Removing Narrative Doubt from Your Writing

"Seem," "apparently," "appeared." Words that express doubt in the information they are conveying. I see these words pop up frequently in the works I read. The question is: what purpose are these words serving, and do they need to remain in your manuscript?

While you may feel like you need to indicate that your narrative voice is infallible, most of the time you do not need these words. They indicate doubt in your narrative: you are both telling your reader information and informing your reader that this information is in doubt. Does the character have the traits described, or does she only seem to have those traits, but is a completely different person underneath? In a place that is described as “apparently safe,” are we as readers supposed to suspect that it is not?

With most narratives, that can be a very complicated position to put the reader in: their only avenue of knowing the narrative world doubts its own veracity. And to describe something in the language of doubt is to insert that its total opposite as also a vague, but not ruled out possibility. If a character “seems pleasant,” it does not rule out that that character contains Lovecraftean horror underneath. In fact, it’s a little bit more possible than if they “are pleasant.”

If you are playing with this, I applaud you, by all means, go forth and conquer, but I would wager most of you doubt your narrative voice without being aware of it.  You are used to working in a world (this one in which we all operate) where others can test the veracity of our perceptions.  Such doubting language may be a good defense against someone who will butt in and say “but that isn’t right.” It’s easy to back off of. You weren’t invested.

But guess what? This is your world. Your creation. You are the genesis of this world, unless your narration is grounded within a very unsure character, write with certainty.  If your “seems” are there because of your own fear, then they really need to go.

“But what about unreliable narrators?” I hear some of you ask. Wouldn’t these words be great for them? While you could use this for an unreliable narrator, even there I would say resist. There are ways to communicate doubt without using "seem," and the some best unreliable narrators are the ones who think they are reliable, but that give away clues that they are not. Those are the ones that don’t even know doubt if it was pointed out to them in the dictionary.

                                   

I’m not saying never use these words, but become aware of when you use them.  Use them too much and they undercut you as author. You tread lightly with your words, in a world that you have created. Go boldly into that world. No one is going to say you have observed your own world wrong.

Go forth; revel in your writer-god status. Strike down those “seems” and those “appears.” Be definitive.

The Myth of Going It Alone

Many self-published authors believe that they can produce a polished product completely on their own. While this isn't a sales pitch (look at me, I'm an editor, I can solve your dilemma) I am going to draw attention to a phenomena. No one can see all the flaws in their own writing, especially in a book length manuscript. These words have become as familiar to you as your own skin after the second or third time through; after all, they sprung from you.  In a very real way, they are you. You start reading a sentence with the intention of looking at it with an eye for errors, and instead fall into the sentence you knew you wrote, rather than the one on the page. We all do it.

There are those techniques we developed in school, when we were on deadline with a paper, and couldn't find someone at 2 a.m. to read our material. Perhaps it was playing around with font sizes, or reading every single word out loud (perhaps even with a funny accent, have I revealed too much about myself?). However, can these techniques work consistently over the span of an entire novel, when every word is as familiar as your own skin?

Having others read it can help, but you have to trust that they know their grammar rules, and can give you the feedback you want and need. If you are surrounded by people with English Literature degrees, willing to read your work, then you are a lucky writer. But best be sure you pay the investment they are making in your work somehow. Take them out to dinner, wash their car, or some other favor, because if you are getting good feedback from them, then they are investing a long time into your book. And even if you have the ideal collection of beta readers, have you gotten the sort of feedback you want? Are you sure that, in their donated time, that they have caught all the errors that could turn your readers off.

And here, we arrive at last, to the part you saw coming from the beginning: editors. But, I hear you say: "Editors are so expensive? How can I afford it?" But, I would wager that you have also ended up buying a poorly edited book, and been tossed clear out of the reading experience (if you could ever settle into it) every time you ran into a particularly bad sentence. Perhaps such an experience has led you to quietly return the book, or, even worse, loudly leave a bad review.  A reader's perception of the worth of your book, or your brand as an author, can be lost very quickly this way.  

As a self-published author, you should be thinking of ways to establish your book's authority within the mind of your reader. The judgment of your brand does not end at the point of sale. You want your reader not only to keep the book, but to rave about it to her friends and family, to give it to people for gift-giving occasions, to post it all over her social media space. Making sure that your prose is finely polished and cleaned, or that your structure is perfectly honed to play with your particular genre audience, is a good way to try to capture that lightening in a bottle. You want to bring the best product possible to market.

I know it can be a struggle to let someone else touch, editorially, what is essentially an extension of you. Every suggestion can sometimes feel more like a critique of you as the person then the work as a text. It is alright to feel anxious about that. You may want to cling to the idea of the lone writer, tapping away on her typewriter, creating in a safe and lonely space, rather than to potentially let someone else help you tweak your creative process. However, know this: a good editor will not rip the creative reigns from you.  We may suggest ways in which the story might be improved, points which it may be weak, or point at characters that may be falling towards stereotypes, but you are the author.  It’s your universe; we just want to help you communicate it clearly. No one needs to go it alone.

From the Margins: Redshirts and Writing

Firstly, by way of a bit of an introduction, I am Suzanne, this agency's friendly neighborhood editor.  If you get to the end of this post and find that you like my thoughts on books, and would like to peek a bit further into my head, I have a separate blog over at http://galacticmarginalia.blogspot.com/.

