Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 1

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gp101

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don't sweat it

An hour on a paragraph? Wait till you spend DAYS on a sentence.

Skip over your paragraph and come back to it when you hit the dreaded "writer's block" and need to take your mind off it. Or wait till you've finished the entire WIP. With fresh eyes I'm sure you'll whip up a better pragraph than any of us can considering you know your story better than any of us. You might even determine you don't need that paragraph and delete it. Why kill yourself now if you might kill the fruits of your frustration later?
 

Roger J Carlson

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Mr Underhill said:
And FWIW, my understanding of the Uncle Jim method is that time spent revising your work doesn't count as BIC, so we shouldn't be staring at a sentence we just wrote for an hour. Just put a little pin with a red flag in it, and keep moving. Of course, I'm still trying to cultivate my own BIC habit to the point I get the shakes if I go a day without putting words to page, so what do I know.
With all due respect to Uncle Jim, an hour a day is all I have. Revising must count as BIC with me. In fact, the hour I spent on this paragraph was cumulative. I've been working on revising this whole chapter for several days. Each time I bumped into this paragraph I'd spend 10-15 minutes trying to fix it, get frustrated, and move on.

The WIP IS finished, at least the first draft is. I'm in revise mode now. My goal is to cut 25,000 words out of 125,000. I don't know if I can, but I'm going to try. Every word cut is a victory, so I also thought about leaving the description out altogether. But one sentence isn't bad, and that's what I was aiming for.

Thank you all for your help.
 

maestrowork

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reph said:
The "jammed into" suggests force, which I think R. C. wants: his character is angry.

Exactly. It's the choice of word that conveys certain emotions -- a typical use of "show, not tell." When I suggested the verb "jam" it was to convey the anger of the character in a more active way, instead of just "fists on her hips."
 

maestrowork

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Mr Underhill said:
Less is more. I'd have to see more of the dialogue, but I would drop almost all of the description and let her words do it. Maybe all of the description. So it would read like,
"It'll work this time, trust me," her uncle said.

"You two are not doing that to her again."​
That pretty much tells us what's happening. If you want to have an action in there, pick one, such as she was on her feet, that is representative of her body language.

Well, in this case I don't think the dialogue alone is enough. At least not the way it's written now. I have no idea how she's going to say "You two are not doing that to her again." Is she calm? Is she sarcastic? Is she angry?

But if you follow it with "She jammed her fists into her hips," it's very clear that she said it with anger.

I agree you don't have to overload the scene with descriptions and such, but a little action, a little "showing" goes a long way.

Now, if the dialogue is, "You two dumb f*** are not doing that to her again. Ever!" then I suppose the line itself is enough and you don't need any action to go with it.
 

MacAllister

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I'm actually not crazy about "jam"--it seems an eccentric choice for that particular action.

But we could debate every single word til the cows come home--and it seems far more important to let it go and write forward...then pick it up on rewrite, if it still seems so important.
 

Roger J Carlson

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Help with Query

If I could impose one more time...:)

I put a query letter for a different novel (Crystal Dreams) on the Share Your Work/SF and Fantasy board. I don't think it gets a huge amount of traffic, so I'd appreciate it if you guys could pop over and take a look at it.

Here's the link:
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12031

Thanks.
 
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maestrowork

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Mac, RJ is in rewrite mode. ;)

If he's going to do only two drafts (like Stephen King does), then now is the time to agonize over every word choice and sentence. ;)

BIC usually only works during first draft.
 

reph

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James D. Macdonald said:
Set your wordprocessor to search for "ly" and delete all your -ly words.
I am so tempted to rep to that advice because I'm thinking of times when it won't app.

Catch you later. I'm off to swat a f.
 

maestrowork

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James D. Macdonald said:
Set your wordprocessor to search for "ly" and delete all your -ly words.

Check your wordcount then.

I hope he doesn't have a character whose name is Lily or Emily.



:)
 

alaskamatt17

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I set it my word processor to highlight all of those -ly words. Then I searched through and deleted most of them (sorry, Uncle Jim, I left about fifteen -ly adjectives in my 106,000 word manuscript). Cutting 25,000 words out of 125,000 word manuscript seems like it would be tough to do. I'd start with slashing scenes before cutting adjectives.
 

pianoman5

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James D. Macdonald said:
Set your wordprocessor to search for "ly" and delete all your -ly words.

I hope you've got your tongue firmly planted in your cheek, UJ.

It's always a useful exercise to do an "-ly" search as it does highlight a number of redundant adverbs that deserve to be shot at dawn, especially the ones associated with dialogue tags.

But I have to question your use of 'all'. I've stood all of mine up against a wall and demanded they rationalise their presence in my work, and quite a number of them have said, "Because removing us would suck life and meaning out of it."
 

Roger J Carlson

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James D. Macdonald said:
Set your wordprocessor to search for "ly" and delete all your -ly words.

