Little help, please? · 8:50am Mar 28th, 2013
Alright … I need to swallow my pride for a moment. Got some good critique back from EqD on Fugue State, which mostly I'm fixing; there was a little sloppiness I needed to tighten up to bring it into featurable state. There are a few complaints I'm having trouble understanding, though. This is — should be — basic stuff, so it stings[1] that I don't see the problem.[2] You all are smart people. I'd love a gentle education, or a second opinion.
So: Showing and telling.
If I get slapped down for "Lyra was sweating, shaking, staring at her in terror," fair enough. I get why that's bad. "In terror" tells us what "sweating, shaking" have already established, and the redundancy adds nothing. All other things being equal, "sweating, shaking" paints a vivid picture in the reader's mind, and "in terror" doesn't.
"Her muzzle firmed with resolve" … more marginal, but same principle. The physical action that goes along with it boils down to "She set her jaw." What you gain in specificity with that, you lose in cliché, but with a little elbow grease I'm sure I could make this more vivid by losing the "tell" of resolve.
But then this is called out for specific criticism:
"Lyra stared at [the binoculars] contemplatively"
and I start to run into trouble.
What does a contemplative stare look like? That word gives me a vivid and specific image, but it doesn't reduce to showing gracefully. "Wearing a thoughtful expression?" … Still telling. "She focused intensely" (tell) "lost in concentration" (tell). Throw that out and go to physical description: "Her eyes fixed on the binoculars, slightly out of focus. Her mouth drifted into neutrality was flat and distant, curling into a hint of a frown." I've now expanded 6 words into 23 and drawn a lot of extra attention to what started out as a suggestion-in-passing that Lyra has thoughts running through her head. I don't feel like this improves things, so what did I do wrong in constructing my "fix"?
"She looked pleadingly" … if I throw telling out the window, I'm left with her eyes widening, her eyebrows raising, her mouth opening. Great! Now I've made Lyra afraid instead of beseeching, and my brain is leaping to the conclusion that I just don't get it and someone's going to swoop in in comments and provide an elegant fix in five seconds for what I've beat my head against for ten minutes and my god I suck why am I wasting everyone's time.
"Shock spread across Carrot Top's muzzle by degrees." "Shock" is telling, but the point of showing is the vivid image in the reader's mind, right? Doesn't "spread by degrees" carry that? I guess I could say "Her mouth fell open by degrees" … no … cliché … hmm. "Her eyes widened by degrees"? I start weighing the two and cross-comparing and my brain begins to[3] chase itself in loops of textual analysis, and long before I conclude that it's possibly a modest improvement, I feel like my time invested has long since left the realm of positive ROI.
And through it all, the niggling suspicion that there's some key point I'm just not getting that will blow it all open for me. I wasn't sold on Lavender Unicorn Syndrome being a sin until I read Ezn's immortal blog post on the matter, so my most of me is convinced there's a simple explanation just out of reach. A calm minority says "show, don't tell" is controversial and misunderstood in the first place and some of my examples are justified. The rest is throwing up its hands and begging for a second opinion.
Worst of all, I feel like I'm not capable of editing my story to fix these things — because if I can look at the examples specifically pointed out to me and be so completely lost on so many of them, how am I going to find the other ones that are there but not flagged?
So. Thoughts? Help? Please?
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[1] I worked professionally as a copy editor for close to a decade. In my defense, this was at newspapers, where many of the basics of fiction writing don't come up. Newspaper writing demands clarity, factual accuracy, and careful attention to tone, but "show, don't tell" gets glossed over because both showing and telling often fall under verboten "editorializing".
[2] It also stings — no, hurts like an angry wolverine — that I've now spent SIX WEEKS on this goddamn story and it's NOT DONE YET and my backlog is climbing even further and in that same time period Eakin has written SIXTY THOUSAND WORDS of a story I have enjoyed every minute of and i'm a hack what the fuck am i even doing here
[3] This phrase is another no-no I was justifiably warned about. Which of course just sets me further into chasing my own mental tail and speeds the downward spiral.
Do EQD prereaders simply look for adverbs?
