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This is number eighty-four in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“GOOD NEWS, LENA,” said Ole. “I bought a condominium!”
“That’s wonderful,” answered Lena. “Now I can throw away the diagram!”
What a wonderful, rich vocabulary we have when it comes to a play on words. When one person can misunderstand another fluently, it is even better.
I read a work on SOL by a very popular and fine author, now deceased, titled Thunder and Lightening. I cringed a little. Of course, the author meant ‘lightning,’ I thought to myself. But the story by Lazlo Zalezac had a 9.03 rating and I wasn’t going to miss out on what he had to say.
Sure enough, the spelling was intentional and was the key to understanding the change in character of the leading male. I won’t give a spoiler as to how it was resolved, but I went from cringing to admiration.
When I released Going for the Juggler in 2016, oddly enough in another of Laslo Zalezac’s universes, I received a lengthy missive from a reader explaining that the vein in the neck is the jugular, not the juggler, and I should have someone proofread my work more carefully.
I spent an equally long email explaining about how authors sometimes use a play on words. Yes, the title brings to mind the phrase ‘going for the jugular’ as a kill-phrase. But the main character in the novel is a circus clown and juggler and the bad guys are going after him!
He sent back a message that simply said, “Face palm.”
I’m so glad I didn’t immediately respond to Lazlo when I read the title of Thunder and Lightening! (Which, by the way, MS Word still insists is misspelled.)
Going for the Juggler and the previous two books in the Hero Lincoln Trilogy are available as a collection or individual eBooks at Bookapy.
It’s great when we can consciously make a play on words, but what about when a word is misused by a person (or character) thinking they have used the correct word? When the word sounds similar but means something different, it is called a malaprop. Isn’t it amazing that we have words for just about everything?
The malaprop was named after a character in Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play, The Rivals: Mrs. Malaprop. This delightful old lady is constantly attempting to sound learned and sophisticated but can’t utter a sentence without a word that doesn’t mean what she thinks it means.
“Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!” says Mrs. Malaprop. The meaning, however, is “If I comprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my vernacular tongue, and a nice arrangement of epithets"
Sheridan was by no means the first to use malaprops—in fact the term goes back as far as the 1600s. Even before that, Shakespeare’s famed character Dogberry from Much Ado About Nothing is known for the speech pattern that is also known by the name Dogberryism.
“Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons,” says Constable Dogberry, meaning “Our watch, sir have indeed apprehended two suspicious persons.”
Emily Litella, a character created on Saturday Night Live by Gilda Radner was known for her malapropisms. My favorite, especially at this time of year, was when she began her editorial speech with “What is all this I hear about presidential erections?” When she is corrected and told the term is ‘elections,’ she responds with her classic line, “Never mind.”
Sadly, the phenomenon is not limited to fictional characters or done for effect.
Australian prime minister Tony Abbott once claimed that no one “is the suppository of all wisdom” (i.e., repository).
Texas governor Rick Perry has been known to commonly utter malapropisms. For example, he described states as “lavatories of innovation and democracy” instead of “laboratories.”
If you’ve heard anything about a “peach tree dish,” “gazpacho police,” or something “fragrantly violated,” thank US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Sometimes the terms are a simple misplaced word or tangled tongue. Other times, however, they are the result of people attempting to sound smarter than they are. Those are the ones to watch out for.
In writing, we encounter a lot of words called homophones that drive readers crazy. This term has absolutely nothing to do with sexual preference. Homophones are words that sound the same (or nearly the same) but mean something different.
Let’s start with “here” vs. “hear.” The first is indicative of place. The second is the effect of sound on the ears.
To, two, and too are three words with vastly different meanings but that all sound the same. When seen in writing, however, they can be cringe-worthy. To is a direction. Two is a number. Too means also.
Then we have the classic “there,” “their,” “they’re.” The first is a place, the second is a plural possessive, and the third is a contraction for ‘they are.’ Readers cringe when they see these confused.
In the ‘sounds close’ category, one of the most common substitution I see is then/than. Most of the time I see it, then is substituted for than. “Then” indicates an order of events. “Than” indicates a comparison or preference. There is a vast difference between “I’d rather do dishes than have sex,” vs. “I’d rather do dishes then have sex. Only one of them actually ends in sex.
