writer really meant, but it’s needlessly confusing.
So, you can use “had” in past
perfect tense to relate events
that happened before the current events of the narrative, but there’s still a
problem: all those hads can really
clutter up your prose. Past perfect tense can become really tiresome to read
and to write if it goes on for more than a paragraph or so. For backstory that
would take any longer than that to relate (anything you might call a bona fide flashback), you’ll probably want to use
another method to share the information.
Past Perfect
Introduction
One method is to use a few passages of hads to introduce your flashback, and then transition back into past simple tense for the rest of the backstory.
Then, when you return to the “present” events of the narrative, you mark that
transition with the word now or
something similar. For example:
Freja approached
the warehouse empty-handed and alone. She had learned that weapons and backup would do her no good when she had
gone up against the cult at the apartment complex in Copenhagen. She had been
armed with an H&K MP5 rifle and her 9mm pistol, and had brought along two AKS
squadrons for the raid.
The first
squadron went into the complex through the front doors while Freja led the
second squadron through the rear. They rammed in the doors, forgoing stealth
for speed and surprise.
[More events,
etcetera.]
When her backup
pistol jammed as well, Freya was forced to withdraw with the rest of the
squadron. It had been an
unmitigated disaster.
This
time, Freya was armed with only her wits and the small book of spells that Emil
had given her. But with her new understanding of what the cultists were, she
knew she could stop them on her own. She walked up to the warehouse door and
pulled it open.
See how it works? A few sentences of past perfect tense at the beginning (and one at the end) let
readers know that we’re jumping backwards in time. This can still be a little
confusing for readers if you’re not careful with it, but it is far more
readable than umpteen paragraphs of hads.
Break and Flashback
An even clearer method of relating a flashback is to simply
use a line break or chapter break to show your readers that you are switching
gears and to then relate your flashback in the same tense as the rest of the
story. This method is used quite often by many authors. You can find some
professionally-done examples in several books that I can think of off the top
of my head:
The Shadow Rising
by Robert Jordan (Book four of The Wheel
of Time)—this is the method by which Mr. Jordan related the history of the
Aiel when Rand went to Rhuidean. Note that he used an in-world method of
delivering the flashbacks; that is, these were memories being projected into
the mind of the protagonist, and we received them as he did.
The Way of Kings
and Words of Radiance by Brandon
Sanderson—the first two books of The
Stormlight Archive have both featured entire chapters devoted to the
backstory of one of the characters (Kaladin in the first book and Shallan in
the second). These chapters are scattered throughout the book, effectively
serving as a series of flashbacks.
Holes by Louis
Sachar—this book is actually unusually complex compared to most middle-grade
stories. The story continually jumps around between the “present day” events of
the story to the recent background of individual characters to various
historical events that pertain to the narrative. In fact, in this book Mr.
Sachar employs every single method of delivering backstory that I’ve outlined
in this post. If you want to improve your flashback delivery, go read Holes and pay close attention to his
tense usage. In fact, that’s your homework—who doesn’t want to read Holes again, am I right? Go do it.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Timey-Wimey Tenses: Getting Future Tense Right
Last time we discussed the sixteen different tenses of the
English language, all of which you’ve probably used before. Of course, some of
them get used more often than others. All of those “future in the past” tenses,
for example—those are complicated and strange enough that you surely won’t need
to use them often, right?
Wrong.
The future-in-the-past
or relative tense is used when
speaking of an action or event that will be in the future for a particular
person whose actions are being related in past tense. It’s a bit of a
convoluted notion, and that’s why many people consider it an obscure tense when
they first encounter it—I know I did. But think about it; the vast majority of
stories are written in the past tense, right? So if a story is written in past
tense, and the author needs to discuss actions that the characters plan to
undertake later on in the narrative—in their
future but not ours—then the author
will need to use the relative tense.
As it turns out, authors use the relative tense all the time. Here . . . I will grab the
nearest book to me and flip through it; I can almost guarantee that I will find
some usage of the relative tense. The book is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (italics added for
emphasis):
The two talked of
small matters as they worked. And while they moved around a great deal, it was
obvious they were reluctant to finish whatever task they were close to
completing, as if they both dreaded the moment when the work would end and the silence
would fill the room again.
There you go. The story is told in the past tense—“the two talked” and “they moved around”—but the author needed to refer to a moment that was
yet to come for the two characters. The moment is in the future for the
characters but not for us, the readers, so the proper tense to use is the
relative tense.
