Category: adjectives

            Y’know, while I was pulling links for this post, I realized something kind of amazing (and I’m glad I caught it).  This is the 300th time I’ve posted on this page.  Three hundred ranty posts about characters and dialogue and spelling and structure. Wow.

            I’m kind of surprised we’re all still here.
            But let’s get back to it…
            Odd fact—I’ve probably fired more types of handguns and rifles than anyone reading this.  You might be a firearm enthusiast, you might be former military, you might be in the military now… but there’s a very good chance I’ve got you beat.  I once compared notes with an Army weapons specialist and it turned out I could name almost twice as many firearms than him that I’d used, including a few obscure ones he’d never even heard of.

            The reason why I can do this is all my time in the film industry.  With the different procedural and crime shows I worked on, it was very common to have a new murder weapon every week, along with a red herring weapon and possibly some random thug weapons as well. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, bolt action, lever action, pump, semi-auto, full-auto…  And every one of these that was actually used on screen had to be test fired by me and then by the actors. 

            Even with some common weapons repeating, over the course of fifteen years… I fired a lot of weapons.

            Now, with all that being said, even though I’ve worked with a ton of weapons, I would never consider myself any kind of marksman.  Definitely not a sniper.  Because there is much, much more to being good with weapons then just being able to pull a trigger.  An AK-47 might seem like a ticket to badass-dom, but not if I don’t know how to load it. Or hold it.  Or turn the safety off.  I’ve heard some great (and kind of awful) stories from soldiers about gunfights with people who don’t know how their own weapons work.

            I bet a few folks reading this have an acquaintance who buys nothing but the most expensive, top-of-the-line tools yet still can’t put an IKEA bookshelf together.  Most of us have heard stories about some guy who spends a quarter-million on a car and then wrecks it within a week because “the car outperformed the driver.” Heck, we’ve all seen proof that giving a director access to grade-A actors and millions in film technology is absolutely no guarantee of a decent movie.

            Y’see, Timmy, having high-level tools doesn’t automatically make me skilled.  They’re two entirely different things.  Sure, I can keep jabbing at that bookshelf with my $300 DeWalt Max XR  20 volt hammer drill, but if I just need to tap in a few finishing nails it’s not going to help much. And the parts the drill would actually work for… well, a Phillips head screwdriver would do the same job.  It might even work better, all things considered.  DeWalt’s are great, but they can kind of suck when you need to work in tight spaces.

            Anyway… where am I going with this?

            I’d like to share something with you.  As I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, I used to work on a text-based online game, what some of you might know as a MUD.  Because it was text-dependent, it was a chance for some people to really show off their skills.  Or complete lack thereof.  A friend of mine still works there and sometimes she shares things with me.

            So, check out this sentence…

            (names have been changed to protect the horribly guilty)

“Lashes aflutter like the wings of a satin bird, Phoebe sets glaukosphaerite lagoons on the newcomer, a smirk glissading across twin folds.”

             WTF…

            Now, I was going to try to sift through this sentence and break down all the places it went wrong.  To be honest, I did.  And I had a page and a half of notes, which is a lot more negativity than I want to have here.  So, instead, let me break all of that down into four simple rules for your writing arsenal.

            And yes, these would be rules, not advice.

            Know what words mean—It doesn’t matter how much my reciprocal saw cost if I keep trying to use it as a butter knife.  An elephant gun is not a sidearm.  And diffuse and defuse mean two entirely different things.

            This is the most important of these rules.  If I want to make my living with words, I need to know them intimately.   Not more or less what they mean or a general idea of how they’re used.  I cannot say words are the tools of my trade and then get repeatedly stumped by vocabulary questions on Jeopardy!. I’ve been doing this for many years, full time for over eight now, and I still pick up the dictionary once or thrice a week to make sure I’m using a given word correctly.  Because I have to know what they mean.

            This is also one of the worst rules to get wrong because it’s a mistake that’s hard to catch.  I won’t catch it because, well, I don’t know I’m using the word wrong.  My computer won’t catch it, because computers are idiots and will only tell me if a word’s spelled right, not if it’s being used correctly. Which means the readers will probably be the ones to catch it… and it won’t give them a good opinion of my skills as a writer.

           

            Don’t overcomplicate—Stephen King once said that any word you go looking for in the thesaurus for is the wrong word.  I’ve mentioned a few different versions of this rule at one time or another.  I’m not saying my writing can’t have some clever bits to it, but I should never confuse (or equate) overcomplicating my writing with complexity in my writing.

