In my last manuscript I cut out 100 pages of text simply by tightening. I didn’t cut any chapters or pages, of even very many whole paragraphs. I tightened and tightened and tightened. Some of this tightening came through search and destroy techniques and the result was a leaner, more active manuscript.
♥ YA Novelists Pushing the Boundaries of the Genre and Writing from the Heart ♥
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Search and Destroy: Word War--by Ellen Jensen Abbott
In my last manuscript I cut out 100 pages of text simply by tightening. I didn’t cut any chapters or pages, of even very many whole paragraphs. I tightened and tightened and tightened. Some of this tightening came through search and destroy techniques and the result was a leaner, more active manuscript.
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Yo Queer-O Un Kervaza (Brian Katcher)
You never know the value of words until you can't use 'em. I took three years of Spanish in high school, but didn't pay a lick of attention. I'd never use that stuff.
Ten years later I was standing in a Mexican hardware store, desperately wishing I knew how to say 'toilet plunger' in Spanish.
I lived in Mexico from 1998-2001, teaching English to kindergartners. And while my students could generally figure out what I was trying to say, it was when dealing with adults that I had the most difficult time communicating. Even when I mastered the basics of conversational Spanish, problems would arise. Here are some of the best mistranslations by myself, and my American/Canadian colleagues.
Your child is having trouble because he's lazy = Your child is having trouble because he's ugly.
Please, speak slower = Please, speak farther away. (They kept backing up)
The toys were cheap = The toys were drunk.
I don't wear a jacket because I'm hot = I don't wear a jacket because I'm horny.
I can't find (street name) = I want to buy a screwdriver.
I don't want this cucumber = I don't want my penis.
Of course, it worked in reverse. EFL kids would often write such gems as Who cut the cheese in here? or I beat my meat and it is good.
Recently, my latest book, THE IMPROBABLE THEORY OF ANA AND ZAK, was released in Spanish.
Yes, the version for Spain is different than the Latin American edition. But it brings me great pleasure to get letters from readers in South America. I'd love to visit my publisher in Argentina one day and tell him Mi tio esta enfermo, pero la calle es verde.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
I can spell it even though I can't say it (Jennifer R. Hubbard)
The first one I remember mangling was "machine." As a precocious young reader, I found a book in the house and began reading it out loud to my mother, to show her how well I could do. She interrupted me to ask what on earth a "ma-CHYNE" (pronounced with a hard "ch" and rhyming with "line") was. When I showed her the word, she said, "Oh, ma-SHEEN!"
Then there was "anxiety." I knew the word "anxious," pronounced "ANK-shus," so naturally my new word was "ANK-shuh-tee," right? I nearly laughed when I heard a classmate pronounce it "ang-ZYE-uh-tee." There wasn't even a G or a Z in it! Where did he come up with that crazy pronunciation?
As it turned out, he got that crazy pronunciation from real life, and I was wrong.
Recently, I discovered that "unguent," which I had been mentally pronouncing as "UN-jent," is really "UN-gwent," an awkward-sounding word that still makes me shudder. I like my erroneous version better.
But hey, I still refuse to use a soft G in "gif." I will go on mentally pronouncing "gif" like "gift" without a T for as long as possible.
Today, when re-encountering the word "balustrade," I realized I don't really know how to pronounce it. Is it "BAL-you-strahd" (my first instinct, influenced by French), or "BAL-you-strayed," or something else?
Be right back.
Neither guess was quite right. My dictionary says, "BAL-uh-strayed." Now I have to retrain that little voice in my head that mentally pronounces words.
I wonder how many other words I'm saying wrong?
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Memory
Friday, March 25, 2016
Words. Magical, funny, and forbidden. -- Jen Doktorski
Stephen King wrote that in On Writing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSlbEq0roEM
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
The Elasticity of Language (by Patty Blount)
Friday, March 18, 2016
An Apocalyptically Thrilling Post (Alissa Grosso)
Why apocalyptically, you ask? I don't really know. You would think that I must have been some very dark and disturbed person to pick such a bleak sort of word as my favorite word. Why not rainbow or unicorn or something more bright and hopeful? I guess I did have a bit of a dark streak, and this was at a time when Winona Ryder was basically the teenage role model, and she was busy making movies like Beetlejuice, Heathers and Edward Scissorhands that tended to more apocalyptically cool then shiny happy rainbow cool.
