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Writing and Editing

Avoiding the Stuffy Voice in Fiction

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One unfortunate trap that beginning writers tend to fall into is using formal language in a context that calls for more ordinary words. I’ve made up a rather extreme example of this sort of slip-up in diction to illustrate what it looks like at its worst:

“What’ll you have?” Betsy asked. She wiped the cheap arborite table clean and glared at Mavis, who had been taking way too much time making up her mind. Why couldn’t the old bat hurry up?

“I’m not sure.” With watery blue eyes, Mavis looked up at Betsy. “Got any ideas?” She combed her thin, ratty hair into place with her fingers.

“Coffee and a blueberry danish? Ain’t that your usual?” Betsy hoped that she’d just quit her stalling and agree to it already.

Mavis perused the luncheon menu. “On the contrary, I much prefer tea. Might you endeavour to expedite my request?” she inquired politely.

The last paragraph will have readers wondering if Mavis has forgotten she’s in an ordinary diner and has suddenly developed a delusion that she’s a character in Downton Abbey and is meeting with the Crawley family in their parlour to have afternoon tea. This unwelcome intrusion of the stuffy voice into a story that is otherwise written in very plain, everyday English is jarring to say the least. Try reading the scene aloud. Did you hear the clunking noises as the words of the last paragraph hit your ears?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with fancy words; no doubt the English language would be impoverished without them. But it’s vital that writers understand when it’s appropriate to use them, and when using them is overreaching. Sometimes it’s an ego issue–writers like to impress with their extensive vocabularies and often think that the bigger the word, the better. But inflating the language when it’s clearly inappropriate to do so is always an error in judgment, and readers will always think more highly of  writers who use a level of diction that suits their context. Throwing highfalutin words around where they don’t belong doesn’t make writers look smarter–in fact, quite the reverse is true. Writers need to toss the thesaurus aside and write with an ear to what sounds natural in the particular fictional world they’re trying to create.

With that in mind, I’m revising that last paragraph in the vignette about Betsy and Mavis:

Mavis looked at the menu. “Actually, I’d like some tea. Could you hurry, please?” she asked.

I hope you agree that this does the job, and in a way that suits the sort of ordinary people Mavis and Betsy are and the unpretentious world they occupy.

 

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General Musing

Gifts My Father Gave Me

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As some readers of this blog will already know, I lost my father, Lawrence “Larry” Kaiser, on February 2nd, just a little over a month ago now. He was 87 and ailing, so his death was not unexpected, but it’s true that nothing can ever truly prepare you for the loss of a parent. Of course, Dad lives on through my memories of him, and as a number of people have pointed out to me, he also lives on through whatever unique qualities he passed along to me, his youngest child.

Lawrence Reide Kaiser
Undated photo of my dad, Larry, looking very dapper, probably around 1950

When I was a child I felt closer to my mother, Shirlee. She was a stay-at-home mom, so we spent more time together than I did with my father, who was busy simply trying to earn a living and support a wife and four children. But as I was growing up, I was often told I was more like my father’s side of the family. Dad was soft-spoken, easygoing, slow to get angry, and unlikely to hold grudges, all qualities that I inherited. He could also be quietly and stubbornly persevering in the pursuit of what he wanted, which is something I’ve also been quite rightly accused of (as character traits go, it’s not a bad one to have). As a young person, he loved to draw, which was an interest I shared with him (though in time we both grew out of this). He was a navigator during WWII on a Lancaster bomber, and I treasure the pencil sketches he did–character studies, really–of his flying crew during this period, as well as some later sketches he did of my mother.

Of course, we also differed in some crucial ways. Unlike me, Dad had a engineer’s mind and had been crazy about airplanes since childhood. He almost certainly would have become an aeronautical engineer if the war hadn’t intervened; when he came back from overseas, he had a young wife and soon a growing family to support, so he carved out a career in industrial sales, which seemed to suit him just fine, making use as it did of his technical knowledge and his relaxed, easy manner with people.

The Kaiser family: parents Larry and Shirlee and their four children.
My parents, Larry and Shirlee, with their brood of four in 1965. I’m the wee one in the white parka.

