Round and Round we Go
I’ll throw a little French at you for starters. This quote from Nicolas Boileau (L’Art Poétique, 1674 - all French-speaking kids used to get this hammered in them in school!)
« Hâtez-vous lentement et, sans perdre courage,
Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage :
Polissez-le sans cesse et le repolissez… »(I couldn’t find a translation that satisfied me, so here’s mine: Hasten slowly and without losing heart, put your work twenty times on the workbench, polish it, and repolish it …)
These past weeks, in between polishing the retro-noir novella (see previous post about writing in collaboration), I’ve been revising and editing the Declan Shaw novel. Declan is my Houston-based private detective who’ll swagger on the scene this coming August (thanks to publisher extraordinaire Shotgun Honey).
The book has a title now: Love You Till Tuesday.
It comes from an old (1967) David Bowie song and it’s so appropriate it screamed to be used. The plot revolves around the murder of a jazz singer, so there’s music involved. Then, romantic entanglements speaking, Declan has the attention span of a squirrel, so making it till Tuesday, might be a challenge. There are other eerie echoes of the title in the plot, but I’ll let you find that out by yourselves when the time comes.
I hadn’t looked at the manuscript in almost a year and I wanted to make sure it was as pristine and ready to go as I could possibly make it.
I was also concerned that I might have been a bit ruthless in the cutting room when I brought the word count down to Shotgun Honey’s preferences.
I had chopped off dialogue tags—the “he said”, “she said”—replacing them with action beats which always helps the flow. For the non-writers among you, it means replacing something like:
“I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” he said, holding her hand.
With:
He held her hand. “I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”
All these “he/she said” in succession, can get quite annoying, and I’m not in the writerly camp that loves to get fancy with dialogue tags and adverbs (as in: he said, jokingly). An occasional “she muttered” or “he whispered” is about as far as I’ll go. I subscribe to the Elmore Leonard rule that simple is better, the reader skips over that stuff anyway, and the situation and context should be written in such a way that relying on adverbs (“kill them,” Stephen King says) is unnecessary. I allow myself a few when they’re essential. Writing tip: they’re not as vital as you might think.
The danger, of course, is that when you remove tags, readers might get confused about who’s speaking. You gotta be careful with the cuts.
I went through the text with a fine-toothed comb to make sure I hadn’t messed things up. In the process, I picked up a couple of impossibilities. One of them: my guy was standing on top of a dumpster. No way! Dumpster lids are plastic and won’t support the weight. People that live near bears reinforce the lids with metal bars for that reason. There are no bears in Houston’s back alleys.
I also found a typo. After twenty readings and compulsive editing, one of these gnats still managed to slip through: laugher instead of laughter. Douglas Lumsden, the author of the wonderful Alex Southerland urban fantasy series, found another one a while ago where I wrote “heroin” when I meant “heroine”. Ha!
The writing community is helpful in so many ways.
I would not have found that tee-less laugh without a Facebook post from Jim Thomsen(Jim is a writer and editor). Jim asked if “he laughed” was an appropriate dialogue tag. Example: “You don’t mean that, do you?” he laughed. Opinions were split 50/50. Personally, I think it’s clunky. I mean, if you’re laughing, you’re not talking, right? Because I’m a compulsive nitpicker, I went through the manuscript looking for laughing occurrences, and found the typo. Serendipity.
It isn’t the first time I take Jim’s advice to heart. He cured me once and for ever from shooting people in the shoulder—in writing. Like most crime writers I never shot anybody anywhere. The shot in the shoulder is a cliché. Movies, TV shows, books … because there’s nothing that’ll kill you in there, it seems a safe place to put a slug. So, the protagonist is winged, clasps his/her hand on the spot, draws a deep breath, and keeps running, before delivering some smart one-liner to a sidekick. Not so fast, folks, says Mr. Thomsen. That nice shoulder area, it turns out, is packed with nerve endings. The convenient wound will hurt like a beast. No running, buddy, writhe on the floor instead, and be ready for weeks of painful rehab.
I’ve completely given up on shoulder wounds. I shoot them in the head now. It’s safer.
It won’t be the last time I read Love You Till Tuesday. No matter how many people set eyes on a manuscript, clunkers can still go undetected. It’s fortunate I love that story and the characters so much …