Editing frenzy: Check your character's voice

There are a lot of templates out there for character creation which include all the basic ingredients about who your character is. That is actually his ID card and extras.  To tell you the truth, I never use any of those. I don't have a clue when are my characters birthdays, I'm not throwing a birthday party for them. I don't need their zodiac signs or their main address and most of them don't even need a last name. I find these things rather obnoxious. 

Someone told me regarding Demon Soul's cover: "When I saw it, I though your characters were Japanese." 

And so what? My characters don't have a nationality, they don't need one, they are not checking at the airport so no passport. But hell you're gonna know if they are a demon or not because they are going to be ranting about it. 

Fitting characters in little boxes is a bad idea because you might always want to change that later if you want to have a party and you need an excuse but it's November and you're character is Taurus that's not going to be good, even if you said he was Taurus just to fill up some more words. Use the information you have on them when you need to and beside when you meet people they don't tell you straight away everything about then unless you are reviewing their CV to hire them.

My point is. Stop with the useless details and get to the point already. Surprise! surprise! To build a character, I told you before to make them realistic, you need to single out what makes them unique. 

The hair colour, the eyes colour that's just details and fill up. I love my green eyes but I don't let them define me. 

So here is one thing that your character should have and that's his particular voice, because of course you are going to write some dialogue. 

To take an extreme case of very well define character, take Francis Dolarhyde in Thomas Harris's Red Dragon. The guy is avoiding every "S" sound he can get around because of a malformation of his mouth. Seriously, I'm not saying that every single character needs to be that extreme but make sure that all your characters don't talk as "you" do.

To do that, there are several things that you can use (today we are learning by example):

A gesture that the character does before talking. If you read Ice Princess by Janine De Jesus  you'll see Sibyl liking her lips. She also likes to use movie quotes which is taken later on by another character while her friend can't get what she is talking about. 

If you look at Demon Soul and the rest of my demon novels. Isakael is always having a strange way of walking as if his wings were too heavy for him, he also always complain about being an angel.

Use a particular word that one of your character repeated all the time. Azazel recently like to say "Damn" a lot. 

Use your characters defaults as well. If your character is proud or vain that's going to show when they move and talk. 

Then when you revise your draft, make sure it's all consistent. 

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt 17, check your time line.

So I have been away for a while cause I was... editing. Harajuku Kiss is now going through the proof-reading stage, you know the part when I pretend that I can catch all the typos. That the couple of people reading it with me can catch all the typos I miss and that when we are done. I'll catch all the typos we all missed together and expect that to be true. 

Not a simple one of my book is typos free I'm afraid and that's not because I stopped searching for them, if you find any, send them my way so that the next reader won't suffer from them. Do I look obsessed with typos to you yet? No? I need to go read that book one more time then.. 

Anyway today I'm going to be nice and I'm not going to talk to you about proof-reading. I'm going to talk to you about one particular super power. How cool is that? It's called Ubiquity, and it's the power that let you be at too places at the same time. You all watch Charmed right, Pru could do that.

But unfortunately your characters can't. I mean maybe one or two can but most of them are just... you know like me and have to go to work and sleep at different time, which is why you need to draw a time line.

Remember those arrow with historical event and king births on the wall of the history class room. Well you gotta make one of these for your story. 

It doesn't need to be of scale of course but you need one.So here is how to do it.

1) Place the main events : That's going to help you make sure that everything doesn't happen on Fridays, that the week-end only have 2 evenings (I know that sucks), that you have the same drive length to school in the morning, that you don't climb a mountain in 2 hours when it should take a week. You see what I mean, right?

2) Place your characters : All of them, even minor one, you need to know who is where and when. All your scene should be on the arrow and all your characters should be on it. If the character appears in two events at the same place in time, BINGO! You have an ubiquity problem, single, isn't it?

3) Time to move : Check that if your character is at two different places in a short time that they have time to move from one place to the other.

Once that is done go back to edit the problem in your draft. It should give you a smooth, flawless time line.

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt sixteen: tenses

If you are looking for the A-to-Z challenge, click here or scroll down.
Hello and welcome to a new editing frenzy post. I hope you didn't miss it too much last week. 

Today's topic is tense. And I can't believe that we didn't talk about it earlier. Anyway, let get started. 

