Phrases Can't Time Travel

            Writers love to weave a spell.  We want our audience to be swept away in our story, almost unaware of anything but the tale we’re telling.  And nothing jolts our readers out of that spell faster than when they come across a phrase that doesn’t match the time period we’ve chosen.

            Except for actual time travel stories, such as “Back to the Future,” in which the injection of skateboards and music from another era provided intentional humor, we have to make sure our characters don’t say “far out” in the 1990s, or “swell” in the 1850s.  You don’t want them using plastic in 1920, or celebrating Mother’s Day in 1890, long before it became an official holiday.

            Fortunately, it’s easy to catch mistakes of this size.  But where too many writers trip up is when they use modern catch phrases in stories set before those phrases caught on.  It’s  grating, it’s sloppy, and it shows zero attention to detail.

In the movie, The Young Victoria, Emily Blunt has a speech in which she speaks of the fact that she will never forget her mother’s betrayal, and says if the mother thinks she will, “You are dreaming.”  It’s simply not an expression used that way then, and wouldn’t be for another hundred years.   

I’ve heard some fiction writers say they’re relieved not to have to do the sort of research required for nonfiction, but all writers have to research the current phrases of their chosen era.  Did they honestly not realize that writing would require actual work?

Even if all your settings are in modern times, you need to be aware of when phrases came into use, and then fell away.  Many popular phrases, like fads, are overused and annoying—but sometimes that’s the point: Maybe you have a character who relies on clichés.

Think how many times you’ve heard someone describe a problem as “a train wreck,” or say someone has been “thrown under the bus.”  But when did those phrases come into popular usage?  Not prior to 2000.  “My bad,” “Make sure we’re on the same page,” and “24/7” are also recent—and badly worn— slang phrases.  I’m not saying not to use them, but use them sparingly and in the appropriate decades.  A slang dictionary can be an invaluable aid.

In the 1980s we got “that sucks,” and teenagers started saying, “She’s like” and “He’s all” in conversations.  It’s also the time period when young adults began making statements that ended with an upswing in their voice, as if asking a question.  You still hear it today.   “My name is Amy?  And I’m selling Girl Scout Cookies?”  It makes you want to ask, “Aren’t you sure?” but the speaker doesn’t even hear that she’s doing it.

New synonyms for “very” and “definitely” pop up all the time, as well.  In the 90s we heard “I am SO not going to class,” “I am SO buying that dress,” and the hideous “hecka” as in, “That was hecka fun.” 

“Seriously?” gave way to “Really?” and it’s anyone’s guess what the next gasp of disbelief will be.  I know, right?

I think my least favorite cliché at the moment (though a new one is always waiting in the wings) is “he has my back.”  How much peril do you actually live in?  Are you really under siege and need someone to fire at the enemy while you run for cover in your day-to-day life?  Maybe you live in a sketchy area.  I’m just saying.

No Free Rides

            In school we’re taught that the rules of writing are mostly grammatical.  And grammar is definitely indispensable.  But there are other rules that make it sing.  Just as a piano student can play mechanically, hitting the right notes and keeping the right tempo, it isn’t enough.  You have to know—and implement—the secret stuff they don’t teach in school.

            Today I’m sharing one of those bits of information and it’s this: No Free Rides.  Whether you’re writing a short story, a novel, a screenplay, or a play, you are taking on unspoken duties to your audience.  You cannot enlist their time and attention and  then sloppily let them down any more than someone can bang on a piano and call it a concert.

            You owe it to your readers to make every word, every scene, count.  Nothing should be included that doesn’t do one of two things:  Advance the Plot or Reveal Character.  Print out those six words and post them atop your monitor if you must.  Each day at the end of your writing, go back over it and see if you’ve included extraneous information or dialogue that doesn’t do one of those things.  If you have, those are Free Rides and must be eliminated.

            What happens if you don’t adhere to this rule?  You’ve seen it for yourself.  You’re reading a wonderful murder mystery and suddenly there’s a chapter describing the kitchen of a restaurant where the detective just ate.  On and on the author goes, describing food preparation techniques and even the cooks themselves—and then none of it ever plays into the story.  You have just wasted a whole chapter learning how to filet a fish and it never even mattered.  Who knows why it was included—probably the author is an avid cook, just took a cooking class, and wants to share his newfound knowledge—but it doesn’t belong in this story. 

            The detective never goes back to that restaurant, none of the cooks figure into the murder, and we don’t even learn why the detective eats there or what he ordered.  It could have—and should have—been edited out.  Not only would its elimination not have hurt; it would have helped by not stringing you along as you paid attention to what you thought were possible clues.

            You see it on television all the time, too.  An opening scene of a hilltop wedding will pull you in, you watch the bride and groom kiss, then the camera will pan to a nearby beach where the stars of this medical drama are reviving a person who nearly drowned.  Never does the storyline go back to the wedding, and you end up puzzled.  Was it the producer’s son’s wedding—an inside joke?  Was it just a pretty shot the director liked?  Huh?  The bride and groom didn’t cause the drowning?  Then why are they there? 

            Meandering, pointless dialogue is as guilty as the Free Ride scene— everything your people say should matter—and should reveal character or move the plot along.  This doesn’t mean your characters can’t mumble or tell ridiculous stories— sometimes that’s the point.  You may want to show how shallow or self-pitying or foolish they are.  But if they’re discussing the flight path of various airlines and nothing ever comes of it—that’s a free ride. 

