Why the Media Are Failing Us

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Back sometime before the Dark Ages, when I was in journalism school, we thought of the news business and the entertainment business as separate entities—the difference between Walter Cronkite and Star Trek. Now the line between the two is increasingly blurred. So when we say “media” today, we cannot mean only the NewsBiz. Americans are influenced by the entertainment and infotainment they watch, just as they are by the “straight” news. And they watch waaaay more of the former.

Financial analysts estimate news and entertainment—collectively, the “media”—is a $3.04 trillion international enterprise. It includes news outlets, as well as digital media [television, music and radio, etc.], streaming services, and more. In many ways, the business models for news and entertainment are similar, with revenues coming from advertising, customer payments, and licensing deals. They also are subject to the same regulatory regimes: the FCC (federal communications commission) and FTC (federal trade commission).

In those days of yore, Americans got their news from a few standard outlets: local newspapers and broadcast television. Because many people in a community read the same newspapers and mostly watched one of the same television networks (originally three—NBC, CBS, and ABC), they tended to share a perspective on events, even though there were some difference among them. Local media helped establish a sense of community, a feeling that “Things may be bad, but we’re all in this together.”

In a big city with more than one daily newspaper, one might be identified as Republican and the other as Democratic. In Detroit, where I grew up, there was the Detroit News (or as my parents called it, the Nixon News) and the Detroit Free Press. The Detroit News, like many other big-city newspapers is no more; the Free Press no longer publishes daily, and there isn’t home delivery every day. If you’re out and about, you can snag one from a vendor standing in major intersections. New Jersey, the nation’s most densely populated state, has no daily newspaper in any major city, not even the state capital. For most New Jerseyans, news is online only.

More than 1,800 US cities and towns have lost their newspapers in the past 20 years (60 dailies and 1700 weeklies); 1300 of these outlets were in metropolitan areas. Over the past 15 years, total weekday newspaper circulation has declined from 122 million to 73 million. Rural areas and small towns have been hardest hit by the loss of local news, but numerous major US cities no longer have a daily newspaper. These include Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Tampa. Most recently, the 157-year-old Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced it’s abandoning its print edition. Those newspapers still publishing are shrinking, due to a loss of revenue from advertisers and subscribers. They’ve become shadows of their former selves, “ghost newspapers.”

Today, online media are filling the gap. Online newspapers cannot provide the depth of coverage of print. Stories are shorter and may lack helpful context. Reporters are fewer and generally less experienced. In online sources, the line between news and entertainment is especially fuzzy. Digital formats had a 45% media and entertainment market share in 2024. And it’s growing, in part at the expense of traditional media.

For where this economic sector is going, look to the investment firms. The fragmented media market poses a challenge to investors, just as it challenges responsible citizenship and social cohesion.

According to Standard and Poors, advertising is healthy in digital platforms, as advertisers shift their money from legacy media to digital; linear television (which follows a schedule, as opposed to on-demand streaming) at the national level, as well as radio, are struggling for advertising dollars. Only sports programming keeps this sector afloat.

The diversity of media in this new landscape leads to further splintering. The days are over when everyone watched the same programs, listened to the same news, and gained something of a shared perception of their community, the country, its strengths and its problems. That’s not to say that the media world of the last mid-century was perfect, but the results of this splintering are all around us. And we haven’t even discussed the impact of social media yet.

Every Word’s a Choice: Part 6 — More on Modifiers

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In the last post of this series, the emphasis was on modifiers, adjectives specifically. It talked about three keys to choosing a adjectives that will help your readers create the story picture you want to paint: they must be significant, sensory details are powerful, avoid overload.

Here are a few more attributes of adjectives to be alert to.

Precision
Some adjectives are so overused and vague they’ve become meaningless. What does it mean when you read that someone received “a big check” or “a little diamond,” that a new co-worker is pretty or beautiful or handsome? These judgments totally depend on the reader’s perspective and provide remarkably little information. They’ve become empty calories on the adjective buffet.

You might think it’s descriptive to say a dress is blue. But how many shades of blue are there? A website for designers shows 144. How descriptive is it, really, to say “blue”? Or green? There are 50 of them above. How different are Army green (maybe you’d choose it for the clothes of an ex-military character), fungal green (for a house in disrepair), Kelly green (for a patriotic Irishman), or teal (for a fashionista)?

