Camy's foreward

I found this while trawling the net looking for help with my writing. Originally it was written for a SF workshop. I pulled this version from Nick Pollotta's site.

INTRODUCTION

This manual is intended to focus on the special needs of the fiction workshop. Having an accurate and descriptive critical term of a common problem makes it easier to recognize and discuss. This guide is intended to save workshop participants from having to 're-invent the wheel' at every session. The terms here were generally developed over a period of many years in many workshops. Those identified with a particular writer are acknowledged in parentheses at the end of the entry. Help for this project was provided by Bruce Sterling and the other regulars of the Turkey City Workshop in Austin, Texas.

#1 - WORDS

"SAID" BOOKISM. Artificial, literary verb used to avoid the perfectly good word "said". "Said" is one of the few invisible words in the English language. It is almost impossible to overuse. Infinitely less distracting than "he retorted", "she inquired" or the all-time favorite "he ejaculated".

TOM SWIFTLY: Similar compulsion to follow the word "said" with an adverb. As in '"We'd better hurry!" said Tom swiftly.' Remember that the adverb is a leech sucking the strength from a verb. 99% of the time, it is perfectly clear from the content how something was said.

"BURLY DETECTIVE" SYNDROME: Fear of proper names. Found in most of the same pulp magazines that abound with "said" bookisms and Tom Swifties. This is where you can't call Mike Shayne "Shayne" but substitute "the burly detective" or "the red-headed sleuth".

EYEBALL KICK: That perfect, telling, detail which creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain post-modern schools is to achieve a prose crammed full of 'eyeball kicks'.

PUSHBUTTON WORDS: Words used to evoke an emotional response without engaging the intellect or critical faculties. Words such as "song" or "poet" or "tears" or "dreams". These are supposed to make us misty-eyed without quite knowing why. Most often found in story titles.

BATHOS: Sudden change in the level of diction. "The massive hound barked in a stentorian voice, then made wee-wee on the carpet."

BRAND NAME FEVER: Use of a brand name alone without accompanying visual detail, to create a false verisimilitude. You can stock a future with Hondas and Sonys and IBMs and still have no idea what the damn place looks like.

#2 - SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS

COUNTERSINKING: Expositional redundancy. Making the actions implied in a conversation explicit. Ex. '"Let's get out of here!" he shouted, urging her to leave.'

TELLING, NOT SHOWING: Violates the cardinal rule of good writing. The reader should be allowed to react, not instructed in how to react. Carefully observed details render authorial value judgments unnecessary. For instance, instead of telling us, "she had a bad childhood, an unhappy childhood," site specific incidents involving, say, a locked closet, two jars of honey and swarm of bees.

LAUGHTRACK: Characters give cues to the reader as to how to react. They laugh at their own jokes, cry at their own pain, and (unintentionally) feel everything so the reader doesn't have to.

SQUID IN THE MOUTH: Inappropriate humor in front of strangers. Basically, the failure of an author to realize that certain assumptions or jokes are not shared by the world at large. In fact, the world at large will look upon such writers as if they had a squid in their mouths. (Jim Blaylock)

HAND WAVING: Distracting readers with dazzling prose or other fanciful fireworks to keep them from noticing a severe logic flaw. (Stuart Brand)

YOU CAN'T FIRE ME, I QUIT!: An attempt to diffuse lack of credibility with hand-waving. "I never would have believed it, if I hadn't seen it myself." As if by anticipating the reader's objections, the author had somehow answered them. (John Kessel)

FUZZ: Element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word "somehow" is an automatic tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story. "Somehow, she forgot to bring along her gun."

DISHISM: Intrusion of the author's physical surroundings (or mental state) into the narrative. Like characters who always light a cigarette when the author does, or is thinking about how they wished they hadn't quit smoking. In more subtle forms, the characters complain that they are confused and don't know what to do - when this is actually the condition of the author. (Tom Disch)

BOGUS ALTERNATIVES: List of actions a character could have taken, but didn't. Frequently includes all the reasons why. A type of Dishism in which the author works out complicated plot problems at the expense of the reader. "If I had gone along with the cops they would have found the gun in my purse. And anyway, I didn't want to spend the night in jail. I suppose I could have just run instead of stealing their car, but then the Martians would have eaten my dog and..." Best dispensed with entirely.

