*****************************************************************************
Thank you for subscribing to "Write Through It," the monthly newsletter brought to you by Manuscript Rx. You can change your subscription at any time by following the link at the end of this message.
******************************************************************************

Greetings, fellow writers!

Welcome to your June newsletter. I hope this finds you well and happily productive. As always, I encourage you to contact me with topics you'd like to see covered in future newsletters.  Since my goal is to make "Write Through It" helpful and inspiring to you, your ideas are paramount.
 
Also, writing is a lonely process. I'm hoping that this newsletter reminds you that you are part of a community (no matter how geographically spread out we may be) and, while we might write very different things, we all face similar struggles along the way.

Feel free to forward this newsletter to a friend who might enjoy it. And feel free to write me with any questions or comments.

www.ManuscriptRx.com
lucia@manuscriptrx.com

***********************************************************************************

The Top 7 Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Manuscript

In the spirit of free-thinking and throwing off the yoke of rules, I propose an amendment to the "If it's not broken, don't fix it" adage. How about: If it's not broken, let's break it? After all, it's a diligent (a.k.a. obedient) student who internalizes the tenets for crafting compelling writing (a.k.a. things readers want to read), but only a True Innovator remains totally unconcerned with readers' tastes (including the tastes of editors and agents). I tip my hat to you different-drumming pioneers out there and offer this month's newsletter in the hopes that those of us who are still stubbornly trying to appeal to an audience might find an easier way.

So here they are, your guaranteed ways to ruin a perfectly good manuscript:

Let your readers intuit your meaning.  (And its inverse, club them senseless with your meaning.) 

a. Twist and contort your sentences so that only a drunk genius or a dead medium can untangle them. After all, why on earth was the Rubik's cube so popular? Because everybody likes a frustrating struggle, not to mention the chance to say, "I did it!" (Even though the annoying kid who always solved the puzzle - while snickering at your clumsy attempts - got his Rubik hijacked and lobbed into the teacher's lav.) 

Anybody can shoot for crisp, clear, straightforward sentences (been there, done that...yawn). But only the truly brave can aim for prose that leaves readers dizzy and disoriented. Think of what you want to say, and then hide that in thick, jungle sentences.

b. The flip side of this (and it's loads of fun) is refusing to let your readers use their brains for much of anything.

If something is good enough to say once, it's good enough to say again. And again. Don't trust readers to grasp anything on the first go-around. Say it again. And again. Repeat. (Did I mention again?) Repeat. 

The extra benefit of this unnecessary reiteration for your audience is that while they're immersed in your story or article, their minds will be free to tiptoe over to really important things, like whether or not you defrosted that chicken for dinner or how can you tell the woman in the adjacent cubicle that her perfume combo is giving you asthma and a scorched windpipe.

Think of it as writing an endless buffet, except all your chafing dishes are filled with the same food group.

Fill up all the white space on the page.

If you treat writing like coloring in the lines, you'll have that page filled in no time. White spaces on the page serve as little breaks for the reader's eye and mind, welcome mental breathers. That space makes the page feel manageable at first glance, before your audience even gets down to ciphering meaning.

Don't let your readers have that break, dear writer!

You've heard this startling workplace statistic, I'm sure: The average eight-hour work day includes only 40 minutes of real productivity. Breaks are the most likely culprit. Coffee breaks and lunch breaks and bathroom breaks and breaks to stretch creaky backs and breaks to answer emergency phone calls from home all encourage more breaks. Train your reader to expect rows and rows of unbroken words and you'll have a tireless reading soldier.

Load on the adjectives and adverbs as if you're earning a commission for each. 

Sure, Mark Twain said: "As to the Adjective; when it doubt, strike it out," but honestly: are you willing to put your money on a guy who predicted the telephone wouldn't last a month?

Adjectives and adverbs are gaudy, they adorn, they distract. Often they do nothing for the meaning (but detract from it), which is good news if you're not sure of your meaning in the first place--people will be too busy gawking at your strings of modifiers to notice that you're not making sense. Why fix the hole you burned in the couch sneaking a cigarette before the Congratulations, You Quit! party your "Sizzle, Don't Smoke" support group threw in your honor when you can just toss a pretty, paisley, tasseled throw over it?

If you're up for a challenge, go one step further. Don't limit your verbal sleight-of-hand to adjectives and adverbs. Use exceedingly large, antiquated, onerous words in general (rather than speaking plainly so everyone can easily understand you). This will prove your intelligence. (That and speaking with a British accent.) Use unwieldy words as if they were throwing stars or nunchucks. (It helps if you think of your reader as a formidable opponent.)

Water it down, baby: Substitute vivid details for bland, forgettable generalizations.

When you present the reader with a specific detail, you also offer an image to the reader. Who needs that kind of mental coercion? But if you make things fuzzy, the reader can think of anything or nothing. Your manuscript will be like Madlibs without the _________.
 