The point is to make your descriptions as vivid as possible, which may mean going beyond the first adjective that comes to mind.

Surroundings
You know the old saying, “clothes make the man.” How you describe what characters wear, their living accommodations, their cars, the foods they eat—all should be selected based on who they are. A Buick is an American car manufactured by General Motors, as we all know. But if you write that your character is a Buick owner or a Lamborghini owner, your readers will surmise more about him than that he has a vehicle to get around in.

In other words, as in our discussion of verbs, the descriptive words you use have not only a literal, everyday meaning, they also carry connotations. If you say your protagonist is a Harvard graduate, that’s different than sending him to Michigan or Baylor. Different schools convey different impressions about the graduate, his family, his connections, and his attainments beyond the seal on the diploma. Make these choices mindfully.

Cliches
A word of caution: You don’t want to describe a character by drawing on all the clichés of status, high or low. People are more complicated than that, and such descriptions don’t ring true. I’ve received dozens of Facebook friend requests—you probably have too—from “retired Navy Seals” who live in Hawai`i, whose photos include friendly-looking dogs and adoring grandkids. And, oh, they’re all widowers. And handsome! Lucky me! These are clichés meant to make the guy seem manly, upstanding, and really OK. They make me laugh.

Once you settle on which details you need, you also have to find a fresh way to express them, avoiding clichés and overused phrases. Publishers don’t like them. Readers roll their eyes. Five years from now, your text may seem dated. Some clichés are so common, they can slip into our prose without our even noticing them. It takes a good ear to tune them in. One I read frequently is: “She let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding.” Have read this a dozen times, most recently last week (in Yellowface), where it was used to demonstrate use of a cliché–an archetype of the trite. How do you know what’s tired and what’s fresh? This is one more reason writers have to READ.

Here are two descriptions, one of a city scene, the other of two sisters. These are the kinds of topics authors write about every day. They can be banal. But these authors dug in and their descriptions are memorable.
“We stopped in the shadows of decrepit wooden structures leaning toward one another over the cobbled pavement as though telling secrets.”(The Railway Conspiracy, SJ Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee)
“Mandy’s clothes are smooth and sharp, Tia’s are rumpled and faded. Mandy’s hair is always pulled back. Tia’s is a mess of tangles. In short, Mandy is pressed. Tia is line dried.”(The Final Episode, Lori Roy)

Dialog is Different
As always, dialog is different than narrative. Trite phrases you wouldn’t consider including in your narration may be perfectly acceptable in dialog. In fact, I’ve read stories in which a character speaks almost exclusively in clichés. It says a lot about them, too. It’s as if they only know what someone else has told them—or have absorbed only tired, worn-out ideas. Author J.P. Rieger has created a wily Baltimore police detective who spouts business jargon whenever he doesn’t want his bosses to know what he’s up to. It’s meaningless—and hilarious—but it reassures the bosses every time. (A recent review of the new biography of Elmore Leonard talks about his stellar dialog: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/elmore-leonards-perfect-pitch .)

Next Installment: Part 7: Word Order Mayhem (A family emergency has slowed the posting of these articles. Expect Part 7 in early October.)

Find past articles in this series in the Writer’s First Draft tab on the home page.

Down and Out in the River City by Wm Stage

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Down and Out in the River City, the third crime thriller by Wm Stage, is a refreshing change of pace in both setting and characters, with a strong feel of gritty reality. Contemporary society’s schisms and Americans’ careless assumptions and prejudices are on full display. This well-paced story puts St. Louis, Mo., special process server Francis Lenihan in the precarious position of having to break the law if he wants a devious serial killer to get justice. St. Louis has as many swirling currents as the mighty Mississippi flowing alongside it, and some are just as dangerous.

River City is one of the city’s many nicknames. A good bit of the action takes place in a homeless encampment that has sprung up in the riverside park surrounding the city’s most famous manmade attraction—the Gateway Arch. Stage doesn’t neglect the city’s troubled racial history, notably the 2014 death of Michael Brown by police in nearby Ferguson. That event created the backdrop of interracial resentments, fear, and anger for this story’s opening.

When Lenihan walks out of the Civil Courts Building, he finds himself in the midst of an incipient riot. A former police officer accused of murdering a 24-year-old Black man has just been acquitted. Caught up in the melee, Lenihan is rounded up with everyone else, and must sit in jail until he can be processed.