            If I have metaphors for metaphors (like using lagoons instead of pools because I don’t want to use eyes), I am pushing my audience away from reading and into analysis.  This is the kind of thing that destroys the flow of my writing.  And that’s the kind of thing that gets my writing set aside in favor of something else.

            Know how things go together—Remember that AK-47?  It’s not going to be half as effective after I force a lot of shotgun shells into the magazine.  They’re two powerful items that do not work well together.

            Know what words mean—Did I mention this one already? Well, it’s probably worth mentioning again.  It is the most important of these rules after all.  And the one most people will ignore, because I need to be able to admit I don’t know stuff before I can learn new stuff.

            Have a big arsenal of words because you need it and you can use it.  Not just because you think it makes you look cool.  I can spend twenty minutes looking up glaukosphaerite and making sure it’s spelled correctly (because it won’t be in the spellchecker), but I could also just use green and then finish this whole page in that same amount of time. 

            And more people would understand what I was trying to say.

            Next time, I wanted to tell you about something I’ve felt for a while now…

            Until then, go write.

            See what I did there?  A clever play on words.  Not quite a pun, definitely not a pop culture reference, but… well, it’ll do.

            It’ll do, pig.

            Also, random note—I set up a Tumblr a while back.  If you ever want to ask a quick question, send anonymous insults, or whatever, please feel free to stop by.

            Anyway, I’m about to wrap up this draft of my current project and it struck me that I haven’t blabbed on about the drafting process, so to speak, in a while.  A lot of folks hate doing drafts.  Some folks skip them altogether, convinced their words are gold the minute they’re set down.  And a few folks get caught in an endless loop of writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and…

            So, here’s a basic step by step of how I go from bare idea to something I’m willing to hand to an editor.  And when I say editor, I mean “someone who will pay for these words I’ve written.”  That being said, this is also a good time to bring up the ever-popular golden rule.

            I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that we all have our own way of writing.  Working through drafts in this way helps me a lot, but it’s not a guarantee of success for anyone except me.  You might need to modify these steps a bit, or maybe a lot.  But I think this is a good baseline method.

            To begin…

            While I’m working on a book, I usually scribble down notes and thoughts about the nextbook.  Characters, dialogue, action moments, reveals… all sorts of different elements.  I’ll shuffle these around into more or less the order I think they’ll end up.  These notes serves as a very, very rough outline, just enough so I can start writing on page one and go when it’s time to start…

            The First Draft—In my mind, this is the “just finish it” stage.  I just want to finish this draft with a beginning, an end, and the majority of points in between.  I don’t worry about catching typos or crafting every subtle moment in the plot. 

            Consider this… diamonds don’t come out of the earth as clear, faceted gems.  They come out as ugly blobs that need lots of cuts and polishing.  So if I dig up a ten-gram diamond, I can’t expect it to make a ten gram gemstone.  If I’m lucky, I might get three or four grams out of it.  It’ll shrink as I work on it, because that’s how I improve it (see below).  So if I’ve got a ten-gram diamond and I’m insisting on a 9.9 gram gem… well, that’s going to make a pretty crappy engagement ring, yes?

            At this early stage, I don’t hold anything back.  I let dialogue, descriptions, and action scenes run on a bit longer than they probably should.  I know I’ll be cutting eventually, so there’s no reason to worry about length now.  For this stage, it really is quantity over quality. 

            If I get stuck on something (an awkward conversation or complex action scene), I’ll just skip it.  Things might not be perfect right now, but I know I’ll be able to go into the exact details of that conversation or this sequence later, so I’d rather keep moving forward and leave that stuff for Future Peter to deal with.  Again, for me, the most important thing is to get the overall frameworkdone.  It’s a lot easier to think about the little things when the big things aren’t looming over you.

            Depending on the book, this process takes me anywhere from two to three months. I had one book take about six weeks, but that was pretty rare for me.

            I don’t show this draft to anyone.  I may take a night off, work on something else for a day, and then it’s right back for…

            The Second Draft— Remember all those problems I left for Future Peter to deal with?  Those need to be dealt with now.  Gaps get filled in.  Characters get fleshed out a little more, and sometimes renamed.  All those awkward knots get worked out.   Because I can see a lot of these elements in relation to the whole story now , I’ll usually find the answers to these problems are more apparent. 

            The goal with this draft is to have a readable manuscript.  No more little notes to myself  or trailing paragraphs that need to get connected somehow.  Someone should be able to pick this up and read it start to finish without thinking they lost a few pages or only got my notes on a chapter.

