writing

Wednesday various

  • When defending someone’s horribly poor choice of words, it’s probably a good idea to choose your own words a lot more carefully than this. I suppose we should be grateful the Washington Times didn’t suggest we look for a “Final Solution” to Sarah Palin’s recent troubles. [via]
  • I have mixed feelings about writing contests in general, particularly ones with entry fees. I took part in this year’s Geist Postcard Story Contest, for instance, since there’s not a lot else to do with a story that short, and the fee a) goes towards a subscription and b) helps out a really good magazine. But, in general, I tend to think money should flow towards the writer, and any story worthy of winning a contest should also be worthy of getting paid something for. (Obviously “money” and “paid” can mean a number of different things here, from actual cash to contributor copies to your name printed somewhere. It’s the principle of the thing.)

    But I absolutely think it’s writing contests like this that give the reputable ones a bad name, that leave me with my mixed feelings in the first place. Seriously, writer beware.

  • Tasha Robinson and Keith Phipps have an interesting discussion about which is worse in popular culture: blind, overenthusiastic hyperbole…or bland, unengaged apathy.
  • While A.O. Scott puts the lie to the notion that critics represent some kind of anti-populist elite:

    Speaking personally, but also out of a deep and longstanding engagement with the history and procedures of my profession, I have to say that the goal of criticism has never been to control or reflect the public taste — neither thing is possible — but rather the simpler (but also infinitely difficult) work of analyzing and evaluating works of art as honestly and independently as possible….There is a cultural elite, in America, which tries its utmost to manipulate the habits and tastes of consumers. It consists of the corporations who sell nearly everything with the possible exception of classical music and conceptual arts, and while its methods include some of the publicity-driven hype that finds its way into newspapers, magazines and other traditional media, its main tool is not criticism but marketing.

    False populism, this idea that some snobs in their ivory towers don’t want you to have any fun — or, worse, want to ram their culture, their ideals down your throat — well, that’s sort of what’s given us people like Sarah Palin, isn’t it?

  • And finally, this is how rumors get started: Twitter in a panic over Oxford Circus ‘gunman’. A “gunman” invented out of whole cloth over Twitter, it should be said. See the course of the brief panic charted here. [via]

Weekend, part 2 of 3

You know the nicest thing about a three-day weekend? Not having to go to work tomorrow, that’s what.

Today was mostly just a typical Sunday, spent working on the New York Times crossword, doing a little reading, and joining my weekly writing group. Afterward, we went to see the new version of True Grit. But, before I talk about that, here’s what I wrote today in our forty-minute free-writing exercise:

If she knew who had killed her, and the ruby wasn’t expensive, she could ask the old conjuring woman to cast one of the old book’s divination spells, to locate the bastard precisely, and then extract what Badger would have laughingly called her revenge.

But the truth was, Maria didn’t know; to her constant embarrassment she didn’t even know for certain that she was dead, not just stuck between realms, caught in this half-formed kind of limbo, and she certainly didn’t have enough in her pockets to buy the ruby the old woman said she was going to need.

And the woman wasn’t going to help her without payment. Maria could see, even now, the woman wanted her out of the conjurer’s shop. There was a glimmer of fear in her eyes, a frightened look Maria had grown all too accustomed to seeing in her recent travels, and she knew she would have to run if the old woman reached for the wireless or threatened to notify the local constable. Half-dead or not, Maria didn’t need trouble with the law.

Badger would have told her to make the most of her predicament, use the woman’s fear to her advantage.

If you’re going to look like a ghost, why not act like a ghost? That would have been John Badger’s philosophy. If they’re going to be frightened of you anyway, why not put that fear to good use? There wasn’t much benefit to being dead otherwise.

And after two hundred years at it, Badger should know.

Yet Maria couldn’t bring herself to act like that, precisely because, as she would have reminded him, Badger refused to act like that either. He talked a big game, and had even pointed at the council of wraiths they’d encountered in Toledo with a degree of admiration, respect. But she knew he clung to his humanity as fiercely as she clung to hers. The wraiths exploited fear, became fear, and, it was true, reaped huge rewards for it. They wouldn’t have needed the ruby, or the conjuring woman, and they wouldn’t have feared the local law enforcement. In Toledo, they were the law. But Maria also knew they were little else; they had sacrificed their humanity in ways that she — and even the two-century-old Badger — wasn’t ready to yet.

Even if it would have helped her find her murderer.

“I can get you the ruby by sundown,” she lied. “You just get the spell ready — cast your bones, whatever it is you do — and I’ll be back before dark.”

The woman sighed, but then nodded. She turned to walk to the back of the shop, with the understanding that this was Maria’s time to leave.

“If you return without it, half-thing,” the old woman said, not turning around, “know that I will finish you.”

I definitely think there’s a story there. I didn’t develop it any further this afternoon, but, in my head at least, Maria and Badger are interesting characters.

As to True Grit, it’s also full of interesting characters. (See how merciless I am with that segue?) And, while I really enjoyed the original, this one is more realistic and maybe overall the better acted of the two films. The exception, maybe, being Jeff Bridges; he’s terrific, as is everybody else, but John Wayne is a very hard act to follow. Hailee Steinfeld is the real standout in the movie, especially given her young age. (Kim Darby, in the original, was in her early 20s when she played the part.) I’m not so sure I love the ending, although it is similar to how the previous version ended, and I gather it’s the ending from the original novel, which the Coen Brothers were determined to adhere to. I think they deserve a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination, if nothing else, and each of the three leads, including Bridges and Steinfeld, deserve acting nods.