FALSE INTERIORIZATION: Another Dischism, in which the author, too lazy to describe the surroundings, inflicts the viewpoint character with space sickness, a blindfold, etc.

WHITE ROOM SYNDROME: Author's imagination fails to provide details. Most common in the beginning of a story. "She awoke to find herself in a white room." The white room is obviously the white sheet of paper confronting the author. The character has just woken in order to start fresh, like the author. Often in order to ponder the circumstances and provide an excuse for an Info Dump.

#3 - BACKGROUND

INFO DUMP: Large chunk of indigestible expository matter intended to explain the background situation. This can be overt, as in fake newspaper clippings, or "Encyclopedia Galactica" articles inserted into the text. Or covert, in which all actions stops as the author assumes center stage and lectures.

STAPLEDON: Name assigned to the voice which takes center stage to lecture. Actually, a common noun, as "you have a stapledon come on to answer this problem, instead of showing the characters resolve it. "

"AS YOU KNOW BOB": The most god-awful pernicious form of Info Dump, in which characters tell each other things they already know, for the sake of getting the reader up to speed.

"I'VE SUFFERED FOR MY ART!" (and now its your turn): Research dump. A form of Info Dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader irrelevant, but hard-won, bits of trivia acquired while researching the story.

RE-INVENTING THE WHEEL: In which the novice author goes to enormous lengths to create a situation already familiar to an experienced reader. You most often see this when a highly regarded mainstream writer tries to write an SF novel without actually reading of the stuff. (because it's all obviously crap). Thus, we get endless explanations of how an atomic war might get started by accident. Yawn. Thank you, but we have all read that before. Also, you get tedious explanations by physicists on how their interstellar drive functions. Unless the science impacts the plot, we really don't care.

USED FURNITURE: Use of a background out of Central Casting. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, or risk re-inventing the wheel, let's just steal one. We'll set the story in the Star Trek universe, only we'll call it the Empire instead of the Federation.

SPACE WESTERN: The most pernicious suite of used furniture. The grizzled space captain swaggers into a space bar and after tossing off a Jovian brandy, lays down a few credits for a space hooker to give him a galactic rim job.

EDGE OF IDEAS: The solution to the Info Dump problem (how to fill in the background). The theory is that, as above, the mechanics of an interstellar drive (the center of an idea) is not important. All that matters is the impact it has on your characters: they can get to other planets in a few months, but it gives them hallucinations about past lives. Or more radically: the physics of TV transmission is the center of an idea. On the edge, we find people turning into couch potatoes because they no longer have to leave their homes for entertainment. More bluntly, we do not need an Info Dump at all. We just need a clear picture of how people's lives have been affected by the background. This is known as 'carrying extrapolation into the fabric of life'.

GRUBBY APARTMENT STORY: Writing too much about what you know. The kind of a story where the starving writer living in a grubby apartment writes a story about a starving writer living in a grubby apartment. Stars all of his friends.

#4 - PLOTS

CARD TRICKS IN THE DARK: Authorial tricks to no visible purpose. The author has contrived an elaborate plot to arrive at, A) a punchline nobody else will get, B) some bit of historical trivia. In other words, if the main point of your story is that this kid is going to grow up to be Joseph of Arimathea, then there should be sufficient internal evidence for us to figure this out.

JAR OF TANG: "For you see, we are all living in a jar of Tang!" or "For you see, I am a dog!" Mainstay of the old Twilight Zone TV show. An entire pointless story contrived so the author can cry, "Fooled ya!" This is a classic case of the difference between a conceit and an idea. "What if we all lived in a jar of Tang?" is an example of the former. "What if the revolutionaries from the sixties had been allowed to establish their own society?" is an example of the latter. Good writing requires ideas, not conceits.

ABBESS PHONE HOME: Takes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream story with a gratuitous SF or Fantasy element cavalierly tacked on.

DEUS EX MACHINA: (god-in-the-box) Miraculous solution to an otherwise insoluble problem. Look! The Martians all caught cold and died!

PLOT COUPONS: The true structure of the quest-type fantasy novel. The "hero" collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword, magic book, magic cat) to send off to the author for an ending. Note that "the author" can be substituted for "the gods". Ex. "The gods decreed he would pursue this quest until sufficient pages were filled to procure an advance." (Dave Langford)