{"id":7545,"date":"2018-10-30T08:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7545"},"modified":"2018-10-30T08:00:38","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T12:00:38","slug":"what-writers-know-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7545","title":{"rendered":"What Writers Know – Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"typing\"

Kiran Foster, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

Writers receive an endless stream of advice about what they are doing wrong (!) or could be doing better(!!). Since most of us can admit that we are not yet perfect, this firehose of negativity becomes wearing. Recently, I posted a few words of praise for what we get right<\/a>. With a promise of more to come.<\/p>\n

My thoughts are prompted by Reedsy founder Ricardo Fayet\u2019s<\/a> recently reprint of \u201c12 Common Writing Mistakes Even Bestselling Authors Make.\u201d\u00a0 Let\u2019s look at the second half of his list, plus my own #13.<\/p>\n

Prepare to pat yourself on the back.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. We can punctuate!<\/strong><\/span> We know that (in the U.S.), the comma and the period go INside quotation marks, the colon and the semi go OUTside, and the question mark and exclamation mark, well, it depends. We know (and I admit to still be working on it) not to overuse the dash, we know to put commas before independent clauses and not dependent ones, and, if the brouhaha over the Oxford comma is ever resolved, we stand ready to hear the outcome. I\u2019ll acknowledge sloppiness in first drafts I read regarding the need for commas before AND after people directly addressed: \u201cI\u2019m telling you, Mom, but you never listen\u201d; in city-state pairs (Princeton, New Jersey, is a fine place); and around the year in month-day-year trios (December 7, 1941, a Day that will Live in Infamy).<\/li>\n
  2. We eye-roll over dangling modifiers<\/strong><\/span> we see in the local newspaper and eliminate them in our own work \u2013 \u201cThrough hard work, the draft was at last ready to go!\u201d If only our drafts would<\/em> do the work themselves.<\/li>\n
  3. Our characters say or ask. <\/strong><\/span>They don\u2019t chortle or declaim or insinuate or interrogate. And they usually do so without any adverbial boost. Those of a certain age may recall the \u201cTom Swifty<\/a>\u201d (I know a truly filthy one; don\u2019t ask). Its perils may make using adverbs seem downright dangerous.<\/li>\n
  4. We make sure the names and spellings of people and places are consistent<\/strong>.<\/span> Of course. (I deliberately violated this precept in my short story “Tooth and Nail.” Bear in mind, the narrator was unhinged.) Moreover, spare me manuscripts whose characters are Berger, Brager, Benton, and Beaton. I will never keep them or anything close to them straight. We know many of our \u201creaders\u201d are actually audiobook listeners. A name heard is harder to remember than one read. Thus the nametag.<\/li>\n
  5. We are not time-travelers<\/strong>.<\/span> We don\u2019t mistakenly flip back and forth between past and present, and we establish the way-back time with a \u201chad\u201d or two then drop the \u201chads\u201d in the interest of simplicity. Led properly, our readers know where they are.<\/li>\n
  6. Homonym errors<\/strong>.<\/span> OK, enough about there, their, and they\u2019re and its and it\u2019s. We know the difference between carrots, karats, karets, and carets. But even when my brain knows the right word, sometimes my fingers do not. Words with homonyms are landmines: \u201creign it in,\u201d \u201cbeyond the pail,\u201d \u201cthe plane truth.\u201d In a story set in Alaska in which a character was eaten by a bear (bare), I referred to his grizzly death. I was making a pun, but I\u2019ve since run across writers apparently unfamiliar with the word \u201cgrisly.\u201d Lee Masterson<\/a> compiled a nice list of these and their cousins: heteronyms, homographs, and homophones.<\/li>\n
  7. And, when in doubt, we consult the experts.<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    <\/a>\"\"
    \n    Read What Writers Know – Part 1<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Writers receive an endless stream of advice about what they are doing wrong (!) or could be doing better(!!). Since most of us can admit that we are not yet perfect, this firehose of negativity becomes wearing. Recently, I posted … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"What Writers Know - Part 2 Some praise for what all good writers do, page after page.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,51,29],"tags":[414],"class_list":["post-7545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-words","category-writing","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1XH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7546,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7545\/revisions\/7546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}