Rosemary Cole's Blog: The Sweet Torture of Writing

Have you ever noticed a flock of birds flying, or a school of fish swimming? They all seem to change direction simultaneously, even though you didn't hear one of them call out, "Okay, guys, left on three!" Yet they do it with such perfect coordination that not one wingtip (or fin) bumps another. Somehow they all just know.

This seems to be the way our language behaves, as well. It's as if there was some huge, secret conference at which everyone decided that we would start using certain words or phrases in a certain way. But there was no conference. Somehow, everybody just started doing it a new way.

Problem is, "everybody" doesn't seem to know the new way is wrong.

This brings me to my next grammar peeve, which is one of these sea changes that just happened in the last few years.

"People that don't know about this don't know grammar."

WRONG!!!

It's "People WHO don't know about this..."

There are two basic types of relative pronouns. The first type (that, which) refers to THINGS.

The car THAT is the fastest will win.

The other type refers to people.

The runner WHO is fastest will win.

When did people suddenly become things? Because everywhere, constantly, I see THAT used to refer to a person. I even see it used like this: "The person that..." when it should be "The person who..."

Take these famous quotes:

He who dares, wins.
He who laughs last, laughs best.

Imagine them with "that" instead of "who." Doesn't work too well, does it?

Or even from Harry Potter: He Who Must Not Be Named.

Wouldn't it sound silly as He That Must Not Be Named?

It's the same thing with using "lay" instead of "lie." Suddenly everyone, including the writers of a medical health pamphlet that I came across, is using lay instead of lie. To quote a popular song:

If I lay here (should be lie)
If I just lay here (wrong again)
Will you lie with me and just forget the world (got it right that time, mate)

Well, I feel better now that I've gotten that grammar peeve off my chest. Thanks for listening!

Rosemary

 DING-dong.
 “Can I help you?”
 “Good afternoon, ma’am—Grammar Police. We need to ask you a couple of questions about an alleged crime that occurred at this address last night. May we come in?”
 “Oh—er, yes. Come in. What’s this all about?”
 “Ma’am, did you or did you not use the phrase: ‘they sprung up from behind the furniture’ in an email last night when describing a surprise birthday party your friends threw for you? And did you not later on send the following tweet: ‘I got 27 present’s’?”
 “You’ve been monitoring my internet activity? You don’t have the right to do that!”
 “We have the authority under the Language Security Act when certain key words and phrases are flagged by our computers. Now will you answer the questions? Just the facts, ma’am.”
 “What about my rights?”
 “I think we’d better finish this conversation downtown, ma’am. Will you come with us?”

Okay, so maybe this little fictional scenario is a bit extreme. I certainly don’t advocate any such rigid, iron enforcement of grammar rules (or anything else for that matter) but I am deeply concerned about the erosion of our language. I implore all of you to do your little bit—be brave enough to use proper English when all around you, others are slaughtering it word by word. Everyone seems to agree that it’s the computer era that is responsible for this, but I have noticed, since finally joining the twenty-first century and getting a smartphone, that when texting it’s very easy to simply select most words, properly spelled out, from the suggestion bar. So why do ppl still insist on usg brokin, mispelt English? The phone even puts in apostrophes for us, which even I probably wouldn’t bother with otherwise *hangs head and self-flagellates for a minute*.

Okay, enough of that. On with Grammar Peeves #5!

In Grammar Peeves #2, I addressed the issue of punctuating dialogue properly. The following set of examples says it all quite handily:

"It’s time," Jack said, "to get to work on our plan."
"It's time to go," Jack said. "There's nothing more to do here."
"It's time to go; there's nothing more to do here."

The next big issue for writers when it comes to dialogue is proper paragraph construction.

Here’s the main rule: The actions and the dialogue of the SAME ACTOR (i.e., Jack in the above examples) almost always go in the SAME PARAGRAPH. This is not a hard and fast rule, however. If you prefer to start an actor’s next words or actions in the next paragraph for, say, emphasis, or because the actor is changing the subject, that’s fine. But here’s what I see over and over in newbie writing:

Jack peered over at Jane.
“I wouldn’t do it that way,” he said.
Jane looked up in surprise.
“Why not?”
Jack sighed and looked out the window.
“It’s going to get you in big trouble.”
“Why?”
Jack smiled.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
He shrugged mysteriously and left the room.

There seems to be a widespread belief out there that everything needs to go on its own line. But it ain’t necessarily so!

