Posts by Tiffany Yates Martin
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This is the eighth installment of these nerdy linguistic posts, an accidental series I stumbled into on seeing how many of the Writer Unboxed community share my appreciation for the delights and idiosyncrasies of words.
Generally I like to approach these posts from a fairly light and irreverent perspective, but today, to borrow from Hamilton, can I be real a second? For just a millisecond? Let down my guard and tell the people how I feel a second?
For all our gleeful enjoyment of the many vagaries of words, they are among the most powerful forces of society and history, which makes authors the formidable warriors who craft and wield them. As the cliché goes, the pen is infinitely mightier than the sword.
And like any warrior, we can choose to use our sword to destroy or to build.
Heroes Rise in Darkness
How many stories have you read where the hero triumphantly rides into a world where all is good and right and bending toward justice? That wouldn’t be much of a tale to tell; what makes a hero heroic is how he handles a world gone wrong.
Maybe it’s hubris or self-importance or just my own in-built bias toward creativity and the power of language, but I think authors and artists are often the heroes of history. Storytellers shed light in the darkness, increase connection and understanding, open minds and hearts. Yes, it may be politics and people who shape the course of the world, but it’s the storytellers who can help shape the ideas and mindsets behind them.
But it requires heroes, those who can transcend the oh-so-human reactions of fear and hopelessness and rage and contempt and disgust to spin a golden thread to connect one person to another, and to teach them to spin their own golden threads to draw in others. Weaving together all those tiny threads can create an unbreakable rope that can help guide all of us toward the good.
No one was ever attacked into changing their mind. Few people reexamine their views and search their heart because they were shamed or mocked or belittled or dismissed. On the contrary, those approaches are almost guaranteed to make most people entrench, to double down on their worldview, and to feed the flames of their own fear or hate or rage.
In moments like that we look to the heroes to help save us, to help create a future with promise and hope and love and good. And the heroes are those who can transcend their own darker feelings to help spread light into the world.
We are the heroes we’ve been waiting for, we wordsmiths. We have to be. The ones who understand the power and potential of that mighty tool we wield to divide or to unite.
Words Can Wound—or Heal
In 2018, outspoken comedian Sarah Silverman tweeted that she was trying to understand people who voted for Donald Trump, and was subsequently attacked on Twitter by a man trying to cut her down with his words, including a potent one intended to diminish and vilify women that many people have a visceral reaction to (it refers to female genitalia and rhymes with punt).
The understandable impulse is to strike back, particularly for those of […]
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Therese here. Before we get to today’s regular post, we want to let you know Tiffany Yates Martin’s latest book, The Intuitive Author: How to Grow & Sustain a Happier Writing Career, releases today! Not only that, today’s post features content that’s in line with her book but didn’t make it into the final cut. In Tiffany’s own words:
I love this story, but it echoed a similar one I told about two local restaurateurs who put their whole heart into their pizza-and-pastrami restaurant (odd combination, I know, but man, it works). I wanted to cover a lot of ground in all the areas that are so essential to develop skills and I couldn’t afford anything redundant. But the William Shatner chapter made it in. :) There was no way I was cutting the Shat.
Enjoy, WU community. And congratulations, Tiffany!
Design by Camille LeMoine
Not long ago, the hubs and I and some friends went to see one of my favorite musicians at a space at the Austin City Limits Moody Theater, tickets I’d eagerly stood by to snatch up, finger poised over the “buy” button, the day they went on sale.
The venue was completely sold out. The woman next to us had driven up from Houston because his concerts had sold out there too before she could secure tickets. The fellow fans around me and I excitedly compared venues where we’d seen him, and talked about our favorite past shows and our hope of attending one of his annual fan retreats, while we danced for two hours straight with one another and along with the crowd, most of us singing along to every song.
This is the kind of response any artist might dream about, isn’t it?
But you may never have heard of Eric Hutchinson, the musician in question. The listening room at the Moody where I saw him was, like all the venues where I’ve seen him play, relatively small, maybe 150 people or so. He’s had only three songs even hit the Billboard charts, and his peak position never made it past 29.
I discovered him incidentally about 15 years ago, when I heard one of his singles on the radio, “Rock and Roll,” and as some songs sometimes do, it snagged my attention so hard I immediately went out and bought his entire debut CD (yes, CD), Sounds Like This.
