Irritation Alert!

The good people at Oxford have done us the service of compiling the ten most irritating phrases. You can read the article here, but I've done you the service of copying the list because every time I go to the article, my computer hangs for five minutes.

I don't know how much time and money Oxford spent on this study, but they could have done better. Here's their list:

1 - At the end of the day
2 - Fairly unique
3 - I personally
4 - At this moment in time
5 - With all due respect
6 - Absolutely
7 - It's a nightmare
8 - Shouldn't of
9 - 24/7
10 - It's not rocket science

Kudos to #1: at the end of the day. It's not that at the end of the day is all that irritating, but people who use this phrase use it after every freakin sentence.

And #5 is a good. Its variant is "I don't mean to burst your bubble, but..." (don't want to rain on your parade, don't want to be the voice of doom, don't want to be a wet blanket, etc.) Again, it's not the phrase, it's how it is used—in that passive aggressive I-mean-the-opposite-of-what-I-say way: of course I don't respect you and of course I want to burst your bubble. I get off on bursting bubbles, that's what I do, in fact if I can smote your happiness for just one moment, I hate myself just a little bit less.

The other eight phrases, they don't bother me.

Nano, Nano

It's that time of year: trick or treating, voting, tofurkey day and writing a novel. November is National Novel Writing Month, and I for one am ON BOARD.

The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. That's about 1500 words a day. That's about six double spaced typed pages a day. Why write a novel in a month, you ask? Shouldn't novels baste slowly like a Thanksgiving dinner?

Well maybe. But the problem with most novels is they baste too slowly, like never come out of the oven. By writing six pages a day, NaNoWrimo removes some of the blocks to completing the first draft of a novel, such as—

1.) Perfectionism. Who cares if it's crap? No time to worry about that when you have 1100 more words to write today. And 1500 tomorrow, and 1500 the next day and on and etc...

2.) Sloth. You record your word count every day and upload your pages to the NaNoWrimo site (which I believe is a little overloaded because I can't get on it tonight to update my word count. Oh well, I'm cheating this process anyway.)

How does one cheat? Well first NaNoWriMo wants you to write a novel from scratch, not continue one you've started. I am continuing one I've started. I'm 52,000 words and 206 pages in and I want to get the dang thing done (meaning approx 25,000 more words). According to NaNoWriMo, bringing a partially finished manuscript to the table destroys the "gleeful, anything-goes approach that makes NaNoWriMo such a creative rush." Agreed, but I've got get this thing done. My partner's tired of hearing we're going to be rich. She wants to know WHEN. Next year I'll do it NaNoWriMo's way.

If you want to jump on board, head over to NaNoWrimo to sign up. You've only lost two days. It's not too late. Registered users receive rah-rah emails to inspire us along, and a little dashboard to monitor our progress. You can share your dashboard with your friends and they can cheer you on too.

Kill Your Critic

I shouldn't complain, but I will. I read a lot of books on the craft of writing and burn through a couple a week sometimes, mostly because I don't always read the entire book. Most writing books, poetically, are terrible. Not in a grammatical or structural way, but boring, uninspiring, pedantic.

The worst books have a piece of recurring advice that grates on me. The gist of the advice is: if you write a passage or scene that you think is particularly fine, that you are super proud of, that you think is amazing—delete it.

The proponents of delete-your-good-writing rely heavily on the quote, alternately attributed to William Faulkner and Mark Twain, "Kill your darlings."

The premise of this argument seems to be: you are so self unaware/narcissistic/tone deaf that if you think it is good, it must be bad, so cut it out. If a carpenter is super proud of a staircase she built, should she rip it out? Why would anyone who is such a poor judge of writing be a writer in the first place?

There are times I write something I think makes me look really smart and I don't want to delete because I want to impress, but deep in my heart I know it's a pathetic crock of crap. Yes, that should be cut and I would wholeheartedly back the advice: "Kill your pretentious crap." Honestly assessing your writing is different than not trusting your instincts.

Today's rant is over.

How's Your Novel Coming?

I spent the better part of last week at a writing conference in Virginia, an exclusive little gathering of 25 or so members of Writers and Critters, an online writing and critique group. The youngest attendee was 24 and I think I was the second youngest at 43. The ages went up from there to 69. I loved the crowd because one person called me skinny, a word not used to describe me in ten years, and another person thought I was in my thirties. But none of that is here or there.

What is here is information we received from a literary agent. Listen up, all you budding novelists. This agent receives about 300 queries a week—that's 15,600 a year. She spends an average of 30 seconds on each query. Wanna guess how many authors she signs on a year?

Five.

If that is not enough to make your ink run cold, she also says that the average author writes 4-6 complete manuscripts before getting a book contract. Not 4-6 revisions of one manuscript, but 4-6 separate, whole, complete stories.

You heard it here.

What's Another Word For Screech?

I've been riding the El lately, due to an on-site gig I have in River North where parking is imposible unless you want to pay $18 to park in a lot. Plus which, the commute is a good time to work on my novel, as things have been super hectic at home since Child #2. Plus plus which, my protagonist takes the El for the first time and waiting for the Purple Line provides the opportunity to take in the sights, sounds and smells of the El with which to write this scene poetically. But all I hear are the standard sounds of public transportationage: whoosh of doors, screech of brakes, rumble of train going down track. So pedestrian. So banal. There is no poetry in public transportation, I grumble. I also happen to be reading The Bonfire of the Vanities on the train and came across Tom Wolfe's description of the subway:

"Every time a train entered or left the station there was an agonized squeal of metal, as if some huge steel skeleton were being pried apart by a lever of incomprehensible power."

Gulp.

Think bigger, I tell myself. The next time I find myself waiting for the Purple Line I listen, and still all I hear is whoosh, screech, rumble — plus I picture a huge steel skeleton being pried apart by a lever of incomprehensible power.

My protagonist also experiences a great amount of fear and another place I get stumped is describing the physical effects of fear without resorting to the usual my hair stood on end, etc. Again, Tom Wolfe:

"The blood drained from Fallow's face, and then his chest and arms. His hide turned cold. Then a million little scalding hot minnows tried to escape from his arteries and reach the surface."

So the first thing I'm going to do, I'm going to stop reading Tom Wolfe.