Rule number 1: Don't mix tenses. 

You can choose to write in two tenses either present or past. If you write in past tense however the dialogues are going to be in present tense anyway. As usual dialogues are a bit different so I'll leave the tenses in the dialogue problem for a later prompt.

Past tense are: Past (preterit), 

                       Pluperfect (to have in past tense + past participle (-ed form)), 

                       Past continuous (to be in past tense + gerund (ing form))

                       Pluperfect continuous (to have in past tense + been + gerund)

The past is used to describe the immediate action and the pluperfect is used for background story, flash backs and when something happened before the current action.

To express a sense of future action in past tense you can use the conditional either in present or past tense. (would)

 

Present tense are: Present

                              Perfect (to have in present tense + past participle)

                              Present and perfect continuous.

                  Of course the future is expressed by the future tense. (will)

It is a common rule not to mix tenses so you have to choose which group of tense you want to write in and verify that you are not jumping to something else. It's really easy to jump tense at time and very natural so it require some concentration to notice.

Rule number 2: You can mix tenses if you want.

Yeah, I know that breaks rule number 1 and some people consider it bad writing.

I don't really have a rule for that. But I would say that you can have a past narrative and still use the present in specific cases some of which are:

  1) If what the narrator said is still true in the present.

  2) If you are talking about something like a general truth.

At the moment, I'm working on Harajuku Kiss and I'm trying to have a superposition of two narrators. One in past tense and the other in present tense. While the first narrator relate the story that actually happened to her, her future self reflect on the action and events. And of course the general truth are in present tense. 

Out of 10 reviews of the introductory 5000 words. Only two people complained that I was mixing tenses and one of them gave an example of a sentence where I was mixing tenses while all the tenses there were plain and simple past tense. I guess it depends on the people and if they are able to relate to the story or not. I think I would just go with my feelings.

In doubt, don't mix, but if you feel comfortable, go for it, just make sure it's consistent. 

             

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt fifteen: dialogues, who is talking?

This is the moment when we start checking the dialogues. We are going to work on this for few weeks.

First we are going to determine who is talking and if it's clear for the reader. There are a lot of time, especially when I read short excerpt of novels when I don't have any idea who is talking and that's a bit turn off.

Make sure it's clear by adding the name of the character with your dialogue tag, make sure you don't use pronoun (he or she) for two different person in the same dialogue if you don't specify the name of the character somewhere.

Here is an example of dialogue from Demon Soul between Brownie (pink) and Gideon (blue)

(1) “Yeah, he is just as fine as when we left him, I’m a bit too stressed about that,” Brownie said pretending that it hadn’t been such a big deal.

(2) “I was a bit stressed too, in fact, that’s why I came back so fast as well,” Gideon said. He was feeling bad for not having understood Brownie’s feelings sooner. (3) “Let’s not do it again”, he added.

Brownie nodded. She took the so precious book on the table and tried to change topic, the atmosphere was really getting heavy.

(4) “I tried to figure out which powers he was going to have first but I don’t seem to be able to find out.”

(5) “Do you think he will have all of them?” Gideon asked.

(6) “Well the demons I know do so probably…” Brownie wasn’t too sure. It seemed a lot for a single baby.

Gideon started to flick distractedly through the book. He seemed to him that he never knew a book so well.

(7) “I’ll try to have the temperature easier to control.” He took a green and an orange stone out of his pocket, (8) “Grenadine and Hitomi asked me to make them a pendant with those three days ago, and I’d better do it soon.”

Analysis.

1) The first sentence is obviously Brownie because of the dialogue tag: "Brownie said"

2-3) Same for the next too: "Gideon said", "he added" 

As Gideon was the one talking it's obvious that he can only represent him, especially that he is the only boy around.

4) There we don't have a dialogue tag but The previous action paragraph belongs to Brownie making it clear she is the one speaking.

5) Here we have again a dialogue tag "Gideon asked" for the question.

6) It makes it obvious that Brownie is the one answering, even more by adding something about Brownie's knowledge.

7-8) Once again, the paragraph circling the action belongs to Gideon making him the speaker. 

I'm not a big fan of having long chunk of dialogue without tags or action thinking that the reader will know who is talking just because there are only two characters and of course they answer to each other. I find it rather clumsy. 