            Keep in mind this doesn’t mean I do show it to people.  It just means I should be able to.  Really, the only person who might see this is my lady-love, and not even her always.  Usually she has to wait.

            For some folks, this stage would really be the first draft.  Those people have nice pages of their own somewhere out there on the web.  This isn’t one of them.  Plus, breaking it up like this takes a lot of pressure off, which I think is a good thing when you’re trying to treat writing like a real job.  No one likes a high-pressure job.

            Okay then, so… now I step away for a couple of days.  Maybe as much as a week.  I’ll watch movies, work out a little, or maybe even scribble up a few ranty blog posts in advance.  The goal is to push the manuscript as far out of my mind as possible.  Don’t look at it, try not to think too much about it. 

            I’m just into this now with The Albuquerque Door, for those who care about such things.

            The Third Draft—Time to make like a slasher and cut, cut, cut.  Two great rules-of-thumb I’ve mentioned a few times—

            Yeah, the second rule goes off the previously mentioned assumption that my first clean, readable draft is my first draft.

            I spend this draft tracking down adverbs, adjectives, pointless dialogue descriptors, and so on.  If they can be cut, they get cut.  One thing I also go after here is common padding phrases that don’t really do anything (sort of, somewhat, kind of, more or less).  One of my regular readers dubbed this somewhat syndrome, and I still call it that.  I like to tell myself I’ve gotten much better about it now that I’m aware of the problem. 

            Sometimes I also like to tell myself that I haven’t gained that much weight since college…

            At this point I’ve gone through the whole manuscript at least twice, so a few larger cuts should be apparent, too.  Overcomplicated descriptions that slow down the narrative.  Awkward sentence structures.  Extensive character moments that really add nothing to the character, the story, or the plot.  Many of these things get tightened or cut altogether.

            I spend a week or two doing this.  This is usually when I let my lovely lady have a look.  She’s my first set of eyes and lets me know I screwed up and I’m too close to see it.

            The Fourth Draft–This is the first big polish.  I go through sentence by sentence, looking for words that come up too often or stilted dialogue.  I also make sure all the cuts and swaps from the last draft haven’t messed anything up.  Are the logic chains still complete?  Did I forget to change Pash’s name to Veek anywhere?  Does Arthur still have time to get that pistol?  Are there any odd character tics that I forgot to remove or add?  Does the whole thing have a good flow to it? 

            This draft doesn’t take long.  Just a day or two.  It’s just one slow, careful read of the story.

            Once I’ve got a solid fourth draft, I send it off to folks to get fresh eyes.   I generally use four or five friends I’ve know for years.  All of them are all professional writers and editors who know how to give useful criticism.  Not to beat a dead horse, but by professional I mean they get paid to do this for a living.  They have actual credentials.

            Speaking of which, some folks might hire a professional editor at this point. Nothing wrong with that.  The important thing is to get an opinion I can trust to be honest, even if I have to pay for it.  A few folks might argue that this is the publisher’s job, but I need to get a publisher first, and why are they going to bother with my crap manuscript?

            Anyway, this draft goes off into the world and it may be two weeks to a month before I look at it again.  The challenge is to resist messing with it while those people are looking at it.  I try to spend the time relaxing a bit, scribbling down ideas for later books (see above), or flexing different mental muscles.

            More than once, I’ve cleaned my office.

            The Fifth Draft— Now I’ve gotten notes back from the folks I begged/ blackmailed/ paid to read this thing.  I go through the whole manuscript page by page with their comments.  If you’ve got multiple monitors, this is a great time to use them.

            Page one… what did everyone think?  What about page two?  How’s page three look?  As I’m doing this, I’ve also got my own copy of the fourth draft that I’m using as a “master document.”  This way I can see all the notes and make whatever changes are required. 

             I mentioned that I ask four or five people to make notes for me.  That gives me a broad sampling on each note/ issue that comes up.  If four people like something but one doesn’t, odds are I’ll call that good.  Nothing’s going to work for everyone.  If three don’t and two do (and of course I do, or I wouldn’t’ve written it), I’ll sit and give it a good look.  If nobody likes it, well… I’m smart enough to admit when I’ve screwed up and something doesn’t work.

            This draft can take another two weeks or more to finish with a full book manuscript.

            The Sixth Draft— This one’s another polishing draft, just like the fourth.   I need to make sure everything still works now that I’ve made those changes and tweaks from my reader’s comments.  So, yet another line by line reading, adjusting as I go.