Since then I’ve seen him live every time he’s come through Austin, and bought all his albums. On this tour he took the stage by himself, with three instruments he alternated playing, and that was it. Just a man and his music and a relatively modest number of die-hard fans, who call themselves Hutch-heads.
How a Creative Career Is Built
That night Eric told the story of that first album that had originally turned me into a fan, the 15th anniversary of which was the focus of this tour. He had been trying to make it as a musician, living at home with his parents in between touring, and was just about ready to give up on music as a career when he decided he didn’t […]
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I’ve just learned a new word that speaks to the very soul of this semiregular column of mine: “grammando,” first used in 2012 by author and editor Lizzie Skurnick in her “That Should Be a Word” column in the New York Times Magazine.
As you might correctly infer, it refers to those people (I want to say “those of us” to myself and regular readers of this column) who take so seriously the strictly correct use of language that it may become their mission.
This word really hit a chord with me, as a former copy editor and current pedantic grammarian, and yet as I listened to linguist Anne Curzán on Adam Grant’s wonderful Re: Thinking podcast, where I first heard the term, I began rethinking my characterization of myself as a (rigid) word nerd.
I’m actually fascinated with slang and the evolution of language in the vernacular. To me—and I’m guessing to a lot of us—there’s music to the language we use, carefully thought out shades of meaning, sound and feel, and vibe we’re aiming for. In other words, voice.
One of the earliest lessons I learned as a copy editor was to respect the authors’ choices (or as I like to think of it, the editor’s Hippocratic Oath: “First do no harm”). Even if something’s technically wrong, if the author feels strongly about it they were generally permitted and even encouraged to overrule the correction.
I think one of the reasons I stayed in demand during my copyediting tenure was that not only was I able to pick up on author voice and such “off-label” usages, but also not try to homogenize it into rigid grammatical correctness.
Language purists, as in fact I have counted myself in the past, may be bristling right about now. I hear my mom’s voice in my head, for instance, bemoaning the end of civilization and humanity thanks to bastardizing our mother tongue.
But our mother tongue is not and never has been a fixed set of rules carved in ivory. With every subsequent generation it evolves with new usages and new words, and the extinction of others. In fact, Curzán cites the editors of the American Heritage Dictionary, whose board of adjudicators she serves on, who say that the basis of their job is to try to keep up how you cats are using the language.
Oh, wait, people aren’t actually cats. Sorry, dude. Oh, wait, not all of you are actual dudes, even those of you who identify as male, since a dude was originally a ranch hand in the West. My bad, unc…but wait, you aren’t my uncle….
I could have used the strictly correct “people” in the above sentence, but that felt a little vanilla for the playful tone and voice I want to strike in these posts. (Oh, wait, vanilla is a plant, and a flavoring derived thereof.)
My feeling is that the literal and rigidly correct use of language can be just flat boring. If there is one element of story that I frequently count to writers as the most important in grabbing your reader and setting your story apart in a world where there is […]
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When one is a word nerd, one can fight against one’s nature—suppressing the automatic correcting of friends’ misused words…working to suppress a shudder when a newspaper (a damned newspaper! bastion of a free and informed society!) is rife (not ripe) with dangling modifiers…trying hard not to see that billboard that for the love of all things holy misuses an apostrophe for a pluralization as the SIGN OF THE GRAMMATICAL APOCALYPSE that it obviously is.
But our nature will out. I’ve been resisting another pedantic post on the vagaries of our vernacular, but then no less a linguistic luminary than Benjamin Dreyer (who was very remotely once my boss in the 15 years I was a freelance copyeditor for Random House, back before it osmosed into Penguin—where I was also a copyeditor) writes a Washington Post op-ed about rampantly misused words and I’m off the wagon.
Join me on my bender, fellow grammar geeks—here are a few banes of a recovering copyeditor’s existence. Today we’re diving into conjugational tomfoolery of some of American English’s most provocative participles.
Vexing Verb Variations
Here’s how some common verbs conjugate: Sink/sank/sunk, drink/drank/drunk, spring/sprang/sprung.
Some of these can be a bit counterintuitive—for instance, I can’t tell you how often I read, “She sunk into a chair,” where the writer is incorrectly employing the pluperfect conjugation despite writing in past tense. GAH.