Warning: In discussing this book, this post has to talk about the book as a whole. It therefore contains spoilers. Just go read the book first. You'll thank me for it.

What would happen if you were on a spaceship that is actually the set for a TV show in another and you didn't know it? Worse yet, not only are you a part of this TV show in another reality, it is a poorly written TV show meant to capitalize on the commercial success of Star Trek, and you aren't one of the bridge crew, you are staff on the lower levels—an extra.

Yes, that is right, you are a redshirt. This is the premise of the book by the same name by John Scalzi, but, at the same time, it is so much more than this. A book that seems to be a humorous examination of what it would be like to be a redshirt trapped on a show (Chronicles of Intrepid) with no concern for that character’s fate or back story actually becomes a very thoughtful, and sometimes incredibly poignant meditation about the writer’s role as god of his or her universe, and the responsibilities the writer has to his characters.

The book’s main characters (different from the ship’s bridge crew and therefore the “main characters” of the show for which the redshirts are being sacrificed for) begin to piece together the pattern of deaths not long after they arrive on the ship. Mysterious disappearances of mid-level officers when the senior officers arrive looking for people to staff away missions, strange and very flamboyant deaths with those same senior officers are involved. Members of the senior staff possess miraculous healing abilities (a convenience for a character wounded in one “episode” to be completely fit by next week’s adventure). All of these new recruits to the Intrepid were replacing people who had died.

But it wasn't until a yeti of a man appears out of the ductwork and tells our main character, Dahl, to avoid the Narrative that pieces start to fall into place. This book is hilarious.

In this book, what is one person’s reality is another person’s narrative, and is shaped by a writer and a writer’s whims. The senseless deaths turn out to be the dramatic gasp needed before the cut to a commercial break, to try to make the danger real without affecting the main “cast” of characters. As far as Chronicles of Intrepid is concerned, the character has no back story, and very little value beyond a little drama. However, from the vantage point we are given through our cast of “redshirts”, we as readers see each one of these deaths as fully felt and realized, and yet they are controlled by a force that has less than the normal cosmic disregard for human life.

In order to gain control of their destinies, these characters travel back to our time (by way of capturing one of the main characters, in order to bend the laws of physics to their favor), in order to meet their writer-god and plead for their lives and dignity. In a plot twist consistent with the twists that had littered the characters’ time on the Intrepid, a solution presents itself that allows the redshirts to put the producers of the show in their favor. They return to their own timeline having saved the day, and hopefully earned the right to die deaths worth dying.

But when you, dear reader, have gotten to the page when you read, “They all lived happily ever after. Seriously,” there are about 100 pages left in the book. This is where the book changes tones, and gets intensely interesting. There are three codas, labeled “First Person,” “Second Person,” and “Third Person,” all dealing with the fall out of the redshirts' visit on individuals in 2012.

The first coda is the one I really want to focus on. It’s written as the personal, anonymous blog of the head writer for the TV show, Chronicles of Intrepid, from the moment right after he’s found out that when he writes a death scene for a character, someone really dies. It is an interesting meditation on writing, writer’s block, and feeling responsible to your characters to provide them a death (and a life) of worth. And underneath it all, the fact that maybe the universe itself may be a chaotic, essentially meaningless world, but that is all the more reason not to let the written universe be. Let me share with you a scene from the “blog,” which Nick, the writer, recounts a dream he had which all of his dead characters came back to talk to him:

NICK

Look, I get it, Finn. You’re unhappy with being dead. So am I. That’s why I am blocked!

FINN

You don't get it. None of us are pissed off at being dead.

REDSHIRT #4

I am!

FINN

(to REDSHIRT #4)

Not now, Davis!

(back to Nick)

None of us except for Davis are pissed off at being dead. Death happens. It happens to everyone. It’s going to happen to you. What we’re pissed about is that our deaths are so completely pointless. When you killed us off, Nick, it doesn't do anything for the story. It’s just a little jolt you give the viewers before the commercial break, and they've forgotten about it before the first Doritos ad fades off the screen. Our lives had meaning, Nick, if only to us. And you gave us really shitty deaths. Pointless, shitty deaths.

NICK

Shitty deaths happen all the time, Finn. People accidentally step in front of buses, or slip and crack their head on the toilet, or go jogging and get attacked by mountain lions. That’s life.

FINN

That’s your life, Nick. But you don't have anyone writing you, as far as you know. We do. It’s you. And when we die on the show, it’s because you've killed us off. Everyone dies. But we died how you decided we were going to die. And so far, you've decided we'd die because it’s easier than writing a dramatic moment whose response is earned in the writing. And you know it, Nick. (p. 266-67)

As I was transposing this quote, there is something about that last moment (“but you don't have anyone writing you, as far as you know” [emphasis added]) which makes this coda, and perhaps this book, strike a chord with me. Don't those two themes often go hand in hand: the power of the author within the universe he or she has created, and the larger analogue of a controlling power in our own universe? These characters are rising up and doing what we ourselves cannot, questioning their creator (finding out for sure they have one and that he is a flawed senior script writer that may drink too much) and demanding that their deaths have meaning.

Since want to keep this blog away from the blatantly religious, I will open up the floor to you, dear reader. How much responsibility do you feel the writer has to his or her characters? If you are a writer, do you characters act in unexpected ways? When you kill them off, do you feel like you are actually killing them off? Do you feel like the writer-god of your universe, or do you feel more like you are the conduit for the narrative and your characters are talking to you?