I often see errors when it comes to future tense in stories,
and it’s usually because writers use the future tense where they should have
used the future-in-the-past tense. The mistake might look something like this:
Callie kept
glancing at the clock as she worked. Her shift will finish at five o’clock, and
then she will go hunt down the nightbeast.
Callie’s shift finishing and her hunting down the nightbeast
are events that are in the future for her,
but not for us the readers, since the whole story is in past tense. Therefore,
those wills should be woulds:
Callie kept
glancing at the clock as she worked. Her shift would finish at five o’clock,
and then she would go hunt down the nightbeast.
Simple as that. Note, however, that if this had been dialog,
the normal future tense would have been required. If the narrator is speaking
of future events, then you need to use future-in-the-past tense; but the
characters themselves still speak of their future in future tense.
“Callie, you need
to take care of this,” Maria insisted.
Callie glanced at
the clock. “My shift will finish at five o’clock, and then I will go hunt down
the nightbeast.”
The same rule applies to stories told in the present tense:
Callie keeps
glancing at the clock as she works. Her shift will finish at five o’clock, and
then she will go hunt down the nightbeast.
But if you’re writing a story in past tense, keep an eye out
for situations where the narrator refers to events that haven’t come yet—these will
often require the relative tense.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Tricky, Timey-Wimey Tenses
A few months ago we discussed tense in stories—how most stories are written in either past or present tense and how authors can accidentally switch between the two. On the surface, tense is very simple, right? There’s
past, present, and future, and that’s that.
But not really.
Without getting too technical, English grammar has this
thing called aspect which alters
tense. There are four different aspects, which can combine with past, present,
and future tenses to produce twelve different
combinations.
But wait, there’s more!
There’s actually more than past, present, and future tense—English
also has what is called a relative
tense, or a “future in the past” tense. This tense can combine with the four
different aspects just like the others, bringing our total of tense-aspect
combinations to sixteen.
I’m going to briefly describe each of these tenses, but
before I do, I’d like to give a disclaimer: I don’t expect you to remember all
of these tenses. The purpose of this post is not to freak writers out with the
hidden complexities of the English language. I’m not saying that every writer
should be able to identify each of these sixteen tenses by name at the drop of
the hat.
The real purpose of this post is to help English-speaking writers
understand their language a little better—trust me, just being aware of the
existence of all sixteen tenses will
improve your writing. It will help you pick out occasional errors a little more
easily. You’ve used all of the tenses before; their use is instinctual to you.
So don’t stress out—just read through the tenses below and enjoy the rush of
new knowledge.
(Of course, I’m not saying you shouldn’t memorize all the tenses and how they’re used. I’m just
saying that you shouldn’t feel any pressure to do so—it’s not a requirement for
being a good writer.)
Present Tenses
Present Simple: Juan
walks to the store.
Indicates that a person performs an action with some measure
of regularity. Can also be used in dialog to describe an action in the moment
(there she goes).
Nanette jogs two
miles every day.
Present Continuous:
Juan is walking to the store.
Indicates that a person is currently in the middle of an
unfinished action or that a person
hasn’t finished a task yet but periodically returns to the task with an eye to
completing it in the future.
“Nanette? I think
she is reading right now. Just a second, I’ll check.”
“I’m studying
Italian in school.”
Present Perfect:
Juan has walked to the store.
Indicates that a person has just completed an action and is
now either ready to perform or is currently performing a new action.
“The suspect has
approached the target and is initiating dialog.”
Present Perfect Continuous:
Juan has been walking to the store.
Indicates that a person has just spent a period of time
performing an action which may or may not be finished—often used when the
action is now being interrupted. Also used to indicate that a specific action
or portions of a task have been occurring regularly for some period of time.
“No, Nanette has
been sitting here with me all day. She couldn’t have stolen the jewels.”
“Juan has been
studying Italian lately.”
Past Tenses
Past Simple: Juan
walked to the store.
Indicates that an action of indeterminate length or
completeness occurred at some point in the past.
“Nanette jogged twice
today.”
Past Continuous:
Juan was walking to the store.
Indicates that an action was in the process of occurring
(and then was probably interrupted or something else occurred at the same time).
Nanette was
jogging when she got the call about Juan.
Past Perfect:
Juan had walked to the store.
