What’s behind you?

The lockdown reveals us to ourselves in unexpected ways.

The ninevoices are used to getting together every fortnight. We thought: lockdown isn’t going to stop us.  So we first tried Skype (four voices, five faces, and most of the conversation consisting of “How do I turn the picture on?”).  Then we tried Zoom (eight faces, nine voices, thanks to some stalwart mobile-phone patching by Anita).  We’ll try Zoom again, if only because nine faces lends itself beautifully to a 3 x 3 grid, and no-one suddenly decamps to a corner and goes mute.

© Smartmeetings.com

Like everyone in the world who’s trying to keep in touch through Skype and Zoom and Facetime and Whatsapp video and Google Hangouts and lots of other clever apps, we’re discovering that it’s not just our voices and faces we’re presenting to the world.  It’s what’s in the background – our homes.  Admit it – you look at all those video phone-ins from journalists and presenters, and what you’re really thinking is: “I like your lamps” or “Gosh, you’re very traditional” or “Do you really have bookcases in your basement?”.

So I think we’ve all learned to pick our spots.  We position the laptop in the corner of a tidy room, or in front of the serious books, or angled towards the good curtains, or certainly away from the carnage of unwashed dishes in the kitchen.  We position the webcam at eye level or above, we face a window. We brush our hair carefully to disguise how we’re turning into Boris Johnson.  We’re learning to edit our lives to show ourselves to the world to best advantage.

Late night host Seth Meyers in his Covidic attic studio. Well jel.

Which makes me think: as writers, do we do the same?  In our writing, do we show our unmade beds and the curtain sagging from the runners? Do we reveal that we don’t mind dirty plates hanging round on a table for a week or two?  Or do we arrange the books on the shelf so that the Philip Roths hide the George RR Martins?  Is our writing a place where we present ourselves as a slightly different person?

© Yale climate connections

I do know that when a friend emailed that she planned to Facetime me in ten minutes, I hastily took off a jumper decorated with food stains, and rushed out to the garden to take the call, having first worked out which bit of foliage would look prettiest behind me.  After the call I went straight back indoors.  It was the worst kind of self-instagramming, but was somehow necessary to disguise the fact that the only way I could have had tidiness in shot behind me was to Facetime her while sitting on the loo.

How do YOU roll?  What’s behind you in the Zoom frame?  What does your writing carefully edit out?

Christine, who currently looks like

On Being A Pedant

Tags

apostrophes, Ed, George Bernard Shaw, Pedantry, Royal Tunbridge Wells, split infinitives, Tanya, The Oxford Comma

On Saturday mornings my other half and I usually stroll into Tunbridge Wells. It’s a pleasant walk alongside the Common and in spring there’s the glory of the municipal daffodils.

Yet on each journey I am affronted, disgusted even, by the lack of an apostrophe on the sign for Major York’s Road. I expect better from Royal Tunbridge Wells. 

Should such things bug me? My husband doesn’t care about Major Yorks Road, yet mutters darkly about split infinitives whenever he catches me using them. He will also place exclamation marks (plural, notice) in the margins of any drafts of mine where a sentence starts with And. Other people’s blood pressure rises at mention of the Oxford Comma.

You might like to see some of our previous thoughts on this often contentious subject.

• https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/10/19/grammar-gripes-less-and-fewer/,
• https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/punctuation-can-cost-millions/
• https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/a-plurality-of-grammars/
• https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/to-be-pedantic-or-not-to-be-pedantic-that-is-the-question/)

As writers we surely have a duty to defend our wonderful language and how it’s placed on the page. However, knowing what is correct, but deliberately bending the rules, can be excusable, and hopefully creative.

So, on that question of split infinitives, let me share something George Bernard Shaw wrote to his publishers:

There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of time to chasing split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman splits his infinitives when the sense demands it. I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly, or quickly to go, or to quickly go. The important thing is that he should go at once.

Your views on grammar pedantry are welcome. Don’t be shy, we’d love to hear from you!

 

Congrat…s!

Tags

Cliff Richard, Eurovision, neologisms, Paradigms, Pet hates, Rafael Nadal

For many of us there are new words or new usages that we love to hate – or maybe just hate. Some of us dislike the increasingly widened use of ‘curate’ (as in a museum, not an apprentice vicar!), or of ‘paradigm’ (I’m sure it has a proper meaning, even if what that is escapes me …). For me a recent one has been ‘Congrats!’. For some reason it has grated on me. Irritated me beyond measure.