My editor would not forgive me if I did not address ‘verbing.’ A few weeks ago, I mentioned an author whose breakthrough novel allowed her to quit teaching and start noveling full time. My editor let it pass, but cringed and called it out to me. ‘Noveling’ is a term popularized by National Novel Writing Month meaning the act of writing a novel. It’s not a word. Mea culpa.
I sat in a sales meeting some years ago at which a vice president spent an hour talking about how the company was going to ‘incentivize’ the sales force. This is not a word but was manufactured from the noun ‘incentive.’
Usually, when a person makes a verb out of a noun, there is another perfectly good verb that could be used instead. My own pet peeve over the past few years has been the use of ‘gift’ as a verb. What is the difference between ‘gifted’ and ‘gave?’
That isn’t to say we should never make up new words. Every year, we find new words that have entered our language and finally made it to the dictionary. Merriam-Webster announced that it added 690 new words to the dictionary in September 2023 alone. These included:
rizz noun, slang : romantic appeal or charm
rotoscope verb : to draw or paint over something frame by frame in order to create a matte
rewild verb : to return to a more natural or wild state.
logline noun : a simple synopsis of a screenplay, film, novel, etc. used for pitching
smashburger noun : a hamburger patty that is pressed thin onto a heated pan at the start of cooking
girlboss noun : an ambitious and successful woman
Dictionaries can be fun reading!
Next week, something so new and different that I haven’t thought of what it is yet!
This is number eighty-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“PUT A COMMA wherever you’d pause when speaking” has to be the worst instruction I ever received from an English teacher. And, in fact, if you look through books and magazines published in the late-1800s and early 1900s, you’ll find pages peppered with the little curved punctuation marks. Some publications look like someone spilled the bottle of them and didn’t clean up.
“But that’s where I pause when talking.”
So what? If you consciously listen to people speaking, you’ll find they pause at all kinds of places that make no sense at all. Pauses are simply a speech pattern and don’t necessarily add meaning to most sentences. Further, people speaking often have no sentence structure at all, and might run-on for an entire page without breathing. Commas are hardly a help there.
There are, actually, places where a comma adds meaning and lessens confusion. In the title of this blog post, adding a comma between ‘eat’ and ‘Gramma’ will save her life.
A panda walks into a café and orders a sandwich. When it arrives, he eats it and turns to the door. He pulls a gun, fires two shots into the air, and walks out. The waiter, puzzled by the behavior, picks up a poorly punctuated pamphlet left on the table which says: “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
This is a quote taken from a bar joke told by author Ursula LeGuin. Author Lynn Truss wrote a popular grammar book titled after the joke, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
The proper meaning, of course, is that “eats” is a verb. “Shoots and leaves” are object nouns—what the panda eats. But with the added comma, the sentence becomes three verbs. To eat. To shoot. To leave.
Another popular saying is “Let’s eat, kids” vs. “Let’s eat kids.” One will leave you fed, the other will leave you dead. Commas save lives.
These examples show that the addition of a comma can change the meaning drastically, but so also can the omission of a comma.
Of course, the best place to use a comma is when separating a list of things, whether nouns or verbs or sometimes adjectives. When we consider this, we often run into what is known as the serial or Oxford comma. I am a proponent of the Oxford comma when it is needed to clarify a list. I believe the only style guide that encourages not using it is the AP Style Guide, which is written to save space in the narrow columns of a typical newspaper.
“Tom likes Sue, Mary, and Leslie.” These are three proper nouns that might not be confused without the comma, but the meaning is clearer with it.
“I’d like to thank my parents, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.” Here, the series is confusing. Is the speaker the son of Robert and Emily? Or is he thanking his parents and two famous poets? A comma before the “and” would make the sentence clear.
“John mounted his horse, drew his gun, and rode off in all directions.” In this instance, we have three verb phrases separated by commas. Omitting the comma before “and” would give the impression there is something more in common between drawing and riding than there is between them and mounting.
It's not gray hair that reveals my age. It's my use of complete sentences and punctuation when I text.
That brings me to the subject of a list of adjectives. Many people place commas between every pair of adjectives in a list. But commas are only needed when the adjectives are of a similar category. What do I mean? I’ll try to explain.