Neither of my parents had much formal education, but both were avid readers who educated themselves on the numerous subjects that interested them. Later in his life, Dad became quite a chatterbox about many topics, and that was when I started to feel I really knew him at last. He would have laughed if I’d ever called him literary, for he had no serious literary aspirations. He did write many letters in his distinctively graceful, artistic script, and he tried his hand at whimsical light verse about family members. He was a very modest man and always called these efforts “doggerel.” No, he was not particularly literary, but he was certainly literate: he had an eloquent and precise way of expressing himself in both speech and writing, and I never knew him to make spelling and grammatical errors. Given his example, it’s probably no great surprise that I’m an editor.

As for where his way with words came from, I have reason to believe that it came from his mother, my grandmother Florence, who I’m told I greatly resemble in both looks and mannerisms. Florence, a native New Yorker, had been a legal secretary, but I learned from a cousin recently that she had literary ambitions and was writing under a nom de plume. What she was writing remains a mystery. My aunt tells me that Florence was delighted by the theatre and could quote extensively from the works she loved, so perhaps she was writing a play. Whether she ever finished what she was working on or pursued publication is also up in the air. My guess is that as a wife and the mother of three young children, she simply put her writing aside, perhaps hoping to get back to it one day. I’ll probably never know. I’m just glad that she and my father were the sort of people they were, and that they passed down something of their wonderful gifts to me.

My father Lawrence Kaiser with his parents, Jesse and Florence
Dad in 1925 with his father, Jesse, and his mother, Florence.
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Interviews

Warrior Girl by Matt Lazar and Amanda Thomas

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Authors Matt Lazar and Amanda Thomas released their young adult novel, Warrior Girl, last October. I chatted briefly with the authors to uncover the story behind their intriguing and unusual tale of a young woman’s coming of age under difficult circumstances.

CK: Warrior Girl is about a young Korean woman, Sun Hi, who attends Oxford and faces not only culture shock, but also a number of obstacles to her success and happiness, including a fiercely competitive academic rival and a hostile flatmate. She finds refuge in an online game called World of Warcraft (WOW). Is there something in your experience that inspired you to write the book? What gave birth to Sun Hi’s story?

ML: When I was in college (Dartmouth), I had a Korean roommate who was really into World of Warcraft. He introduced me to the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) genre. I learned that WOW wasn’t really a game in that it was absorbing enough that it could become as real to someone as their “real life.”

Part of what makes Sun Hi unique is that she’s the only protagonist I can think of who plays WOW–it was important to me to write a story that shows how playing a game like WOW impacts a person’s real life.

CK: I was a little surprised by the book’s title, as Sun Hi is actually rather timid and sensitive throughout much of the book, not bold and aggressive. What is it about her that makes her a warrior in your eyes?

AT: Yes, I think that despite her timid nature she shows great strength in overcoming the problems that she has. When everything is against her she keeps going and of course she is a formidable warrior on WOW. She is a multi-layered and resilient person who looks fragile on the outside and has a steely determination inside.

CK: Playing WOW is much more than passing time for the characters—I was really struck by how the game impacts Sun Hi’s vision of herself. It seemed to be an important factor in her growing self-confidence. There’s a lot of criticism of such games in the media—a lot of discussion about how they can trigger violence. Your book seems to suggest otherwise. Do you believe that these games can have a positive impact on young people?

AT: I think they can and I would hasten to say that our portrayal of the game and those who play it is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of such games. They exist and people play them. Our interest was in exploring how this kind of gaming can affect the confidence of a person, in this case Sun Hi, who is otherwise virtually friendless and lacking in any other resource.

CK: Obviously, not everyone has the experience of attending university in a culture that is foreign to them. Yet some experiences the book depicts would seem to be universal. What aspects of your novel do you think young readers will identify with?

AT: I suppose that even if a student goes to university in their own country it can be a daunting time at first, and for the shy or those lacking in confidence a difficult time. I suppose it would be good if young people saw Sun Hi’s struggle and thought that they, with less of a mountain to climb, had the possibility to shine.

ML: Warrior Girl is really a love story with twists and bumps–none of the characters escape unscathed. I think young readers will identify with this.

