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Inspiration: from Facebook to Freud
I had a silly Internet conversation.
Alex: When you become a world renown writer with like 10 books on the NY Times top selling books list, can you make one TERRIBLE psychology pun in a book, so I know that you love me
KJ: If you can give me a good psychology gag appropriate to the Edwardian era (Freud, I suppose?) I’ll see if I can get it in the one I’m doing now. Hmm. I’m looking at 1902 here, would that be hideously anachronistic? Off to Wikipedia!
KJ: Oh bah, the period’s wrong. I shall keep this challenge in mind, somehow.
Alex: Wait, this is not the wrong era
Alex: oh, out by a few years
KJ: 1902 so Freud wasn’t famous yet
KJ: Alright, the Psychotherapy Gag Gauntlet has been thrown down and accepted subject to me writing a book set after 1904.
And there the matter rested and I thought no more about it.
Three weeks and 20,000 words later, I was doing a conversation that revealed backstory.
I knew that my hero, Daniel da Silva, had been kicked out of Cambridge. I knew why, it’s important for his character and reactions, but I wasn’t sure what he’d done next. I was sure he’d finished his degree somehow, he’s a stubborn sort. So, when I came to that part of his backstory, I wondered if he’d he’d gone abroad.
Where? Well, Germany was the European centre of education in 1902. And a German education would mean he speaks fluent German, which would open up all kinds of new fields for his part-time employment as a spy. I had already started wondering if maybe his mother should be German, to give him fluent language skills; the foreign education is a much more elegant solution.
So, I had a useful backstory point. Nothing serious. But at this point, a number of existing plot points and issues started to coalesce.
- If da Silva speaks German, lived there, has probably been travelling for spying purposes in the German alliance states of fin de siècle Central Europe, he might well have encountered some cutting edge thoughts on how the mind works.
- In fact, Da Silva has a phobia of going underground. Might he have sought out and consulted some forward-thinking doctor about that?
- Curtis, his counterpart, has a post-traumatic psychosomatic injury. You try saying that in Edwardian English. But if da Silva was able to discuss that in the context of modern (1902) thought…
- Da Silva is ultra-modern, intellectual, Jewish, Continental, introspective – all the things that Freud represented that were alien to a stolidly English mindset, such as Curtis’s, which da Silva is busy upsetting, leading to some wonderfully difficult conversations.
- And after quite a lot of subterfuge, sneaking, verbal sparring, psychological cave torture and bare-knuckle fighting, I really needed a scene where the two of them could stop, and talk, and laugh…
Bugger me. What I needed, quite specifically, was one of the psychology jokes that Alex had sent me.
Now, I absolutely did not twist the plot to shoehorn in a joke. I’d entirely forgotten about the silly Facebook chat at that point. But somehow, spending five minutes three weeks ago looking at early psychology on Wikipedia had fermented at the back of my mind till I had a really useful bit of backstory, a way to talk about one of the characters’ issues, a running theme that clarified the contrast in personality and background between them, and a terrific joke for a scene that needed the sort of connection that comes with shared laughter.
I’m not sure what this goes to show about writing, except that you never know what will prove fertile ground for the story to grow. But thank you, Freud, for the glory that is the human subconscious. And thank you, Alex, for the joke.
Speech Verbs, and Why You Shouldn’t
My brother used to wind people up by adding speech tags in conversation.
Me: I was going to the shops –
Him: “She announced.”
Me: And I saw this bloke –
Him: “She revealed.”
Me: Will you shut up?
Him: “She demanded” – Ow, that really hurt!
Me: “He yelped.”
Speech tags can be just as annoying for a reader, plus you can’t punch the author. All the following horrible speech tags are real examples I’ve encountered as an editor, and all of them jar me right out of any immersion as a reader.
This is Not a Synonym For “Said”
“I’d like a drink,” she averred.
“It’s a nice day,” she opined.
“My name is John,” he pronounced.
See also ‘declared’, ‘asserted’, etc.
