The written universe can seem like a cold, unfriendly place to new writers. At first, it is difficult to find other writers, and we wonder if we are alone in the universe. When we finally are able to see across the void, we discover writing groups in our local area.
We are not alone. We are part of a vast cosmos of authors much like us, some far more advanced and others less so.
At times, we wonder if our star will ever shine as brightly as theirs.
We attend groups and submit our best work. In the beginning, we feel bombarded with reprimands, x-rays highlighting our beloved narrative’s flaws.
- Show it, don’t tell it.
- Simplify, simplify.
- Don’t write so many long sentences.
- Don’t be vague—get to the point.
- Don’t use “ten-dollar words.”
- Cut the modifiers—they muck up your narrative.
These comments are painful but necessary. This knowledge enables us to produce work our readers will find enjoyable.
However, all rules can be taken to an extreme. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. The most important rules are:
- Trust yourself,
- Trust your reader.
- Be consistent.
- Write what you want to read.
We must understand how to balance mechanics and grammar and other obvious rules and still write with our own voice and style.
Participating in a critique group requires delicacy and dedication. It also involves restraint and the ability to allow other authors to write their own work. A group shouldn’t micromanage a manuscript, as too much input and direction can remove the author’s unique voice from a piece.
One of the admonitions we regularly hear refers to the number of modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) we might habitually use. As writers, we all want to be accepted and have others like our work, but we must write from the heart. That means using modifiers, descriptors, or quantifiers when they are needed.
Chuck Wendig, in his post The Danger of Writing Advice from Industry Professionals, says,
And so the advice really should be, don’t use adverbs or adjectives when they sound awkward, or when they fail to tell us something that we need to know. [1]
When we read, we see that certain words and phrases don’t add to the narrative and only serve to increase wordiness. These words hamper our ability to suspend our disbelief when used too freely.
These words fall out of my fingers and into my keyboard randomly and out of my voluntary control. During NaNoWriMo, I don’t self-edit as I go because, at that point, I’m just trying to get the story down. The second and third drafts are where I shape my grammar and phrasing.
Modifiers change, clarify, qualify, or limit a particular word in a sentence to add emphasis, explanation, or detail. We also use them as conjunctions to connect thoughts: “otherwise,” “then,” “besides.”
Descriptors: Adverbs and adjectives, known as descriptors, are helper nouns or verbs, words that help describe other words. However, they can be reviled by writing groups armed with a little dangerous knowledge.
Many descriptors are easy to spot as they often end with the letters “ly.” When I begin revising a first draft, I do a global search for the letters “ly,” and a list will pop up in my left margin. My manuscript will become a mass of yellow highlighted words.
It’s a daunting task, but I look at each instance and see how they fit into that context. If a word or phrase weakens the narrative, I change or remove it.
Quantifiers: abstract nouns (or noun phrases) meant to convey a vague number or impression, such as: very, a great deal of, a good deal of, a lot, many, much. The important word there is abstract, which shows a thought or idea that doesn’t have a physical or concrete existence.
Removing descriptors and quantifiers often strengthens the prose by eliminating the sense of vagueness. If they are necessary, I leave them. As Chuck Wendig said, words like “later,” or “everywhere,” or “never” or “alone” are also adverbs.
I don’t see myself reading a book written with no adverbs whatsoever.
Sometimes I feel married to a particular passage. Even so, certain words and phrases don’t add to the narrative and only serve to increase the wordiness. Used too freely, they make the story seem unreal, and that is something we don’t want. These are known as “weed words.”
Before I bother a professional editor with my work, I seek out the words I would flag as an editor, making what is called a “global search.”
Caution: if you are hasty or impatient, a global search can be dangerous. This is a boring, time-consuming task. Don’t take shortcuts. If you panic and choose to “Replace All,” you risk ruining your work.
The word “very” is a quantifier. It attracts abuse in writing groups and writers’ chat rooms and is considered a weed word.
Perhaps you decide to simply eliminate every instance of the word “very” because you have discovered you overuse it. You open the navigation pane and the advanced search dialog box. Next, you don’t key anything in the “Replace With” box, thinking this will eliminate the problem.
Before you click “replace all,” consider three common words that have the letters v-e-r-y in their makeup:
- Every
- Everyone
- Everything
A hard truth about weed words is that they are often components of larger words.
Examine the context. Have you used the word “actually” in a conversation? You may want to keep it, as dialogue must sound natural, and people use that word when speaking.
However, if you have used “actually” to describe an object, it’s probably unnecessary.
Context is everything. Take the time to look at each example of the offending words and change them individually. You have already spent a year or more writing that novel. Why not take a few days to do the job right?
There is no quick way to do this. Every aspect of editing must be done with the human eye, patience, and attention to detail.
Feel free to copy the above image and save it to your files as a .png or .jpeg, and also the modifiers as connectors image, above right.
As I have mentioned before, editing programs are available, some free, and some for an annual fee. Your word processing program has spell check, which can help or hinder you. Grammarly is an editing program I use for checking my own work. Unfortunately, these programs are unable to see the context of the work they are analyzing.
We define context as the parts of a written or spoken statement that precede or follow a specific word or passage, usually influencing its meaning or effect.
A person with limited knowledge of grammar and mechanics won’t benefit from relying on Grammarly or any other editing program for advice. This is because these programs operate by algorithms and finite rules.
The program will often strongly suggest you insert an unneeded article or change a word to one that is clearly not the right one for that situation. I recommend investing in the Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation. Look things up and learn how grammar works.
