Four Stealth Issues. And Good News.

First, the good news: my new suspense novel, working title Rearview Mirror, has been accepted for publication. Yay! (Plot summary: a protagonist with an eerie resemblance to Billy Joel struggles to save the world and defeat the Space Monkey Mafia, a deadly secret society run by Harold "Hula Hoops" Castro).(Bonus points if you can guess what song I heard in the car this morning while driving back from the high school). (And an actual blurb about the plot is here).(And apparently it's National Parentheses Day!)

Now, for the stealth issues. I want to discuss a few writing glitches that are very sneaky about slipping into manuscripts. And yes, you’ll sometimes see them in published books, which means they sometimes sneak past editors as well. How can we avoid these stealth issues? As Mad-Eye Moody would say, “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”

1. Tiny point of view slips. These can be oh-so-insidious. We’re writing along, solidly in Jane's viewpoint. We’re thinking her thoughts, feeling what she feels, seeing the world through her eyes. We would never dream of all of a sudden telling the reader what Bob is thinking, or that his foot itches--we know we're in Jane's head, not Bob's. Then, we type this line: “Anger darkened Jane's eyes.” Whoa, baby! Hold the presses! Whose POV are we in? Jane's. We think what she thinks, right? When was the last time you thought to yourself, “Man, I am so ticked. Anger is darkening my eyes.”? We don’t think about ourselves with that kind of outward observation, and neither does Jane. She can feel symptoms of anger—maybe she notices her face is getting hot, or her heart is pounding, or her stomach is clenching, or her muscles tightening, or whatever—but she’s not going to notice how her own eyes look, unless she’s staring at herself in the mirror. Rule of thumb: if you’re in a character’s POV, don’t describe reactions that she wouldn’t be able to see or think or feel.

2. I confess, I’m bad at remembering what grammatical errors and constructions are named. It’s more intuitive for me—I can tell you this is wrong, but I can’t tell you what the error is called. I had to Google around and try a couple of things before I could finally put a name to my next stealth error (and Annette Lyon of Word Nerd Fame can tell me if I got this right or not): dangling modifiers. Here’s the type of sentence I’m talking about: “Trembling with fear, Sarah’s skirt rippled around her knees.” Okay—we get it—the writer means Sarah is nervous, and her knees are shaking. “Trembling with fear” is supposed to modify Sarah—but the sentence doesn’t say that. The way it’s set up, “trembling with fear” is modifying “Sarah’s skirt.” Apparently, Sarah’s apparel is sentient and it’s scared (no telling what her shoes are feeling). So when you’re setting up a sentence like this, make sure you say what you mean: “Trembling with fear, Sarah felt her skirt ripple around her knees.” Or whatever you want. Just make sure your modifier matches up with the word you intended it to modify. No dangling! Constant vigilance!

3. Unintentionally whackadoodle –ing constructions: “Locking the door, he raced across the street.” Ladies and gentleman, meet your protagonist—Gumby! No one else would be able to twist a key in a lock and cross the street at the same time. Yeah, okay, I know what the sentence is supposed to mean—first, he locked the door and then he crossed the street. But that’s not what it says. Grammatically, it says he did both at once. “Tying her shoes, she ran down the stairs.” I wonder how many bones she broke. Yes, a protagonist can do two things at once—real people do that all the time. “Sipping bacon grease, Rob read a few more pages of Jeff’s new romance novel, A Time to Sigh.” But when your grammatical construction indicates that a character did things simultaneously, make sure those things actually work if you do them together.

4. Emotional tone. Characters are people too, and should react to events emotionally like real people would. When someone traumatic or strange happens to a character but he keeps sailing along cheerfully, seemingly unshaken, it can jar me out of that fiction-reading suspension of disbelief so important to enjoying a story So, because it bugs me when I read it, I automatically avoid it in my own writing, right? Heh. Did I mention these are stealth errors, creeping in when you’re not paying attention? In my new manuscript, someone is murdered (Spoiler! Bet you didn’t see that coming). Another character—we’ll call him Tom--knew the victim quite well, and there are some issues surrounding the death that ought to upset Tom (in addition to the fact that the victim is dead). But when I show Tom after the murder, he’s all cheerful and joking—he doesn’t show distress; he doesn’t mention the victim. I don’t know how many drafts it took me to realize that Tom ought to be visibly troubled by what’s happened, but I know it slipped through at least the first two drafts. I think it’s easy to do this, because sometimes we’re just moving the story along, and we forget to stop and let our characters worry or mourn or react, like a real person would.

After all, characters are real people, right?