Sir Cliff didn’t sing ‘Congrats!”. What would have come next – ‘And celebrats!’? I don’t think that’d have come second in Eurovision. Twenty-second, perhaps.

Which words or usages have this effect on you?

When you’re writing, can you bring yourself to put these words into the mouths of your characters? If you just hate the unliteral use of ‘literally’, would you make one of your characters use it as showing rather than telling an aspect of their characters? Or, perhaps, are you so annoyed by it that you wouldn’t want any piece of work with your name on it to contain this solecism? Tricky one, eh?

I’ve changed my mind on ‘Congrats!’, for two reasons. The first was seeing Rafael Nadal use it twice in his victory speech after having just won the American Open: if one of the best tennis players the world has even seen can use it, speaking in a language not his mother tongue, clutching one of the sport’s biggest prizes, then who am I to criticise …

The second reason is more prosaic. I was composing a tweet. I needed to cut some characters to keep within the magic 140. And, yes, it was ‘ulation’ that went. There. I’ve admitted it. I’ve used it myself. It’s not so bad.

Stop Nurdling and Write

Ninevoices Summer Competition ends on Thursday, 31st August 2017. A mere 99-199 word story incorporating at least one of the endangered words associated with nature featured in our 22nd June post could win you £100. The entry fee is £5 and any profits will go to the charity PMRGCA-UK.

The joy of words – en français

Tags

French, Kenneth Williams, Où est la plume de ma tante?, Petula Clark, Sasha Distel

Seeing Kenneth Williams’ party piece Ma Crêpe Suzette on TV last week I thought it deserved another outing, for the sheer fun he has in putting the words together.

I’m old enough to remember Petula Clark and Sasha Distel’s greatest hits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlmeBBFLXg

I’d love to hear the French/English version.

‘The Elements of Eloquence’

Tags

Bible, Dashiel Hammett, Elvis Presley, Lennon & McCartney, Mark Forsyth, PG Wodehouse, Philip Larkin, Procol Harum, Rolling Stones, Shakespeare, ST Coleridge, Wordsworth

“‘I wandered lonely as a cloud …’ Clouds are not lonely. Especially in the Lake District where Wordsworth wrote that line. In the Lake District clouds are remarkably sociable creatures that bring their friends and relatives and stay for weeks. … It’s not that Wordsworth didn’t know about meteorology, it’s that he did know about metaphor.” (Mark Forsyth)

I distrust books that have blazoned on the cover, “I laughed out loud”. But in the case of The Elements of Eloquence – How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, I did too. My fellow travellers on the train to Rochester pretended not to notice.

In this book Mark Forsyth explains figures of speech (39 in all) used by writers good and not-so-good over the last 500 years, with examples and comment. Shakespeare, the Bible, William Blake, Leonard Cohen – they’re all here. This is a great read in its own right, and also a mine for the writer aspiring to write better.

Take Merism. This is when you don’t say what you’re talking about, but instead name all of its parts, as in “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health”, when you could just say “in all circumstances”…

Or Polyptoton, the repeated use of one word as different parts of speech or in different grammatical forms, eg Lennon & McCartney’s Please Please Me. Or the Bard in Richard II – “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”.

Enallage, a deliberate grammatical mistake – “Love me tender” works where “Love me tenderly” wouldn’t. Unadverbial Elvis.

When Mick Jagger, singing of his honky tonk woman, tells us that “She blew my nose, and then she blew my mind,” he is demonstrating his use of Syllepsis, where one word is used in two (or more) incongruous ways.

There are Transferred Epithets, when the adjective is applied to the wrong noun, as in Wodehouse: “His eyes widened and an astonished piece of toast fell from his grasp.”

We all know Hyperbole: Dashiel Hammett on a private eye: “He … could have shadowed a drop of salt water from Golden Gate to Hong Kong without losing sight of it.”

Philip Larkin’s most famous line, we learn, is an example of Prolepsis, when you use a pronoun before saying what it stands for. We don’t know who They are, until we’re told they’re Your Mum and Dad. Doesn’t work the other way round, does it?

‘The Fourteenth Rule’ – Mark Forsyth’s own term – is that a number can give an apparent significance. The “sixteen vestal virgins” in Whiter Shade of Pale work so much better than “several vestal virgins”.     The Spirit that follows the Ancient Mariner’s doomed ship does so “Nine fathoms deep”.  (What was so special about 54 feet down?)