I also complained few weeks earlier about action cutting the dialogue and characters doing three thing at the same time. Here you can see that the character are first sharing a book on topic but not overusing it. Also their actions aren't presented in the same sentence as the dialogue tag. Then between 7 and 8, there is a change of action for Gideon used to emphasise the change in the dialogue, still him taking the stones out is closely related to his explanation for it.

 

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt fourteen: sentence length

If you want to kill your reader, the easiest way is to keep the same length through the entire novel. The monotony is sure to make them sleep. I talk from experience because I was reading a book that had a good story and good writing but I kept on dosing of every time I was reading it. Turned out that I wasn't the only one. It was made of very long sentences for an entire chapter and that's what totally bored me out of my mind.

Having only long sentences makes your writing hard to read, especially if you are explaining something really important or if one of your character is having a monologue. Generally long sentence works well for description or if the character can't make up their mind. Longer sentences allow more details and more chances for focus.

Having only short sentences makes your writing sound choppy or interrupted. Like you want to change topic all the time. It can get confusing. It also denotes a lack of complex ideas in the story or a lack complex mind for your character. Short sentences work well for intense action and to accelerate the path.

To fix short sentences, try adding more details or use coordinating conjunctions (but, or, and....)

To fix long sentences remove the coordinating conjunctions, separate two ideas or two descriptions, or separate the action from the description. I was reading this book where the action kept on being interrupted by description of the place and I ended up not knowing where we were and what was going on.

Keep in mind that you don't need to kill all short sentences and all long sentences but rather to keep some of each while trying to maintain a sentences length average between 15 and 21 words. We are aiming for variety.

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt thirteen: Doing two things at the same time.

Today I'm going to be talking about those extremely multitasking characters who have to do so many things at the same time. It's overwhelming.

I was reading last night and in the book, the characters couldn't talk without having some sort of body motion making them pretty restless and me too at the same time. They couldn't run without looking at something or someone so that their actions were blended into the description making it really hard to 1) follow the action and 2) carrying about the surrounding. 

Give your characters a break! Of course details are important but stop adding something useless just to add some words because it's just filling up empty space with empty meaning. I mean in that book, they even brought two new characters for diner and the evening passed without even a conversation, leave alone something meaningful, it was totally awkward. Had I been in the room with them, I would have felt awkward too.

So let's get practical, shall we?

There are three things to check:

1) -ing which are not part of passive form this time.

Example: 

Initial: She jumped down from her chair laughing and brushing her hair out of her face, looking at him. She wanted to kiss him so badly but he couldn't have meant it that way because he crossed his arms back on his chest.

(I tried my best to add some but it was hard.)

Replace by: He made her laugh so hard that she jumped from her chair, her hair flying all over the place. He looked at her approach, she was too close now, he took a step back and crossed his arms back on his chest. He wasn't sure what she wanted but he didn't mean it that way.

2) As

Example:

Initial: As she looked down the street, she saw the car pulled by the horses but they weren't his horses. As the door opened, a man too tall to be him stepped out. She put her face closer to the window to see him more clearly but pulled back as the fog formed on the cold glass.

Replace by: The car pulled by horses she couldn't recognised entered the street. A man too tall to be her friend stepped out, she put her face closer to the window to look at him more closely but the fog formed by her own breath blocked her view.  

What happened to the door? Well, if the guy can't walk through walls it had to be open, useless to say it.

3) While

Example:

Initial: While I was sitting on the floor in from of my unfinished homework, I couldn't find a way to concentrate. Peter was at the desk, I could only see his back and his arm slightly moving on the side while he wrote frenetically. It wasn't the first time I was doing homework with Peter but I had never noticed how handsome he looked from the back while concentrating.

Replace by: I was once again doing my homework with Peter, but new feelings filled my mind. I couldn't take my eyes away from his back, I was sure unable to concentrate on my homeworks. This angle showed him more handsome then usual. Why did I need to sit on the floor in the first place? He would sure have finished before me and I would have to stay here alone instead of walking home with him.

There is nothing wrong with characters multitasking but try not to be too repetitive with the grammatical element you use when having them do several things, it soon gets boring. 

