The Fredösphere

What do you read for pleasure?  There's a genre of non-fiction that's new to me, that few people know about, but is a source of endless delights:  Advice To Would-Be Fiction Writers.  Typically, an ATW-BFW author is an editor haunted by years of reading bad manuscripts.  There's a build-up of exasperation that comes out in the advice.  To our everlasting benefit.  And entertainment. 

Consider E. E. Knight's restrained complaint about extravagant emotions:

Marcia! Marcia! Marcia! - characters who always have their emotions dialed up to "11." They laugh "uproariously" at stuff that's worth a mild snigger, fight to keep from screaming when they're third in line at the ATM, agonize over whether to have the vinegarette or ranch. Can we save the "I'll never be hungry again!" fist-shaking for something more important that a checkout line, please?

The name "Fred" turns up sometimes.  It's more proof that "Fred" is the ultimate old-shoe name, rendered odd by the extremity of its familiarity:

For example, "Jane's dog" means the dog belongs to Jane. "Fred's house" means the house belongs to Fred (or at least that he lives in it). Apostrophe-S is used to indicate possession.

Another Fred, this one doing that ol' who-whom thang that Lenin talked about:

The nameless character would be a harmless trifle were it not for the fact that this conceit requires the writer to perform all sorts of elaborate literary gymnastics to avoid revealing the name. I once read what was otherwise a fine piece of work wherein the lead character's name (and gender!) were hidden through the first 57 pages, including a fairly graphic scene of the character having sex. Neat trick, no? Neat trick, no. See: Show-Off Experiments.) This bit of legerdemain was accomplished by arranging that every person in the book just happened to talk to and about this person without using a name, and by the writer referring to the protagonist as The Ranger, the Leader, the captain of the band, etc., etc., etc.

It did not take long for it to turn stilted and awkward. Nor did the eventual revelation of the character's name and gender have any particular effect on the story, or have any dramatic purpose. The sex scene was especially baffling, as the writer, of necessity, could not reveal the sex of the character's partner in bed. While the writer made it clear what was being done, the writer, trapped by her own cleverness, was unable to make it clear who was doing what to whom. Oy. If your character has no name, or if you keep his or her name hidden with a series of allegedly clever artifices, you will spend 23 pages stuck with damn fool locutions such as "the boy in the shirt." Knock it off. If his name is Fred, say so.

Another great (manufactured) example from the same link is the weird opener.  This is considered bad:

"Sarah walked down the aisle, still unclear why she had agreed to marry a giraffe. The groom, waiting patiently at the altar, resplendent in black tie, spats and spots, swung his long neck around to watch her approach, all the time placidly chewing his cud."

The spats are a nice, and nicely decadent, detail.  Frankly, I would be proud to be the author of such an opener.

C.J. Cherryh has her own pet annoyances:

Mirrors … avoid mirrors, as a basic rule of your life. You get to use them once during your writing career. Save them for more experience. [...]  If you haven't read enough unpublished fiction to have met the infamous mirror scenes in which Our Hero admires his steely blue eyes and manly chin, you can scarcely imagine how bad they can get.

Limpid pools and farm ponds: I don't care what it is, if it reflects your hero and occasions a description of his manly dimple, it's a mirror.

I recently listened to the classic Princess of Mars in an audio book from Libravox.  The faux-horses and faux-dogs made me roll my eyes, because I knew about the dreaded Smeerp:

[W]atch out for what Damon Knight calls “calling a rabbit a smeerp.” Just because you call a long-eared short-tailed lagomorphic mammal with long hind legs a “smeerp” doesn’t make it alien. We all write sf in standard English, unless we are Anthony Burgess (who did made-up dialect well), or some other people who do it not so well. There’s no particular reason to translate words for time, distance, and food into gibberish. (I don’t know why time, distance, and food are so susceptible to this in science fiction, but they are.) If your characters are drinking coffee, have them drink coffee, not “klaa” or “jav.” Coffee’s been around for more than a millennium. It’s probably going to last.

And, from the previous link, here's one of my faves, which reminds me of the time a white woman described her black adopted daughter as "literally an oreo."

"His Head Literally Exploded!"

"Figuratively" means that you are speaking metaphorically or symbolically. "Literally" means that you are speaking with precision and realism, that you are saying what exactly happened. "Literally" is not a generic intensifier. If you are talking about someone's headache, "figuratively exploded" is the phrase you're looking for -- at least in comparison to "literally exploded."

Ouch.

Labels: Fiction