CK: What sorts of messages do you hope readers will take away from your book?

AT: I suppose that perseverance and goodness will always triumph over evil.

ML: I hope readers come away with a feeling that getting to know someone from a different background can be fun and exciting. We wanted Warrior Girl to be a fun read that’s accessible to all kinds of people. Many of Warrior Girl’s fans have never played WOW.

CK: Studious Sun Hi finds herself in the unlikely position of being the cox for the Oxford rowing team. Your descriptions of rowing culture seemed very realistic to me, as if it were very familiar to you, and I have to ask if you have related personal experience or it’s just a case of excellent research.

AT: The research was exhaustive although it was research that was a pleasure to do!

CK: Tell me about your history as writers and what has influenced you. Is Warrior Girl your first book?

AT: No, I have ghostwritten many books for clients on subjects as diverse as kidnapping to a romantic novel set around Islamic finance! I love to write and in particular enjoy an element of intrigue.

ML: Warrior Girl is my first novel. My first book was my master’s thesis, An Oral History of the Cleveland Browns.

CK: Now that the book is finished, do you have other books in the works? Are they in the same vein as Warrior Girl? Can you tell me anything about them?

ML: I am developing a sequel to Warrior Girl.

AT: I am continuing with my ghostwriting work and looking forward to the day that I have the time to write something else for myself! I am working on a series of books on heavy horses for a client at the moment as well as an account of a British woman who opened a chain of massage parlours in Australia.

To read reviews of Warrior Girl or to purchase the book, click here.

 

 

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Writing and Editing

Point of View (POV) in Fiction: First Person

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Writing in first-person POV is something many fiction writers instinctively gravitate to. It seems easy and natural to adopt this POV in writing, probably because we’re so accustomed to telling stories about ourselves in conversation, and of course we always tell them in the first person. Certainly, I’ve always favoured this perspective in my own work, and I now find myself shuffling between two alternating first-person narrators in my book, Virginia’s Ghost.

The chief advantage of first-person POV is the wonderful sense of intimacy it creates, the sense of being right inside the narrator’s head, privy to all of his or her thoughts, perceptions, and emotions. You can create an intense bond between narrator and audience when you’re writing from the first-person POV, and that intimacy is one of the chief reasons for selecting it. Of all the different POVs, it is probably the one that most easily allows readers to become emotionally invested in your story.

Remember, though, that your narrator should be someone whose head readers would actually want to be inside for the duration of an entire short story or novel. If your narrator is weird, obnoxious, or arrogant, you can be sure that few readers will be interested in your book. Draw up a detailed profile of your first-person narrator to ensure that you’ve created someone worth spending all that time with. Think about what qualities will make your narrator worth listening to. Does she have a particular attitude that makes her fascinating? Immerse yourself in the character and remember that when you’re writing in the first person, you’re writing using your character’s voice, not your own. You’re filtering your entire story through your narrator’s perceptions, so this character’s take on things had better be interesting.

Remember too that using first-person POV limits you to writing about only what the narrator knows and has experienced, so in this way, it can limit where your plot goes. Though I suppose you could have another character telling your narrator what just happened in the other room, this is far from ideal. You cheat readers by offering a second-hand account when they really wanted to be right there, front and centre, seeing the action through your narrator’s eyes. It almost goes without saying that your first-person narrator needs to be someone who is constantly at the heart of the action–in most cases, your protagonist.

Another important thing to be conscious of when using first-person POV is that your narrator is in the position of knowing the whole story right from the start. What this gives you as a writer is the flexibility to discuss, with the benefit of hindsight, what the narrator wouldn’t have perceived earlier in the narrative but now understands. To what extent you want to exploit this is up to you. My view is that when you write from a position of hindsight, you sometimes reveal too much about what’s to come and you also distance readers from events. By contrast, writing in real time, as events are actually unfolding, creates a sense of immediacy that plunges readers into your narrative.