Lenihan’s views on this and other examples of racial discord are not easy to pigeonhole. He seems to be on first one side, then the other. Maybe at all times he’s simply on the side that will give him the quickest path out of it. What I particularly valued in this book is that, through Lenihan and the people he drinks with, you hear the full range of attitudes about race and social issues, for better and worse. It’s no shade of polemical.

Lenihan works for the sheriff’s office, delivering legal papers to people involved in landlord disputes, divorces, court cases, and the like. As you can imagine, although a process server has no authority to arrest people, the recipients of these notices can be unhappy to see him. Lenihan goes about his day-to-day work during the course of the story and how he works is an interesting window on a behind-the-scenes job.

The story starts in earnest when Lenihan receives a call from the father of a young murder victim. Lenihan’s business card was in the dead man’s pocket. The father wants to know more about his son’s last days and, desperate, asks Lenihan to investigate. This takes him to the homeless encampment, where Lenihan hopes to pick up the young man’s trail. There, Lenihan connects with a Black preacher named Cleo looking for his brother. Through Cleo, Lenihan meets some of the colorful characters who make the camp their home. Chasing down fragments of information of wildly varying reliability leads in a direction that threatens Lenihan himself. I liked this book a lot. The setting and characters are fresh and well-developed, and a nuanced understanding of the process server’s life grows out of author Stage’s own background as a licensed process server in St. Louis.

“The Power of Titles”

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By the time authors finish writing a story, they (should) have a pretty good grasp of its essence. But that intimate knowledge doesn’t necessarily lead to a good title for the work. Sometimes too much knowing just confuses things. As frustrating, a title that would fit perfectly might be overused. Another one doesn’t convey much of a first impression. Still another might cross genre boundaries and provide little clue to the content. AI advocates suggest letting the machine review the story to come up with a title. (Didn’t work for me, even after several prompts.) “My Book” isn’t much of a title, even with (Finally!) added.

Last week, Author’s Publish hosted a webinar, “The Power of Titles,” in which author Emily Harstone addressed this problem. The most common type of title is what she calls the “placeholder” or “license plate” title. It conveys the work’s core idea or theme, but not much more. It’s often the most obvious choice, one anyone might pick if asked to suggest two or three possibilities.

A disadvantage of generic placeholder titles is they may be forgettable, so when your cousin who reads and loves your book talks about it with her friends, and they ask, “what’s the title?” she gives them a blank look. But placeholder titles can work. Harstone suggests The Hunger Games as one that manages to be specific and intriguing. The DaVinci Code is another.

Many books may share a one-word title like Witness. A quick Amazon search brings up multiple books with just the one word title, an added “The,” or close variants. John Sandford, though, has taken the one word “Prey” and tacked it onto various other words for a whole series of books, even when the combination doesn’t exactly make sense (coming next April, Book #36, Revenge Prey). Doesn‘t matter—you see that word “Prey” in big type and you know instantly what you’re looking at.

Harstone suggests reviewing titles in your genre (Amazon makes this easy if you search for, say, “best-selling thrillers”) and seeing whether your prospective title fits in with current trends, since a good title supports marketing. She says titles generally have to: convey a unique aspect of your book, convey the genre (in partnership with the cover art), and/or “communicate an idea you want readers thinking about.” Good examples of this last would be All the Light We Cannot See or We Begin at the End.

Titles that suggest the book itself will plow overworked ground are generally not of interest to me. That would include any starting with “The Woman Who . . .” or, worse, “The Girl Who . . .” They make me think (possibly unfairly) that the authors are trying to ride the wave of other books’ popularity, rather than coming up with their own ideas. Well, there are lot of books out there, and I need to make choices based on some criteria, even flawed ones. A trend possibly near its tail-end that Harstone notes is the use of numbers in titles. Examples are 2017’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo or 2018’s The Seven 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (another Evelyn with same last initial). One such book I read at the outset of this trend, which I recommend highly, is 2017’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti.

Having so many words, these titles risk violating Harstone’s advice that a title should look good on a cover, that is, not too long. Yet, we can all think of successful books that do have lengthy titles. I’m thinking of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Both memorable. At the other extreme was the brilliant Dodgers by Bill Beverly (2016), about young men on a cross-country criminal mission (dodging the law) who were massive fans of the LA Dodgers. When I see that title, the whole book comes back to me. Harstone might consider Dodgers a “helium title,” one that adds another layer, making it more than it first appears. They are more common in short stories (and poems) because shorter works are more focused. Novels do a lot of things, and a title generally picks only one of them.