            I know it’s tempting to include something you jotted down a few months ago that you really love—a great little snappy bit of dialogue, or a breathtaking description—but save it for another work if it doesn’t apply to the piece you’re crafting at the moment.  Move the story along or let us know more about your characters.  That’s how to make music people will pay to hear.

Challenge Yourself!

            Authors like a challenge.  By definition, we are folks who tackled the daunting task of sticking to a schedule, disciplining ourselves to stay with a project even on tough days, and ultimately finishing an entire book.

But some of us must be masochists, because we raise the bar a bit and give ourselves challenges even beyond that. We toy with torture and see if we can write an entire book without revealing that the main character is actually a woman, until the closing line.  Or we use the voice of death for our narrator (“The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak).  Or we write a poem (“Little Tree” by e.e. Cummings) where the physical silhouette of the words actually looks like a Christmas tree.  Of course, we don’t want our reader to notice, until we choose to reveal the surprise, if we reveal it at all.  Mystery writers and puzzle creators are most adept at this; it’s built into their craft.

Coleridge, when writing the great epic poem, “Kubla Khan,” had the additional challenge of being interrupted by an insurance salesman, and consequently lost his train of thought and never finished the poem.  But that was an external challenge, not one he chose.  Speaking of trains, I gave myself the challenge while writing “Pinholes Into Heaven,” never to use the word train.  This was particularly fun, since half of the book takes place on one.  My hope was to convey the feeling of the train without the reader ever noticing the missing word.

Don’t we all love to make a game out of daily tasks?  Whether it’s hitting all the green lights on your way to work, or guessing where to place your computer cursor so it’s in the right spot when a new screen pops up, we give ourselves challenges.  Someone says “Guess where I found this… or guess what this cost…” and we mentally jump in with an estimate, to see if we’re right. 

Even little kids do this, seeing how far they can jump, contriving the rules for made-up games, feeling the thrill of victory when they can spin the coin just one second longer than last time.  So my message is to give in to this innate desire to stretch just a little farther, and get your writing up onto a higher plane than where you left it yesterday.  Write a short story about a shoe salesman, but never use the actual word shoe.  Write about an artist and at the end, reveal that he or she is blind.  Make all the dialogue lines exactly five words long.  The key is not to get caught, but to do it seamlessly enough that the reader doesn’t even notice the obstacle course you’ve set up.  Then, like a satisfying mystery, they can go back through your story and realize the clues were there, but hidden in plain view.

Few writers, few people, really, can resist a challenge like this, so go for it.  Make it a short exercise, just to see if you can do it.  When I was in grad school at USC, a professor said it’s really hard to write in second person (you walk into the room, you think it looks familiar, you’re not sure, etc.) so I went home that night and cranked out a humor piece in second person, just to see if I could do it.  And it became my first Op-Ed sale to the Los Angeles Times.  Something about being told a thing is difficult or impossible makes us want to do it all the more.  I still remember a neighborhood girl poking me in the stomach when I was seven, and saying, “You aren’t ever gonna be a author!”  I had just said that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up.  And her pronouncing my future failure sealed my determination to prove her wrong.  I also discounted her opinion when she said “a” instead of “an,” but that’s another topic.

Give yourself a challenge.  You’ll be surprised at how much harder you’ll work, but also by how much more enjoyable the work will be.  And when you hit the mark, there’s a grinning satisfaction at achieving your goal. 

Here’s an idea: Write something where every paragraph begins with the next letter of the alphabet.  Oh, wait.

About Those Miraculous Moments...

        I've told you before that a good writer turns up the heat on his hero, and puts him in a perilous situation, right?  Suspense and conflict swirl around our protagonist, keep us on the edge of our seat, and make us wonder how he'll ever get out alive.  His enemies or problems should be worse than he is good, so that the odds are stacked strongly against him.  In fact, the opposition should be almost insurmountable.  That way, when he finally does defeat the foe, it's a much more satisfying victory.
        But here's where many beginning writers trip up:  They've allowed their hero to get into a dreadful mess (good job), but they haven't figured out how to save him realistically (oops).  So, out of nowhere, an inheritance arrives to save the house.  Or a helicopter appears in the desert sky to rescue him just as the vultures are circling.  Or his boss dies and he gets the promotion after all.  Or his girlfriend suddenly turns into a superspy.  These miraculous saves are doing the opposite to your story: They're killing it. 
        No bit of good fortune should be large enough to save the day, ever.  This makes for a cheap ending (like a hideous dream sequence where you realize you've been duped the entire time) and readers will resent you and mutter, "How convenient," among other things.
         So here's the rule on luck:  You can have outrageously bad luck happen, but not outrageously good.  If your hero is about to play in the Superbowl but suddenly a rhinocerous escapes from the zoo enclosure, charges into him and breaks the hero's leg-- as utterly stupid and impossible as that may be-- a reader or moviegoer will actually accept that before he'll accept an equally unlikely scenario that helps your hero.
        And we've all seen it and accepted it when the girl running from a kidnapper finds a gun, but it has no bullets in it, right?  Nevermind that every day in the news you're reading about a kid finding a gun and accidentally shooting his grandmother with it, this one-- to work in your story-- must be unloaded.  And then she somehow escapes the house, darts through a dark forest and makes it to the highway-- but flags down her kidnapper's team.  What are the odds, right?  It couldn't be a housewife or a farmer heading down the highway, nope-- she will flag down the one car that keeps her in peril. People accept these kinds of wild flukes.  But it's because they're counting on you to deliver a clever, well-constructed save.  Don't let them down.