For those who aren’t quite as geeky about grammar, pluperfect is also known as the past perfect—or as I like think of it in my shortcuts-for-dummies mentality (and by dummies, I mean me, the woman who still sounds out “Wed-nes-day” syllable by syllable to make sure I spell it right), the past-past tense. Or if we want to dumb it down even further, you can think of it as the “had” tense, as in, “The author of the blog post had never seemed so pedantic to her readers as she did at that moment” or “The writers’ site had been interesting until it was hijacked by an out-of-control editor.”
The pluperfect is the one I always advise authors to use care with, especially in flashbacks, where it can get a little thick and ridiculous—witness this perfectly correct sentence: “The yogurt she had had had had three weeks to turn green in the sink.” Ah, English, you whimsical little minx.
Pro tip: If you’re writing flashback scenes within a past-tense story, which is often where the pluperfect tense comes creeping in, signal that time shift to readers with a well-placed “had” or two here and there, but then drop it or your writing will seem cluttered, your reader will become weary, and you will seem a pretentious douchebag.
Back to sink/sank/sunk: The boat is about to sink; the boat sank last week; the boat had already sunk when Jack and Rose found the apparently single-occupancy door floating in the Atlantic.
The same applies to spring/sprang/sprung—although virtually no one uses sprang correctly. Nonetheless, he sprang out of his waterbed, which had sprung a leak.
For some reason drink/drank/drunk causes great consternation, as if using the correct pluperfect is a value judgment on someone’s tippling habits: After they drank the first bottle of wine, they reached for the second, but realized they had already drunk it. (At which point yes, perhaps indeed they were drunk, […]
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So often in the craft of writing authors are presented with black-and-white dos and don’ts, foolproof systems for creating best-selling stories, story-craft dogma accepted as gospel despite our industry being entirely built on absolutely subjective opinion: from beta reader feedback to what will appeal to agents and publishers to what sells in any given market to wildly varying critical and online reviews of the exact same book.
Despite that I have worked 30 years in this business offering exactly that—opinions and advice about what makes story effective—I do not like writing rules.
I’m a staunch proponent of the idea that every story is unique, as is every author creating it, and that effective stories grow from the inside out, not by having a rigid system or set strictures imposed on it from the outside in. I base all of my work as an editor—and the entire premise of my book Intuitive Editing (where I even put the word “rules” in quotes every time I use it)—on this idea.
But (always a but)…! It’s true that human beings tend to respond to story in largely predictable and conventional ways, our brains predisposed for certain storytelling conventions. It’s true that there are market realities, genre expectations, reader expectations. We can forge our own path in telling our stories, but the ultimate litmus test of whether they work is how well they engage and affect the reader. And this is something that we can learn by mastering and intentionally wielding elements of story craft that can elicit those results.
And yet invariably when I’m teaching a workshop, someone will bring up exceptions to every guideline for successful storytelling. I call this the “James Bond never changes” phenomenon, from a common comment I hear when speaking about character arcs.
And sure enough there are plenty of successful stories where characters don’t change. (I’m looking at you, Forrest Gump and John Wick.) Plenty of stories that don’t build to a clear climax (hello, Cloud Atlas), where characters don’t seem to have clear driving goals (’sup, Lebowski?), where so many of what we construe as the holy grails of storytelling simply don’t apply (I see your weird ass, The Lobster). And yet the story is still successful, whether critically or in its sales or in its audience devotion.
So while in my speaking, teaching, and writing about writing I usually cite stories that successfully illustrate effective use of the storytelling techniques I’m teaching about, after finishing a recent book I really enjoyed that conformed to very few of these “rules,” I thought it might be useful to analyze how it breaks them and succeeds anyway.
Why this story shouldn’t work
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake was recommended to me by a friend as her favorite novel (as much a subjective gray area of a concept as are storytelling “rules”).
Lahiri’s debut novel, published in 2003, followed her 1999 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. It received a very healthy number of high-profile good reviews, and also this painfully tepid one from Publishers Weekly. It has a 4.3 rating on Amazon with just over 10K reader reviews, more than 500 of which are 1- and 2-stars, and nearly 1,100 […]
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Language is an elastic and fungible thing.
Elastic because it stretches to include vernacular and slang, dialect and patois, regional and cultural quirks, and even out-of-the-box usages like acronyms and emojis.
Fungible because it changes to evolve with society and the people in it, who aren’t constrained by rigidly trying to fit themselves into a restrictive set of ironclad idiomatic rules and usages, but rather who make their language change to reflect them and their world.
If it didn’t, yea, verily would we find ourfelvef prefently talking like thif forthwith, lo.