Another example is Exposure by Ramona Emerson about a Diné crime photographer and a series of deaths, out of doors in the wintertime. Exposure clearly has two meanings here. My short story “The Queen’s Line,” set in 1884, might make you think of the London Underground (the Circle Line was completed that year), but no, it’s about the death of Queen Victoria’s son Leopold from hemophilia and the rumors about her genetic line that ensued. So, the title not only gets at the essence of the story, it conjures an era. At least to me.

If you have any tips based on how you develop titles for your own work, please share!

How Adjectives Sharpen Descriptions

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Whether you’re describing a person, a location, or a bit of action, details help readers envision it. Adjectives and adverbs provide many of these details. They help readers draw a mental picture of what your characters are experiencing. But adding details doesn’t mean piling on any old modifiers. Details, first of all, must be significant.

Here’s an example: “The entire palette was muted, faded, earthen . . . save for a lone splotch of brilliant, hysterical red on the dress of the peasant girl . . .” This quote is from the 2025 gothic thriller Victorian Psycho, which I reviewed yesterday. A key detail is that “splotch of brilliant, hysterical red.” Not only will the reader encounter quite a few splotches of red before the book’s last page, the most interesting aspect of the description is the unexpected word “hysterical.” They’ll run up on that one too.

Here’s another example: In my novel set in Rome, the blond hair of one gangster is mentioned several times the first time the reader “meets” him. Being white-blond, his hair sets him apart from other members of his gang and Italians in general. It’s a marker. When the blond hair is mentioned afterwards, most readers (those paying attention) will know exactly which gang member I’m writing about. A visual cue, like that blond hair, is sometimes more memorable than a character’s name.

That goes for sensory details in general—our descriptions can include more than what we see in our imaginations. They can include what we hear, feel, smell—even taste. A woman who always wears lilac perfume, a man whose voice has a growl underneath it, air so thick with pollution you can taste it. Or what our senses can’t perceive: sudden silences, the emptiness in a room, as in this example: “Robert switches off the ignition. The engine shuts down. The air-conditioning and radio turn off. Inside the car, it’s suddenly quiet.” (Lori Roy, The Final Episode, 2025) The sudden quiet is a significant detail.

The corollary to choosing significant details is to avoid using too many of them. If a barista who’s an “extra” in your story hands over a cup of coffee, readers don’t need an inventory of her bleached-blonde hair and low-cut shirt. Readers work hard to assemble a mental picture of what you describe, and then try to keep track of it. It’s annoying to go to that effort for unnecessary facts. Plus, too many details slow the story.

Master story-writer Anton Chekov once cautioned a young author about overloading the details: “You have so many modifiers that the reader has a hard time figuring out what deserves his attention, and it tires him out.” The key here again, is significant details

If you’ve done a great deal of research on some technical topic, and you believe it’s important to convey it, try weaving it in like you would backstory. Information dumps of any kind are tedious. Still, as I remember the late Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, he spends a considerable number of words describing the gun the Jackal selects for his assassination attempt and the modifications he wants made to it. It’s techy-stuff, but Forsyth’s character explains the purpose of each feature and change he wants. He made these details significant. He gathered me in, making me an accomplice to the crime he was planning.

Next Tuesday: More modifiers

Part 1: Introduction to “ Every Word’s a Choice”—finding the best words to tell your story. The series is based on a talk I recently gave at a writers’ conference. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11484

Part 2: Using effective nouns to establish a relationship with readers. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11501

Part 3: A strong verb can do a lot for your story.

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 3

Part 4: More about the importance of colorful verbs.

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 4

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

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Virginia Feito’s new gothic thriller, Victorian Psycho, has attracted the attention of readers and commentators for its originality, as well as for its in-your-face macabre violence. It’s graphic. It’s bloody. And in this book, the first-person narrator is the serial killer. She doesn’t murder at a discreet distance, either. No poison here. When toward the end of this short book (190 pages) she tells you she’s holding a cleaver, well, you know . . .