Indicates that an action was performed and completed before
further actions took place.
Juan suggested
they go out for dinner, but Nanette had eaten already.
Past Perfect
Continuous: Juan had been walking to
the store.
Indicates that an action was in the process of being
performed when it was interrupted and probably left incomplete.
“The suspect had
been working for hours before we apprehended him. We don’t know yet how much he
got done.”
Future Tenses
Future Simple: Juan
will walk to the store.
Indicates that an action of indeterminate duration or
completeness will occur at some point in the future.
“Nanette will
pick up the ingredients we’re missing.”
Future Continuous:
Juan will be walking to the store.
Indicates that an action will be in the process of occurring
(and will then probably be interrupted or something else will occur at the same
time).
“I guarantee you
Nanette will be reading the book when you get home.”
Future Perfect:
Juan will have walked to the store.
Indicates that an action will have already been completed at
a future point, when something else may then occur.
“Do you think Nanette will have read the
book by that point?”
Future Perfect
Continuous: Juan will have been
walking to the store.
Indicates that an action will have been going but will yet
be incomplete at some point in the future. Statements with this tense will
usually focus on the duration of the incomplete task.
“Nanette will
have been studying for ten straight hours by the time you get home. She will
need a break.”
Relative (Future-in-the-past) Tenses
Here’s where things get fun. Relative or future-in-the-past
tense generally refers to an action that will be in the future for a specific
individual, but not necessarily for the speaker. This often means that a
portion of the sentence (or the surrounding sentences) will be in past tense,
but the action referred to in relative tense will be yet to happen at that point in time, although it may
have already happened for the speaker.
It gets even more confusing because relative tense takes the
same form as conditional sentences,
were something will only happen if something else happens first.
… let’s just get to the examples.
Tenses are concerned with the time of events in your story, so things can get a little . . . wibbly-wobbly. |
Relative Simple:
Juan would walk to the store.
Indicates that someone in the past expected to perform an
action of indeterminate length or completeness at some point in their future.
Nanette knew that
she would buy the book.
Relative Continuous:
Juan would be going to the store.
Indicates that someone in the past would be, in their
future, in the process performing an action (which would then probably be interrupted).
Nanette figured
that she would be reading by then.
Relative Perfect:
Juan would have gone to the store.
Indicates that someone in the past would perform an action that
will have already been completed at a future point, when something else might
then occur. Confused yet?
Nanette realized
that she couldn’t read that night, because by then Juan would have already retrieved his book from her place.
Relative Perfect
Continuous: Juan would have been
going to the store.
Indicates that someone in the past would perform an action that
will have been going but will yet be incomplete at some point in their future.
Nanette knew that on a normal day she
would have been jogging for fifteen minutes by this point in the evening.
You made it! That post ended up a lot longer than I’d
planned, but I hope it was informative. Next time, we’ll discuss a little more
about why all these tenses are so important.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Grammar Basics: What Every Writer Should Know
Like every other vocation, writing comes with a plethora of
technical terms—everything from past
perfect continuous tense to non-defining
relative clauses. Unlike many other vocations, however, writing is a task
that can be performed with next to no knowledge of its technical aspects. In
other words, you don’t need to know what a grammatical article is in order to use one correctly. Most people do this instinctually.
That’s not to say that a knowledge of the technical aspects
of writing isn’t useful and important. Generally speaking, the more thorough a
person’s knowledge of grammar, punctuation, and all of the technical details of
writing, the more precise, legible, and skilled their writing will be. But such detailed expertise is not
necessary to write a good story. That’s why I usually refrain from using
technical writing terms in my blog posts: it’s not so important that you know
what a present participle or a gerund is, it’s just important that you
know how to use verbs that end in –ing.
But there is a minimum level of knowledge that every writer
should have if they want to write for a living. You don’t need to be able to
diagram a sentence, but most editors will expect you to know at least the following terms and what
they mean:
Basic Sentence
Structure: Subject, Verb, and Direct Object
I’ve gone over the basics of what makes up a sentence
before: a subject, a verb, and (often) a direct object. Every writer should know what each of those terms
means and be able to identify them in a sentence.
The subject of the sentence is the thing that is performing
an action.
The verb is the action that is being performed.
The direct object is the thing that is being acted upon—the
thing that the verb is affecting.
Koharu sipped her sake.
Subject Verb Direct Object
Remember that not all verbs require a direct object.
