Jim's List of
Writing
No-Nos
By
James R. Muri
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the Blizzard Guy's Literary Site
Disclaimer:These
are pet irritants of the Blizzard Guy's friendly Acceptance Editor.He
has assembled this list from reading submissions over the years, and
has
compiled them for us.If you have
other No-Nos you think belong on this list, send them along to irumrj@yahoo.com
Or, do you want to read some really amusingly bad lines? Click here.
- I get
very uncomfortable when the
author overuses
adverbs very often. It's
very disappointing and sometimes very aggravating to see very
superfluous
adverbs detract from otherwise very good prose. So
consider doing a global "search and delete" for the word 'very' in your
stories. Lacking the visceral
strength to do that, eliminate it from all non-dialogue. To juice
up your writing, also search and delete for 'pretty,' 'somewhat,'
'fairly,'
and other life-squeezing adverbs. In fact, it's a good policy to
avoid adverbs altogether.
- Ellipses
. . . They have their place. Perhaps
once every 50 pages or so.
- It was. We
were. They were. I
was. She was. I
am. We are. You
are. Sentences are much
stronger when they do not begin with or contain phrases like those
above. To
strengthen your prose even more, avoid tentative verbs like 'seem' or
'guess'.
- Dialogue
is people talking. It
should sound natural and human.
- This
tip from the Washington State
Department
of Redundancy Department: Avoid
redundancies, such as "We were in the process of leaving." Examine
your phraseology to ensure you don't repeat the same thing again in the
same sentence. (Extra points: I
used a redundancy in the previous sentence. Did
you catch it?)
- Metaphors,
similes, analogies: Oh,
you abusers of the comparisons! How
you grind me into gravelly dust like the leftovers at the bottom of the
pestle setting on the floor of a teepee, a mute ceramic goddess only
made
whole by the male mortar. Make
your usage of those comparisons appropriate as a sparrow's wing, so
that
readers' eyeballs don't fly out of their faces and take off down the
runways
of confusion.
- Once I
had had enough time to begin
this effort,
I thought I would mention that the word 'had' is often overused. You
may not believe this, but I had had occasion to discover that it is
possible
that 'had' need never be used
twice in a row, and that editors will strike one whenever they find two. It
is also almost never necessary to use them as auxiliary verbs, such as
"I had come to the store" instead of "I came to the store."
- Sentence
fragments. Don't. (ps
– How many sentence fragments have I used in this list? Circle
them and laugh.)
- Prepositions
and their proper usage
are common
subjects we are all familiar with. So
what rule did I just violate? (extra
points: correct the violation.)
- He
said. She
said. He said. She said. Ugh! How
boring! How colorless, especially
when used over and over! Use
your word processor's thesaurus to find synonyms for 'said' and use
them
to convey a speaker's frame of mind or actions to the reader. For
example: She asserted. He
affirmed. She whispered. He
breathed. She muttered. He
stuttered. She offered. He
reported. You get the
idea.
- When
narrating in an omniscient point
of view
(POV), do not use contractions. Reserve
those for dialogue only. Omniscient
observers are required to be grammatically correct and are not allowed
to use colloquialisms, which all contractions are.
- When
offered an opportunity to do so,
let the
characters show the reader the way of the story – do not intrude as the
author to tell us and thereby shortchange the reader. Spoon-feeding
the reader is the ultimate in author arrogance. By
that, I mean telling them what to think, what to feel, what to conclude
from the events being portrayed. Readers
have life experiences – let theirs guide their interaction with the
characters
in the story you're telling. Again,
writers should never intrude between their characters and readers.
- Watch
your tenses. A
common error is the use of the word 'now' when the author should have
used
'then.' 'Now' is a word
that implies the present – indeed, it means 'now', exactly as it says. So
when telling a story in the past tense, the word 'now' should almost
never
be used, except in dialogue.
- Lay,
lie, laid, lain – learn how to
use these. They
are among the most egregiously misused words in our language. If
unsure, use synonyms instead. I
once used the word 'layed' in a story. You
can guess how embarrassed I was about that.
- Bunny
trail run-ons are frustrating for readers, who might want to read a
good
story by the fireplace while sipping a homemade wine of theirs, vinted
from dandelions they harvested in their own yards during the early
spring
before spraying for those blasted bugs that cause their yards so much
trouble
that they have to work all day in the sun to get rid of them.
- Hyperbole
has its place, but most
readers will
respond more viscerally to austere prose crafted with a paucity of
carefully-chosen
nouns and verbs. So when
in doubt, apply the rule that less is more.
- Pronouns
and objects: make
sure they agree. Example: "El
thought that Debbie's backpack looked just like the one her boyfriend
had." See
the problem? Whose boyfriend
is being talked about? Compare
that to "El thought her boyfriend had a backpack that look just like
the
one Debbie carried." That's
not as bad, although still a little nebulous, since 'her boyfriend'
could
still, to some, mean Debbie's boyfriend again. So
better still: "El's boyfriend
had a backpack just like the one Debbie carried, El thought."
- When
doing dialogue, make sure the
reader knows
who is talking. Here's
a bad example:
The
wind sighed in the trees."Can you
tell me why?" Jane asked.
"Sure." Sandy
scratched his head.
"Then –then maybe you should."
Again the wind sighed. Both
thought for a time.
"Maybe it would be better if we
didn't
talk about it, though."
"You sure?"