If you pay close attention in that example, you can suss out who is saying and doing what. But the reader shouldn’t have to do this. The reader shouldn’t notice anything but the ideas, impressions and feelings the author is trying to evoke. The story, in other words.

Let me rewrite the above example using the paragraph rule I introduced above.

Jack peered at Jane. "I wouldn't do it that way," he said.
Jane looked up in surprise. "Why not?"
Jack sighed and looked out the window. "It's going to get you in big trouble."
"Why?"
"That's for me to know and you to find out." He stood up, giving her a mysterious smile, and left the room.

Notice that I left the dialogue tag off Jane's Why? You can do that if there are only two people speaking and the conversation is moving back and forth between them, but not with a group, and only when it is instantly clear who is speaking. Otherwise, you need a tag or some kind of hint as to who is talking.

You might have spotted another little trick I used: The action of a speaker in the same paragraph can substitute for the dialogue tag. Since it was Jack who stood up immediately after speaking, you know it was he who spoke.

On the other hand, I often see writers bunch up different characters’ dialogue and actions in the same paragraph. The general rule is: If a new actor speaks or acts, put it in a new paragraph.

The two Labrador puppies tumbled together in the hay, mock-fighting. Chocolate pulled free and cocked an ear. “The farmer’s coming!” he exclaimed. His sister, Vanilla, looked out. “Is he bringing us a bone?”

As soon as Vanilla acted or spoke, the writer should have created a new paragraph for her. Keep her actions and words all together in the same paragraph.

The two Labrador puppies tumbled together in the hay, mock-fighting.
Chocolate pulled free and cocked an ear. “The farmer’s coming!” he exclaimed.
His sister, Vanilla, looked out. “Is he bringing us a bone?”

You may notice that I started a new paragraph for Chocolate. To me, this is an individual actor starting something new; thus, a new paragraph is called for. But you don’t necessarily have to do that. As always, it’s not a hard and fast rule and there are exceptions. If you want to express multiple quick reactions to something, for example. You don’t have to sweat this rule; if it feels right to keep it together, do it. You’re the author. Just try to keep a single character's words and actions together in the same paragraph.

Again, this is not about making sure the reader knows. Of course most of them can figure it all out from the text. The point is, you don’t want to distract them, not even for one second. This takes the reader out of the story and kills the pace.

And that's it for now! If you have any questions about dialogue, or any grammar questions at all, fire away in the comments (this link will take you back), and I’ll do my best to answer.

Until next time, happy reading (and writing)!

It's me, Rosemary, back again with another grammar peeve. Every day (note: 2 words) I see instances of word misuse. Bloodied phrases and abused words, broken and sprawled at the scene of the crime… which more often than not can be found in magazines, on the Internet, on advertisements and notices, and in SELF-PUBLISHED BOOKS BY NEW AUTHORS.

Have you committed any of these heinous acts? Watch out, the Grammar Police are coming for you!

Here are a few of the most shocking types of word crimes: the ones that involve homophones [homo = same; phone = sound]:

It's not PEAKED my interest or PEEKED my interest, it’s PIQUED my interest.

I didn’t PEAK around the door, I PEEKED around the door.

It’s not POURED over the map, it’s PORED over the map.

You’re not stronger THEN him, you’re stronger THAN him.

You steer your horse by the REINS; the king REIGNS over you. And it RAINS a lot on the plains.

You HOARD your gold; the barbarians form a great HORDE.

You take a BREATH, and you also BREATHE (note the “e” on the end of the word, which often seems to be missing).

SHOULD OF, COULD OF, WOULD OF should of been—er, have been—SHOULD HAVE, COULD HAVE, WOULD HAVE.

And now to get into some other infractions:

You go to the gym EVERY DAY, but you wear your EVERYDAY outfit. It’s only one word when it’s an adjective, describing something. Otherwise, it’s two words.

Here’s one that really irks me: I don’t LAY down, I LIE down. But I LAY an object on the table. Granted, this one can be really confusing. Lie and lay are two different verbs.

TO LIE is an action a person can take. (We’ll leave out of this discussion the meaning of telling an untruth). I lie down on the floor. The verb conjugation is as follows:

Present: lie
Past perfect: LAY
Present participle: lying
Past participle: lain

TO LAY is something one does TO or WITH something else. Example: I lay the book on the table.