If I'm helping at all, it's in avoiding the prereaders, not necessarily improving your writing. Those are two very different things.
"Show don't tell" along with the ever present fear of "Mary-Sue" is one of those things that ruin fanfiction writers.
All of these rules have some merrit, but they can't just be mindlessly applied as general rules. They're guidelines that show what CAN look wrong/tiresome for the reader.
The binocular example is perfectly fine, as long as you don't have it surounded by other similiar constructions. Same goes for "She looked pleadingly".
In general it has been stated quite often that applying with EQD is pretty much hit and miss, and a lot of the critique you will receive will be just thinly veiled personal opinion (which is okay, after all we're talking about people who do those things for fun, not proffessionally).
I haven't read you text, but from the examples you've given here, I would change the more obvious mistakes, and keep them where you have no good idea how to change them (better keep a bad construct that's well written, than a badly written good construct). Worst thing that can happen is that you'll get three strikes.
Gimme a little while and I'll swing through the story sometime later today and see if I can pin down what their problem is.
Oh, and you aren't a hack. I'm just completely insane.
Seconding the good Professor over here 953385
They might be calling you out on the idea that adverbs make for weak prose[1], and are simply unable to do so in an effective way so they use "show not tell" as a sort of catch-all.
[1] The idea being that you, as the author, shouldn't need to resort to adverbs to make us, the readers, understand a character's actions, motivations, etc. We should know that Lyra's being contemplative from context, not from you telling us[2] to our faces.
[2] Oh... maybe that's why they're calling it "telling." ...I still think they could have done a better job explaining their problem.
Ask your prereader to clarify. People do that all the time.
Regarding the general attitude EqD has to show-don't-tell I'll take the gross liberty of quoting myself:
That said, I do think that your examples can be slightly improved[1] by restructuring them. I'm firm in my belief that rewriting them Martian-style[2] will not help.
So. Let's see if I can help:
The tricky part here is the adverb. While it is, of course, madness to insist that they all be removed as some writing authorities say[3], they make for flabby prose. Generally an adverb is there to modify a verb's essential meaning slightly. Like that 'slightly' back there. Investing large amounts of meaning is a no-no, and for good reason. Too much adverbs and you end up with more alien fiction -- this time written by Elcors[5]. X did Y Zly. It's addictive, I'll grant you, but it makes for uninterested readers.
Enough with natter. How would I do it, then? Well you can simplify:
but that's a little spare, so you can expand
Or, you can take a different tack and try for something else, like:
Is this telling? Well that's tricky, isn't it? But it paints a picture, and that's what's important.
Now it's another example of putting the bulk of the meaning in an adverb. It's not that bad of a thing, but some people are sensitive about it. How about the very simple
which is workmanlike, but lacks the intimation that the chief medium of the pleading being her stare, so you could make that into:
or even, if you are willing to risk a touch of adverbitis:
Okay, that's just niptickery. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with that construction. But, huh, we could try for different takes. You could try and describe how that gradual-shock thing looks:
But that's going a bit wide of your original construction, so let's try:
Huh. It's okay, I guess. Better than your take, I think, if the shock is a big deal. Otherwise your more economical take is much better.
Thing is, there's really no secret to this. You can write using pure showing[6] but it won't work in every context. If you want things to happen in your story, you really can't spend a few paragraphs on every emotion, now can you?
There are no secrets, okay, but there are a few tricks, which you probably know. My favorite is to encode the emotional subtext in the narration itself (works if you are using third-person limited or first person). Taken further this gives you the unreliable narrator, of course, which is another fine piece of writerly trickery.
You can also cheat and put in an internal monologue if your character means to do a lot of contemplating.
So. There's my thirty-seven cents[7]. I hope I was of some help or, failing that, at least amusingly diverting.
[1] Mind, that's improve according to me. EqD may have other opinions. Indeed. EqD probably will have other opinions.
[2] Bad Horse later paraphrased me in an interview, I think, and called this Alien Anthropologist prose, a much better term. He has a way with words, that one.
[3] By and large I despise such absolutist pieces of advice -- never do this, always do that. Such formulations, it always seemed to me, sacrifice applicability and clarity for self-aggrandizing bombast. Well what do you expect from people who dispense writing advice?[4]
[4] Wait a a minute aren't I....oh.