This evolution is right and good and as the Creator intended.
And yet just as is true in a healthy functioning society, balance must be struck between maintaining guardrails for holding the line of established norms and standards that do serve to help society function—like accepted meanings and usages of language that facilitate clear communication—and allowing room for these “rules” to shift and change to accommodate societal and individual progress.
And yet… And yet, friends, there is still a need for order and structure and consensus. One must, if one wishes for words to maintain meaning and clarity in enabling successful human intercourse (I’m talking about interrelation and communication—don’t make it weird), agree upon certain conventions and accepted denotations for words.
Which brings us to this latest installment of “You Keep Using That Word…” my semiregular and perhaps vainglorious attempt to hold that banner aloft and work to maintain at least some kind of linguistic order in this increasingly chaotic world. (H/t to Ken Hughes for the series title…and do we see what I did there with the “h/t”? Whoa. Meta.)
Vexing verbs
One of my many foibles is an irrepressible urge to mentally correct common misuses, like substitution of one word when the writer means another—as unconscious and inevitable for me as a patellar reflex.
It goes thusly:
Hapless author: “She set her cape on the fireplace mantle.”
My brain: No, she did not—she set it on the mantel.
If I’m feeling really pedantic and picayune (which I frequently am), I might righteously add to myself, In point of fact, she set her mantle on the mantel, amusing myself no end and cackling aloud as a result, eliciting perturbed looks from those around me.
Or take today in the New York Times—the venerable Gray (not grey, in this country anyway) Lady!—where a headline declared that at the first GOP debate, one wannabe overlord—sorry, president—allegedly “mislead” viewers about a certain topic.
Aside from the who-could-have-foreseen-that shock of a politician misleading anyone, we have a very common verb-tense violation: It should be “misled” in past tense (which as a younger human I used to pronounce like “whistled,” which makes sense, actually, so let’s give a bye to poor, literal baby-Tiffany, who also pronounced the “w” in sword and the “b” in “subtle,” because come on—look at them! But at least she was trying hard to master new vocab).
And let us stop here for a moment and pour one out for the many copyeditors whose jobs were axed in journalism budget cuts, resulting in egregious errors like the above (or inadvertently hilarious headlines like this) regularly making it into even the most respected publications. Woe betide society, and THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
The above misuse […]
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Hello, my partners in pedantry, my picayune peers. Welcome to another installment of morphological minutiae, aka “Wait, that means what?” (If we’re going to keep meeting like this for these etymological explorations, these terminology tête-à-têtes, these bacchanalias of linguistic douchebaggery, we should probably come up with a better title for this series—I welcome suggestions.)
For those just joining us, over my early career years as a copyeditor I worked on literally hundreds of manuscripts and spent countless hours with my nitpicking little nose buried in resource books at the library (yes, actual books, because that’s how long ago this was, kids: pre-internet).
And because I have the soul of a zealot where language is concerned, I made lists. Long lists of the common misuses of words and grammar and spelling and all the other obsessive bits of dry, tedious syntax and semantics that make editors such fun and welcome guests at parties.
And now that I have found my people, judging by the enthusiastic pile-ons of my fellow fanatics in the comments section of the Writer Unboxed universe, I share these communication cock-ups with you.
So let’s plunge in with this very special episode of “That’s Not What That Means.”
I’m Begging You to Stop Begging the Question
Let’s start with one I’m betting most of you know, even if you use it wrong nonetheless: Begging the question.
So many misuse this phrase, in fact, that this incorrect usage has now become accepted into the vernacular, and we all have to live with people being able to righteously justify an egregiously wrong use of this inordinately popular phrase—THANKS A LOT.
You knew, of course, that the original meaning of this phrase isn’t—as it’s currently used—to suggest an assertion that raises a specific question, as if it’s one of those irritating folks who drop intentionally cryptic or leading comments into their conversations in a bid to force their listeners’ engagement. “Please, please ask me more!” this annoying conversational sortie wheedles, tugging on your metaphorical coattails for attention.
No, this phrase was never so obvious and crass in the past. Originally it oh-so-classily referred to a fallacy of one’s logic: assuming the truth of one’s argument with no established basis or proof, like, “America is a trash fire and I alone can fix it,” which begs the question that America is in a crisis without proving it, or “Many people say that I am a very stable genius,” which asserts a conclusion about people’s personal beliefs as completely unsupported “fact.”