I don’t mind taking the time to visit each problem and resolve them one at a time. I see this as part of my job, just what an author does to make sure her work is finished to the best of her ability.
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PREVIOUS POSTS IN THIS SERIES:
How the Written universe works part 1: the connecting particle
How the Written universe works part 2: the physics of conversation
How the Written Universe Works part 3: Lay, Lie, Laid
How the Written Universe Works part 4: Relativity and Possessives
How the Written Universe Works part 5: ellipsis, em dash, hyphen, semicolon
Credits and Attributions:
[1] The Danger of Writing Advice from Industry Professionals, by Chuck Wendig, Terribleminds, The Ramble, http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2017/12/12/the-danger-of-writing-advice-from-industry-professionals/ ©2017. Accessed 25 April 2022.
Authors need to understand the rules of how the language we write in works. When we are just starting out, we might have a grip on the basics, but we don’t understand how or when to use the rare punctuations.
This bring us to creative punctuation, such as the symbol “!?.” An exclamation point followed by a question mark, these mutant morsels of madness are called “interrobangs.”
The semicolon. This joining punctuation is not complicated once you know the one rule about when to use semicolons:
Compound sentences combine two separate ideas (clauses) into one compact package. A comma should be placed before a conjunction only if it is at the beginning of an independent clause. So, use the comma before the conjunction (and, but, or) if the clauses are standalone sentences. If one of them is not a standalone sentence, it is a dependent clause, and you do not add the comma.
Explain why you want that particular grammatical no-no to stand, and your editor will most likely understand. If you know the rule you are breaking, you will be better able to explain why you are doing so.
However, we can learn a great deal from books embodying poorly executed plots and badly scripted dialogue.
The first books of the series establish a science of magic. One can either use chaotic magic or ordered magic. Although some mages can only use one side or the other, the most powerful mages can manipulate both sides of the magic. The entire series explores this concept well. It is a well-planned magic system, with good rules.
Structurally, the books in this subseries feel like he knew how to end it but struggled to fill in the arc. Past events and conversations get repeated verbatim to every new character. Long passages of remembering and agonizing over what is done and dusted fluffs up the narrative.
To me, book 21 reads as if (while books 19 and 20 were in the publishing gauntlet) he still had to fluff up the ending to make book 21 long enough to be considered a novel. The evidence of a lack of genuine inspiration is the absurd “scar” the protagonist is left with after winning an unbelievable victory and nearly dying.
Everyone, even your favorite author, writes a stinker now and then. 
Or, in some cases, as in the book I am focusing on today, it takes us back to the world we thought we left behind.
How do we survive when who we are is not the person our family expects us to be?
Judy’s writing achievements include two one-act plays that paced among the top three winners in national competitions and were staged in Colorado in 2005 and 2015. She was commissioned to write a ninety-minute program for Stage Left Theater in Salida for the 2010 winter holiday season. She describes herself as a glass-half-full, gay Christian and enjoys traveling—whether exploring faraway places or nearby towns. Judy and her wife managed a real estate appraisal business for eighteen years in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and following retirement, relocated to Olympia.
Artist: Frans Hals (1582/1583–1666)
It deals with things like the mass of objects, the speed at which they travel, how speed and mass are converted to energy, and how mass warps the fabric of space and time.
But what about “It?” Here, we are dealing with possession by the inanimate. We don’t need an exorcist, although a good maid service would resolve a great deal here at Casa del Jasperson. But in this case, we are referencing something owned by the inanimate:
In the case of number 4, the sentence would be stronger without it. Most of the time, the prose is made stronger when the word “that” is cut and not replaced with anything. I say most, but not all the time.
In the written narrative, the many forms of this verb are what 
“Lay” is a transitive verb that refers to putting something in a horizontal position. At the same time, “lie” is an intransitive verb that refers to being in a flat position.
To lie is an intransitive verb: it shows action, and the subject of the sentence engages in that action, but nothing is being acted upon (the verb has no direct object).
The verb that means “to recline” is “to lie,” not “to lay.” If we are talking about the act of reclining, we use “lie,” not “lay.” “When I have a headache, I lie down.”
All around us, gravity works in hidden ways. Gravity on a small scale keeps everything securely stuck to the surface of Planet Earth.
Creating memorable characters is the goal of all authors. After all, who would read a book with bland and uninteresting dialogue? Dialogue is where most information is given to the characters and the reader. However, when we are just beginning to write, many of us are confused about how to punctuate conversations. It’s not that complicated. Here are four rules to remember:
When you envision your characters in conversation, you must think about what the word natural means. People don’t only use their words to communicate. Bodies and faces tell us a great deal about a person’s mood and what they feel.
For this reason, we don’t want to inject an excess of flushing, smirking, eye-rolling, or shrugging into the story. Those actions have a specific use in conveying the mood, but anything used too frequently becomes a crutch.
First up is the particle. In grammar, a particle is a word with a specific purpose that depends on the words around it. It is a function word that is always associated with another word or phrase to impart meaning.
Today’s readers have no patience with Tolkien’s style of paragraph-long compound sentences composed of clause after clause divided by conjunctions, commas, and semicolons.
I try to limit idioms and phrasal verbs to speech, and then only to that of one character. When used in conversation, they sound natural, but even there, I go lightly. I want to show a specific character’s personality but don’t want my prose to feel cliché and overdone.
Artist: 
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 