...With a twist!

Poll #1186008 best first line
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

If you could choose one of these books to read right now, judging only by what you've been given, which one would it be?

Goddammit, Cory Doctorow, I need to go to bed, and I'm only on page 32!

ETA: Okay, seriously. I have to work tomorrow!

...

ETA: I should have gone to bed. Instead, I finished one of the best books I have ever read.

I just read the prologue and first two chapters of a fantasy novel on OWW which I found totally freaking awesome, and I made the mistake of looking at what other people said to do with it. Hahaha! Oh, it's so painful. It's a crazy patchwork world, and the narrator's speech is thick with slang and references that go over our heads. Predictably, reviewers started choking the protagonist's voice by complaining that they didn't understand what was going on.

There were things that needed to be addressed, but they were underlying structural issues that had to do with pacing. The style was akin to A Clockwork Orange or the "Jabberwocky" poem: a hodge-podge of Latin, Italian, slang, and plain old made-up curses that existed in such obvious parts of the sentence that you could tell an epithet from an animal even if you don't have a wide vocabulary, and if you happen to have one at least as wide as mine, you could tell what animal it was. I wish people wouldn't try and make everything into the same story, but I guess I'm probably as guilty of it when I don't "get it" as anyone else. Le sigh!

Reading this, I felt a lot like I did when I started Perdido Street Station, but this has more action and a female James Bond feel as well, so I hope some editor sees the potential in this that I do. It made me want to write a story with zany language, too.

In fact, I'm going to go razzum one up soonce.

Our stunning model is jaylake, wearing a T-shirt it's okay to spill Jell-O on and polyurethane medical tubing.

I edited this from an e-mail discussion with a fellow OWW member:

Telling vs. showing is one of the worst things to hear in a critique--I don't know if you've heard it before, but it's probably the most annoying thing I've dealt with so far, and I still do it if I'm not paying attention. I'm not sure I'm the right person to ask about it, since I still do it, but then again, maybe it helps that I understand how bloody impossible it is to spot. ;)

The first response I had when someone said, "Show, don't tell," was, "Um, all writing is telling--that's what I'm doing, telling a story!" We unfortunately have crappy language for these concepts. It would be better if there were writing-specific words, but instead we'll just have to go with writing-specific definitions. When I say you're telling, I mean you're summing up a variety of details by making them into a conclusion. When I say you should be showing, I mean I want you to show the variety of details and omit the conclusion.

I think part of our predilection for "telling" in writing comes from how we're taught to tell (and here I mean "convey") stories, and how we accept them verbally from other people. Most people say,

When I arrived, there was a clown sitting on the sidewalk, bawling like a baby missing some candy.

If my mom tells me that story, I'm going to believe it immediately because she's my mother, and I know she wouldn't lie. If you tell me that story, I'm going to be slightly more skeptical because I don't know you, and I think that's where telling-vs-showing is important. It's not that I think you're a liar--I definitely don't--but I'm going to watch your body cues and stuff. For all I know, it was just an ICP fan wearing Juggalo facepaint, and you misinterpreted that as a clown. And perhaps you hate clowns and might be saying he was sobbing when he was really just having an allergy attack that made his eyes water--you could have uncharitably chosen to interpret it as sobbing, since a clown just like him killed your father at a rodeo.

The point is, I'm suspicious because you flat-out told me a fact, and I know it could be unreliable because you could be unreliable. I can't hear an author or watch his body cues, and since it's fiction, I know the author could be trying to trick me.

The way you get around your reader's innate suspicion of facts presented by someone they don't know, that they have no way of verifying, is to make sure you're showing what happened through a variety of non-subjective details (or just more easily believable/imagined details). These should lead the reader to your obvious conclusion. Once they feel like they've made the conclusion on their own, they're going to trust it the way they never will if you say, "There was a..."

In this ridiculous crying clown example, if I was editing my work to make it have less telling, I'd change it to,

A man in a wig leaned against a parking meter, his over-sized shoes dragging in a puddle of oil. He didn't seem to notice through the cascade of tears smearing his red and white facepaint.

Now you know he's a clown, even though I didn't really say it, so if I refer to him as a clown later, you won't feel like I'm bossing you around and telling you what's what--I let you figure it out, and THEN I showed that I also had figured it out. You also think he's crying, but you're still open to the possibility that he could have eaten an Indian ghost pepper or petted a Persian cat and then rubbed his eyes. Neither of us are sure about the tears yet, but we'll find out soon, because now that we have our guesses, it's okay to make it clear when I ask the clown,

"Hey, man, are you all right?"