            And at this point… this is when I’m done.  There’s only so much a given writer—in this case, me—can do with a given story.  There comes a point when further work accomplishes nothing and I’m just rewriting for the sake of rewriting. I’m sure we all know someone who’s just been working on the same manuscript for years and years because they’ve got another one or two drafts to put it through.  If my manuscript’s not ready for a publisher (or film producer) by now, it probably means I screwed up something big right at the start. 

            Maybe with my initial idea of rebooting the Laff-A-Lympics as a medical drama starring a gender-swapped, alcoholic Captain Caveman.

            Next time… well, if there’s anything next week it’ll be really quick.  I’ve got a flight on Thursday.  If you’re in Dallas next week, please swing by Texas Frightmare and say hi.  I’ll be in the Made in Texas room.

            Either way, go write.

            A few quick cuts.  A little off the top.

            Once again, I must make pathetic excuses for missing last week.  I wanted to post this Wednesday night before I left for Crypticon Seattle, but ended up bogged down in last minute preparations.  By the time I realized I never put this up, I was about two miles above San Francisco.

            Anyway, enough of my pathetic excuses.  Let’s talk about cuts.

            As writers, we all need to make cuts.  Our first drafts always have too much.  We put in every wild idea and detail and prolonged conversation.

            Before anyone says anything—no.  None of us write perfect first drafts.  Not one person reading this.  Not you.  Not me.  Definitely not that guy over there.  The only person who writes usable first drafts is Paul Haggis, and even he doesn’t think they’re perfect (Clint Eastwood does, though).  And Paul isn’t here, so we’re back to saying none of us.

            (Mr. Haggis—if you are here, thanks so much for the support.  You probably don’t remember, but I interviewed you twice for Creative Screenwriting and you were fantastic)

            All this means that in the second draft, third at the latest, we have to make cuts.  We want our books and screenplays and short stories to be lean and tight.  It’s a tough world out there, with a lot of tough publishers, and I can’t expect my story to get anywhere if it’s not at fighting weight.

            So, here’s a few quick, painless ways you can make some cuts and help your manuscript lose a thousand words or so…

            Adverbs—  As I said above, most of us get caught up in the flow of words, the impetus of a scene, and the thing that slides by most often is the all-but-useless adverb.  We try to pretend they’re important, but they can always be replaced.  When it comes down to it, adverbs are the Shemps of the writing world.

            Three out of five times if you’re using an adverb, you just don’t need it.  The fourth time odds are you’re using the wrong verb, and once you find the right one, again, you won’t need the adverb.  And that fifth time… well, maybe it’s only one in six.  If you’re using your vocabulary well, there aren’t many times you need an adverb.

            I was at a conference a few years back where writer/ Editor Pat LaBrutto tossed put a great rule of thumb.  One adverb per page, four adjectives per page.  It’s only a guideline, granted, but if you’re averaging five or six adverbs per paragraph… maybe you should give them all a second look.

            In my recent editorial pass of the fourth Ex book, I cut just over 200 adverbs from the manuscript.  That’s almost a full page of adverbs, gone.  Search your manuscript for LY and see how many you find.

            Adjectives—People use a lot of adjectives to make normal, average things sound interesting.  Coincidentally, these folks tend to have a poor vocabulary.  So when I don’t know multiple words for shirt (like Henley, tunic, tee, blouse, polo, Oxford), I’ll just use multiple adjectives. 

            Of course, we all go a little overboard now and then  (anyone who says they don’t is lying to you) because we’re convinced this person, this place, this thing needs extra description.  Yet we all know too much description brings things too a grinding halt.

            There’s an odd habit I’ve seen among fantasy writers—not only them, but enough to make it worth mentioning—to use dozens of adjectives per page, if not per sentence–often redundant ones like “gleaming chrome blade of pure silver.”  I’ve mentioned before that I used to help run an online fantasy game a few years back, and the other night I was talking with one of the staff members who’s still there.  And she and I hit on a wonderful turn of phrase that I think applies here.  Simply put, using more adjectives and adverbs doesn’t make me a better writer.  It just means I’ve got a weak vocabulary and I’m a very poor editor.

            That—People tend to drop that into their writing a lot, and a good four out of five times their writing would be tighter without it.  I used to be a that junkie until someone pointed out how unnecessary it often is.