It’s also worth saying that much of it is highly comic, poking fun at the aristocracy and its Victorian-era pretensions. The heroine, Winifred Notty (which I invariably read as “naughty”) is posing as a governess and was hired to deal with the two children of the Pound family: Drusilla, an angsty teenager, and the young heir, William, insufferably puffed up with his future importance.

Their mother, a faded woman imprisoned by the constraints of her social situation, is unable to think beyond them. Though she senses something off about Miss Notty, she grabs hold of the wrong end of the stick when she believes the governess is trying to seduce her husband. Mr. Pound may actually be interested in being seduced—something you justknow won’t turn out well.

You gradually assemble a sort of understanding of Winifred’s background. She was illegitimate; her father refused to marry her mother. Her mother moved to another town and passed herself off as a widow, marrying a local Reverend who grew to think of his stepdaughter as the incarnation of evil. She was sent to a girls’ school, but after The Incident (which I’ll leave you to discover on your own), she was returned home.

The foods the Pound family is served are described in sometimes lascivious detail, as the governess perceives them. But then she has something of an oral fixation—prone to biting or licking or sucking on various objects and people.

I came to think of this story as akin to a gruesome fairy tale, in which all sorts of outlandish and grotesque occurrences are possible. You must decide for yourself how much is literally true and how much is in Miss Notty’s mind. It’s gory, but good. The book is being made into a feature film, scheduled for release next year, starring Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jason Isaacs.

Merging Media Streams

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An article by John Koblin in yesterday’s New York Times says the days of separate subscriptions to multiple tv streaming service are waning. It’s just too complicated, too many passwords, too much keeping track. As a result, the bigger players are bundling popular services. Viewers need only one interface to find shows and movies on many different channels. For example, Amazon Prime Video users can watch HBO Max, Paramount+, etc.; Apple and other services are riding the aggregating train too.

According to research Koblin cites, nearly a third of all new streaming subscriptions are bought in bundles. So? And this will come as no surprise—media, tech, and cable companies are fighting to be the preferred one-stop shop. Media companies can offload marketing and other costs to the bundler. But they get smaller revenues because of the bundler’s cut. Amazon, for example, keeps from thirty to fifty percent of the subscription revenue. Netflix, as the largest subscription-supported company, with a wide variety of its own content, hasn’t needed to play with the bundlers so far.

I’ll have my eye out for where the streaming service MHz may land. We subscribe to it directly (along with a number of unbundled others, probably insanely duplicative). MHz offers foreign and international films and television series, usually with subtitles. We joined because it carries the whole Detective Montalbano series, set in Sicily. If you’ve missed this show, I’m sorry. A digression here: the producers scoured Sicily’s community theaters for good character actors. As a result, all the small parts (the landlady, the vamp, the car mechanic) are brilliant additions to the recurring cast.

We’ve watched the detective show Makari (Sicily again), and have started Imma Tataranni about a female deputy prosecutor in Calabria. All three shows have some over-the-top characters. They do involve murders but aren’t especially gory, and they include a fair bit of humor, created mostly by human ridiculousness, not snarky one-liners.

Another favorite is the French show, The Art of Crime, featuring a young Parisian police detective in the art crimes unit. He knows nothing about art (and cares less) and is teamed up with a young woman who works at the Louvre who knows everything and cares passionately. In a clever move, the artist involved (Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, etc.) “visits” the woman and they have interesting conversations. Weirdly charming. Her father is an eccentric Andy Warhol look-alike. We watched two episodes of the UK knock-off, Art Detectives, and weren’t impressed. In that one, the man is the art expert and the woman a former patrol officer. She’s smart, but most definitely second-fiddle. (Says a lot, right there.) No humor to speak of. We’re cutting our losses.

Whether you regard your televiewing as a buffet—one of this, one of that—or a full course meal of bundled choices, happy watching!

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Treating Themes Like Shy Forest Animals

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So many thought-provoking insights were in the George Saunders interview I wrote about last week, I saved a few for today. One issue he talks about is how politics and themes enter his writing. Not deliberately. He calls the writer mind the one “that wants to pull the big manure truck with your politics and your thematics in it and dump it on the reader.” We’ve all read novels like that, that hammer home their point again and again, as if the reader is too dim to get it.