I mean, you see how silly using this fallacy makes one appear. “Begging the question” in cases like this is a very elegant way of pointing out what might otherwise be termed “ridiculously unsubstantiated assertions.”
If you must use this phrase at least adjust it to accuracy. Try something like, “a question that begs an answer”—but why not give your prose a bit more assertiveness instead and relieve it of the need to supplicate the reader? Even in its bastardized usage this is a bit of a pretentious circumlocution: “Here is a point that might be made, but have you considered, my friend, this more complex additional point I shall now bequeath upon you?” Just say it in the first place, for the love of line editing—make your point […]
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Like a lot of us who have borne a lifelong love for language and words, I have always been almost as fascinated by the mechanics of writing as by the style and substance.
Spelling bees were the bomb for me when I was younger (and I admit to participating in more than one adult version as well), and diagramming a sentence was my jam in high school—the order and logic and lucidity of it all! In its precision and clarity, language could be like math, except actually fun. Those of us who find our way into editing careers often seem to be as left-brained as we are right-brained.
Punctuation can be as thrilling as grammar: The wrongly maligned semicolon magicking a comma-spliced run-on sentence into an elegant complex thought; the jocular, informal em dash heralding an impending related tangent, explanation, elaboration, or contradiction that reflects so well the way many of us think and talk.
But judging by the heated throwdowns over the humble Oxford comma, ellipses, my cherished semicolon, and others, people have feelings about punctuation. Sometimes uncomfortable ones.
Let’s see if we can assuage some of those emotional reactions by clearing up at least a few vexing little punctuation bugaboos. Punctuation isn’t an author’s nemesis, but her helpful handmaiden; think of it as the traffic signals of writing to guide your reader smoothly through the flow of your story.
Punctilious Punctuation
Let’s start with the most egregious punctuation violation: If you are still using two spaces after a period, I invite you to stop it. That convention is a relic of the earliest days of typography, and using it may make you look like a dinosaur. Of course, you are welcome to continue insisting upon it, but let’s acknowledge that it’s a bit of an affectation, like wearing a monocle, isn’t it?
You go on and do you if you must, Mr. Monopoly, but in today’s youth-obsessed, debut-obsessed world, do you really want to draw attention to the fact that you learned a QWERTY keyboard in “typing class” on a manual Smith-Corona with only one monospaced “font” that required the extra spacing for readability?
While we’re at it, you might let go of your beef with the Oxford (serial) comma. For some reason it’s become regarded as the comma of commoners—highbrow lit-rary folk seem to eschew that helpful little device, as do Anglophiles, as Brits tend not to use it. Revisit some of the many hilarious misunderstandings you risk by not using an Oxford comma and let them encourage you to take a moment for that single extra keystroke of comprehension and clarity.
And here’s the skinny on ellipses: No more does the venerated world of publishing add a persnickety little space between each dot. Close those puppies right on up…just like that…. BUT:
Quotation Vexations
Speaking of our […]
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I see you, word nerds. I know who you are. You’re the ones who can’t drive by a billboard with a grammar mistake (“In a class of it’s own”) without visibly cringing. Who have memes like this as your screen saver. Who keep Dreyer’s English in your nightstand and regularly reread and analyze passages like it’s the King James Bible.
I see you, and I feel you.
As an editor I may or may not derive an inordinate amount of amusement from malapropisms, dangling modifiers, quotation marks misused for emphasis that call the author’s “authority” into question, and comically clumsily translated signs like these…but I know I am not alone.
A few posts ago I wrote about words you’re probably using wrong, and from the comments it seemed to hit a chord with my fellow word nerds, so here’s another ridiculous helping of word nerdery to delight you, enlighten you, and perhaps let you bask in superiority, chortling at those poor benighted fools who violate the vernacular. (Spoiler, though—judging from my 15 years at the beginning of my editing career as a Big Six copyeditor, that’s most of us at some time or another.)
Misusing our language commits a cardinal sin of writing, which is to muddy your intentions and the readers’ experience of your story. Knowing how to use the main tool of our business, language, allows you to be a more effective storyteller.
So with that lofty goal in mind…let’s get down and nerdy with it.
Picking Apart Parts of Speech
You don’t “feel badly” for someone, unless you’re trying to have a feeling for them and you just can’t swing it; you simply feel bad for them. (Probably because of their substandard grammar, I’m betting.)
And you don’t cap a list of progressively important things with “most importantly,” unless you’re saying it with the air of a self-satisfied douchebag—it’s just “most important.”
