At the bottom of the deepest circle of revision hell

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. – Elie Wiesel

We have met the enemy, and he is us. -- Pogo

Finally, on our writer’s quest for redemption from The Seven Deadly First Page Sins (as devised by author/editors Tex Thompson and Laura Maisano), we have reached the end. That’s right, the lowest depths of revision hell. And the good news, once we reach bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up!

In Dante’s version of hell, the lowest circles were occupied not by the most lecherous or violent. Those sins, although deadly, he considered the ones most tied to our earthly, bodily nature. He reserved the lowest depths for the fraudulent, the seducers, the flatters. Those who sinned against our intellect, with the devil at the very bottom. Thompson and Maisano call their writerly version of these ultimate intellectual sins, the sins of indifference. Although the sinners of Dante were without hope, there is redemption for even the worst sins of a writer’s craft. But writer beware – the sins of indifference are the most difficult to repair.

In the interest of knowing the enemy (especially when she is us), Thompson/Maisano name the sins of indifference clichés, confusion and – worst and deadliest of all – boredom.

The problem with clichés is, they once worked so well! Like Lucifer, they originally bore the aspect of angels. Some were quick and easy forms of shorthand that packed a lot of information into small packages. Is that crystal clear? Plain as the nose on your face? Does it make you mad as a hatter? Do we even know what these tired phrases mean anymore? 

Some flattered us into the sins off excess with the lure of genre-specific clichés – endless, and endlessly trite descriptions of magic, romance, or bad behavior. 

image: pixabay

Some will try to insert themselves into any genre. Anyone who wants the full course on writerly sins will need to contact Thompson/Maisano (or have your writing group leader do so), so I’ll only provide snippets from their list of the tired but still filthily sinful “dirty dozen” of opening page clichés: character waking up, character addressing the audience, dream sequence, flash forward to something actually interesting from much later in the story (annoying prologue syndrome). 

Stop! I can hear readers crying. Didn’t Metamorphosis (1915) open with a character waking up? Didn’t David Copperfield (1850) and Catcher in the Rye (1951) open with a character addressing the audience? Didn’t Rebecca (1938) open with a dream sequence (not to mention flashing forward to an interesting event later in the story)? And weren’t they successful, now classic, tales?

Remember though, clichés weren’t born that way. They were tactics so brilliant that everybody and her dog used them. Only not so brilliantly. Notice the dates on those original stories – none of them are recent. And a century after Copperfield, the direct address to readers had become so banal that Catcher had to make a deliberate attempt to subvert it. Daphne du Maurier gets additional mileage from her dream opening in Rebecca by telling us directly that it’s a dream, not pulling any tricks. And though it’s also a flash forward, there’s actually even more interesting stuff in the book than the fate of an old mansion.

And for everyone whose critique group has told them never to open with a character waking up, I’ve got to say that waking up to find yourself transformed into a giant insect has got to be out of the ordinary course of a character’s life. It makes me wonder what Kafka’s critique group had to say about it.

Still, before anyone becomes too discouraged, Thompson/Maisano urge us to be as hopelessly dull and cliched as we like on our first drafts. Then . . . do something else.

“Take your first, second, and third ideas and place them carefully in the garbage!”

Clichés, though, aren’t the only sins of indifference. There’s also confusion (who did what to who and where and when?) Leaving questions in a reader’s mind can be a good thing. Or a bad thing.

Good if it makes the reader wonder what comes next, or whether the character will get what she wants, or even wonder what’s in that strangely shaped, ticking parcel? Questions go bad when the reader can’t picture the scene, doesn’t know who’s speaking, or who did what to whom.

And finally, the baddest of the bad, the greatest writerly sin of indifference is . . . boredom. 

Speaking to a meeting of Dallas Mystery Writers, Thompson warned that there is no way to completely boredom-proof a story. There will always be somebody who just doesn’t get it, just doesn’t care. We can, however, make our stories boredom-resistant, by providing them with a unique character, a daunting task, a strange place or thing, an intriguing mystery or an unexpected reversal. 

There’s not room in the opening pages for us to do justice to them all. Pick one and do it well. And save the rest for the rest of the pages of our book.

(Coming – revision doesn’t always need to be hell. One author/editor finds it the part of writing he enjoys most.)

Mirror, mirror – clichés, tropes, or indispensable aids?

Ever have one of those days when a single thing jumps out at you wherever you turn? It happens, of course, when you’re already attuned to a topic. One day I was writing about a person who walked with a cane – which I’d never thought about before – unleashed armies of people everywhere I turned, all walking with canes! And this wasn’t even in a hospital or nursing home.

I had a similar experience this weekend when, after a marvelous workshop about writerly revision, including the dreaded topic of clichés (hint: avoid them like the plague) I walked into a discussion at the Dallas Book Festival about tropes.

What’s the connection between clichés and tropes? Both are shorthand ways of conveying information without needing to spell out all the details (a definition cribbed from one of my recently-favorite sites, TV Tropes, which I wrote about earlier this year in "How does a writer juggle a cast of multiples."

image: pixabay

As A. Lee Martinez, a writer on the festival’s trope panel put it, “even good writers have techniques to tell the story,” without reinventing language from scratch.   

Whether we call them story structures, or archetypes, or elements, some genres require tropes. Mess with expected tropes too much, and readers will throw down the story in puzzlement, if not outright disgust. The happily ever after (or at least, happily for now) endings that are de rigueur for romances are familiar tropes. 