[5] Mass Effect reference. No, I have no shame.
[6] To toot me own horn a bit, Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea is much like that. But that's 1600 words to describe a single emotion, basically, and eight minutes of action. Wildly impractical for anything but this sort of experiment.
[7] Two cents adjusted for inflation.
Despite following GoH (a situation for a writer much anologous to a standup comic following Robin Williams), let me chip in my own two cents.
EqD pre-readers get massive amounts of stuff to work through, some of which is good, a few great, and a huge number of drek, or slush. Time constraints determine much of their response.
The drek gets down-voted and insta-rejected.
The good-but-could-be-better is dropped into MSWord, and a quick list of grammar errors and typos shot back at the prospective writer. (green and red underlines in Word are my nemisis)
The hey-this-looks-promising gets that treatment plus the rubber stamp of "Show don't Tell", which I think can be best described as doing a search inside your document for "ly " or "ly." and dinging you once for each usage, along with some useful comments.
My 'Concept Art' got three pages of this on the first submission, and after being fixed, got three pages again on second submission/rejection. (I swear those errors breed and multiply when I'm not looking) Before I submit my sacrifice upon the altar of EqD a third time, I'll be sending it through the /fic/ review process like I'm doing to 'Traveling Tutor' (still pending review after a month, so patience is a virtue).
Wish I could help. Unfortunately I have the same problems so maybe when they help you you can tell me what I am doing wrong next
Some good advice in this thread. At this point, there's only two things I can add.
If you find a pre-reader whose personal tastes are similar to yours--or at least one whose mind is open--you can request him for future submissions. It's not a guarantee, but it's worked for me so far.
If he's reasonable, you can ask for clarification, or even make a case for allowing an alleged "problem" to go through. In my first story, there was a run-on sentence. I successfully convinced Vimbert to let it stand, because it showed that the protagonist's mind was racing.
I just hope your next project doesn't run into so many hangups.
What you gain in specificity with that, you lose in cliché
I disagree. Sometimes, making a "non-cliche" statement just looks...stupid. Like saying, "His eyes thinned to lines," instead of "His eyes narrowed to slits."
What does a contemplative stare look like? That word gives me a vivid and specific image, but it doesn't reduce to showing gracefully. "Wearing a thoughtful expression?" … Still telling. "She focused intensely" (tell) "lost in concentration" (tell). Throw that out and go to physical description: "Her eyes fixed on the binoculars, slightly out of focus. Her mouth drifted into neutrality was flat and distant, curling into a hint of a frown." I've now expanded 6 words into 23 and drawn a lot of extra attention to what started out as a suggestion-in-passing that Lyra has thoughts running through her head. I don't feel like this improves things, so what did I do wrong in constructing my "fix"?
If you're writing from this character's perspective, you can just show us what she's thinking. If from another's, you can show it through dialogue, or through the other character's own perspective. For instance, the other pony could ask Lyra a question and Lyra doesn't answer.
"She looked pleadingly" … if I throw telling out the window, I'm left with her eyes widening, her eyebrows raising, her mouth opening. Great! Now I've made Lyra afraid instead of beseeching, and my brain is leaping to the conclusion that I just don't get it and someone's going to swoop in in comments and provide an elegant fix in five seconds for what I've beat my head against for ten minutes
You could use body language--having her reach out, for instance. Or you could just make it clear she's pleading through dialogue/through the other character's impressions. I'm not sure if "Gave a desperate look" is showing or not, but it's less telling than "pleadingly".
and my god I suck why am I wasting everyone's time.
Man, you ain't wasting our time. The thing is, by forcing us to think about this stuff, you ain't just helping yourself--we're becoming better writers. Besides, everybody needs help with stupid things now and again. I'm always bugging people, with the proper use of commas.
"Shock spread across Carrot Top's muzzle by degrees." "Shock" is telling, but the point of showing is the vivid image in the reader's mind, right? Doesn't "spread by degrees" carry that? I guess I could say "Her mouth fell open by degrees" … no … cliché … hmm. "Her eyes widened by degrees"? I start weighing the two and cross-comparing and my brain begins to[3] chase itself in loops of textual analysis, and long before I conclude that it's possibly a modest improvement, I feel like my time invested has long since left the realm of positive ROI.