And many more, as they used to say on compilation albums …

Great entertainment, and you’re learning while you laugh! Published in 2014 by Icon Books Ltd, ISBN 978-184831733-8 RRP £7-99

 

Critical reviews: thick skin required

Tags

All Desires Known, Iris Murdoch

In this world nothing is certain except death and taxes, wrote Benjamin Franklin. Authors might want to add nasty reviews to the list.

Every novel that is ever published will get at least one bad review – that is, if it gets any at all. You cannot as an author please everyone.

But a critical review still makes for painful reading. You’ve done your very best and here is some stranger being rude about your work. It feels like a personal attack, and no amount of re-reading of praise in other reviews removes the sting.

Some critical reviews – however unpleasant they are to swallow – may be a good thing. They can point out weaknesses of which we’d been entirely unaware. This is useful constructive criticism, offering things to consider when writing our next novel. We can be very grateful for this help.

The nasty reviews where you can’t help thinking that the reviewer hasn’t bothered to read the book can be dismissed but they are still irritating. One less than complimentary review of my novel All Desires Known said something about its sleepy village backdrop, which struck me as odd as it’s set in a busy town with scenes involving the local theatre and mentions of  Waitrose! Clearly I had failed to give enough sense of place …

Authors have a range of advice for coping with negative reviews. Worth remembering is that most would-be readers have learnt to be suspicious of nothing but praise and a hundred per cent crop of five stars. All those friends and relations roped in …

Iris Murdoch’s philosophical approach might come in handy as well. ‘A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tweaking with red

Tags

fiction editors, John Constable, Mr Turner, Royal Academy, tweaking

You’ve slaved away at a short story and are really rather proud of it. Your writing friends have been complimentary and you like to think it’s as good as you can make it.

No thank you, say the fiction editors you send it to.

A nasty jolt to your confidence. WHAT is wrong with it?

In the film Mr Turner, there’s a scene based on a real life incident that took place in 1832. John Constable had been working away at his painting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge for about fifteen years, and was just putting the finishing touches to it in the Royal Academy gallery when Turner stomped in and painted a small red buoy in the middle of his own painting of Dutch ships in a gale. The splash of red instantly brought the painting to life.

It’s possible that one tiny tweak to a story – that splash of red paint – might be all that is needed. If only you had Turner’s unerring eye.

 

 

 

Goodbye to adverbs, she says reluctantly

Tags

adverbs

Adverbs, we are told by the experts, ruin our writing. They are the mark of the amateur.

There are fashions in creative writing rather like there are in cooking. (Just now chilli is everywhere; it’s hard to find a recipe or a menu choice without it. Not good if you aren’t too keen on a burning mouth and throat, but never mind, in a few years it’ll be some other ingredient). But is the wholesale rejection of adverbs here to stay or just the current creative writing bandwagon?

I don’t like feeling bossed into following a writing style recipe, but after having a go at getting rid of all the adverbs from a story I have to admit that the anti-adverb brigade has a point. I hadn’t realised how these -ly words had crept in – and weren’t actually needed. Lazy writing? Well, yes. Cutting them out or creating original images to give the same effect – even if this meant using several words rather than the one adverb – gave the writing a fresher, cleaner and sharper impact. It was also a surprisingly enjoyable and imaginative exercise.

I wonder if competition judges and agents stop reading when they come upon an adverb?

 

Mirror, mirror on the wall…

Tags

criticism, writing groups

‘Hold it up to the mirror,’ said the tutor at the portrait drawing class.

I’d asked her to come and look at my work. It looked all right to me. Secretly, I thought I was doing rather well.  I’d followed the usual advice of standing back from it every ten minutes or so. I knew that staying too close for too long in front of a drawing means you lose a sense of perspective.

I gave the mirror idea a go. A nasty shock. How could I not have seen what was now so obvious? Eyes too far apart, neck too thin, not enough back to the head. Errors that I’d missed, but which were clearly shown up in the mirror image.

A writing group can act as a mirror. How many times have I been grateful for the incisive comments of other writers. They’ve homed in on faults and omissions I’d never have spotted for myself. The value of other people’s ideas and suggestions as to how a piece of work can be improved cannot be over-estimated.

But there may be dangers. In a long-established group, familiarity with, and enjoyment of, the work of other members may make the mirror a little dusty. We may sit too close to the work being read to be as objective and sharp in our criticism as we once were.

On one level none of this matters. The happiness gained from sharing the whole business of putting words together and the generous encouragement of others must be worth more than anything. But it would be interesting to learn of the experiences of other writing groups. Any comments, anyone?