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt twelve: Prepositions

You are going to tell me, preposition are fun, there is nothing wrong about them, are you really going to hate on every words in the English language? Leave the preposition alone! Or I hate that grammar crap people write grammatically correctly, I don't need to know what is a preposition.
1) I love grammar! Because it's fun and I learned it as a kid putting colors on sentences!
2) Yes, I'm here to hate on everything and especially fat writing because at the moment that's what the prompt are taking care of. So let's have a look at the preposition. 

Up side down! On it's back!

STOP over using them!

Let's start with checking that we don't have two prepositions following each other.

Example: 
Initial: The vampire turned back toward me. His face was hidden in the dark but his yellow eyes shone and his fangs reflected the moon light. 
Replace by: The vampire faced me. His face was hidden in the dark but his yellow eyes shone and his fangs reflected the moon light.                                                  ^--- See that I even managed to get rid of both of them. (Sometimes I'm proud of myself, like today, it never lasts long unfortunately.)

Let's continue with making sure that they are not creating redundancies.

Example:
Initial: Mark climbed up the stairs and passed me the vial of holy water.
Replace by: Mark climbed the stairs and passed me the vial of holy water.

And for the little strong head who wants to tell me that they didn't know the girl was in the second floor...
New version: Mark descended the stairs and passed me the vial of holy water.

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt eleven: The adjective and their noums

That's when we delete the epithet adjectives, all of them 'cause they are useless... 

THE END.

Nah, just kidding. But it seems that adjectives are as hated as -ly adverbs. And, I still don't know why. Anyway, we need to take care of them. Let's do it efficiently and not be too barbaric about it! So we need to have a look at the noun they are qualifying. 

If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about just let me know because apparently some people *cough* writers *cough* don't have the grammar skills of elementary school French kids. Nothing wrong about that French kids are awesome and you can still learn. 

Start with spotting an epithet adjective, ask yourself one question. Does it give something to the noun next to it? Mostly, is it giving anything new to the picture? Or is it totally redundant and vague?

If yes, you're a winner, move to the next. 

If no, figure out what's wrong with it and change it.

Here are some examples:

The deep ocean. If you are not on the shore the ocean has to be deep or maybe it's a lake.

The pretty face. Hum, what makes it pretty?

The thick jungle, the deep forest. I personally never saw them any different. 

The tall building. Compared to what kind of building?

If you are describing something make sure that the reader can see the complete picture in your head, it's not as if they are standing next to you looking at it too.

On another note: An image starts in the writer's mind and finishes in the reader's mind. Don't spoon-feed them with so much details that they want to pull their brain's out because it doesn't have anything to do, boring. Give them the juicy steak caramelised on the side that they can cut with their own knife, no need to chew it before serving.

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt ten: Clarification the -ly adverbs

Adjectives and especially adverbs are some of the most hated words in the English language, I'm not sure I understand why but I know that too many -ly adverbs in the same paragraph annoy the hell out of me.
 

Azazel's adverbs madness

1. It slows down the rhythm and loses the vocalic agreement.
   When I write I like to use sounds to create images, for example, several substantives starting with S show the sinuous path of a snake. 
   
   
2. Verb + -ly adverbs can be replaced by another more specific verb, for example, run+quickly=race, speak+loudly=yell, talk+lowly=whisper 
   
   
3. Some of them like (very or really) just cover space. Of course they are commonly used in speech and should appear in dialogue but they should also be kept away of the narrative. They are vague and don't bring anything to the start.
   
   
4. A lot of them can also be replaced by a more specific paragraph.
   Example:
   Initial: He opened the door brusquely making me startle.
   Replace by: He opened the door, which hurt the wall, making me startle.

Go ahead and get rid of them!

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt Nine Clarification: Start and begin

This is where we stop starting things and keep on doing them.

To tell the truth, people always start something, you can't really do anything without starting it. You start to talk, you start to eat, you start to breath slowly, you start to run, you begin to think that this is getting a little bit repetitive.

But if you are going to use start/begin every time you character start something you'll get in deep water, then to be true to yourself you'll have to say that he is in the middle of doing something but what if it's 3/4 done and what if it should be finished but it's not so he starts doing it again... then you'll also have to give an end to the action, just for consistency and it's likely to make the all style of your writing unbearable. Well maybe not but that's for emphasis.

One rule I like to observe is use start/begin when the action is interrupted straight away. 