These are all (more or less) acts of speech, but they are attention-grabbing, a bit jargony, have specific meanings, and are absolutely not synonyms for ‘said’. I don’t need ‘opined’ to work out that a character is expressing an opinion, and if she isn’t expressing an opinion, then it’s the wrong word. The only reason I want to read ‘pronounced’ is if a character’s name is Xgafjbnvk and he’s explaining how to say it.
If a character is doing something with their speech that the author needs to convey – whispering, hissing, snarling or shouting – that’s fine. (If used sparingly, and if the dialogue supports it. Even better is to make the dialogue snarly or shouty.) But using a tag as a regular synonym for ‘said’, rather than conveying a precise meaning about how the character spoke… basically, just don’t.
This is Not a Speech Verb At All
“I agree with you,” he nodded.
You can nod your head till they give you a red hat with a bell on it and force you into a dubious relationship with an elderly gnome, but it won’t create audible speech.
“Wonderful,” she smiled.
Smiling is not speaking, nor is laughing, or giggling. This may not bother everyone but it bothers the hell out of me. They are different acts. Speak with a giggle, smile after you speak, rely on the dialogue to create the character’s light and joyous mood. Or use these as speech verbs and watch me have a brain haemhorrage on your MS. Whichever.
“I – I’m not sure,” she hesitated.
Yuk. Not only is this not a speech verb, but it’s one of those cases where either the action is made clear by the dialogue itself, in which case it’s unnecessary, or the action isn’t in the dialogue, in which case it’s the wrong word. Wrong on so many levels.
Yeah, Well, “Said” Isn’t All That Either
‘Said’ is a much more ‘silent’ word than other speech verbs, but it can still make its presence felt too strongly. I made great efforts to avoid horrendous speech verbs in my own writing, and then had my editor gently point out that my Hemingwayesque reliance on ‘said’ was heavily overdone and became obtrusive through overuse. (She put it much more nicely than that.) And she was absolutely right. I went through The Magpie Lord deleting ‘said’ and turning it into action wherever possible, and the writing sharpened up nicely.
Compare these three. Which is punchiest and most visual?
“You’re dead meat,” John threatened, reaching for the knife.
The very definition of trying too hard.
“You’re dead meat,” John said, reaching for the knife.
What does ‘said’ add here? We know he said it. It’s in quote marks.
“You’re dead meat.” John reached for the knife.
Snap.
So, down with speech verbs! Bin the thesaurus, lose the obtrusive or inaccurate speech tags, and make your writing visual and active…
… she pleaded.
Editor, writer, anaconda, rat
My name is KJ Charles and I’m a first-time novelist. (The Magpie Lord, Samhain, Sept 13.)
In my other life, I’m an experienced commissioning editor. (For the purposes of this blog I’m an anonymous editor, so I can give actual examples without feeling too constrained about authors thinking, ‘Is she talking about me?!’ (Honestly, darling, I’m not. It’s those other authors.)
This blog is about what it feels like to straddle both sides of the publishing fence. I’m pretty sure it means you get splinters in your bum.
I’m hoping to give some insights for aspiring writers, new authors and people interested in the word business as to how the system works, and why things happen the way they do. I will also be blogging about how it feels to be edited rather than editing. Expect expletives.
But first things first. Me.
I’m a commissioning editor, meaning I buy and edit MSS. I’ve spent my whole career in various forms of publishing. I have taken on a lot of new authors out of the slush pile.
I also write in my free time (hollow laugh). I have completed two full length novels, one of which got me an agent and some nice feedback, but no publication. I took a long time off writing when I had my children (the pram in the hall is the enemy of creativity, particularly when it’s got my son in it) and have only recently got back behind a keyboard again.
Knowing the game from the other side gave me some advantages in knowing what editors want and what to expect. Someone brilliantly referred to ‘the book moving through the publishing process like a rat moving through an anaconda’. It’s easier to be the rat if you know how anacondas work. This blog is aimed at sharing that knowledge.
So, on with the show!