Mellowing in my old age (maybe).

Vladimir Nikulin | Fotolia

Tomorrow is my birthday. I won't quite reach "old fart" status this year, but I'm getting pretty close. And I find that while I'm less tolerant of certain things (racism, misogyny, oligarchy, and people who make me jump through hoops for what I'm due instead of just giving it to me) as each birthday passes, I'm also more willing to let some things go.

Take, for example, the use of certain words. No, not those words. 

Here's what I mean: On Monday, Chuck Wendig put on his crankypants and vented about this Wall Street Journal article, which talks about how language teachers are restricting their students from using certain words. Good, bad, fun, and said are out; instead, these fifth- through seventh-graders are being encouraged to use longer words. (At least one teacher has even banned you and I from classroom writing. How do you get around pronouns, for goodness' sake? I'm envisioning the class turning in work in a sort of Japanese style: "Why did honorable friend not answer when this person texted?")

The WSJ story makes it out to be a new thing, or at least a new-ish thing. But when I mentioned the furor to my daughter Kitty, she said she'd gone through the same thing with her teachers. That means this pedagogical idea has been around for at least 15 or 20 years.

I know why the teachers are doing it. Kids that age ought to be expanding their vocabularies, especially if they want to do well on the SAT in a few years (and if their teachers and parents want them to do well on the SAT, which of course they do). Short, punchy Anglo-Saxon words will only get you so far on standardized tests; you need to be able to wheel and deal with more complex words, and writing them is one way to learn them. But I worry whether these teachers are teaching precision in vocabulary. Okay, maybe you don't want the kid to use said if they're shouting. But an across-the-board "pick another word" edict can get you some pretty odd juxtapositions: something like "Deal me in," he beseeched just isn't going to cut it in most situations. 

The biggest problem, however, is that the kids internalize these rules, and then have to unlearn them later. Good and bad are perfectly fine words. In some cases, they're the perfect word. You don't have to call your salad magnificent unless it actually is. And embroidering on bad can be a lot of fun, but it can also go over the top pretty fast.

Said, too, is a perfectly fine word. In journalism, it's considered the perfect word for attribution. In fact, journalists like all sorts of short, punchy Anglo-Saxon words. Of course, they have some dumb rules, too. I vividly recall one writing expert telling us not to use the word feel when referring to a person's opinion. You know how people sometimes say, "I feel this is X because..."? That sent this guy through the roof: "YOU FEEL WITH YOUR HANDS!" he wrote in the class handout.

But going back to said: Many creative writing types recommend its use in dialogue tags, almost to the exclusion of anything else. Said blends into the background for the vast majority of readers, letting you -- and them -- get on with the story. Lately, I even find myself using said sometimes when a character asks a question.

Then there's another type of crankypantsy vocabulary practice: that of putting one's nose in the air and declaring this or that not a word. Self-appointed word police will even check the dictionary for words they're suspicious of, and the Oxford English Dictionary is one of their go-to resources. 

It turns out that the folks at the OED don't consider themselves any sort of authority on whether something is or isn't a word. Their take is that words are invented all the time. If someone uses it, it's a word. If a lot of people use it, it might get into the dictionary. But if it's not there, it doesn't mean it's not a legitimate word.

(Take that, Chrome! Crankypants is too a word!)

Anyway, my gift to you on this birthday eve is to use whatever words your teacher tells you to use -- in class. Outside of class, you have my permission to use whatever word you want. Including those words.

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These moments of not-so-crankypants blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

"Use adverbs sparingly," she advised editorially.

This coming Wednesday, March 4th, is National Grammar Day, so I thought I’d celebrate by writing a post about grammar. Although it’s not really about grammar. It’s about one of those rules for good writing.

I learned a lot of writing rules back in broadcast journalism school: write short, uncomplicated sentences; don’t put more than twenty words in a sentence; write in present tense; don’t use the word “yesterday,” lest your listeners think you’re running old news; and on and on.

These particular rules are pretty much useless for fiction writing. Most novelists don’t write in present tense (although I hear it’s a thing in some circles) and nobody cares whether you mention “yesterday” in your novel or not. But among the rules that have stuck with me is this: Don’t use adverbs.

As I’m sure you know, adverbs are modifiers. Whereas adjectives modify nouns and pronouns, adverbs modify verbs (and adjectives, and sometimes other adverbs). Adverbs come in many flavors, including in conjunction with other words in adverbial phrases and clauses. But your garden-variety adverb is easy to spot: it’s an adjective with –ly tacked onto the end.

Right about now, you’re probably saying, “But why such prejudice against the poor adverb, Lynne? It never did anything bad to anybody, did it?”

Well, no. But it’s weak. If you dropped that adverb and used a different verb, your sentence would be stronger. Let me show you what I mean. Let’s say you wrote this:

Fred moved quickly across the field.

That’s an okay sentence, as far as it goes. But how did Fred move quickly? Let’s look at a few possibilities:

Fred hurried across the field.
Fred darted across the field.
Fred streaked across the field.
Fred galloped across the field.
Fred careened across the field.

See the difference? In each of these sentences, Fred is still moving quickly. But depending on the verb you choose, your reader will draw a slightly different – and more descriptive – picture.