Although writing in first-person POV doesn’t appear all that difficult, many writers nonetheless make errors when writing from this perspective. By this I mean that they make “illegal” shifts into another character’s POV. If your narrator suddenly starts telling us what another character is thinking, that’s a POV error, as there’s no way he could possibly know. As well, if the narrator starts describing a scene he hasn’t witnessed, that’s also an error. Writers also frequently make the mistake of describing the first-person narrator’s appearance as if they were looking down on him from above, which is yet another breach of the POV rules.

It may take some practice, but If you can create a compelling first-person narrator and stay consistently inside that character’s head, then you are well on your way to mastering first-person POV.

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Interviews

New Book Release: Liberation by Robert Jennings

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Liberation Cover Art

I’m delighted to announce that just in time for the end of the world, author Robert Jennings has released his post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, Liberation. I caught up with the amiable and talented Mr. Jennings to ask him all about his novel and the writing life. I hope you have as much fun reading this as I did interviewing him.

CK: As we all know, the world’s coming to an end on December 21st, so we may as well not bother to buy Christmas presents. In view of this, your science fiction novel, Liberation, is very timely–an apocalypse occurs on 12/21/12 in which the world is overrun by green-skinned creatures called orcs, and only small groups of people manage to survive. Apart from the impending end of the world, can you tell me what else inspired you to write this particular story?

RJ: I first heard about the Mayan end-of-the-world “prediction” shortly after Y2K disappointed us. I think that was what first got me thinking about the story, and the reason for the date of the invasion in the book. I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic stories. It’s fascinating to see how different storytellers portray the aftermath. Plus, I’ve always been a small-town boy. I like the atmosphere and the camaraderie, and I really wanted to portray that as much as I could. And I played a ridiculous amount of Dungeons & Dragons in my youth. I always liked the orcs.

CK: One thing I really love about Liberation is the protagonist. I found it refreshing that John Potter is an Everyman with whom we can all identify, not a superhero. In battling the orcs, he demonstrates courage and devotion to his people, as well as a sense of humour. Are there particular people in your life—or characters in literature—who inspired your protagonist?

RJ: That’s very kind of you to say. What I was looking for out of John was exactly that Everyman feel. I like to imagine that the choices John makes in the book are what most of us would choose, given the circumstances. Of course, after getting feedback from readers in the early stages, I realized that I put a lot more of myself into John than I had intended. People kept telling me, “That’s a ridiculous decision. Nobody would ever do that!” As for his inspirations, I drew a lot from Richard Cypher in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. I loved the down-to-earth feel of the character, even after he learns that he is, for all intents and purposes, a superhero.

CK: The book’s about an invasion that very nearly wipes out the human race, but it’s about much more. What do you see as some of the core ideas of the book?

RJ: The main one, I think, is family–and the lengths to which we would go to make sure they’re safe. In that regard, I really identified with John. I can’t imagine anything that I wouldn’t do for my kids. That’s one of the things that made the book really fun to write.

CK: The citizens of New Lamar, which the book centres on, have adapted to their devastated world by developing skills, such as blacksmithing, that are largely obsolete in Western society. They are also a remarkably cohesive group of people. How do you think present-day humans would cope in such a post-apocalyptic society? Would we do as well as the people of New Lamar?

RJ: That is a question that I’ve given way more thought to than is probably healthy. In fact, I may have started calling myself a writer in order to justify the inordinate amount of time I spend thinking up end-of-the-world scenarios. I think, of course, that it would go pretty badly for a good while, but eventually the people who survived would pick up and rebuild. I think that’s part of human nature. We’re always looking to make things better for ourselves and those around us. That, or we’ll all end up killing each other over canned beans.

CK: What would you like readers of your book to take away from it?

RJ: Honestly, just entertainment. When I sat down to write the book, I didn’t have any lofty goal in mind, aside from “Let’s see how this plays out.” If someone finds a message there that resonates with them, awesome, but it wasn’t intentional. If the book entertains you for a couple of days (or hours, if you’re my daughter), then I’ve accomplished everything I’ve set out to do.

CK: You work with another writer, Thomas Clark. Most people think of writing as quite a solitary pursuit. What’s it like to collaborate with Thomas, and what are the two of you working on right now?