And yet, I think I’d still give the slight edge to the original movie, if only because the new one doesn’t include this wonderful exchange of dialogue:

“When’s the last time you saw Ned Pepper?”
“I don’t remember any Ned Pepper.”
“Short feisty fella, nervous and quick, got a messed-up lower lip.”
“That don’t bring nobody to mind. A funny lip?”
“Wasn’t always like that, I shot him in it.”
“In the lower lip? What was you aiming at?”
“His upper lip.”

Personal space

One space to bring them all and in the darkness book-bind them…

A casual observer, albeit one with access to Twitter and the patience to wade through my replies to other people yesterday, might think that I take Farhad Manjoo’s argument that you should never, ever use two spaces after a period much more seriously than I do.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t find it surprisingly fascinating. Because I did, enough to dig out my copy of the APA Publication Manual and argue the point over Twitter and elsewhere — although not enough to dig through more than a small handful of the comments on Manjoo’s original article. Internet comments can try any man’s patience.

From a writing perspective, I’m still not convinced it makes any significant difference how many spaces you use. Outdated or not, most style guides do suggest (or at least condone) the use of two spaces in draft manuscripts. And drafts are, by and large, the only thing that writers are themselves going to produce. It’s more an issue for publishers and typesetters than writers, quite frankly.

It’s also worth noting that the one remaining monospaced font mentioned in the article, Courier — which, as a monospaced font, would seem to suggest the continued need for two spaces after a period — is still the preferred manuscript font for many publications. According to author William Shunn’s oft-cited formatting guidelines:

For easy readability, limit your choice of font to either Courier or Times New Roman. Courier (my strong preference) is a monospaced font, which means that every character is exactly as wide as every other. It’s easier for an editor to detect spelling errors in a monospaced font than in a proportional font like Times New Roman (in which the “i” uses less horizontal space than the “m” does). With a monospaced font, there will also be fewer characters on each line, which can make your manuscript easier to scan.

Shunn goes on to acknowledge that “many writers have come to prefer Times New Roman” and that “either is usually acceptable,” but each publication is going to be different. Some editors won’t care what font you use, while some will be incredibly specific. I know Courier is the font I’d prefer to see when reading submissions to Kaleidotrope, for instance, but I won’t turn anything away as long as it’s at least readable. At work, we format the manuscripts we send to production in Times New Roman. As Jeff VanderMeer has noted, “Guidelines are among the roughest and least precise of god’s creatures. They’re usually there simply to ward off the most inappropriate of submissions.”

Vonda N. McIntyre’s manuscript preparation guidelines for the SFWA suggest using only Courier, adding:

The subject of proportional fonts is controversial. I recommend against them. Yes, they are prettier. But they were designed for publication, not for manuscripts. You mix typesetting and manuscript format at your peril.

I find this particularly interesting because John Scalzi, recently elected president of the SFWA, agrees with Manjoo, and quite strongly. But, as I wrote in response there:

In less formal (that is, the majority of) communication, it boils down mostly to two equally valid aesthetic choices — and/or is rendered moot by the automatic single-spacing that happens when, for instance, text is translated into HTML [browsers]. That is, it’s arguing over a pet peeve that’s almost never an actual issue, all in the name adhering to the way you were taught, or to proving the way we were all taught was wrong.

I thought Eric B. raised a few other interesting points over Twitter — he’s not wrong when he says, “There’s no *reason* most grammar rules have to be, other than readability and consistency.” — but I remain unconvinced. Does a difference in the number of spaces we use, one or two, truly impede readability, and is it actually an affront to consistency if my e-mails to you contain a different number of spaces than your e-mails to me? (Heck, even my dogged insistence on hyphenating “e-mail” puts me at inconsistent odds with a growing majority, yet I don’t think it’s unclear what I’m talking about. At least, not for that reason.)

In published documents, online or in print, meant for a wider audience than one’s own personal (or even internal business) communication, I do agree that one space should be the norm. Consistency should be the norm. But for draft manuscripts, particularly those written in that tenaciously monospaced Courier font, two spaces are in fact preferred. It may create a small amount of extra work for copyeditors and typesetters after the fact, who then need to turn those two spaces into one, but it creates less work for the editor who has to read the manuscript. And nowadays, that extra work shouldn’t often be more complicated than a few instances of find-and-replace.

For everything else, that personal and business communication I mentioned above, it either doesn’t matter, or one space is already the default. It comes down to aesthetics, which are important but subjective, and pet peeves, which are silly things to create rules around in the first place.

Writers on writing, teaching

Rachel Swirsky:

Anyway, writers are all frenetic bundles of experiences and influences. Might I have eventually realized how to improve my prose on my own? Probably. But would the stories I write be the same if I didn’t have Michael Swanwick in my head saying that all stories are a balance between dinosaurs and sodomy? Almost certainly not. [via]

Theodora Goss:

At the beginning of the semester, I tell my students that writing is a system of black squiggles that we use to conveying meaning. In other words, writing is itself, ab initio, an insane enterprise. And we go on from there.

Monday various