I might wonder hopefully if you already knew that, but I wouldn’t write “Hopefully you knew that” unless I’m referring to the optimistic quality of your knowing.
Something can be “on top of” something else, or “over it,” or even “over-the-top” (as this post, in fact, could be accused of being), but not “overtop” unless you’re using it as a colloquialism in a character’s point of view. “Overtop” is not a preposition, any more than “underbottom” or “throughmiddle” are.
While we’re on the topic, “any more” referring to quantity should be two words, not one, in usages such as the last sentence. “Anymore” is only for time, despite that for some philistines these usages are supposedly interchangeable (but never supposably).
My examples have taken a turn for the worse—which is a worst-case scenario for some readers, if worse comes to worst.
If you haven’t as yet tuned out (never “as of yet”—but you already knew that, didn’t you?), let’s move on to other troubling misusages.
Fallacious phraseology
If you’re offering someone an ARC of your book, it’s an advance copy, not an advanced one (unless you are distinguishing it from a remedial edition you give to your less erudite friends).
If you’re letting it all hang out you’re buck naked, not butt naked (no matter how intuitive the latter may seem, given the fundamental involvement of one’s derriere). And no judgments […]
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I’m not talking about the stories that you write. I’m talking about the ones you tell yourself: while you’re writing, when you can’t write, after you write, when what you wrote doesn’t get an agent or publisher, or isn’t well reviewed, or doesn’t sell well.
Our attempt to find reason and logic in what is so painful to us—rejection, disappointment, setbacks with our personal creative work—often results in finding reasons that don’t actually exist. “Reasons” that decimate our confidence and self-image and equanimity, the very elements we need to most freely create our best work.
It’s not these events themselves that can derail creatives, but the storytelling around them that we choose to subscribe to: Failure. Lack of talent. Hopelessness.
I’ve written a lot about this kind of destructive internal messaging and how to deal with it. But in this post I want to examine the premise of that story itself.
The Fallacy of the Story We Tell Ourselves
Usually it goes like this: “If I work hard and learn my craft and write the best story I am capable of writing and keep doing that, then eventually if I am good enough I will get published, my books will be hugely successful, and I will be a working writer forever and ever, amen.”
Unfortunately that’s just not how this career works. It’s not how most creative careers work. It’s not actually how any career works.
Interestingly it’s story itself that teaches us to think of it this way: The hero valiantly fights battles and ultimately he succeeds because of his skill or talent or goodness or strength. Humans are almost hardwired to believe this, and no one more so than writers, who live it every single day they practice their craft and try to incorporate some version of this idea into the narratives they’re creating.
It’s satisfying and tidy, but it’s not what happens in our writing—and it’s not what happens in life.
I regularly interview successful authors for a monthly “How Writers Revise” feature I write on my blog, and there’s not a single author I’ve spoken with who hasn’t talked about this business’s ups and downs, obstacles and setbacks, crushing disappointments as well as heady successes. There’s not one of them who hasn’t ridden a roller coaster between them all.
This is a business of ups and downs. Of seemingly random outcomes from decisions made based on the most subjective of criteria. Even factoring in that it is a business (and many times whether or not you get an agent, or whether or not you get published, has less to do with your talent or your story than it does the current market and the subjective preferences of a handful of individuals), after that it’s anybody’s guess what may capture a reading audience and what may not. What may sell well and what will not. What may be critically well received and what may not.
An author may struggle for novel after novel to even make a dent—a process ever more challenging now in a fast-moving industry that quickly moves on to the next shiny new debut author—and then suddenly break out. Ask Read More
Photo Stinjn Sinnen
Tension is the propulsive force of story—the means by which the storyteller not only spins her thread, but then holds it taut and pulls her reader steadily through the tale. Let that tension drop and the thread collapses, momentum stops, and readers put down your book.
Without tension, all you have is a pretty pile of yarn.
It sounds like a tall order—or a recipe for melodrama—but as the force that gives structure and form to the web you’re weaving, tension belongs in every single thread of your story.
Harnessing its power to pull readers into your web without risking sensationalism or soap opera involves expanding our definition of what tension is and how to incorporate it.
Tension is often defined or understood to be basically some form of opposition, friction, conflict, an obstacle. But perhaps a better way to think of it in weaving it throughout your story is that tension is anything contrary to a character’s (and reader’s) desires or expectations, however minor.