RJ: It’s interesting, to say the least. Tommy has been my best friend since before he could even read, so working with him is great. He’s an incredible storyteller, and he has a shrewd eye for plot holes. I think that putting the words themselves to paper is something that is best done alone, but I couldn’t imagine having put this book together without Tommy’s help. Incidentally, he did the cover, which I think is fantastic.

Right now, we’re working on his first book. The working title is Rogue’s Phoenix, and it’s the beginning of an epic fantasy series in a world of his creation. The world is populated by people who fall through rifts from other worlds and are forced to try to make the best of it. It’s been incredibly fun to collaborate on, and it should be ready for release first quarter of next year.

CK: Can you tell me a little about your history as a writer? How did you get started? What keeps you going?

Well, here comes the clichéd “I’ve been a writer since all the way forever ago.” Which is true, to an extent. I’ve always loved writing, but I had never really considered it as a career choice. I liked robots and spaceships too much. The story for Liberation has been bouncing around in my head for about ten years. I even tried getting it down on paper once, but it was horrible. So, I shelved it until about five years ago, when I was deployed to Baghdad with the US Air Force. It was also about this time that I started working with Tommy on Rogue’s Phoenix. I had a little free time on my hands, and the story poured out in about two months. Then came the incredibly fun process of submitting the manuscript to agents and publishers, only to get rejected time and time again. So, again I shelved it. I was glad that it was written, but didn’t really have any plans to do anything with it, since it obviously wasn’t good enough to publish. Earlier this year, I got laid off from my job and my wife was like, “Why don’t I go to work while you focus on your writing.” That was when it first really clicked for me that I might be able to actually be an author. And that’s also what keeps me going. If my wife believed in me enough to risk financial ruin, I must have something going for me.

CK: Do you have any advice for beginning writers?

RJ: Don’t give up. If you aren’t accepted by an agent or a publisher, don’t be discouraged. Publishing is changing, and you don’t need them anymore. You can do it all yourself if you feel inclined. Except editing. For that, you need Caroline. A caveat, though, is that you’d better have a strong manuscript. Editors can help, but it’s ultimately up to you to write a good story.

CK: Now that Liberation is finished, what’s next for you?

RJ: That’s a good question, only because there are so many things on my plate that it’s hard to keep them separated. Priority zero is Rogue’s Phoenix. We’ve got to get that one ready for publication before the end of March. I would like to have the sequel to Liberation done (yes, there’s a sequel–isn’t there always?) by the end of June, and the book that I wrote last month for NaNoWriMo is tentatively scheduled for September, but it’ll be a side project while we’re working on the second Rogue’s Phoenix book. And then I’m going to Disneyland.

Liberation is now available as an e-book on Amazon.

 

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Writing and Editing

Redundancies and Pleonasms

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Today’s blog post is by freelance editor Arlene Prunkl of PenUltimate Editorial Services. Until I read Arlene’s post, I’d never heard of the word pleonasm before, which sounds like some sort of substance you’d look at under a microscope. And who knew that there was even a word for all those little redundancies I’ve always gotten such a kick out of? I hope you enjoy Arlene’s wonderfully succinct and informative post.

Redundancy is just one of the many problems that fall under the general category of wordiness. A redundant phrase or expression is called a pleonasm. You may think you know when a redundancy occurs, but some of them can be subtle.

How often have you heard a friend say something like this: “An unexpected surprise came when a pair of baby twins was born at 12 midnight”? What is a surprise if not unexpected? What are twins if not a pair? Who can be born but a baby? When is midnight if not at 12? Your friend could just as well have said, “A surprise came when twins were born at midnight” with far less repetition.

Or what if you heard someone say, “The armed gunman gave an advance warning that he would make death threats on their lives”? Can you find the pleonasms in that sentence? The expressions we use are full of unwitting redundancy.

I’ve prepared a good long list of pleonasms; some of them are rather funny. Can you see what’s wrong with these? Can you think of any others? Once you start paying attention to each of your words, I’m sure you’ll begin to detect occasional redundancies. In fact, email me with your pet peeve redundancies and pleonasms, and I’ll add them to this list!