If you can keep that conceptualizing mind quiet, Saunders believes, your themes and politics will behave “almost like really shy animals.” He recommends simply ignoring them, pretending you’re not interested in them when they come out of the woods. If you instead concentrate on the story you’re telling, these ideas/themes/whatnot will be there. They’ll leach in, coming in “so honestly, and they won’t be abstract, but intimately linked to action and character.”

Maybe that’s why, not deliberately, but completely subconsciously, I didn’t even recognize how much the theme of prejudice (and its ill effects) had seeped into my novel, Architect of Courage. I hadn’t set out to write a book about prejudice; in fact, I hadn’t even realized so much of it was there, in one way or another, until after the book was finished and I was working on blurbs and synopses. You can’t hide who you are, I suppose.

This topic reminds me of how much I admired Brad Parks’s crime novel, The Last Act, which he wrote in furious response to Wachovia and Wells Fargo Banks’ laundering of drug cartel money (which I learned about only because he included an incendiary author’s note). The book itself says nothing to convey his outrage; on the surface it’s an entertaining crime story, with nice twists, but it lays up next to that theme.

Saunders believes it’s a matter of being patient with the writing and letting the story go where it wants to go (the idea of a story having its own wants is a little hard for me; it’s easier to think of letting your subconscious mind work hard), and not forcing it. When an author pushes a story in a particular direction you can run into the problem of, “Oh, she did that goofy thing for plot reasons, not because it makes any sense.” Saunder would probably disagree, but in mysteries, sometimes the plot does need to go in a certain direction, yet it cannot seem that the author is steering it that way. If it’s too blatant, readers feel manipulated.

Television shows, working against constraints of time and possibly imagination, make transparent plot-driven choices all the time. Why do tv police officers always decide not to call back-up? Why do young women wearing long nightgowns and carrying a candle that will inevitably blow out go down in the basement at night to investigate a mysterious noise? These are plot-driven actions that are character-driven only for people who are irresponsibly reckless. We watched two different Scandinavian tv mysteries in a row where a woman officer decided to trail a dangerous suspect in her car at night in bad weather despite her colleagues on the radio saying, “Wait for back-up!” Since one of the main reasons people enjoy reading fiction is finding out “what happens next,” the more the what’s next isn’t obvious, the better off the author is.

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 4

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Verbs (Still) Do the Heavy Lifting
Here’s more on how choosing strong verbs can bring your story alive.

Does your character merely walk into a room? How does he walk in? You can make his style of entry specific and more visual by adding an adverb:
            He walked slowly into the room.
            She walked briskly into the room.
Better yet, choose a strong verb—one that works harder for you.
            He can stroll, sashay, amble, stagger, or trudge into the room.
            She can stride, race, march, skip, or strut.

Characters can hike, parade, saunter, shuffle, step, skip, wander, lope, meander, plod, shamble, hustle, and on and on. It all depends on who they are and what they may expect to find in that room. A teenage boy about to be called to task for denting the family Buick will enter the living room where his father waits very differently than would his sister who just won the school spelling bee. Personally, I’d like to see a character who scuttles into a room, but I haven’t yet written about a scuttler.

Try this
Think about how you might replace the pedestrian verbs in the following sentences with something more interesting. In some cases, tighten up the wording or remove unnecessary filter verbs (like “see,” “hear,” etc.). These sentences aren’t wrong. They’re just not as interesting as they might be. And a whole book of not very interesting sentences ends up being a not very interesting book. Here’s an example of verb replacement: The cat was in a square of bright light. You might replace “was” with “sunned.”

Your turn:
He said that was great. (Hint: take out a couple of words.)
That bullet was much too close for comfort.
From the living room, I heard a great crash.
My glasses, broken in the fall, were in my jacket pocket.
I saw she was much too sunburned to have spent the day at the library.

Let’s look at a few of the verbs in our song (discussed in Part 2 of this series and linked again here). Right away, in the first line you’ll see a “was,” but there’s also a “carried,” which is an action you can picture and a “lived,” (a verb full of life). Strong and evocative verbs in the song include: “stopped rambling,” “marched me away,” “sailed off”—sounds like a lark, doesn’t it?—“stained,” “butchered,” “corpses piled” (no burial niceties). The Australian soldiers “sailed off” but, once wounded, were “shipped” back home, like cargo.