I don't really like 'by degrees", to be honest. It feels technical, and isn't really needed. I think you're trying so hard to avoid "cliches" that your work is going to just look strange. Why not "she froze" or "her jaw dropped"? There's a time to go for original phrasing and a time to just try to convey in a non-distracting manner what's going on.
[2] It also stings — no, hurts like an angry wolverine — that I've now spent SIX WEEKS on this goddamn story and it's NOT DONE YET and my backlog is climbing even further and in that same time period Eakin has written SIXTY THOUSAND WORDS of a story I have enjoyed every minute of and i'm a hack what the fuck am i even doing here
I just got turned down by EQD after waiting over four weeks for their response. During that time I was unable to update the story because I wanted to maintain its already insufficient quality standards. I felt bad about the hiatus--bad enough that I was actually glad when I finally got turned down. My point is, don't worry about it. Some stories are harder to edit than others.
I really loved "No Regrets", and I find your assertion that you're a hack to be, honestly, dumb.
Oh, and I just want to speak up to say that while the prereaders aren't perfect, I do agree with them (in general) on the matter of show vs. tell. With the exception of "pleadingly", that is. I think "pleadingly" is defensible. Otherwise, "telling" is a sign of laziness--of an author not wanting to have to go into detail over something. Telling should be avoided when at all practical. Which is why I wage a one-goblin crusade against stories that use "deadpan" as a dialogue tag.
Wow.
To be honest, I was hoping Silver could eventually make it to EqD some day. It would be hard enough with a human story, I know, but seeing you get hit with things like this...
Blood ran cold, I tell ya.
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Thank you for the alternate constructions and to GoH for the shining analysis. This was especially edifying: "An adverb is there to modify a verb's essential meaning slightly. Like that 'slightly' back there. Investing large amounts of meaning is a no-no." The principle that adverbs structurally aren't designed to be load-bearing words — put too much meaning in them and they pull attention away from the nouns and verbs that carry the sentence — is simple and unobjectionable, and gives me something to evaluate them with. If I take nothing else away from this post, that by itself will help a great deal.
"Contemplated" and "pleaded" seem like fine verbs — a fertile seed of demonstrable improvement — and I've got a lot of food for thought with all the other suggestions.
As for "shock spread across her muzzle by degrees", my best guess is that the objection was to "shock" (which is, gasp, a word describing an emotion instead of a physical manifestation of that emotion). I'll press for clarification.
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This is a general thank-you for everyone's comments. It's all useful, in many different ways. The analysis, the ego-soothing, the greater perspective, the tips on EqD prereader wrangling. I don't have a lot of specific responses, but I appreciate what you've said, I'm taking it to heart, and I'm feeling a lot better about this.
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Well, there is that.
I was noticing you mention in your story comments that you don't even generally use a prereader. You are Evel Knievel working without a safety net, man. 
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I'll drop a PM later tonight.
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Just let yourself learn and grow as you write, and do your best to make each draft (and story) better than the last. Clearly, I've still got plenty of things to learn despite finishing … ergh … close to 100 short stories and several novellas by now (the pony stuff is only a tiny and recent fraction of my writing), but a lot of people think I'm writing well anyway!
What I'm writing today is clearly better than the things I wrote fifteen years ago (get off my lawn!) … but, even so, there are a lot of things I can pick out from those early stories as being well-done. If I had had the help and feedback and criticism in those early days that I'm getting now from FIMFic, it wouldn't have taken me nearly so long to get the polish down. It's that same potential that got me following you guys; peeling all the extraneous stuff away from it is just a function of learning and editing.
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A follow-up thought about hackitude:
The anxiety issues here are not about what I've written, but about how little I've written. I think I'm at peace with the notion that I can write well … but if I can write the occasional 10k-word story well and take forever to do it, I'm not operating at the same level as the authors that are the real superstars here.