– Dry desert
– Free gift
– End result
– Over and over again
– Whether or not
– Former business failed/former ex-husband
– Personal friends/personal opinion/my personal anything
– Standard orthodoxy
– Genuine original
– Ancient fossil
– Basic necessities/basic fundamentals
– Major milestone
– Linger behind
– Rugged mountain range
– Quickly mushroomed
– Interconnect/intermix/interlink
– Future ahead looks bright
– Main thrust
– Small cubbyhole
– Familiar fixture
– Single most/single biggest
– Point in time/period of time
– Death threats on his life
– Close proximity
– Actual experience/past experience
– Advance planning/advance warning/advance reservations
– All meet together/join together
– Armed gunman
– 12 midnight/12 noon
– Autobiography of one’s life
– Awkward predicament
– Cease and desist
– Each and every
– First and foremost
– Cheap price/expensive price
– Commute back and forth
– Consensus of opinion
– Difficult dilemma
– Estimated roughly/guesstimated
– Filled to capacity
– Frozen ice
– General public
– Green in color
– Natural instinct
– Null and void
– Pre-recorded
– The reason is because
– Regular routine
– Suddenly exploded
– Surrounded on all sides
– Broke both his legs
– The winter months
– Postponed until later
– Mutual cooperation
– In order to…

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Virginia's Ghost, Writing and Editing

Reflecting on the Kindness of Strangers

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Unlike poor Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, I’ve never depended on the kindness of strangers. I’ve always thought that doing so was most unwise, as strangers can’t reliably be depended upon. However, when people I don’t know emerge from nowhere to be unexpectedly kind or complimentary, it usually gives me such a boost that I feel as if I’m walking on air. I’m not the sort of person who craves attention, but I love compliments as much as the next person. You can imagine how I felt a few days ago when I received a whopping big compliment on one of the pages of this website; it was the first ever compliment on my site from a complete stranger.

I’m only just learning the ropes of SEO, so I don’t suppose a lot of strangers have managed to stumble across my website yet. And even if they have, I wouldn’t expect them to comment. The only people who comment either know me in person or they’re editing clients I’ve worked with before and we at least know each other via emailing or social media. The stranger’s comment was short and sweet, but as far as I was concerned, it was a doozy: the lady said that my writing had given her goosebumps. She’d been reading an excerpt I released on this website from my novel-in-progress, Virginia’s Ghost, in which my heroine encounters an unexpected presence in the basement of the auction house where she works. The whole purpose of that scene was to give readers goosebumps, and just knowing that at least one person was affected that way really lifted my spirits, especially since I’d been feeling stuck in an uncomfortable state of limbo between my second and third drafts for days. Her words of encouragement got me started on my third draft. Who knew that just a few well-chosen words could have such a big impact?

Many writers I know, including me, work in a critical vacuum throughout much of the writing process. In the absence of positive feedback, it’s all too easy for your self-confidence as a writer to dwindle. It’s vital to receive some sort of psychic pay in the form of praise from time to time. And praise from strangers is really the best sort to receive, as it’s motivated only by the quality of the work itself. Strangers don’t feel the need to be nice to you the way your friends and family often do; they don’t tend to treat your ego as if it were a fragile piece of glass.

And knowing that your writing is having the desired effect–that it’s genuinely reaching into people’s hearts and affecting them in exactly the way that you wish to affect them–is a wonderful feeling. It just doesn’t get much better than that. Yes, I write to satisfy my creative impulses and my need to express myself, but I also write to engage readers in the story I wish to tell and to move people emotionally. My audience is vital to me, and that they are moved by my words means I’m effectively doing my job as a writer. And it also means that I have very powerful motivation indeed to continue.

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General Musing, Writing and Editing

Overcoming Tendinitis for Writers and Editors

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Occupational hazards would seem to be few and far between for writers, editors, and others who spend long, solitary hours tapping away at a keyboard. Some would say that we have it easy; as an editor, I’m not exactly out there risking my neck by fighting crime (unless you consider grammatical errors to be criminal acts). Loneliness–the deep kind that is best alleviated by face-to-face interaction, not chatting on social media–is a risk and certainly affects our emotional well-being. Another obvious threat is gaining weight. The unfortunate truth is that the refrigerator cannot be locked and is always much too close at hand. And we sit entirely too much, so we don’t burn off as many calories as we should. Apart from that, are there really that many occupational hazards that can befall us?