Sometimes in writing fiction, though, you don’t want your verb to quite so obvious about pulling the action along. Sometimes you want your verb to fade into the background. Yes, I’m talking about dialogue tags.

Some people just hate the word said. It grates on them. The repetition makes them crazy. If you’re one of those people, I apologize, because I believe said and its cousin asked are critical tools in any fiction writer’s toolbox.

If you use strong verbs for dialogue tags, you run the risk of taking attention away from the dialogue. Plus, it’s too easy to stray into the hyperbolic (ranted? cajoled?) or the physically impossible (I’m sorry, but nobody can shriek through an entire sentence).

But if you’re going to use plain-vanilla verbs in your dialogue tags, you need to do something else to give context to your characters’ words. You can describe their body language – crossing their arms, tapping their feet, looking away, and so on. Or you can describe what they’re doing as they’re talking – peeling a label off of a beer bottle, making an omelet, cutting flowers for a bouquet. Or you can use an adverb:

“Is Fred going to be all right?” Sadie asked hopefully.

“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said briskly. “Just don’t let him careen into any more fences.”

I wouldn’t go overboard on putting –ly words in dialogue tags; I’d use them sparingly, and intersperse them with the other methods I mentioned. But my point is that adverbs do have a place in fiction writing. Just not a huge one. And do take care that you don’t stray into Tom Swifty territory with them – unless, of course, you want to.

Happy National Grammar Day!

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(This post was originally published at Indies Unlimited.)

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These moments of Tom Swifty blogginess have been brought to you, as public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

When the rules don't apply.

Reading can be a subversive exercise. Sometimes it encourages you to break the rules.

I just finished a book that I received in my book bag at last fall's World Fantasy Convention:  Lifelode by Jo Walton. I'd never read anything by Walton before this, so I didn't really know what to expect. But the book's description appealed to me -- it's set in what appears at first glance to be a fantasy world. Applekirk is more or less a castle, and those who live there more or less practice magic, which is called yeya in the world of this book. There are some peculiarities in this world: the farther East you go, the more yeya there is and the more time speeds up; the farther West, the more time slows down, and yeya becomes a rumor, or maybe even a fairy tale. But the oddest thing at first glance is that the book is written in present tense. And it works -- or at least, it worked for me, because one of the main characters views time in a non-linear fashion. Often when she looks at someone, she sees a sort of ghost or shade of their past or future self, so that everything happens at once, all the time.

Now, writing in present tense is not a usual choice for authors. Sure, Suzanne Collins uses it in her Hunger Games books, but by and large, the default is past tense. And the intarwebz are full of reasons why you should stick with past tense (although I would argue that a competent writer -- like, say, Walton, for instance -- would easily avoid the pitfalls listed in this Writer's Digest article).

It turns out that Walton stretched another boundary, too. While at first glance, Lifelode is fantasy, Walton says in the Q&A at the end of the book that it's definitely sci-fi. The novel's world is actually a pocket universe -- a fold in space-time -- which explains why time passes faster, the farther east you go. I don't know that you need to know that to enjoy the book; you can certainly read it as fantasy set in an odd magical world.

This tweaking of expectations is also evident in Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, which was my Rursday Read this week. This book is very definitely sci-fi -- spaceships, aliens, and artificial intelligences abound. Leckie's protagonist, Breq, was once part of the AI that operated a spaceship, which may be mind-bending enough. But the people of the society that created the ship have the capability of becoming either gender -- so their language has no gender. Leckie could have taken the easy way out and denoted this by having Breq use "it" as his/her default pronoun. But instead, it's "she". It's a little disorienting, and a constant reminder that the reader's not in Kansas anymore.

Both of these authors are multiple award winners. Leckie's book won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Arthur C. Clarke awards last year. Walton's past work has also won the Hugo and the Nebula.

I'm bringing this up because I saw a bit of advice on Facebook this week about how you shouldn't use big words in your fiction writing. Supposedly, it's because throwing a bunch of unfamiliar words at your reader will throw them out of the story. Now, usually I'm on board with this advice; after all, I spent a lot of years writing radio copy. For that, you use short words and simple sentences because when you're writing for the ear, clarity is key. But fiction is a different beast, and sometimes complexity is better. One of my favorite authors is Stephen R. Donaldson, whose Thomas Covenant books are rife with unfamiliar words. Donaldson has said he used the difficult vocabulary in part to make it clear that the Land is not our world. And Donaldson's work has won numerous awards, too.

So we have three authors who have won a boatload of awards for breaking the rules. It's probably no accident that these three authors write speculative fiction, where rule-bending of all sorts is allowed, and even encouraged. But I think the takeaway is that each of these authors had a good reason for doing what they did. Donaldson used unusual words to set the Land apart from our world. Leckie's Breq calls everyone "she" to underscore his/her alien origins. And Walton uses present tense to reinforce the idea that time moves oddly in her world.

So if you're tempted to bend or break a writing rule, have at it. But don't just do it to do it. Know what the rule is there for, and figure out why it doesn't apply in the case of your story. After all, that's how the award-winning authors do it.

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Speaking of awards: Congrats to Birdman on winning the Oscar for Best Picture tonight! (Did I call it, or did I call it?)

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These moments of rule-breaking blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.