Perhaps (once the commission and the SL editing are done) I need to try writing without a safety net[1], just as a kick in the pants. Pick a story idea, churn it out as fast as I dare, and drop it onto the site either without prereading or with limited, single-pass prereading. No pretensions of greatness, just to see how I can do at top speed. The 14k-word Social Lubricant — which demonstrably requires some aggressive editing but which Benman and PPP keep begging me to post as my best-yet story — was finished in a mere seven days during NaNoWriMo.
--
[1] On an actual story, not on this eldritch horror.
Assigning deadlines is definitely a big help, at least for me. I find the works I'm proudest of are the works where I didn't edit as I went (and the ones where I thought to outline, but that's another matter).
I wish you the best of luck!
954662
Even just a simple idea that's only got enough meat on it for one or two good scenes, that way you don't have to worry about about broader themes or sustaining a flow over a long period of time. I did An Important Letter in about 90 minutes, and I think the Winningverse parody I never posted took me maybe three? That needs another pass and to be fleshed out before I would ever actually put it up though. Just something you're confident you can sit down and bang out in day. Trying to write really fast for a sustained period of time will burn you out on an idea, no question (Which is why people who got used to my Stitch in Time update schedule are going to be quite disappointed for about the next two weeks).
953385 Do EQD prereaders simply look for adverbs?
No; they look for words ending in "ly". You probably aren't doing anything wrong. Grab three great books by different authors off your shelf. (Not Hemingway.) Open them at random and look for adverbs. If they have more than you, stop worrying. If they have fewer, it still doesn't mean you're wrong. IMHO current (post-1980) authors avoid adverbs too deliberately, as they avoid speech tags too deliberately.
This is just a thing EqD does. Authors complain about it frequently. Bookplayer wrote a blog post about it a few months ago. They have this guide, the Omnibus, that some pre-readers use as a checklist. I think they search for all instances of "ly" and ask for them to be removed. There are at least 4 ways to respond:
- Realize that you want to be published on EqD. Take the words out, knowing it makes the story worse. I've done this.
- Argue for the ones you want to keep. I've done this.
- Plan ahead and put a few sacrificial adverbs near the beginning of the story. They will likely ask for them to be removed. Remove them.
- Forget EqD. I don't do this, because I'm set in my ways enough that I can adjust how I write for them and go back to how I want to write on the next project, and because I'm an attention whore. But if it gives you this much anxiety, if you have to choose between learning bad writing habits and giving up EqD, give up EqD.
(Usually they're right about some things and "wrong" about other things. They might be "wrong" about 4 adverbs but "right" about 8 of them.)
Sometimes we writers fall in hate with a specific phrasing or moment, and we want to describe it and be done with it. We know how we think about that moment we're writing, darn it, and we can't explain it in any fewer words, and there's no other adequate description!
Whew.
It's time to step back from the keyboard and monitor, take a deep breath, pull out the pencil and notepad, and rewrite the moment entirely, possibly even from a different narrative perspective. Story is 3rd person limited? Make it 1st person, or second person omniscient, or flashback, or something else.
Or just start by transcribing the last sentence of the paragraph above the problematic portion, and go off on a tangent. The issue might just be how precise and perfect the surrounding sentences are, and we don't notice that we've written ourselves into a corner in terms of how much space we can take to describe the moment we're writing about. This sentence wants to keep up with the Joneses in brevity or concept, and it just can't.
954662
That is not the best metric to use. Measure against yourself.
Also measure against me. If you finish SL after I finish the story it inspired thenwe will have words.953607 953714>>953906 954694
Two points re: Dealing with pre-readers:
—There is more than one pre-reader. Some of us care more about prose. Some of us care more about characterization. Some of us care more about conflict and pacing. And frankly, some of us are better at this job than others. When interpreting our messages, think about your prereader rather than the prereaders.
—To expand on what a few people have said: if you think we're wrong about something, you can write back and explain why. Show that you're thinking seriously about the critique, and we'll pay attention. (Most people reading this have probably given critique before, and you know how authors can react. Some will argue back and forth in an effort to figure out whether the problem is real and learn why it exists. Some will tell you why your opinion sucks and this story is the greatest. Make sure you look like the former.)