Present: LAY
Past perfect: laid
Present participle: laying
Past participle: laid

What makes it rather confusing is that the past tense of lie is the same word as the present tense of lay: LAY. To help clarify this, here are more examples for you.

TO LIE:
I lie on the bed. He is lying on the floor.
Lie down on the ground, now!
She lay on the couch last night.
The kids had lain on the ground last week.

TO LAY:
Present: I lay the blanket on the sand. The kids are laying the table for lunch.
Lay your gun on the ground, now!
He laid his gun on the ground.
She had laid out all the instruments before the operation.

Note that all of these “to lay” examples involve doing something WITH or TO something else. That’s because TO LAY is a TRANSITIVE verb, whereby action is transferred to an object. Therefore an object is always required. You make a bed, you lay the table.

And that's it for this episode of Grammar Peeves. Hope it helps!

Where do your ideas come from?

This must be the question most frequently asked of authors. I believe there are two sources for ideas. The first, of course, is a person’s own imagination. These types of ideas are strongly influenced by our personality type and how we see the world. Someone who is more pragmatic, concrete or attracted to the mechanical might have the sort of inborn ideas that lead to stories about futuristic machines or habitats. My personality type tends to be idealistic and romantic. One of my earliest ideas—which I haven’t actually used in my writing yet—is about a girl with immense psionic powers, the product of a secret breeding program, who saves humanity from itself.

The second source of ideas is other stories. Yes, authors definitely feed off each other’s ideas. Yet it’s not at all derivative or plagiaristic, because the elements we pick up from another’s writing go into a kind of simmering pot in our heads. They cook there for a while, combining with original ideas and each other, and suddenly one day, up pops a fresh new idea with our own unique stamp on it.

I’ll give you an example. Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved space station stories, from Babylon 5 to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Downbelow Station by the great C.J. Cherryh sank to the bottom of my consciousness like a stone, where it still lives to this day. I often thought of the fictional people on that space station, struggling to make a living and raise families in the midst of interstellar war. I thought: what if (yes, this is the essential idea question!) there was a young mother, an asteroid miner dealing with harsh circumstances (quite possibly including abuse by some huge, faceless megacorp) who, while passing through such a space station, just quietly “lost” a kid she no longer was able to support and was too stressed out to cope with? I thought of the dark underbelly of Deep Space Nine, the lowest levels of the station where the law had less of a reach, and I figured such throwaway kids would probably congregate there, trying to avoid station security personnel. And the germ of an idea was born. It expanded when combined with other idea elements, such as super-powers and alien invasions, to create something altogether new and different. I can’t wait to write this one! But you see my point, how ideas feed and spin off each other, merging and changing until a new concept is born—unique, but with many existing ideas feeding into it.

Until next time, happy reading!

Hello everyone,

I'm pleased and excited to announce that today marks the official launch of The X-Variant!

To those who have been waiting patiently to buy the book, as of the wee hours of April 14, Eastern Time, it is available on Amazon as an eBook here, and should become available today or tomorrow as a trade paperback (click the button that says "see all editions").

The special introductory prices are $0.99 for the eBook and $7.25 for the paperback (which is the lowest price CreateSpace will allow me to set it). These prices will continue through the end of April only, so grab your cheap copy now!

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who has been helping me with reviews and marketing, especially Jolanda, Nancy (The Avid Reader) and Cranky (The Book Curmudgeon) for cross-posting your reviews to my book's Amazon page! For those who still need to do that, I'd sure appreciate it. You can use the link above to buy the book or post a review.

Thanks ever so much, and enjoy!

I see misuse and abuse of the English language every day, and every time, I cringe. Just as when you see an animal being abused, you want to run up and rescue the poor bit of language, fix it up and make it healthy again. I wish we had a SPEL to report these abuses to - a Society for the Protection of the English Language!

The worst part is that it constantly threatens to become accepted - mangled, broken rules replacing the old ways. Okay, yes, language does have to be flexible to some degree and change over time with changes in usage. But do you really want to see the following misuses adopted into our beautiful language?

What I'm thinking of today is the way the tenses of SIMPLE PAST and PAST PERFECT have been getting horribly mixed up. I've seen it mostly in new authors' manuscripts and in independent authors' published (and poorly edited) books. Are you one of these? It's a NO-NO!

"The end-of-class bell rung." No! Past tense: should be RANG.

"She sung a hymn." Nope. Past tense: should be SANG. Or past perfect: She HAD SUNG.