Tension Isn’t Always Obvious
Tension doesn’t always mean high drama, high conflict, or even high stakes. It can be overt and direct—an argument, a slap in the face, the killer at the door. But weaving it throughout your story often involves much subtler, indirect tension, what’s sometimes referred to as “microtension.”
Tension can be a million little moments in every scene—even the seemingly light, happy ones. Smooth sailing may be a #lifegoal, but it’s a storytelling death knell.
Conflict may briefly relax for those “upswing” moments of your story, scenes of connection and progress and triumph, but even in your story’s high points, some form of tension should be lurking:
So how do you use this powerful force to weave the tapestry of your story tightly?
Use Opposition to Create Tension
Let’s dissect a snippet from the opening pages of Steven Rowley’s delightfully humorous, poignant novel The Guncle, where the only thing at stake ostensibly is two children—staying temporarily with their single gay uncle after the death of their mom—wanting to make a YouTube video.
Patrick hovered his finger over his phone before calmly hitting record. “Tell me something about your mother.”
Maisie and Grant turned inward, each willing the other to speak. Patrick had never witnessed such a case of debilitating stage fright in his entire career. […]
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I started my publishing career back in the nineties as a proofreader and copyeditor for most of the Big Six publishers (before they started swallowing one another up).
The work could be demanding and sometimes tedious—copyediting requires a laser-sharp eye on literally every word and mark on the page, not to mention questioning everything: words you think you know the right spelling for, punctuation or grammar usage that seems okay at first glance, common words that might be trademarks (Realtor, for instance, and Dumpster, for a time), facts woven almost invisibly into the narrative that you have to parse out and check (“She emptied the chamber pot” can entail a deep dive down a rabbit hole of defecatory norms among a certain societal class in a certain part of a certain country in a certain month of a certain year), and reams of other linguistic arcana that must all be spotted, checked, and potentially corrected.
And yet I loved it. The precision of language usage was as close as I’ve ever come to understanding why math nerds love their field the way we word nerds love ours—with the added creative flourish that good copyeditors balance the science with the art: pedantically correcting usage is a great way to destroy an author’s voice and intention. My approach to copyediting was similar to my approach as a developmental editor: I’m not so big on rigid, complicated “rules” that can feel stifling.
But as a copyeditor I still had to know those rules—and share them with authors to explain my suggested changes—and I always liked to find simpler, practical approaches that might stick in the mind a little more readily.
So allow me to share my decidedly nonstandard ways of remembering how to properly use some of the words that may vex you most.
“Lay” and “Lie”
Without question the biggest bugaboo I see and hear from authors is “lay” versus “lie. ” Keeping these two distinct words straight is complicated by the way each conjugates in present, past, and past perfect/pluperfect tenses (or, as I like to simplify the latter, “past-past tense…”).
Lay = “lay, laid, laid.”
Lie = “lie, lay, lain.”
What the actual hell.
There’s really no workaround for the conjugations except to memorize them, but if you do and can be certain which base verb you need you will never get it wrong again. Here’s the hack:
If some other force or action is required upon a person or thing to effect the action in question (meaning to make it happen, rather than “affect,” meaning to influence or have an effect on), use “lay”; if it performs the action all by itself, use “lie.”
The book on the table? It’s lying there, all on its own…unless you’re carrying it and lay it down. It’s the subject of the first sentence, but the object of the second, where you—the acting force—are the subject.
With all due respect to Eric Clapton, Sally needs to lie down, not lay down—unless he plans to pick her up and then lay her down (into a lying position…because he means to lie with her or, in the vernacular, to lay her…I mean, how fun is this?!).
Snow Patrol upped the musical ante in the song “Chasing Cars”: “If I lay here.” The singer is no doubt planning […]
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Like probably every writer who’s read it, I’m fascinated by the recent New York Times “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” article—but not just for the obvious reasons of the astonishing story it tells. (Haven’t seen it yet? It’s worth it. I’ll wait….)
Yes, this is rich story material: two driven artists who began as peers, one more successful while another still struggles, à la Mozart and Salieri; interesting, complicated characters; and a question and theme deeply, darkly resonant for authors, who so frequently draw from life: Where is the line? Heck, there’s even an organ transplant.
But as juicy as the story itself is, what I think makes it so effective and haunting is how author Robert Kolker tells it.