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You know, I really ought to apologize. My own personal experiences with EqD pre-readers (well those of them I drew, anyway) have been nothing but good. So. Um. Yeah. I do apologize. It's a bit thoughtless to paint a very amorphous bunch of people with one wide, wide brush. Thankless, too, considering they do for absolutely no reward a job which, truth be told, would make me scream and run the other way crying for mommy. So. Yeah. I feel like a bit of a bastard, and not my usual verbose sort. Sorry.
That said, I do have two quibbles:
1. I hope you do realize EqD patronage is a big deal for writers of ponyfic and having our precious precious stories looked over by other people who hold their fates in their hands is an...interesting experience. Moaning about this phenomenon and such people is not the fairest of reactions, I grant you, but it is very human. So don't take it as personal, I assume it really isn't. Certainly isn't in my case -- my experiences were actually quite pleasant. It's just the same impersonal resentment that springs around similar phenomena outside our little pony circle, such as the much-loathed Rejection Letter in the ranks of professional or want-to-be-professional writers.
2. I've seen responses that, truly, weren't very thoughtful. My self-quote wasn't from an abstract rant but from a concrete comment about a concrete response. I've seen Show Don't Tell being used as a club, and it is not a nice sight at all. That said, those were the acts of some prereaders not all prereaders, your point is well taken.
Quibbles aside, though, it is a thoughtless way of talking about it. I am sorry.
954859 -- (More than one pre-reader) Yeah, but I always seem to get the Drama guy with my Comedy fic, and vice-versa.
In effect, everybody who reads a story is a pre-reader, and I treasure greatly the ones who leave "helpful" comments, even to the point that I have recruited several of them as pre-readers (and vice-versa.) It feels good to give back by helping with some other author stories, to the limits of my fairly limited skills.
Generally I prefer to make spelling/grammar critiques by mail, as not to clutter comment sections. Same for plot holes (Bob is blue here, and orange here..) and characterization issues (Like Rarity speaking with a southern drawl)
Plot points and major characterization issues make good comment food, and sometimes even make me go back and rewrite sections like comment#1075 on Monster.
-- (argument vs discussions) I know I'm an emotionally fragile creature, but nothing brings that home like that first rejection letter from EqD. Took forever to get to 'Acceptance', and I wallowed hopelessly in Denial for a full week. The exchange of emails between me and the reader got a bit heated, I'm afraid, and after a bit I just gave up; partially in frustration at a long string of my 'So what's wrong with that?' answered by 'It's wrong,' partially from embarrassment at my behavior. I find the best critiques come from other people marking things up in the Gdoc while I'm writing.
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I appreciate the sentiment. We get a fair amount of heat*, but honestly, your comment didn't feel that way. I've seen critiques and I've seen attacks; that was no attack.
1) I am familiar with the feeling! And I've got a trio of rejections to prove it.
2) It definitely happens. I wish people were more willing to tell us when it does, but I think most writers are intimidated by us. Then they only overcome that when they're angry, which... doesn't end well. So please, if we're wrong and you're not furious, write.**
*Lest anyone think it's some thankless slog, we do hear from folks who appreciate us, and that makes it worth it. That stuff just gets less attention because it never leads to the 90-comment flamewars.
**Corollary: if we are wrong and you are furious, don't write. This does not only apply to ponyfic.
I think part of the problem you illustrated is simply the use of adverbs.
"Contemplatively"
"Pleadingly"
These are adverbs, helpfully flagged by the treacherous -ly at their end. There are good, healthy reasons to use adverbs in fiction writing, but these reasons are rare. In most circumstances, adverbs are a shortcut. They're a way to tell the reader how an action was performed, rather than showing it.
Cut out your adverbs. Slay them. When you have only nouns and adjectives and verbs left, you are forced to show how Lyra stared at the binoculars. You are forced to show how Rarity pleaded with her expression.
Adverbs are the training wheels of writing. They're a crutch. Try writing without them, and be surprised at how great your writing really is.
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Please post Social Lubricant. I want to link it to people and show it off.