Speaking of movies, I remember once reading the word apocalyptically in a short movie review in the newspaper and was so thrilled that I had to clip out the review and paste it into my journal so that I could save it forever and ever, and, in fact, it is still somewhere in storage in my attic, but I have to apologize for not taking the time to dig it out so that I could quote it verbatim. I can tell you that it was a review for a movie called Twister, no not the one with Helen Hunt and the flying cows. This was a way cooler and stranger movie with Crispin Glover and a bunch of colorful characters trapped in a house during a tornado. It's a brilliantly weird movie. You should watch it. Here's a trailer for it that I found on YouTube:
As this was in a time when the movies you saw were limited to what was playing at your local theater, was available in your local video store or happened to be aired on television, it would be years before I'd finally get to see Twister. I wasn't disappointed.
Anyway, with words it's not just what they mean but how they sound, and apocalyptically is a truly beautiful sounding word. J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote an essay titled "English and Welsh" in which he praised the phrase cellar door for how beautiful it sounded, and he wasn't the first. Apparently the phrase also appeared in a 1903 novel called Gee-Boy by Cyrus Lauron Hopper in a passage about someone who collected words for their beautiful sounds. Cellar door joining the likes of fanfare and pimpernel and Sphinx. In my humble opinion, apocalyptically sounds even better than all of those pretty words.
It was always my assumption that I would write the sorts of books where I would make use of the word apocalyptically on a regular basis. Then somewhere after I had abandoned 20 or so unfinished novels and completed a couple of more brutally (see what I did there!) awful ones, I read a book by one of my literary heroes. In Stephen King's On Writing there's a part where he rails against the use of adverbs, and it made me think back to my one-time favorite word.
Alissa Grosso has written three young adult novels that don't use the word apocalyptically even once. You can find out more about them and her at alissagrosso.com.
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Searching for Wordlessness by Jody Casella
choosing words and thinking about words and sometimes even dreaming about words
when I am writing novels and blog posts and interviews and articles, or when I am reading books or scrolling through news online or clicking the click-bait-y headlines or the crappy comments (no matter how much I tell myself NEVER to do that) or perusing recipes and shopping catalogs and Facebook posts and Tweets and the titles of Instagram pictures and the back of the cereal box.
My own thoughts are a stream of endless words,
a tumbling tangled mix of dialogue snippets and To-Do lists and what I'm making for dinner and worries over my kids away at colleges on opposite ends of the country, and never mind the latest toxic stew of political speeches which sends me off on a hopeless tangent of despair for humanity,
and sometimes I want all the words to stop
so I can feel silence and just Be for a moment
wordless
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Word Games (Stephanie Kuehnert)
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Horror - The word that (literally) scares people away
Friday, March 11, 2016
In defense of prescriptivism
Thursday, March 10, 2016
I Know Your Book Is Shortlisted For A Prize, But... (Sydney Salter)
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
School House Rock Rocked the Words! By Kimberly Sabatini
Monday, March 7, 2016
My Favorite--And Least Favorite--Publishing Words and Phrases (Joy Preble)
Dead, stuffed deer in rowboat.** |
Friday, March 4, 2016
Rainbows and Unicorns, Oh My! (Bill Cameron)
Greetings! New guy here. My name is Bill, and I write stuff. (That's me to the right: Bear Head Man). I’d like to open by thanking Patty and Holly for inviting me to join the team here at YA Outside the Lines. It’s an honor and a privilege to be included in such an amazing group.
And such a fun topic to start with! Words. Favorite words. Scary words. Words that make me cringe and words that make me grin. Mostly I love words, any words. They are our tools, after all, the foundation of our craft as writers.