One thought to bear in mind. Words have their usual, literal meaning, but they also carry secondary meanings. “Stained” is a good example. You can understand this verb as merely discoloration of the sand and water, but it also carries—maybe even subconsciously—the implication of shame or something dishonorable: “a stain on one’s reputation.” A stain is almost never a good thing. “Butchered” is another example. While it could just mean killed, in this context, it conjures up another, more powerful meaning—that of “indiscriminate slaughter.” Especially the choice of “like lambs to the slaughter,” with lambs being a symbol of “innocence.”

And, of course, readers bring their own context to a story and the words in it. While we all can be moved by the “lambs to the slaughter” image, the mother or brother of someone slain in war would hear it quite differently.

Like everyone, I have a few writing pet peeves, nails on the blackboard kind-of-things. They include the verbs “get” and “got.” I eliminate them as relentlessly as I chase down a wasp in the house. They’re perfectly fine words, but they mean so many things! Scroll down the list of definitions [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/get], and see for yourself. When you find one of them in your story, it’s an opportunity to identify a more precise verb!

Next Tuesday: Adjective and Adverbs
Part 1: Introduction to “ Every Word’s a Choice”—finding the best words to tell your story. The series is based on a talk I recently gave at a writers’ conference. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11484
Part 2:  Using effective nouns to establish a relationship with readers. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11501
Part 3: A strong verb can do a lot for your story. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11536

Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow

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No doubt many crime fiction readers eagerly anticipated Presumed Guilty, Scott Turow’s new legal thriller. I know I did, having been a fan ever since his debut with Presumed Innocent almost 40 years ago. I looked forward to seeing what his character, Rusty Sabich, is up to, now that he’s in his 70s. And, I relish the clash of wits in a good courtroom drama.

In the current book, Rusty’s tenure as a judge in fictional Kindle County, Minnesota, is finished, and he’s moved about a hundred miles north to rural/small town Skageon County. He’s living on a lake and has found a new live-in love, Bea Housley, a school principal.

Bea is not baggage-free. (Which of us is?) She has an irascible father and an adopted son, Aaron, in his early twenties who spent jail time for drug possession with intent to distribute (the drugs actually belonged to his on-and-off girlfriend, Mae Potter). Out on parole now, Aaron has to abide by certain rules: no driving, no associating with drug addicts, and no leaving the county. He’s in Bea and Rusty’s custody and living with them. Thankfully, he’s pulling his life together.

Mae, the beautiful young woman Aaron’s loved for years, remains a problem. He should not be associating with her, not only because it’s a violation of his parole, but because she’s unstable and manipulative. She’s like a tornado through the lives of her friends and family. But young love is what it is. She and Aaron are secretly considering marriage, and he proposes a weekend camping trip to sort out their future once and for all. No phones, no distractions.

The trip ends with a big argument between them, during which Aaron realizes Mae will never change, that she will always be totally self-absorbed, that people’s advice that she’s not good for him is correct, that he’s done. He hitchhikes home, just as Rusty and Bea were about to report his disappearance to his parole officer.

He makes it home. Mae does not. Two weeks later her decomposed body is found, apparently strangled. Aaron is devastated. Her family is too, and immediately points to Aaron as the probable culprit. That fact that he’s Black and Mae was white hovers over him. Is this why they never approved of Mae and Aaron’s relationship? Mae’s father is the Prosecuting Attorney for Skageon County and puts a lot of law enforcement pressure on Aaron. Eventually, Aaron comes to trial.

Much of the book is the unfolding courtroom drama. I liked that part a lot. It was fascinating to see how the defense team tries to unravel the prosecutor’s evidence, making what at first sounds devastating at least open to interpretation. If you enjoy courtroom scenes, you’ll find some riveting ones here.

But at 530 pages, the book has lots of other stuff packed in as well. There’s too much backstory about Rusty, Bea, and their families and, for my taste, way too much navel-gazing by Rusty around various issues. I recognized that he loves Bea and didn’t need it rehashed multiple times. He agonizes at great length about whether he should become Aaron’s defense attorney, as Bea pleads with him to. He shouldn’t, for obvious reasons, and you read all of them, many times. But of course he’s going to do it, or else what’s in those 530 pages? To complicate Rusty’s emotional state further, he and Bea have a serious falling out over an issue I found frankly implausible.

To sum up, while the trial scenes were great, much of the rest of the story was, for me, seriously over-written. It’s like eating three Christmas dinners in one evening. You’re so stuffed it’s hard to say you actually enjoyed the experience.