For example (and I'm breaking my own rule here, because examples are the stuff of healthy manuscripts...readers like it when you show them what you mean, rather than when you merely try to say what you mean), let's take the very first line in Neal Shusterman's novel, The Schwa Was Here:

"I don't really remember when I first met the Schwa, he was just kind of always there, like the killer potholes on Avenue U or the Afghans barking out the windows above Crawley's restaurant--a whole truckload of 'em, if you believed the rumors."  

I know, I know: it sings, it pops, it compels the reader to press on. (But we're not concerned with the audience today, remember?)

Prescription for ruining it: Excise the potholes, Avenue U, the damn barking hounds, not to mention Crawley's restaurant (as opposed to a generic restaurant), and you've got a sentence that might invisibly disappear into the background of any manuscript at all.

The memorable voice and totally unique details are especially ironic, because the Schwa the narrator refers to is a boy so seemingly boring and forgettable that he's always in the middle of disappearing. So Shusterman had the perfect excuse to bland it down. Yet he allows his narrator to see and describe things in electric detail, even while an important character retains his curious translucency. 

Make it predictable: Say No to surprise.

Let's face it--most of life's surprises stink. Getting fired; hearing from your boyfriend (at the restaurant on your third anniversary the day after you told him you couldn't live without him) that the relationship is kaput; an unfair Weight Watchers weigh-in on an obviously miscalibrated scale (and ensuing public lecture about the Points System by Bitsy, a natural size 2)...all surprises, all lousy.

Forget crackling tension, twisty plot turns, breath-catching surprise when you revise your manuscript. Who needs more surprise heaped on an already unpredictable life? Give your audience a plot they can unravel with their eyes closed. That way they can keep their eyes closed when they read. Your readers (the ones that stick with you) will thank you for the snooze.

Keep your characters flat and unremarkable....or too good to be true.

The swiftest way to kill a manuscript is by creating characters your readers won't care about.  So flatten the life out of your characters: strip them of anything vivid or remarkable or memorable or remotely interesting. Dilute them until they could be anyone (or, better yet, no one).

Especially strip them of flaws. Since all real people are flawed, readers are flawed too. And they like reading about people they can identify with. So if your character is too good to be true (a daughter-in-law who cherishes her husband's mother, even after the woman announces at the couple's first Thanksgiving that "Bill's first wife always made a nice moist turkey"), your readers will tune out.

Readers like to see people struggling with the right thing to do, and often succumbing to the wrong. That way, when in their real lives they have to say to Attila the in-law, "Oops, I forgot about that pesky tree nut allergy when I whipped up the muffins, but you must have an Epi-pen knocking around in your bag," they can feel better about themselves. 

Don't worry about dialogue: Who really says anything interesting anyway?

We're forever bombarded by words and images. And most of that hurled muck is filtered out, garbled like the adult-speak in Charlie Brown's world. So do the math: If most of what we hear and read doesn't stick with us in the first place, why sweat the dialogue on your own page?

Zip through writing dialogue for your manuscript, beefing it up with easy-to-type fillers like um and okay and whatever or ho-hum discussions about the weather.

Focus more on the dialogue tags than the characters' speech itself. Experts know that the simple "said" provides the least interference with dialogue content. The eye passes over it without slowing down, and therefore what the characters say isn't slowed in the process.

You can break that reader-friendly, fluid pattern by avoiding "said" (it's a four-letter word, after all). Weigh the dialogue tags down with verbs like chortled, gushed, guffawed (or other verbs that describe actions that are impossible with simultaneous speech). Announce who is speaking even when that fact is totally obvious (that serves double duty: it's a drag on the give-and-take rhythm of natural speech and it clubs your reader with redundancy).

If your characters could talk, they might not be happy with the spotlight shifted away from them, but, thanks to your ingenuity, they can only mumble uh and whatever and Man, what do you think about all that rain?

You know, now that I think about it, you probably won't bother ruining your manuscript anyhow, which means all this was a colossal waste of time. So few people actually take advice anymore...

(If you think of any other ways to ruin a perfectly good manuscript, I'd love to hear them!)

lucia@manuscriptrx.com
www.ManuscriptRx.com

********************************************************************************

Read Through It...Book of the Month:

The Modern Library Writer's Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction (Modern Library Paperbacks), by Stephen Koch.  2003.

Koch cites writers from Anthony Trollope to Stephen King in this excellent guide to that sometimes-mysterious thing we call the writing process. Koch is a well-respected writer and teacher in his own right, and he offers accessible advice on basics like plot, reading like a writer, and the importance of habit. But you don't have to be struggling with the basics to come away from this book with something meaningful and helpful--veterans and newbies alike have celebrated this paperback workshop. Highly recommended. 

**********************************************************************************

Quote of the Month:

"One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines." 

~Emile Zola      
 
 
**********************************************************************************

Don't forget about my manuscript evaluation: For those of you who haven't yet taken advantage of it, I offer a complimentary coaching session or review of the first ten pages of your manuscript, which includes my written notes as well as a 30-minute phone consultation. Visit the website or e-mail me for details. 

Till next time, keep at it and those words on the page will keep adding up.

All best,

Lucia Zimmitti
Manuscript Rx
www.ManuscriptRx.com
lucia@manuscriptrx.com