It's not your best-yet work. I prefer No Regrets and The Lotus Eaters (which I consider one story, or a story and its sequel). I don't have to think Social Lubricant is the best to think it's very good and worth posting.
Have you considered changing the main character from Lyra to Octavia?
It would remove yet another troublesome instance of "ly". Please, hold your applause.
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This is interesting advice, but not something I can afford to take at this moment. I already feel like I'm bleeding time into this story, and I want to triage it and ship it out with an EqD band-aid.
I agree on the utility of experimenting, on the large. Hell, look at my published stories. Serious character-driven alternate-reality drama, shameless princess-in-ponyville comedy, a second-person sexfic narrated by the protagonist's partner (okay I'm a little too proud of that one), and now a meditation on musical numbers. I'm editing a story about the Mane Six having drunk relationship talks, and I'm writing a pony Highlander crossover. If I ever write something that isn't experimental the world will end.
That having said, I'll mentally bookmark what you said for the next time a scene writes itself into a corner.
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dashie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/rsz/mlfw489_small.jpg
… my next ship will be Octavia x Opalescent. We shall call it Octopuss.
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Sorry, I was failing at language. Benman explicitly said that with editing, Social Lubricant could be my best story yet. I didn't mean to put words in your mouth.
I'm glad you like it too, though — and glad NR hit a high point!
I really, really should resist the temptation of stepping in between 955165 and 954694. When elephants fight, etc.
However …
There's an anecdote which I read here on FIMFic a while back; I think it was from Bad Horse (correct me if I'm wrong). To the best of my recollection, it went thus: The author turned in a story to his creative writing professor, who handed it back, said "Now rewrite this with zero adverbs and see what happens," and it was a tremendously valuable learning experience. The significance of this is … well … look who told it, and see Bad Horse's argument above.[1]
That having been said, I have 90 adverbs in my story, out of 7000 words. This is almost certainly too many. Zero is just as certainly too few.[2] I suspect that I can shed 20 and it will unambiguously improve the writing (I've already murdered 10 and miss none). I can probably sacrifice another 20 with some struggle, and maybe 20 beyond that on the altar of EqD if that's what's standing between me and a feature. 953607 already provided some fantastic examples for restructuring the ones I quoted.
I'd be genuinely curious to do an adverb-per-word count of famous novels and of top MLP fanfic (both best-written and most popular, not the same thing at all). Not as targets, but as data points.
At any rate, I appreciate your time and advice. (Especially Cold, who I haven't seen around here before — thanks for dropping by!) Time for me to get back to culling the herdly herd.[3]
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[1] If I'm misremembering, embarrassing for me, but I remember it being used as part of a larger point that what's necessary is not adverb genocide but adverb justification. If I'm REALLY misremembering and it was CiG who told the story, DOUBLE embarrassing for me, but still see [2].
[2] Relevant but tangential: CiG's anti-adverb reply contained the phrase "These are adverbs, helpfully flagged by the treacherous -ly". I do NOT point this out in the ad-hominem "you do it too" sense — but because when I look at that construction, I see an adverb carrying its weight. It's expressing tone in a way that the neutral "flagged" can't muster and synonyms don't carry. It sets up parallel structure that invokes a direct contrast with an opposite descriptor ("helpfully flagged", adv v / "treacherous -ly", adj n). Recast the sentence to express the same sentiment and preserve the former while killing the adverb, and you lose the latter. Frankly, I can't improve on that construction.
[3] I am keenly, painfully aware of every single adverb in this comment, but I'd rather be lazy and write this quickly than spend time polishing a blog post when it's the story I want to fix. Crutches Shortcuts are essential when the goal is saving time.
956633
Once upon a time, I was good enough at identifying words that I could go through a text and extract a word count of it by part-of-speech. This was something I learned to do in English classes, where teachers insisted on variations of asking what each word in a sentence was. It was something I didn't think of as relevant. I learned to do it, thought it easy, and paid no attention to it.
I blew it off, and forgot about it once the skill was no longer relevant. Now I struggle to identify parts of speech. I'm capable, but it's challenging. When you say "90 adverbs in my story, out of 7000 words", I'm gobsmacked. That's something I would have been able to do. It's something that would take ages now.