Starting back in July, I experienced tendinitis for the first time in my life. The inflamed tendon was near my elbow, but the pain also radiated into my wrist. The inflammation was so severe that for a number of weeks, I couldn’t twist a lid off a jar or turn a key in a lock without experiencing excruciating pain. Everyday activities that I’d taken for granted became hellishly difficult, and that included working at the computer.

I started to assess my behaviour at the keyboard, and I noticed a few things. First, I was using the mouse much more than I needed to, so instead of using it to move up and down through a document (a bad habit I’d somehow got into), I switched to the arrow keys. As well, I was moving away from the keyboard inadvertently; my chair is on casters, and because of a slight incline in the hardwood floor, I was rolling away and straining to reach both the keyboard and the mouse. I slipped a carpet under my chair, and I’m now sitting more snugly up against the keyboard. I always check that my hands are centred precisely over the keyboard before I begin typing, rather than at an awkward angle to it.

All this was helping, but the inflammation was still so severe that I needed medical help. So I visited my acupuncturist-chiropractor, Dr. Z. Worried that tendinitis might put an end to my editing activities, at least temporarily, I asked him what the chances were of recovering from my affliction. He said that for some people, especially those who don’t actively try to do anything about it, tendinitis becomes a chronic condition. I knew I wasn’t going to be one of those people; I was definitely willing to put in the work to overcome it. What choice did I have?

Because my tendinitis was a repetitive strain injury, Dr. Z. advised me to take as much time away from the keyboard as I possibly could and simply rest the tendon. Otherwise, the inflammation would never come down. I would also need to ice it three times a day for a few minutes at a time. As well, I applied Traumeel homeopathic cream a couple of times a day. Dr. Z. taught me stretching exercises that I could do daily, and I went to his office once a week for acupuncture treatments. After he removed the needles, he also did some deep muscle massage on my arm. I started taking a supplement called SierraSil Joint Formula 14. Before long, I turned the corner and the severe inflammation died away. Dr. Z. told me I could start strengthening exercises, as keeping the muscles strong would prevent a recurrence of the tendinitis.

Cumulatively, all these measures worked; it wasn’t any one thing that solved the problem. Now I can work away at the keyboard for hours pain-free, and I’ve even been able to go back to knitting (although Dr. Z. cautions against doing it daily, as I used to). I still try to take entire days away from the keyboard, if I can tear myself away from both work and the allure of the online world. If you have severe tendinitis, it’s all too easy to give in to despair; but given enough time, effort, and patience, you too can overcome it.

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Writing and Editing

Are Grammar-checking Websites Worth the Bother?

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A client mentioned recently that she has a thirty-dollar monthly subscription to a certain popular website that promises to check your spelling, grammar, punctuation, style, and word choice for you. I should say at the outset that I’m biased and tend to turn up my nose at sites like these; I don’t imagine that they have a hope of ever replacing me or my editor colleagues, so I don’t lose any sleep over the fact of their existence. Feeling a little mischievous, I thought it would be entertaining to run an experiment to see exactly how accurate my client’s grammar-checking site really is. I signed up for the free seven-day trial and wracked my brains to come up with some excruciatingly bad text. This is what I submitted to the grammar checker for assessment:

The lion tapped his crown and screamed quietly, now that Im kind of the forest, I’m kinda loosing my mine.

Your majesty, with all due respect, their is no kneed to carry on in this fashion, felicia robinson his advisor said patiently. Its not appropriate. Yew have had plenty of time to get used to our knew roll, four you have been king of the forest for quiet some time. The time for complaining has past, you must except your responsibilities more better than you have bin doing

Bee that as it may the lion inserted boldly, but I am not pre-pared. And when am I two have time to eat steak, eggs, and peanut-butter.

My text had a grand total of thirty errors, and the grammar checker found just ten of them. Yes, it knew that losing  and prepared were spelled wrong, and it realized that certain homophones were the wrong ones, like their and yew. And it picked up a comma splice and the improper comparative more better.