I saw this next one often from doctors and other healthcare professionals, believe it or not, when I used to type medical and psychiatric reports:

"He had drank alcohol over the weekend."

Here we have horribly mixed tenses. If you want simple past, it should be: He drank alcohol. If you want past perfect, it should be: he HAD DRUNK alcohol.

He drinks
He drank
He had drunk

She sings
She sang
She had sung

The bell rings
The bell rang
The bell had rung

So as an author or writer, when should you use past vs past perfect? Authors constantly do this incorrectly, but as many fiction novels are written in the past tense, it's even more important to get it right.

Okay, the simple past is just that - simple. It's for things that happened before now.

Let's say that John is our main character. He's going to meet someone in town, fall in love and have an adventure or whatever.

"John woke late, got up and shuffled over to the refrigerator. He was feeling rough--just a hair of the dog was what he needed. But there was no beer left. He got in his car and drove into town to buy some more."

Okay, pretty clear so far. Except what if you want to talk about stuff that happened BEFORE John's past? All this stuff happening with John is happening in the past. So in a way, the past is John's "now." So if you want to refer to something that happened BEFORE John woke up, what tense do you use? If you use simple past, it could get mixed up with the "now" past, so to speak. The reader might get confused as to what happened when.

"John woke up late, got up and shuffled over to the refrigerator. He drank a lot of beer and was feeling rough--just a hair of the dog was what he needed. But there was no beer left. He got in his car and drove into town to buy some more."

Reading that, you're not sure if John drank beer in the morning when he got up, or was he referring to a previous episode?

This is when the past perfect comes in. It's for a past that happened BEFORE another past.

"John woke up late, got up and shuffled over to the refrigerator. He had drunk a lot of beer and was feeling rough--just a hair of the dog was what he needed. But there was no beer left. He got in his car and drove into town to buy some more."

See how that clarifies it? How about this one:

"John spotted Mary walking to town and pulled over to pick her up. They dated often but he wasn't sure how he felt about her."

With this wording, you're not sure if they had been dating at one time or were still dating now. Just slipping in the word "had" before "dated" places it firmly in the past before this one.

There are clue words that tell you when to use past perfect. These are words/phrases like: last week, last year, before, until now, previously, etc. In general, use past perfect for things that happened before the "current" past events.

"I walked to the library, then remembered I HAD left my books at home."

"Driving home, I passed my friend on the street and waved. That was odd - I HAD passed her on my way out, as well."

I hope this helps.

I'd love to hear any questions or comments!

Okay, so here we go with another grammar peeve. I hope I'm not coming across as some kind of grammar Nazi, but these things bug me so much! I just gotta get it out of my system.

This is especially for all of you aspiring authors out there. I'm trying to do two things: save your editor a lot of headache, and save you all the extra money you won't have to pay your editor to fix all your writing!

GRAMMAR PEEVE #2: NOT PUNCTUATING DIALOGUE PROPERLY.

In my time so far as an indie author and editor, I have seen countless manuscripts in which the dialogue is not punctuated properly. Dialogue, or the words a character speaks, are enclosed in quotation marks (except in Great Britain and certain other places, where they are enclosed in inverted commas or what we Yanks call apostrophes). That much we all seem to get.

Let me set up a sample sentence, unpunctuated.

"It's time to go" Jack said

Now here's where the problem seems to lie for many writers. What punctuation mark is used after the word "go"?

ONLY A COMMA IS USED HERE. NOTHING ELSE*.

"It's time to go," Jack said.

*As with everything, of course, there are exceptions. These exceptions are the question mark, the exclamation mark, and the ellipsis. These can also be used depending on the effect you want.

"Is it time to go?" Jack asked.
"For cryin' out loud, it's time to go!" Jack said.
"It's time to go..." Jack said (denotes uncertainty).

But it should NEVER be: "It's time to go." Jack said.

DO YOU DO THIS? You'd be shocked at how many writers do.

Okay, now let's look at a sentence that is interrupted by the dialogue tag instead of having it at the end. Here's an example sentence, again without punctuation.

"It is time" Jack said "to go to work"

You see how the dialogue tag interrupts the sentence? This is perfectly fine, but you must use the correct punctuation. Again, that dialog tag should be preceded only by a comma, never a period.

"It is time," Jack said, "to go to work."

Notice that the second half is NEVER CAPITALIZED. That is, the word "to" is in smalls, not a leading capital. This rule only holds when it's one sentence, however. When the dialogue tag is between two sentences, you must capitalize the new sentence. Example:

"It's time to go," Jack said. "There's nothing more to do here."