When using multiple adjectives in an English sentence, the correct order to follow is:
1. Determiner (e.g., a, an, the, your, each)
2. Quantity (e.g., one, three, many, few)
3. Opinion (e.g., ugly, cute, precious)
4. Size (e.g., big, small, tiny)
5. Age (e.g., young, old)
6. Shape (e.g., round, square, rectangular)
7. Color (e.g., red, pink, orange)
8. Origin (e.g., American, South African, Korean)
9. Material (e.g., silk, plastic, wooden)
10. Purpose or qualifier (e.g., wedding dress, travel journal)
If multiple adjectives are used in this order, no comma is needed.
“He was a handsome young South American man.”
On the other hand, if using adjectives that fall into a single category above, it is common to use commas to separate them.
“He was an ugly, despicable, dishonest old man.”
All three adjectives, “ugly, despicable, dishonest” could be classed as “opinion.” Note there is no comma between “dishonest” and “old” because they are in different categories.
Changing the order of adjectives from the order they appear in the list will almost invariably sound wrong, even though it is sometimes done.
“It was a linen, orange, antique napkin.” Compare with “It was an antique orange linen napkin.” Even with commas in the first sentence it still sounds awkward.
Is this an exhaustive list of when to use commas? Heavens, no! There are the use of commas to set off an introductory or appositive phrase, the use of a comma to separate a direct quotation from its attribute, separating a participle phrase from the remainder of the sentence, after the salutation or closing of an informal letter, and wherever the sense of the statement is clarified by using a comma.
I will comment on some additional grammar issues in the next post. It will likely be a mishmash of several writing errors I see frequently. You guessed it: “Synonym roles like grammar used to make.”
Enjoy!
This is number eighty-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WHERE Y’ALL FROM?” asked the Southern Belle.
“Where I’m from we don’t end sentences with a preposition,” replied the snooty Yankee.
“So, where y’all from, bitch?”
Yes, we English speakers were all taught that we shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. That wasn’t even a rule until the 17th century when a self-styled grammarian made the statement. But, even then, we don’t always get it right.
In the example above, the first sentence is a fine example of having things understood in colloquial English. While the rule, when interpreted strictly, would require a sentence that said “From where are y’all?” it is awkward and absolutely no one would actually speak that way.
And that is what we’re all about in this post: Rules that get tossed around by the grammar police, but aren’t as absolute as they’d like to believe.
When I wrote Devon Layne’s Redtail back in 2013, I started the story with a deliberate misunderstanding of a question. Cole is asked about his “first time” by a counselor. In our prurient minds, we might jump to the conclusion that the counselor is asking about his first time having sex. And, indeed, Cole launches into a salacious description about what could have been considered a first time having oral sex.
“Why is it that everybody wants to know about your first time? What kind of voyeurs are we? Do we just want to compare to see that we weren’t the only ones who were somehow disappointed? Or to prove that our experiences were so far better than everyone else? Or to participate vicariously in something we lost long ago? The first time. The first time.”
It turned out that his description was of the first time eating oysters. It is revealed, however, that both interpretations are false. What’s really being discussed is his first time as a time traveler.
And so it is with many rules of the English language. They have to be taken in context, not merely as a hard and fast rule.
The three-book Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures series is available as a collection or as individual eBooks at Bookapy, and in paperback from other online resellers.
In the 1940s, a popular joke was credited to several sources, including a clerk, an army officer, and others, but was most frequently ascribed to Winston Churchill, simply because he was the most famous personage. The actual source is unknown.
It is said that Churchill circulated a document for comment and approval and was severely criticized for ending sentences with a preposition. His response was “This is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.”
Yes, the phrasing certainly makes the point of not ending the sentence “This is the kind of pedantry I will not put up with” with a preposition. However, the latter is not only far clearer, but is actually correct! What we miss is that the entire phrase ‘put up with’ is referred to as a ‘phrasal verb’ and is treated exactly as a verb. To “put up with” means to “tolerate.” It is not treated as a preposition at all!
Can you give us some other examples, Devon? Well, certainly.
“That is a woman you would never run out on.”
“She is someone I’d really like to get together with.”
“She has the kind of personality you can really feed off of.”