But on the whole, it performed dismally. Yes, it did find a number of the misused homophones, but it missed others such as past, bee, and four. So much for the “contextual spelling check.” And although it claims to be concerned with word choice, it completely missed screamed quietly in the first line, and it seemed to think that inserted was fine when asserted was what I meant. Its grasp of punctuation was abysmal, as it didn’t seem to know that my passage included dialogue and therefore needed quotation marks. Nor did it realize that the last sentence was a question and required a question mark at the end, or that Im needed an apostrophe. And sadly, it missed that peanut butter isn’t hyphenated.

Possibly worse than the things it missed was the wrong advice it gave me. It told me that in be (okay, I did write bee) that as it may the may should be maybe, dismissed my use of the pronoun you as improper in academic writing (not that the nonsense I fed it could be deemed in any way academic), and dissed my use of and at the beginning of a sentence. It called its not appropriate a sentence fragment, failing to recognize that all that was needed to make it a proper sentence was an apostrophe in the first word. It didn’t recognize that felicia robinson was a proper name that simply required capitals; instead it told me that the words were actually misspelled. I was taken to task for using kind of (which was actually a typo–from the context it should have been apparent that I meant king of), yet it somehow missed kinda in the same sentence.

Okay, I admit that the test I gave it was tricky; I threw everything I could think of at it with the intention of messing with its so-called mind. Perhaps I was unnecessarily cruel to the poor thing. But all the types of errors I threw at it are certainly common enough in manuscripts; they’re just usually not present in such mind-twisting quantities.

Should you as a writer rely on grammar-checking websites? Absolutely not. Though they may offer interesting tidbits of information about grammatical rules in their analyses, they can’t even begin to grasp subtle or even not-so-subtle contextual issues, so they will miss a good portion of the errors–two-thirds, if you go by my results–and can misinterpret that which is actually correct. If you are really concerned about accuracy, you need the judgment of an actual human being, and there is simply no substitute for a good editor.

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Virginia's Ghost, Writing and Editing

Not Just Anywhere: Writing about Specific Places in Fiction

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A few days ago, I finished the second draft of my novel, Virginia’s Ghost. I printed the whole thing out and have since started reading it again, scribbling notes in the margins about things I want to correct in the third draft. But more than correcting errors, I need to add much more detail. One storyline in the novel is set in 1928 Toronto, but when I was reading through the book, I was struck by how blandly generic my setting seemed. I could have been writing about almost any North American city in the twenties. Rather than writing about made-up places based vaguely on my impressions from Hollywood movies, I need to write about real places that existed in Toronto back then. And I need to learn a lot about these places, either by visiting them (if they still exist) or reading about them.

What better place to start than right in my own neighbourhood? A pivotal scene between my well-to-do young flapper Constance and her caddish boyfriend Freddy takes place in a park–but not just any old park. I’m rewriting the scene to take place in Craigleigh Gardens, just off South Drive in the South Rosedale area of Toronto. The present-day park was the original site of Craigleigh, a 25-room Victorian mansion that belonged to wealthy businessman Edmund Boyd Osler. He lived there from 1877 until his death in 1924, after which the house was torn down and the 13 acres of land it stood on were presented to the city as a public park. Below are the stately stone and wrought-iron gates to Craigleigh that were erected in 1903. If you look closely, you may be able to make out 1903 in gold on each gate between the two main pillars.

And here’s the plaque that commemorates the Osler family’s extraordinary gift to Torontonians:

I’m fortunate enough to be able to treat myself to a walk in this lovely park almost every day. It’s airy and spacious, and it’s a wonderful place for my dog Trinka to romp and stomp and enjoy some precious off-leash time.

And as I walk through the park, which would have been quite new back in Constance and Freddy’s day, I now imagine the two lovers playing out one of the most emotionally wrenching scenes of their young lives before a cluster of colourful onlookers, all of whom have definite opinions about what’s taking place. Just knowing more about Craigleigh Gardens and experiencing the beauty of this place every day helps bring the scene between Constance and Freddy to life in my mind. I only hope that my experience will translate into writing that vividly brings it to life for my readers.

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