Example:

Initial: Clara started to run toward the mountain, the cold icy wind of winter brushing her face as passed near the bridge.

Replace by: Clara ran toward the mountain, the cold icy wind of winter brushing her face as passed near the bridge.

Or in case of interruption:

Clara started to run toward the mountain but Jimmy caught her hand and forced her to stop and look at him. 

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt Eight Clarification: Modal verbs

This is where we try to get rid of the modal verbs by reformulating sentences:

Modal verbs are: Could, would, must, can, will, shall...

Run a search for each of them and see how many you have. 

If would and will are not extremely annoying as they mark the sense of future in the narrative (replace with present/preterit or with an action), could and can rapidly become repetitive and heavy.

They are used the most with sensory verbs so let's have a look here at two of them in a different setting.

Example: 

Initial: He could see that she was unhappy but she couldn't have thought of telling him it was the fault of his mother.

And I'm sure you can think of something to get rid of them but let me do it for you once anyway. 

Replace by: He saw she was unhappy but she refused to tell him it was the fault of his mother.

We have also been around cutting down to be in a previous post so let's continue this sentence editing. (It also fixes the POV issue, mega win.)

Replace by: Her unhappiness showed on her face but she refused to blame his mother in front of him. 

Now this is not a perfect sentence is it need to be transformed again for more show and less tell.

Replace by: Her smile left her face as his mother entered the room with a plate filled with potatoes and placed it in front of her. She dropped her book and seized the knife as the older woman nodded in approval. He mentally counted the pages she turned tonight. Before his mother moved in, he brought her new reading daily. She piled the potatoes without a word and let them fall gently in the bucket of cold water. 

Editing is a long process, you won't get it write the first time, you won't get it right the second time, just keep deleting words just keep adding details.

 

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt Seven Clarification: The verb "to be"

This is where we make sure that we don't have millions of the verb “to be” under any form hanging around.

When the verb “to be” is hanging around, the writing is rather imprecise and hence needs to be adjusted.

1. Start with expression such as “there is”, “there are”, “there were”, “there was”... “it is”... and see if you can replace them with a noun plus verb. 
   
   
   Example:
   Initial: When he entered the room there was a bouquet of fresh flowers on the table
   Replace with: When he entered the room the smell of flowers freshly picked up struck his nose. 
   
   
2. Continue with tense check, see if you can replace a passive tense by an active tense.
   
   
3. Make sure you are using continuous tense properly.

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt Six Clarification: the senses

I've got a bit tired of words checking so let's do something a little bit different this week and go back to our word check next week. 

We are going to start checking out your characters/narrators perceptions. I know we probably all have the seeing and hearing right cause we are naturally awesome like that but the three others take practice.

Here is a way to had some flavor to your writing and make sure you use all the perceptions your character has.

1. Character enters a new place. List what he sees, hear, and smell.
2. Character touch something what does it feels like. (Ex, is the glass hot or cold, is the fabrique soft, is the couch hard when she sits on it, does she scratch herself of the rose thorn.
3. The character eats something, what does it tastes and smell like did to cook add some unusual spice, how did the kiss taste like? Did the guy drunk coffee before kissing her or was someone chewing on mind gum. Was the girl wearing perfume.
4. Touch feeling due to movement if people run they get sweaty and smelly.
5. Keep in mind that perceptions are altered when people get tired or are preoccupied or hurt
6. Use smell to bring back flashback memory as it is the sense the closed related to memory.

One way to go if you feel like you are missing a sense more than another is to force yourself to notice things using it more in your daily life. 

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Editing Frenzy: Prompt Five Clarification: feeling verbs

It is Tuesday again and here is a new prompt for our Editing Frenzy.

We are going to take the diet list again and start working on our feeling verbs.

Take the feeling verbs: feel.... (check out diet word list for more) for each of them figure out why the character feels this way and see if you can explain it differently. 

Example: 

Initial: Rob didn't know what he had done wrong but he feel like Kirsten might be angry at him.

Replace by: Her face tensed and her smile dropped as soon as he entered the room. She stopped laughing with the others and played nervously with her spoon in her coffee cup. She kept her eyes on the cup as well or starred at their colleagues. Rob crossed the room to joined them, without even looking at him she walked back to her desk. 

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