Those are all phrasal verbs. In most instances, a phrasal verb could be replaced with a different single word verb. “Run out on,” for example, means “abandon.” Of course, they don’t always appear at the end of a sentences. We use them all the time, but never stop to figure out what they are called.
“I’d never run out on her.”
Who is this woman? Well, I do write erotica, so you can choose almost any of my characters to cozy up to.
English has all kinds of ‘rules’ that just don’t always apply. For example, we are taught the spelling rule “i before e except after c.”
Except when your foreign neighbor Keith gets eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters!
And if you try to alter the rule by explaining that it only applies to words in which the ‘ie’ rhymes with ‘bee,’ let me remind you of caffeine, plebeian, protein, seize, and Keith. I’m afraid you will find more words in the English language that break the rule than follow it!
This is so much fun! Here’s another hard and fast rule in English: Use the indefinite article ‘a’ before a consonant and ‘an’ before a vowel. Of course, the first example that comes up, people think of as just being a rare exception: “It’s an honor to meet you.” Okay. So, except before ‘h’. But it goes much deeper than that.
This is one of the cases (remind me to address apostrophes sometime) when the spoken word trumps the written rule. Whether the letter used to spell the word is a consonant or vowel is not as important as the sound it makes.
It is an honor to meet you.
He is a humble man.
She is an MIT graduate.
She went to a university.
In each of these instances, it is the sound of the initial letter that determines which article to use, not the letter itself.
Some people look at the exceptions to our English language rules as being something that destroys the purity of the language. Early spellcheckers, like some editors, determined incorrect words based solely on the rules and blindly corrected to the rule. This is an inherent danger with the new generative AI algorithms. We have no guardian checking AI to see if it is using the correct grammatical form or only the most popular. That’s why so much AI generated text sounds like a speech given by a presidential candidate. It has no filter to determine what is actually correct English.
James Nicoll, a Canadian freelance game and speculative fiction reviewer, turned a phrase in a 1990 article on Usenet that has been adopted and adapted to memes for twenty years or more.
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
Indeed, many of the rules of English simply don’t apply to the homogeneity of our mostly-borrowed language. If you’d like genuine pure English, perhaps you should go back a millennium or so ago and try this on:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Even the British no longer write like Chaucer did in 1400, let alone like the anonymous author of Beowulf just 400 years earlier!
Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum
þéodcyninga þrym gefrúnon
hú ðá æþelingas ellen fremedon.
English has never been easy!
I’ll continue with good writing gone bad in next week’s posting on punctuation. Don’t try this in a text message. You’ll be marked as an old man! “Let’s Eat Grandma.”
This is number eighty-one in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE, RIGHT? For the most part, that would be the answer given by nearly every native English speaker if asked what the verb tenses are. I say “native speaker” because almost all English as Second Language (ESL) students are taught all the proper uses of the different tenses, while Americans generally skip all that. It went out with diagramming sentences in fourth grade.
The truth is that we use the twelve basic tenses all the time, but often use them incorrectly. If you know no better, then it’s all okay, right?
When writing for public consumption (rather than your private journal or a text message) it can be helpful to understand the different tenses and what they imply. It helps in clearly communicating to the reader. It might even be one thing that differentiates between humans and artificial intelligence. I’ll talk about the latter in a future post, but not today.
My writing of the Team Manager series was interrupted a few years ago by a new character introducing himself unexpectedly as I was driving along US 95 south of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
“Hi. My name is Bob. I’ll be your demon this evening.”
Suddenly I had a 4,000-year-old happy-go-lucky (mostly lucky) demon on my hands who demanded that I tell his version of the past four millennia of human history.
Whatever you say, Bob.
But writing Bob’s story, also involved determining the point of view. (I wrote about POV in my post on 9/15: “Put Your Butt Behind You.”) It was simple to declare it would be Bob’s Memoir, and thus be written in first person. Beyond that, though, I needed to decide if I would record it as if it was happening in the present, or would I write it as being in the past. The first sentence implies a first person simple present tense: “I’m Bob.” But the second sentence implies a simple future tense: “I’ll (I will) be your demon this evening.” In the same paragraph, Bob switches to a present perfect tense: “We’ve (We have) prepared a delectable array of vices…”
They are all typical usages in speech, but we lump them all together as just past, present, and future.