But, for me, there’s one in particular that falls in the cringe category—and, no, it’s not “moist.” My cringing is is probably a tad ironic, since this word is always used as a term of unrestrained support for a book or story. It’s a word that means a book is a must-read, a book that will grip you and won’t let go unti you’ve turned the last page—if then. It’s—
Unputdownable.
I know, I know. Author sacrilege! But in my ear, it’s clunky and unlovely and feels oh so forced. And yet, I know I should love this word. Heck, if a reader described one of my books thusly, I’d absolutely shut my yap and be thrilled. But deep inside—and I can’t help this—I confess I’d wish they put it another way.
I suspect it’s one of those words that came about because it takes up a lot less space than “You won’t be able to put this book down!” If I’m a graphic designer tasked with placing a blurb on some cover art, unputdownable is assuredly easier to fit than an elegantly worded declaration full of dependent clauses and requiring multiple line breaks. I get it, I get it. Still.
Now, if we’re talking about words I like, well, you’re in for a long, long list. My gift to you in this, my inaugural post at YAOTL, is to not share them all. But there are a few honorable mentions, words I make a point of sneaking into almost every novel or story I write.
The first is more phrase than word, but I think it counts. Starting with my second book, “rainbows and unicorns” makes a regular appearance in my work—not an easy task when you write gritty, realist crime fiction. It started as a joke from my editor at the time, Alison Dasho. “I'd like to see you fit rainbows and unicorns into this noir procedural.”
Gauntlet thrown.
When I was writing about a grizzled cop in his 50s, finding an appropriate spot for rainbows and unicorns was a genuine challenge. But it didn’t get any easier when I turned my attention to young adult. Joey Getchie, 16-year-old orphan and foster kid, isn’t the kind of fellow who frolicks through sun-dappled meadows made fresh by a cleansing rain. But I’m not one to wilt in the face of a charging unicorn, so even Joey has a run-in with a rainbow and hornéd equine or two.
Ultimately, the best writing is about the finding the right words for the situation at hand. In that way, unputdownable may not be my first choice, but it could still be the best choice. Rainbows and unicorns are fun, but I would never force them into a story if they simply didn’t make sense. Another favorite word of mine, fulvous, didn’t make it into Property of the State because the word didn’t work with the voice of my narrator. Joey Getchie would have given me the laser-powered side-eye if I tried to sneak fulvous into his vocabulary.
What’s great is the wealth of choice we have at our disposal as writers. Can’t abide by the word moist? Don’t let that dampen your spirits. The magic of language is it’s just dripping with alternatives. We just need to find the words that wet our particular whistle.
Thursday, March 3, 2016
THE POWER OF POSITIVE WORDS (HOLLY SCHINLDER)
I recently received this utterly lovely review from Kirkus...the very first trade review to come in for SPARK (coming out from HarperTeen this May) and the best review I've ever received from Kirkus:
Quin hopes her drama-class senior project can save a local theater and change the course of history. "At Verona High, drama is for the shy." Quin and her classmates in Advanced Drama are "senior nobodies" who would prefer to blend into the scenery. But their teacher (who happens to be Quin's mom) wants to use their senior project to save the Avery, a local theater in their small town that was shuttered 70 years ago after a pair of star-crossed lovers, Emma and Nick, died on its stage. Reluctantly, the class begins to work on the project—a production of Anything Goes—with Quin as the director. At the same time, Quin learns that the Avery is somehow beginning to revive itself. She also discovers that her classmates Cass and Dylan are reliving the doomed romance of Emma and Nick. In Quin, Schindler has crafted a quick-witted, white protagonist who draws readers into her search for answers about her family's past as well as the Avery's. Scenes set in the past are rich with authentic voices and period detail, and Schindler's crisp prose flows easily between the past and the present. Even when it seems impossible for the show to go on, Schindler's imaginative story will have readers rooting for Quin and her classmates to "break a leg." A tale of love, family, and friendship, tailor-made for readers who believe in the mystery and magic of the theater.