Three Peeves

by Stephanie Black

Today’s blog is about three of my pet writing peeves. You may have different peeves, or may not consider mine peeve-worthy, but hey—feel free to disagree with me and/or post your own peeves in the comment trail. The more the merrier!

(Random thought: Peeveworthy would be a good name for a butler).

Here’s today’s writer-beware list, in no particular order.

1. This peeve is what one writing book—can’t remember which one—called “unintentional simultaneity.” It involves sentences like this:

Lacing her running shoes, Matilda sprinted down the stairs.

Did she? Wow! The woman is more flexible than Gumby and has the balance of a tightrope walker. The grammatical construction of the sentence indicates that she’s lacing her shoes and sprinting down the stairs at the same time. (Note: Do not try this at home).

Today’s advice: If you’re using an –ing clause to spice up your sentence, please be sure it makes literal, simultaneous sense.

I realize some of you may feel I’m being too picky about this. After all, readers aren’t going to take the sentence literally. They know what you mean. But it still bugs the heck out of me because it's just . . . wrong.

2. Head-hopping. Naturally, I can’t get through a list of peeves without mentioning head-hopping.

There are fantastic examples of omniscient third-person POV books out there. Take Gone With the Wind, for instance, where the narrator is not only free to jump heads whenever she chooses, but also to offer commentary on the characters that they would never offer on themselves, or to summarize how the war is progressing, or whatever is needed. It's brilliantly done. What I don’t like is when a book is written in a POV that, rather than feeling omniscient, feels like third-person limited (seeing only what the viewpoint character sees) until zap, the writer jumps into another head mid-scene.

Today’s advice: Unless you truly mean to use an omniscient viewpoint in the sense that that narrator is an observer on the action, wait for a scene or chapter break to switch viewpoints.

3. Blah climaxes. After two or three or four hundred pages of build-up, I want some payoff.

When you go to a fireworks display, where does the biggest eruption of color and light come? At the end. When fireworks start exploding right on top of each other, you know it’s the finale. Wouldn't you be disappointed if you went to a fireworks display and it ended with single, smallish burst? You'd sit on your blanket on the grass, staring hopefully at the sky, waiting for the real finale, until, faced with only a blank, black sky and a few wisps of smoke, you'd finally mumble, "I guess that was it," and go home. Disappointing, right? You expected it to end with the biggest bang.

Another example: our community symphony played Tschaikovsky's 1812 Overture in our recent concert, and it was the last number on the program. As our conductor pointed out, what can you do after the 1812? He’s right. Anything else would be anticlimactic (Tangential story: when we were rehearsing the 1812, I was sitting right in front of the percussion section. As we were playing, I heard a crash, among all the usual crashing, that sounded like a cymbal hitting the floor. But I thought maybe it was supposed to sound that way, until we finished, and the conductor and percussionist were discussing his broken cymbal strap. Oh—it sounded like a cymbal hitting the floor because it was a cymbal hitting the floor. At the rehearsal break, the percussionist came up to me and reported that he’d just about had a heart attack—the strap for the cymbal had broken on a big upswing, and there he was, watching this cymbal go flying through the air toward me. And there I was, sawing away at my violin, unaware that I was in danger of getting creamed by a flying cymbal. Come to think of it, it’s a good thing we didn’t have real cannons . . . ).

Anyway, where was I?

Today’s advice: Climaxes--make them appropriate, satisfying, and big enough to merit the build-up. A blah climax is such a letdown. You don’t want your reader reading the climax and then turning the page feeling like, um, was that it?

Now it's your your turn. What are your pet peeves? I know you have them.