The clown's shoulders shake as he sobs a reply. "No. I just got four rejections in the mail today, and every one of them said my novel had too much telling."

I produce five envelopes from inside my jacket pocket. "Hey man, don't sweat it. I've got five, and every one of them is a form."

I don't know if that helps you, but I'll tell you something: even writing this reply helped me, so thank you so much for asking me what I meant by my review.

This is the sentence:

A suped up Honda zipped down the lonely street.

There is dissent over the proper way to spell/punctuate the term "suped up."

Poll #1181198 How do you spell sup/supe/soup?
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

How do YOU spell it?

No, it's like THIS:

For the record, I thought the term is derived from supercharged, not from filling the car with Campbell's. But also for the record, Urban Dictionary disagrees with me. "Soup-up" is the official entry for making your car/bike better. Then again, UD is a reflection of the opinions of people who spend their money on using the Internet instead of tweaking their engine. And to flip back again, perhaps I should ignore what is probably correct according to people who own such vehicles and just go with what's correct according to people who'll be reading my work, especially since Google gives me 194,000 results for "suped up" and over a million results for "souped up."

...But Wiktionary accepts both.

And all this over one little phrase! I love language. ^_^

ETA: Thanks to cheapdialogue, we have a definitive etymology--just do a search on that page for "souped up" or "zoom, zoom, thud." Or, if you're lazy, here's the money shot:

"To soup" as a verb originally meant, not surprisingly, to provide someone with soup, but around 1931 "to soup up" appeared, meaning to modify the engine of an aircraft or motor vehicle to increase its power and speed. In part, this use may have been rooted in "soup" as 1930s slang for the stimulants sometimes injected into racehorses to make them run faster. But a more immediate source (and the reason your spelling makes more sense) was probably the fact that the preferred method of "souping up" an engine was to add a "supercharger," a device designed to force additional air into the cylinders and boost power. It is also possible that the simple adjective "super," as you guessed, may have figured into "souping up."

++=YUM!

I was reading about Scoville ratings for peppers, and then HPLC. Peppers are neat.

What's the hottest thing you've ever eaten?


P.S. ( I was tagged for a book meme. )

So I was at this convention, and me and some friends were standing around in a hallway with some fuzzy little kittens that looked approximately like this:

"This should be a better world," a friend of mine said. "A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where you could just go, 'Wow, I'd like to touch myself right here, in public,' and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing yourself to a vulgar display, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful, and there's too many kittens as it is."

Then another friend spoke up.

"You can touch yourself," she said to all of us in the hallway. "It's no big deal. Nobody spays their damn pets, so there's more kittens than there are Starbucks locations."

Now, you have to understand the way she said that, because it's the key to the whole project. The spirit of everything was formed within those nine words - and if she'd said them shyly, as though having to watch my onanation was something to be endured or afraid of, everything would have been different. But she didn't. Her words were loud and clearly audible to anyone who walked by, an offer made to friends and acquaintances alike.

Yet it wasn't a come-on, either. There wasn't that undertow of desperation of come on, touch yourself for me, I need you to validate my self-esteem and maybe we'll hook up later tonight. There was no promise of anything but a simple show, and the kitten that God would punish for it.

We all hung out in the hallway, and at first it was just me, and only one kitten exploded. But lo, the others gained their confidence - cupping our palms to touch the clothed swell of the place strangers are never supposed to touch you - and suddenly kittens were going off like firecrackers. God's fiery wrath struck again and again, bolts of fizzling blue lightning smiting every last miniature feline. They were the cutest of cats, worthy of being sacrificed.

And life seemed so much simpler. (And more covered in kitten slime.)



...If you don't know what this was about, you're such a lucky person. Let's go back in time and trade f-lists. :)

studphish and I went to the beach on Wednesday morning to collect glass for our fish tank. That's not him in the picture with me--he has more hair.

( Five more... )

This is old, but I hadn't seen it before. This morning I was stalking an attractive woman procrastinating by reading old blog entries using the Internet for perfectly legitimate purposes and came across it.

Beware the potty language if you're at work or near miniature humans.

And yes, I have glitter-and-roses novels, but since I've already written five bad ones, and that's not even counting the two humiliating contributions during my adolescence (or the four I'm working on right now, or the three almost-done-but-needs-work projects I've shelved for now), I feel all right about saving some of 'em.

But I don't think it hurts to remember that I don't want to be a braincrack addict.