Self-Deprecating Notes

Since I am still massively unhappy with the voice in The Witch of November, I'm trying something I should have tried many months ago: I'm starting over. Not completely, mind you, (again, I have not lost complete control of my faculties) but enough that I'm not trying to simply reword what I have to make it sound better. I'm actually rewriting the damn thing line by line, much the way I do for a second draft.

A good chunk of my problem right now is getting back to the heart of my style. In trying to find that perfect voice I had in my head but could never make work on paper, I must have reworded things a hundred times. And the more I reworded it, trying to make it sound "cute" or "punchy" or "witty," the less it sounded like ... me.

I recognized that a while back but I didn't stop fiddling and now it doesn't sound like me at all. It's okay, I guess. Some parts are a little clunky, and some parts are a little trying-too-hard; those kinds of fixes are easy once you recognize them. But the problem I have with it now is I don't see me in the writing at all.

It was in trying to fix the mess I've made of my first few chapters that I came to realize a few things:

1) There is such a thing as using too many fragments. I tend to use fragments for emphasis or to give the writing a more conversational tone. However, using too many fragments one after another or in conjunction with each other makes the writing read choppy and look sloppy. Oops!

2) I'm not remarkably witty. Or consistently funny. In trying to make the writing wittier than I actually am, it winds up smacking of trying way too hard. It's better when I just let the humor come when I feel it should rather than trying to inject some kind of droll remark in every line.

3) I have a bad habit of explaining things forty-seven ways from Sunday. I started writing first drafts this way because I had the opposite tendency at first: I'd just write whatever popped into my head and by the time revisions rolled around, I'd reach sections where I had absolutely no idea what I meant. So now I explain everything, mainly so when I get back to that section in edits, I'll have some idea what I'm talking about. The result is exposition in the narrative, the dialogue, and in the inner monologue. Which is a lot of freakin' exposition. Oy.

4) I tend to be very all or nothing. My characters are eleven, so I have it in my head that the narrative has to be in kid-voice. I'm a long way from eleven, so kid-voice is hard to maintain over the course of a novel. As a matter of fact, the only time in recent memory that I completed a project in kid-voice was a 13,500-word Supernatural fic called "Corpse Fire" (oddly, one of my favorites, if it's cool to have favorites of your own work.) My usual style is a tad more adult. Why it can't be okay in my head for me to write the narrative in my normal style and leave the kid-voice for the dialogue, I can't tell you.

5) I tend to write a lot in the passive voice. You know, the "The floor was littered with debris" construction rather than "Debris littered the floor." Or "He was sitting on the sofa" instead of "He sat on the sofa." Again, oops!

Also, I start sentences with "But" and "And" a lot. And while that's okay sometimes (see what I did there, did ya?), it's totally not cool all the time.

Grammar Pet Peeves

I've previously posted these in my LiveJournal, but this is a good post for this blog as well.

It needs to be said here that I'm not a grammar nazi. I won't correct you unless you ask me to do so. There are plenty of things I screw up still (lay/lie, affects/effects, and frequently ending sentences in prepositions, to name but a few), but I do have some pet peeves. Most of these are written mistakes because I tend to see them all over the damn internet and then I get twitchy. Without further ado:

Pet Peeve One: Definitely.

Definitely. Not definately. It's one of those words that is spelled wrong so frequently that most people use the incorrect spelling thinking it's correct. However, there is no "A" in the word. Finite, infinite, definite. Definitely.

Pet Peeve Two: Lose/Loose

Lose = to misplace (verb)

Loose = not tight (adjective)

These words are NOT interchangeable! You cannot "loose" your keys. You cannot feel like you are "loosing" your mind. You "lose" those things.

If you're using the word as a verb, for the love of puppies and kittens, please use one "O."

Pet Peeve Three: Should Of/Would Of/Could Of

This one literally makes me go "Oh HELL no."

"I should of gone to the game last night" is very, very wrong because there is NO SUCH PHRASE as "should of." The phrase is "should have." The "have" is part of the tense of the verb (conditional tense) and it is needed for the sentence to make grammatical sense.

I understand where this one comes from (there I go ending sentences with prepositions!) I once had a kid ask for grammar checks in a story he'd written and he used "should of" in dialogue even though he wrote it correctly anywhere outside of dialogue. When I asked him why he did that, he said, "Well, it's dialogue."

That was when I realized he wanted it to read the way it sounds when people speak. And while I'm all for vernacular in dialogue because there's nothing worse than reading dialogue and thinking, "No one really talks like that," he should have contracted it to "should've." Dialogue or no, you need the "have." It's important. 

So it's "should have" or "should've." No exceptions!

Pet Peeve Four: Just Between You and I

Anything occurring "just between you and I" is WRONG. Anything that happens "just between you and me" is correct.

I know it's drilled into our heads in elementary school to not use "me," but there are instances where "me" is the correct word. That's, you know, why it exists as a word.

"Me" is proper in "just between you and me" because "between" is a preposition and needs an object, so you need to use the object form of the pronoun.

An easy way I was taught to spot the difference between using "I" and "me" is to take everyone else out of the picture:

Take the sentence "Bob and me went to the store." Would you say "Me went to the store?" No, so you'd use "I" there. (Grammatically, this is so because "Bob and I" is the subject of the sentence and the subject pronoun is needed.)

Now, "Jim went to the store with Bob and I." Would you say "Jim went to the store with I?" No. Use "me" there. (Again, with = preposition, which needs an object, so you need the object pronoun.)

I = subject. Me = object. Keep it straight, peeps!

Pet Peeve Five: Loath/Loathe

This is the one that makes me groan out loud. For freakin' real.

Loath = reluctant, unwilling (adjective)

Loathe = to despise, to detest (verb)

You are NOT "loathe" to tell her something that would hurt her feelings. You are "loath" to tell her something that would hurt her feelings.

This is one I'd seen in so many places that I actually had to go to dictionary.com to make sure I wasn't wrong! I think this mistake irritates me so much because no one really says "loath to" anymore unless they're being pretentious. But when you're being pretentious and you do it wrong, it just makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about (yep, another preposition ... go me, ha).

So there we go, my top five grammar pet peeves. I also have a list of Things Not to Do When Posting a Story Online, but that'll be a whole separate post, ha.