Check your wordcount then.
Hey, that gives me an idea for another program: Adverb Eliminator. It'll work like this:
  1. Make a copy of your file
  2. Turn on Track Changes (MS Word of course)
  3. Check every word to see if it ends in ly
  4. If so, delete it
  5. When done, you can go back and scroll through the deletions and either accept or reject it.
Could work. Thanks, Jim.
 

James D. Macdonald

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If, when you've pointed your pistol at the adverb's head and said, "Ask yourself, punk, do you feel lucky?" the poor little word makes a case for its survival, you can let it stay.

Sort of a catch-and-release program.

Everything must advance the plot, support the theme, or reveal character. Those things that only do one of the above ... may find themselves in the Cold Darkness.
 

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Roger J Carlson said:
Hey, that gives me an idea for another program: Adverb Eliminator. It'll work like this:
  1. Make a copy of your file
  2. Turn on Track Changes (MS Word of course)
  3. Check every word to see if it ends in ly
  4. If so, delete it
  5. When done, you can go back and scroll through the deletions and either accept or reject it.
Could work. Thanks, Jim.

Were I doing this, I'd add an exception list, which could be derived by using a wild card search or boolean search of an online dictionary.
 

DreamWeaver

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A search for -ly words is pretty easy; is there any way other than a line-by-line reading to weed out excess adjectives? YMMV, but if every noun in a sentence has one or more adjectives, I know I've got gardening to do. I invariably end up with too many adjectives in my first draft.

My apologies if this has been covered recently. I haven't read the complete back-thread yet.

Kris
 

reph

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DreamWeaver said:
A search for -ly words is pretty easy; is there any way other than a line-by-line reading to weed out excess adjectives?
What's wrong with line by line? Wouldn't you look at every line anyway while writing the second draft? (=, roughly, editing the first draft)?
 

LightShadow

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I do everything line by line, but sometimes you still miss something. Thing is, if you've been reading all your life, and reading things that are grammatically correct, you'll know something's wrong without even remembering the specific rules.
 

DreamWeaver

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LightShadow said:
Isn't it just a matter of omitting needless words? (as E.B. White would say)
Yes, I suppose you could look at it that way. I think of it more as style surgery than as correcting grammar, so omitting needless words works. The style part would be deciding if they are excess or not.

The pitfall in doing it line-by-line is that sometimes one only sees what one expects to see. A computer search for -ly words will find them, when one's brain might skip over them. I haven't figured out a way to do that kind of mechanical double-check with adjectives, so even when they could go, I often miss them until someone (beta reader, proof reader, friend--I'm not published, so no editor) points them out. If I'm lucky. If the readers are being too polite, they won't point out excess adjectives because they're not grammatically wrong.

To illustrate, here's the same sentence before and after a successful adjective check (my style only, yours may legitimately differ):

Excess adjectives:
A small brown bird sang a sweet and soulful song from the drooping branches of a leafy green willow tree which stood on the muddy banks of the gently flowing stream.

After adjective check: A small bird sang its song in the leafy branches of a willow tree on the banks of the stream.

No adjectives at all: A lark sang in the willow near the brook.

My drafts includes everything with very little mental editing, so the first example is fairly accurate. The second example is what the excess adjective check gives me, and the third example is what I aim for. Not that I don't want any adjectives at all, just that I want to use them carefully, only when I need them.

Kris
 
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Lenora Rose

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LightShadow said:
Even the needless stuff is needed every once in a while. How many books have you ever read without -ly adverbs, for example?

I believe that's what's called: Everything in moderation, including moderation.

IIRC, J.K. Rowling uses far more adverbs than is common in North American writing, and to some degree this is seen as personal style, to some degree part of an overall East-of-Atlantic style (Britain tends to be more forgiving of extra flowers in prose than the US, and in some other Romance languages, what is considered spare in English is considered *disgustingly* bare and just reads wrong.), and to some degree as a flaw in her writing.

To what degree each aspect is emphasized depends on the reader.

I will say that I wouldn't recommend her as an example of good style (Especially with all the ALL CAPS SENTENCES ENDING IN EXCLAMATION POINTS!) but of good story overcoming some rough prose. I'd also frown upon an as-yet unpublished writer using her success to excuse their own excesses in prose (Or a published one using it as an excuse to one's editor when the editor asks to cut a few...).

I cut adverbs as often as I can, but still have a novel whose opening sentence has an adverb. I held a gun to that adverb about four different times, and it always talked me out of the cut.

(The sentence in question is "He watched the other boys covertly.")
 

black winged fighter

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While I definitely don't enjoy overcrowded sentences, I don't like minimalist writing, either.
"A lark sang in the willow near the brook" is bare of adjectives, and if an entire book were written this way, I would lose interest quickly. However, I use passages like this one to break up my more descriptive writing and move the story along.
 
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