She punched him in the same spot that he had been stabbed in.
He knew that the machine would not stop—ever—until she was dead.
Phoebe could see that the two of them were meant to be together.

            On that same Ex book, I cut over 130 that‘s—just over half a page.  Use the Find feature, search for uses of that in your writing, and see how many of them are necessary.  Odds are you’ll find that at least half of them aren’t.

           Useless Modifiers— I’ve also called this Somewhat Syndrome a few times.  This is another one I wrestle with a lot, although I like to tell myself I’ve gotten better about it.  It’s when I pepper my writing with somewhat.., sort of…, a bit…, kind of…, and other such modifiers. Nine times out of ten they’re not doing anything except adding to my word count (not in the good way) and slowing my story (also not in the good way).  Use the Find feature again and see how many of these are doing anything in your writing, and look how much tighter and stronger your story is without them.  I cut another 200 hundred of these in the aforementioned Ex book manuscript.

            Appeared to be…   –This is one of those phrases some folks latch onto and use all the time.  Problem is, most of them don’t understand it.  It tends to be used as an introduction of sorts, leading the reader into some purple-prose description.  This phrase sometimes disguises itself as seemed to be or looked like or some variation thereof.

            The thing is, appeared to be doesn’t get used alone.  It’s part of a literary construction where the second half of that structure is either an implied or actual contradiction.  So when I’m saying…

            …what I’m really saying is something along the lines of…

            …and what I wanted to say all along was just…

            If I’m not trying to establish a contradiction, using appeared to be and its bastard stepchildren isn’t just wasted words– it’s wrong.

            “As you know…” –I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that this is probably the clumsiest way to do exposition there is.  Really.  Ignore everything else I’ve said here, but please take this one bit of advice to heart.

            Just by saying “as you know,” I’m stating that the character I’m speaking to already knows the facts I’m about to share.  So why repeat them?  Why would I have two people engage in such a useless bit of dialogue?

            When I put in “as you know” or one of its half-breed cousins, it’s a poor attempt to put some exposition in my story with dialogue.  If I’m using it, I guarantee you there’s either (A) a better way to get the information to the reader or (B) no need for it because it’s already covered somewhere else.

            I might be able to get away with doing this once–just once–if I’ve got a solid manuscript.  I mean rock-solid.  And even then, it shouldn’t be in my opening pages.

            Anyway, there’s half a dozen quick, easy cuts.  Try them out and see if you can drop a few hundred words or more.

            Next time, I want to get back on schedule by quickly pointing out a possible problem.

            Until then, go write.

            Allow me to explain, then feel free to report me…

            When it comes to adjectives, one of the easiest bits of description to drop into writing is colors.  I can tell you I’m sitting here right now on a gray chair wearing a blue shirt and black shorts (there’s a major heat wave going on in Los Angeles right now) and my tan cat is trying to get my attention.

            Now when a lot of us hit that mid-phase in our growth-as-a-writer arc, we start using metaphors for everything.  My shirt isn’t blue, it’s sky-colored.  My shorts are the color of coal.  My cat, Charlie Baltimore, is linen-colored.  Some folks get comfortable at this point of the arc and they’re the ones who tend to use lots and lots of purple prose (color pun not intended, but it works so I’ll go with it).

            The catch, however, is when people develop the habit of describing everything as “colored.”  Even colors.  Which is wrong.

            I’ve seen some folks describe things as red colored, yellow colored, and blue colored.  That’s just silly.  And it’s excess words I could cut.

            Y’see, Timmy, colors are inherently “colored.”  If I tell you my shirt is blue, it’s understood that I mean “my shirt is the color blue.”  So I wouldn’t tell you “my shirt is the color blue colored.” 

            I should never use the word colored with colors.  I shouldn’t have blue-colored sky or green-colored grass.  They’re already colors—what else could they be?  Blue flavored sky?  Green textured grass?  Snip that word and have blue sky and green grass.

            I use coloredwhen I’m making descriptive comparisons.  A girl with strawberry-colored hair can wear a grass-colored dress, for example.  My zombies have chalk-colored eyes.  One draft of Ex-Patriotshad Stealth described as “shadow-colored.”

            Use the Find feature and search through your latest work for uses of the word colored.  Make sure it’s being used correctly.  Slash it if it isn’t.

            Next time I may be a bit cramped for time, so you’re either going to get a rant about time bombs or another screenwriter interview (if I’m really up against the wall).  But if I do, I’ll make sure it’s a fun one.  Or, at least, highly controversial. 

            Until then, go write.