In the end, I let Bob decide when to use which tense, as it was his story. All three volumes of Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon are available individually or as a collection at Bookapy.
I’m an expert at all this English language stuff because I have a bachelor’s degree in English, right? Ha! I don’t even come close. So, I turned to English professor Sarah Avery, writing as Dr. Pretentious, for the definitions of the twelve tenses. If you like contemporary and epic fantasy, check out her breakthrough novels in that category that got her out of academia and into noveling full time.
Dr. Pretentious broke the tenses down with a simple chart. Yes, there are past, present, and future. Let those be the labels for the rows. In the columns, we have simple, progressive, perfect, and perfect progressive.
Simple past, present, and future are the tenses we all think of immediately: I did. I do. I will do. We can substitute nearly any verb in these three places and have a sensible statement.
But what if the statement involves an action that is continuing? The progressive tenses are all about duration and began before the moment being discussed, continue in the moment being discussed, and may or may not continue beyond the moment being discussed. Past, present, and future progressive: I was doing. I am doing. I will be doing. Note that these all require a verb ending in “-ing” (a participle).
The perfect tense is used to talk about the relationship or sequence of two moments in time. The action occurred and was completed before the moment being discussed. Past, present, and future perfect: I had done. I have done. I will have done. Isn’t that easy?
And finally, the perfect progressive tense describes both duration of the action and the relationship of the sequence. Past, present, and future perfect progressive: I had been doing. I have been doing. I will have been doing. Notice that these also require a verb ending in -ing.
And there we have the simple description of the twelve tenses in the English language. Why do we make it so complex?
The biggest problem for the author is in switching tenses in a story in a way that doesn’t make sense. This is often the case in colloquial speech. For example, “He shouted an insult at me and then he just leaves.” Both events described in the sentence happened in the past, but the second action was written as though in the present. While you might use this construction in a conversation at the dog park, it just doesn’t work in writing.
On the other hand, don’t change construction that distinguishes past action from present state of being. For example: “I walked to Jitters this morning and ordered my usual decaf quad grande Americano. I like my coffee hot, strong, and black.” In this instance, the past tense verbs of the first sentence indicate an action that happened earlier. The present tense verb in the second sentence indicates a present state of being. As long as I have not stopped liking black coffee, it should be present tense.
In attempting to be right in tense usage (or in trying to increase word count, or to sound more sophisticated and educated, i.e. pretentious) authors frequently resort to complicated sentence structures that require a certified grammarian to understand. We could invent all kinds of tenses to explain these.
“If he would have been elected…”
I think this might be called a past perfect conditional, but what would separate that from the more easily parsed past perfect? (Also called 'pluperfect' by some.)
“If he had been elected…”
When in doubt, use the simplest form that is clear.
Sometimes, people learn a rule in the English language and write all kinds of convoluted sentences to make it work. It’s not necessary to work so hard at it. Next week it’s something “Up With Which I Will Not Put.”
Enjoy!
This is number eighty in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
IT WILL COME AS NO SURPRISE to some of my readers that my education was not specifically in writing. My double major in college included English, but my real focus for my BA and graduate studies was theatrical design with a secondary emphasis on play writing.
While I did my master’s work in Minnesota, I designed and built 24 shows in 24 months and had two of my plays produced. Hooray for teaching assistantships. I ended 1978 in a state of total burn-out. I left my job, my marriage, theatre, and almost everything else in my life. I decided, eventually, to go into something low-stress.
Like publishing.
Ah, well.
Nonetheless, I carried a huge amount of theatrical training into writing and publishing. One of the things that has stuck with me through the years is simply that Friday night at 8:00 the curtain goes up. There comes a point with every novel at which it has to be released to the audience, even if the leading actress is still being sewn into her costume! It’s showtime!
This is a good time to mention that books, like plays and blog posts, are not necessarily written in chronological order. The first Nathan Everett book published by Long Tale Press in 2007 was For Blood or Money. I always planned to continue this as a series, so I wrote the next two volumes, Municipal Blondes and Stocks & Blondes, in the next two months after I finished the draft of For Blood or Money. But they weren’t published until much later!
Instead, I went back and wrote the first book in the series, For Money or Mayhem. Eventually, I wrote the second book in the series, For Mayhem or Madness. Then I published the final two that had been written years earlier. Confused yet? Maybe someday I’ll write other volumes in this popular cyber crime series.