Perhaps that means I should drill myself on parts of speech again. I have a collection of appropriate textbooks. You are keenly aware of every single adverb in that comment? I, to my pain and regret, am not!
956633
Ha! Got me. Yes, I do use adverbs from time to time, usually without realizing it. I suppose I would argue, though, that there's a difference between using an adverb as a shortcut (i.e. "staring contemplatively") vice using one to set the tone of the sentence (i.e. "helpfully flagged"). It's possible to demonstrate how someone stares at binoculars, describing their expression to convey that they are feeling contemplative. I'm not sure it's possible to otherwise construct "helpfully flagged" to convey the same meaning without using an adverb.
So, that's my excuse. Use adverbs if they're the only way to make your point. Otherwise, reword your sentence.
Or it's possible I'm just being a hypocrite! Its been known to happen.
956633 Adverbs do the most damage in speech tags and as substitutes for body language. I leap to their defense because I perceive over-reaction and over-simplification, and because I feel sorry for the poor, despised adverbs. Also, we're speaking in the context of EqD, which has a history of persecuting innocent adverbs. Some pre-readers go through stories with a checklist that has "eliminate adverbs" on it, and this leads to author puzzlement like what you described.
956953
Oh, heavens, nothing that complex. To locate them in my story, I did a regexp search for "ly[ .,!?]", and manually subtracted a few non-adverbs (e.g. only, jolly) from the count of results. Good enough for our purposes. I'm impressed you've done that by hand.
I was painfully aware of every adverb in that particular comment because we're talking about me using them! Clearly (oh hey there's another one), if I'm peppering my story with inefficient ones, this awareness isn't an all-the-time thing.
957221 957226
Thanks again for the clarifications. "Adverbs do the most damage in speech tags and as substitutes for body language": another good takeaway.
So did you say "by degrees" to avoid "gradually?"
Apparently, there's this odd taboo on adverbs, which I don't honestly get. "Not," is technically an adverb, which seems fine. Just the mistake of a novice, probably.
955151
It seems to me like one thing that would help is having an archive of "rejection reasons" that is either public or semi-public. At the moment, it's completely private between the pre reader and the author. There are entirely valid reasons to reject a fic, then there are INvalid ones (I've chatted with someone whose Harry Potter crossover was rejected because Harry was out of character. Thing is, they were judging Harry by the latter half of the books... and this was a Harry at age SIX).
This results in an air of arbitrary decision making done without oversight, rightly or wrongly.
1105464
This would be valuable. Still, it would be really hard to set up because of confidentiality concerns. "Hard" doesn't mean "impossible," though, and asking individual authors for permission is possible even if it would be a huge hassle. I'll give it some thought
I'm pretty sure I know which story you mean. (First published to fimfic on April 7 2012, published to fanfiction.net July 20 2011, right?) I rejected that one, and I stand behind that decision. Harry being out of character and acting like a preteen is only one of several reasons I shot it down. That was back before the dawn of time, when Seth managed the ficbox, so it's entirely possible that only a summary of the rejection letter was sent.
1105668
...I thought he WAS a pre teen. In The Wizard And The Lonely Princess (and yes, Harry doesn't mind talking about this too much) Harry makes contact with Luna and the Nightmare at age six. How is it valid for him to be "out of character" when we only see him first when he's five or more years older?
I quote from the very first line of the fic proper:
Regardless of what the other reasons were, to claim that Harry is out of character for acting like a pre teen? Completely, totally wrong - because he IS one. He's SIX.
1105677
I meant "preteen" in the sense of "ten to thirteen or so", which is the usual meaning. [1] [2] [3] Sorry about the confusion; English is a weird language.
1105690
So you mean he was acting too old, then. Again, we don't know what he was like - we see him five years later. (It's known that kids who are abused, especially, can have unusual development rates.)
1105690
Well, I checked - seems he was specifically told Harry's characterization should be closer to how he was in the later books.
1106820
I didn't mention the later books in my email. I guess it's possible Seth inserted that? He had a habit of skimming and misinterpreting reviews back when he managed prereader communication. If the author asks me to send him the text of what I wrote, or to post it here, then I will.