How the Storytelling Makes the Story
Let’s start with the way Kolker opens on one of his protagonists, painting a portrait full of conflict from the first line: Dawn Dorland evinces a “sunny earnestness” that some find “a little extra.” She’s “openhearted and eager,” even as she feels “like an outsider.”
She’s relatable, passionate about her work and a seemingly decent sort who even ends all her letters with the notable signoff “Kindly.”
Pay attention to that cleverly dropped bread crumb. Kolker is using it to show us who Dorland is, while subtly planting what will later become an essential element in the unfolding of her story.
From the beginning he’s keeping us a little off balance as we try to fit together the pieces of the puzzle of Dawn Dorland. She does an immense and inarguable act of kindness: donating a kidney to a stranger. But right away we start to see that she might be just a little too proud of that kindness, might fly her own flag just a little too high.
In fact, when one of her writer friends fails to acknowledge her extraordinary gift in the Facebook page Dorland started to publicly tout it, Dorland actually bears down on her to force her praise for it.
By this point did you begin to believe Dawn Dorland to be a self-aggrandizing narcissist craving attention? Maybe mock her desperate need for Sonya Larson to acknowledge her kidney gift? Did you even start to question Dorland’s motives for doing it in the first place? Or did you take her at face value, follow her desired narrative? Already Kolker has planted delicious uncertainty in our minds.
But then he reveals more layers of story, upends our expectations: Did you side with Sonya Larson at first—someone being held emotional hostage by a desperately striving peer? Did your alliance start to shift when you found out what her short story was about? Or how closely some of it adhered to Dorland’s own experiences and posts? Or that Larson mocked Dorland to her fellow “Chunky Monkeys” writers after presenting a very different face to Dorland and publicly? Little by little Kolker keeps peeling the onion.
Did your loyalties and opinions shift throughout? Kolker isn’t just listing off the facts of the story—he’s drawing you into it, making you an invisible third party, a hidden judge and jury.
That direct involvement the reader feels elicits strong visceral reactions in us: Did you feel defensive? Angry? Outraged? Astonished? Mocking? Confused? Empathetic? Did those reactions […]
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I’ve recently become obsessed with pie.
Not eating it, necessarily—I can generally take or leave most pies—but I’ve been dedicating an inordinate amount of time to making pie…more specifically, pie crust.
Partly I blame the Great British Baking Show for my obsession—my husband and I devoured ten delicious seasons night after night for months, and I managed to convince myself while watching these avocational bakers that I, too, could churn out flaky rough puff like a natural-born pâtissier.
But pie crust, as it turns out, despite having basically four simple ingredients, is a lot more difficult than cutaway shots of bakers expertly book-folding fat chunks of grated butter into dough and rolling it out into a perfect flaky crust might suggest.
Here is a partial list of offenses I’ve committed against pie: burned crust, rubbery crust, crust so leathery and tough we had to cut it with brute force and a butcher knife, crust that tore and had to be patched together into a sloppy Frankenpie, crust that slumped down the sides of the pan and massed in an unappetizing lump around the base, crust that puffed up into a giant blister and then popped, crust I somehow baked into a hard brown edges and a soggy raw bottom.
May I remind you: It’s four ingredients.
Luckily I’m not kidding myself I’m a great baker; nor am I trying to become one. I just enjoy it, and I like the challenge of trying to master a new skill and don’t mind taking the time to travel a learning curve. So each time I make a mess of a pie, I cheerfully bin it and start again (or let my husband eat it, as luckily his pie standards appear to be extremely low).
It’s harder to have that same sanguine approach with you’re dealing with something closer to your heart, like your writing.
Some stories come together so smoothly, it’s almost like they write themselves. But most stories are more like my pie crusts—they may take a lot of work before you get it quite right.
The vast majority of manuscripts I work on with publishers go through three separate edit passes with the author—and this is after however many she may have done before turning it in. Sometimes we go beyond three passes. I’ve gone as high as six on some.
It’s common—and oh, so easy—for an author to get frustrated when a story takes that kind of time and work to come together. She may start to doubt herself—her talent, her skill, her worth as a writer. He may start to doubt the story—is it worth telling? Should he just chuck it and start over?
But if a pie crust—with its paltry four ingredients—can take such effort for even experienced cooks to master (and they do, as I comfortingly learned in extensive troubleshooting online searches), why do authors come down on themselves so hard if they sometimes struggle to orchestrate the vast multitude of ingredients that go into creating a successful story?
I think the answer is twofold:
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