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Better English 48
Timely Communications Tips
August 5, 2010
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EVERYBODY WANTS TO PUBLISH
-- SHOW, DON'T TELL
-- COMMON MISTAKES
-- BEDEVILING, TECTONIC, AND SHOULDERING
-- THERE ARE THREE GENRES

I thought I'd take a break over the summer. As soon as I said goodbye to my intern to begin my mini vacation, the phone never stopped ringing. From authors. Who want to publish. So this edition comes much later than I had planned.

But contact with so many manuscripts gave me a number of tips to share with you.

SHOW, DON'T TELL
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 I don't have to tell you this, but most novelists produce mediocre work. The exceptional talents are few. But those few have latched on to one special technique.

They show rather than tell.

Fiction is not nonfiction that relies on the truth, accurate details and the real world as we know it.

Fiction is a lie, my former colleague, Brown University novelist Jack Hawkes declared.

Journalists, essayists, and other nonfiction writers tell us that an idiot boy is watching some golfers. But a novelist like Faulkner simply has Benjy say, "They were hitting little."

One writer tells, the other shows. The sure sign of a mediocre novelist is to see how much she tells us rather than shows us. Is she a novelist or a journalist deciding to write a novel?


COMMON MISTAKES
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 One novelist we are publishing made several common mistakes in an early draft. Any good editor would correct them. But since they are so common, I recommend that you look out for them too.
  • ensure vs. insure; ensure makes certain and does not relate to insurance
  • further vs. farther; one is extent, the other refers to distance
  • all right is two words, not alright

BEDEVILING, TECTONIC, AND SHOULDERING
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 Of course you have a notebook. Every serious writer has a journal or note cards or a smart phone to keep ideas from escaping.

Here are examples of original diction that you can reuse:
  1. In March, NYT writers tell us: "A key figure in the domestic abuse scandal bedeviling Gov. David A. Paterson told investigators that the governor phoned to enlist her help in quieting the accuser, according to a person with knowledge of her account."
  2. One journalist describing Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison: "But her campaign appears to have misjudged the tectonic political shifts of the past year."
  3. Margalit Fox, in the NYT two years ago, writing of the death of singer Dakota Staton, says, "By the time she began recording albums, rock 'n' roll was shouldering aside her brand of bluesy jazz."

THERE ARE THREE GENRES
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 The three genre in which all literature falls are
  • prose
  • poetry
  • drama
One publicist asks us in her questionnaire to choose the genre. She really means category or subject or kind. A narrative poem is a kind or subject or category. So is a detective thriller or a memoir or a historical novel or a collection of essays.

But everything we write falls into one of three genre. And then there are different kinds of prose, poetry and drama.

Yours sincerely,
Barry Beckham


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