Usually when you start a new topic, that's a new sentence. If you wrote the sentence: "It's time to go, there's nothing more to do here" that would be technically incorrect. You should use a period or a semicolon to separate the sentences.

"It's time to go. There's nothing more to do here." OR
"It's time to go; there's nothing more to do here."

But don't connect sentences with commas, that's a big NO-NO!

How do you know if it's a separate sentence? Speak the phrase aloud. If it makes sense all by itself, it's a sentence. Here are a couple more examples for you.

"I think," Joe said, "he is going to be sick."
"I wonder," Debbie said, "what is on the other side of that hill." (notice no question mark here - it's not a question!)
"That's not the right way," Mark said. "We should have turned left back there."

Okay, that's it for Grammar Peeves for this week; I hope it helps (notice the semicolon)!

Any questions, be sure to ask and I'll do my best to answer them for you. :)

I know it’s a bit unusual, but in my blog post on Goodreads this week I am reviewing a movie. Well, it is actually based on a book. The Door began as a Hungarian novel written in 1987, later translated into English. I never actually read the book, but I really loved the movie and I'm reviewing it here because I think it's a great example of the kind of story that makes a compelling novel. Filmed in English, it is a character-driven, intelligent drama about a successful novelist and her unusual relationship with her elderly, hardbitten housekeeper (powerfully acted by Helen Mirren).

I believe it takes a fierce kind of bravery to see life as it really is, to embrace even its most fearsome aspects. Most of us go through life avoiding these moments. We hurry away, averting our eyes, pretending its not happening. When someone we know suffers or dies, we go through all the expected motions, but often we don’t allow ourselves to truly confront it or acknowledge our true feelings about it. We’re often not honest with ourselves about our feelings, and we certainly don't tell others our real feelings about these things.

Not so with Mirren's character Emerence. This humble washerwoman teaches a novelist, of all people, about what people really are--and what they really need from others. A beautiful movie, filmed expertly and unsentimentally. Emerence would approve.

Having spent some years doing various types of editing, I find that I'm far more distracted by grammar goofs than I used to be. Or could it be that writing and grammar has gotten worse recently? In any case, it's getting to me so much that I've decided to write a series of short blog posts featuring the writing errors I see every day. I spot them in books, advertising, letters, and articles published by teachers and other professionals. These are grammar no-nos that really bug me. Do you do this?

GRAMMAR PEEVE #1: Using an apostrophe with a plural noun. NO! Apostrophes are used with possessive nouns, not plurals.
WRONG: I have ten new follower's on Twitter.
Correct: I have ten new followers on Twitter.
Correct: My new follower's name is April. (singular possessive)
Correct: My followers' preference is science fiction. (plural possessive)

Thanks for letting me rant about my pet peeve!

Doing some heavy rewriting. I thought I'd already done that and even did some final polishing, but beta reader input (bless their hearts) made me realize it needed a LOT more. I ended up cutting most of chapters 5 and 6. While I disagree with some of what the BRs said, I think they're right that it drags in places, and that I tend to over-explain and over-describe. That old info-dump demon keeps rearing its ugly head. I'm trying to tell the story from the point of view of the characters and not some invisible narrator. This is SO much harder when you're writing science fiction. I need to learn how to fit exposition of my world into what's happening instead of standing back and explaining a setting or event.

My critique partner says yeah, writing from a limited narrator's perspective can be tricky sometimes. It comes down to what the characters know about their given time and place.

He tends to stick with one character's POV throughout instead of jumping around to different ones, so a lot of the time, he says, his protagonist is in the dark and the info comes to her in some way, which gives him an excuse to babble about some important world facts.

So I'm working on rewriting this tiresome narrator voice I've got and recasting the scene from the more immediate viewpoint of my main character (MC). I also have a few scenes from secondary character POVs. I feel this helps provide interest and variety. Although I'm not using super-tight third person limited, I'm trying to be very careful about shifting out of the head of the person I'm on, so I was surprised that one of my BRs thought I was writing in third omni and shifting POVs. Maybe he meant all those terrible narrator interjections, which I am in the process of fixing now.

With any critical input on your book, however, you have to measure everything against your own convictions. Readers tend to disagree and contradict each other, so you can't follow every bit of advice. At some point, you have to go with what you feel deep inside is right.

Happy writing!