Haruto
slept.
Subject Verb
(no direct object needed)
If a sentence does not have that central subject and verb,
then it (usually) isn’t a sentence—it’s a sentence fragment.
Adjectives
An adjective is a
word that modifies a noun, like so:
Koharu was an intelligent woman.
Adjectives can be colors (the blue car), qualities (the adorable
baby), materials (a wooden sword),
nationalities (a Japanese car), ages
(the seven-year-old girl), and more.
The limiting factor is that they will always
describe a noun.
Adverbs
Adverbs (the use of which is discussed here) are words that
modify pretty much everything but
nouns. They can modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, phrases, and even
entire sentences. They usually end in –ly,
but not always.
Modifying a verb: Haruto spoke quickly.
Koharu visited yesterday.
Modifying an adjective: Haruto thinks
that he is extremely clever.
Your overly worried sister doesn’t think so.
Modifying an adverb: Haruto spoke very quickly.
Modifying a phrase: Koharu drove us nearly the whole way. (Modifies the
phrase “the whole way.”)
Modifying a sentence: Eventually, we all decided to go
together.
Prepositions and
Prepositional Phrases
A preposition is a word that describes the location,
direction, time, or possessive quality of a noun or action. Some examples:
Location: Your coat is in the closet.
Direction: Haruto drove to the store.
Time: We’ll eat after the lecture.
Possession: We’re going to meet the
President of Japan!
A prepositional phrase
is simply a preposition and the words it is linking to the rest of the
sentence.
My book was on the shelf.
The creatures
came from outer space.
I’ll get this
done before I clock out.
The Queen of England won’t be there, sadly.
Tense and Perspective
You should know which tense
and which form of perspective your
story employs and be generally familiar with the most common tenses and
perspectives. You can find a handy rundown of tense and perspective here.
Pronouns
A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun or noun
phrase. Examples include I, you, she, this that, these, who, what,
whose, mine, his, and so many more. There are a good ten or so categories
of pronouns, which I don’t expect everyone to learn—just know what a pronoun is
and the basics of how to identify them.
Now, again: I’m not saying that you would not be well-served
in studying your grammar and punctuation—all the elements of writing, really—to
a greater depth than what I’ve covered here. But at the very least, every writer should know the terms above
and how to identify the parts of speech that they refer to. Instinct and
experience can make up for a lack of detailed knowledge, but they can’t make up
for the basics.
Remember what Uncle Iroh taught us all: learn the basics, as they are your greatest ally. |
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Mismatched Lists, Part Two
This is part two of our discussion on mistakes that crop up
when authors write lists; you can find part one here. In part one, we discussed
mismatched lists of nouns; today, we’ll discuss lists of actions. For instance:
Before he could
go out for the evening, Jeremy had some chores to get done, like walking the
dog, cleaning out the car, and run to the store for snacks.
Do you realize
how much effort I put into this? I had to research all of the information
myself, tracked down the original designers, and convinced them to help me put
together a matching setup.
Can you see the problem with those lists? The items in these
lists don’t all match. Let’s play a game of “one of these things is not like
the others”:
walking the dog
cleaning out the
car
run to the store
for snacks
The first two items in the list begin with “-ing” verbs (we’ve
discussed those several times before), but the final item in the list does not
(it begins with an imperative verb, if you’re curious). That’s a problem—when
you list actions like this, the format of each action needs to match the
others. Partly, we do this because symmetry looks and sounds better. But it’s
often more than that.
The formatting of each action needs to match up with the
portion of the sentence that introduces the list. You should be able to remove
all of the actions in the list but one (any one) and still have the sentence
make sense. Let’s look at the second example above in this manner:
I had to research all of the information
myself.
I had to tracked down the original
designers.
I had to convinced them to help me put
together a matching setup.
That didn’t work, did it? Those second two items on the list
switched to past-tense verbs, even though the introductory text required an
infinitive form of the verb (the basic, “unchanged” form of the verb). We can
fix the sentence in one of two ways: we can fix the second two entries in the
list or we can change the introductory text and first item in the list.
I had to research
all of the information myself, track down the original designers, and convince
them to help me put together a matching setup.
I researched all
of the information myself, tracked down the original designers, and convinced
them to help me put together a matching setup.
It’s that simple: items in a list should match one another
in format, especially when it comes
to the tense of the verb.
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