(Writing a romantic relationship that doesn’t end happily? Call it, as another panelist suggested, “women’s fiction” instead. Different genre, different trope.) 

Clichés only become clichéd when their descriptions are so apt that they become too familiar and lose their freshness. Not to mention become disease-ridden, somewhat in the manner of red-tip photinias in landscape plantings. Their original virtues of striking aptness and novelty contain the seeds of their ruin. (Obviously, this whole topic has infected my writing!)

And although tropes are useful because of their familiarity, as panel moderator Stacey Kuhnz pointed out, “at some point, tropes need to be a little bit different,” or risk becoming clichés themselves.

I nodded sagely, only to fear as I was revising a manuscript later that I had also fallen victim to a particularly dreaded cliché/trope -- the mirror image description.

Decades ago, when omniscient narrators were in style, writers had no qualms about flat-out telling readers what their story characters looked like. In Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell could tell us directly that her heroine Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but she had green eyes and black hair and the fair Irish skin that freckled too easily under a Southern sun. No one giggled at this writerly interpolation. (Besides, we had the fair-skinned, dark-haired Vivien Leigh in the story's movie version to show us exactly how Scarlett looked. And yes, this time she was beautiful.)

When omniscience fell out of fashion, writers found salvation in having their characters, especially female characters, view themselves in mirrors to describe – and often critique – their own appearance. And although I’m now leaning toward other ways to describe a character’s appearance, I miss mirror images.

These, after all, have a long and honorable history – dating to biblical times -- of showing us not only what we look like, but by their subtle, “mirror-image” aspect, of conveying an eerily different aspect not only of our outward appearance but also of our personality. In fact, a shadowy, alter-ego version of ourselves.

What would the fairy tale of Snow White be without the evil stepmother’s magic mirror? Or Harry Potter’s story without the illusory wish-fulfilling Mirror of Erised?

When my heroine looks at herself in the mirror, she doesn’t see the color of her eyes or skin or hair – all too well-known to herself to comment on – but the color and texture of the bruises on her neck from a near-fatal encounter with an ex-lover.

Encountering her action again during manuscript revision, I thought long about it. Isn’t it natural for anyone to examine the impact of such visible blemishes? Is this a cliché only limited to females? And if the blemishes are on a part of the body not visible to the person, is there any option other than using a mirror? Would the mirror use seem less a cliché if the character were examining her back?

None of my critique partners complained, but readers will have the final say. Ultimately, I hope they’ll pardon her – and me – for the mirror image. 

Wordcraft -- Gonged for a good cause

Among the most-anticipated events at this past weekend’s DFW Writers’ Conference in Hurst, Texas, was the Gong Show. There were also a rousing keynote speech, informative classes, and chances to “pitch” to literary agents -- that is, persuade them to take a look at a piece of writing with the hope they’ll represent the author to publishers.

But nothing thrills writers more than hearing their work, or that of their colleagues, ridiculed over a public address system.

The original Gong Show was a 1970’s TV review of amateur talent whose judges ended performances in front of a nationwide audience by striking a gong. The DFW conference’s version was less brutal, although the conference’s 2012 chairperson, Jason Myers, said some writers left in tears last year. (I saw no tears this time around.)

The show’s real purpose is to demonstrate something of immense help to writers -- what kinds of writing samples and query letters agents like, or more especially, dislike, receiving from writers.

Participants dropped a query letter or the first page of their novels into a box anonymously, for later reading before a panel of agents serving as judges. A sample continued to be read until at least three agents struck their gongs, and then explained their decisions.

There was some variation in tastes. One dazed but happy author of a memorably-gonged nonfiction query lived to see four agents in the audience -- not on the panel -- ask for samples of his work.

But no others were so lucky. What follows is a compilation of brutally honest comments, which I’ll leave without attribution, for the safety of the agents involved.

The biggest turnoff was any use of clichés -- of words, phrases, or situations. Please
pledge after me never to open a novel, or a query letter, by having a character awaken from a dream. Agents invariably considered this a failure of imagination. A sample comment: “I really loathe novels that start with ‘I woke up.’”

Also getting the gong of death: novels starting with descriptions of weather, no matter how dramatic. And agents found clichés in things I’d never think of, probably because I haven’t read thousands of unpublished manuscripts. An agent who deals with young adult (YA) fiction gonged for novels opening with a character’s move to a new place. Think demons who whisper temptation over the heroine’s shoulder have never been done before? They are, an agent said, “the modern version of ‘a dark and stormy night.’’

Other dislikes cited more than once were “boring,” “didn’t thrill me,” and “predictable” writing.

But although an agent said, “I look to reject because I’ve got 2,000 queries behind yours. You really have to make it pop,” authors also got the gong for “overwriting,” “trying too hard,” and “purple” prose. One agent, for instance, gonged a novel whose character “peeled her face” off a window pane in the opening page. After all, in some genres, face peeling can be a literal event.

Finally, an agent advised sidestepping the repeated crime of “creepiness,” even in the opening of horror novels, with a memory aid that may offend the weak of stomach, but spare others the heartbreak of rejection. It is: to avoid “the three p’s -- pee, puke, and pooh.” After all, dear protagonist, if we don’t know you yet, we don’t want to meet you first in that condition.