But as my first published book, For Blood or Money had problems in it that I really needed to correct before I brought out the second edition in 2013 when I was ready to release For Money or Mayhem.
One of those problems was a theatrical no-no referred to as “Breaking the Fourth Wall.” If you look at a theatrical setting, you’ll readily see it is intended to be viewed from the front. Of course, there are thrust stages with the audience on three sides or theatre in the round, there is still a performance area and a “fourth wall” between the action and the audience.
Breaking the fourth wall involves crossing that boundary between the action and the audience. A character comes forward and talks directly to the audience members instead of staying on the stage, behind the wall.
The most typical way this is done in writing a novel is in the narrator using comments directed to the reader with words like, “You know…” or “If you walk down First Street…” We use these expressions all the time in speech when we are talking to other people. It is a kind of universal ‘you.’ But it seldom works in a novel unless you are specifically writing in a second person POV. In my humble opinion, that seldom works anyway. In a first person or third person story, it breaks the connection with the reader rather than enhancing it.
I think this is often done to try to heighten the personalization of the story, but it can often backfire… even in the character’s dialog. For example:
Dag: “Imagine your husband is cheating on you.”
Jen: “I’m not married.”
Dag’s personalization of the hypothetical experience backfired on him. In the same way, if I use the pronoun “you” in my writing, I stop telling a story and attempt to personalize it by addressing the reader. That, except in rare occurrences, will also backfire. I did this a lot in For Blood or Money, and realized that it most frequently shows up in first person narratives.
The entire Seattle Noir Cyber Mysteries collection and the individual eBooks are available at Bookapy. Paperbacks are available online.
You will notice (See how easy that was?) that I break the fourth wall in this blog all the time. That is because I am not telling a story independent of the reader, but rather am telling you, the reader, what I’ve learned about writing and erotica over the years. Since this was not learned in a formal course on writing novels, the ideas sometimes are out of order and seemingly random. However, I find they help me in my writing as I dredge things up and review them in my current work.
Breaking the fourth wall is not unheard of in third person narratives, and is even more jarring. For example:
“He examined the contents of the bag and pulled out a pocket knife, a role of duct tape, and a ball of string. Then he reached for one more thing. You never know when chewing gum might come in handy.”
In the last sentence, I stopped telling a story and gave an aside to the reader. (I also switched tense!) That was the kind of thing I needed to correct in the Seattle Noir Cyber Mysteries and in everything else I write. My editors are also very good at spotting those things and reminding me to correct them.
Another lesson I learned from my time in theatre, was that plays are performed in a black box. The designer needs to give an indication to the audience regarding where the setting ends. Most theatrical settings do not have ceilings because the lights need to be directed downward in order to eliminate obnoxious shadows on the background, or even to prevent lights from shining in the audience’s eyes. The tops of walls and edges of the set need to be defined so the audience knows where the action stops. “Nothing to see above here.” My rather famous design advisor in Minnesota told me bluntly that I needed to ‘finish my walls.’ This was done with a border, a capstone, a partial ceiling, or other finial that would define the top of the set so people knew that anything above that was not part of the play.
That is more difficult to apply to a novel, but I find it is necessary. I need to know and tell the reader where the edges of the story are. In dramatic works, especially tragedies, playwrights are still paying lip service to the concept of Aristotle’s three unities.
Unity of Action: The action should be consolidated in a single plot.
Unity of Place: The play should take place in one location.
Unity of Time: The entire action should take place in a single daylight period.
Of course, these 400BC ‘rules’ were not dug out of the extant works of Aristotle until the late 1500s, so there are many examples of plays from greats like Shakespeare that do not follow them at all. While Aristotle’s suggestion is way too limiting for a novel, it is still a good reminder to focus on a single major plot. A novel is typically vastly longer than a play, so the unities of time and place are not as strongly adhered to. But a conscientious writer will still know the boundaries of his story. This is the beginning, this is the middle, and this is the end.
I try, often unsuccessfully, to follow that pattern.
Did you know there are twelve defined tenses in the English language? I didn’t get around to talking about that this week, but next week I’ll tackle “Tense and Pretense.”
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