The Write Spot Blog by Marlene Cullen

Tag: Writers Forum of Petaluma

  • Force yourself . . . and don’t stop . . .

    Storm clouds“Force yourself to begin putting words on the page immediately, and don’t stop until the timer goes off, even if you have to write about the weather.” — Jan Ellison, inspired by Ellen Sussman

    I read this quote in the 12/4/15 Writer’s Digest guest blog post, “9 Practical Tricks for Writing Your First Novel,”  written by Jan Ellison.

    Since Ellen Sussman was scheduled to be a Writers Forum presenter and since I also believe this philosophy . . . my ears perked up. . . .  Daydreaming about how “ears perked up” would look and could it really happen? I think so, in a Fred Flintstone kind of way, when he’s . . .

    Oops, I’m taking the writing advice to put words on the page too literally. And the timer is ticking.

    Brian Klems, host of The Writer’s Dig Blog where this post appears, gives this introduction to the article:  “Whether you’re writing your first novel or are struggling with completing a second one (or more), sometimes you need some help focusing and figuring out how to reach your goal. Use these 9 tricks to help you go from first sentence all the way to completed novel.”

    I found “9 Practical Tricks for Writing Your First Novel” to be helpful. You might also find inspiration and  helpful ideas in this blog post by Jan Ellison.

    Jan Ellison is the bestselling author of the debut novel, A Small Indiscretion (Random House 2015) which was both an Oprah Editor’s Pick and a San Francisco Chronicle Book Club Pick. Jan’s essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere, and she received an O. Henry Prize for her first short story to appear in print.

    Ellen Sussman is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels, A Wedding in Provence, The Paradise Guest House, French Lessons, and On a Night Like This. She is the editor of two critically acclaimed anthologies, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave and Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex. She teaches through Stanford Continuing Studies and in private classes.

    Ellen Sussman will be the presenter at Writers Forum of Petaluma on Thursday, June 16, 2016 where she will talk about will talk about A Writer’s Life: Process and Craft.

  • Guest Blogger Rayne Wolfe: Trust your first readers.

    Guest Blogger Rayne Wolfe, Author of Toxic Mom Toolkit, talks about the pain and acceptance of comments and criticism when others critique your writing.

    “Listening to criticism with an open heart is hard, but it always pays off.”

    Rayne WolfeLearning to Love Our First Readers

    I was in a classroom at the Catamaran Literary Conference in Pebble Beach, my first writing conference ever, and a fellow writer was ripping my work apart. I could feel the shame rise up in my chest, coloring my neck and face with a dark blush.

    Sitting there among very accomplished writers, including literary prizewinners, even college professors who were all certainly better writers than me, my ears began to ring. Nerves.

    This fellow writer, who ran her own popular writing conference each summer, was picking apart a chapter from my new book.

    After publishing my memoir, Toxic Mom Toolkit in 2013, I was tackling a companion workbook on going “no contact” with very toxic people, including toxic mothers.

    My chapter draft began:

    You’ve told losers to hit the road.

     You’ve left jobs that were demanding demoralizing dead-ends.

     You’ve even moved from one end of the country to the other – one of the most stressful things you can do – other than giving a Ted Talk. So why is it to hard to break up with your toxic mother?

    As my blush rose past my chin and raced up towards my eyebrows, the writer was saying in front of everyone,

    “As I was reading this, my first thought was, well, don’t a lot of people who were raised in toxic families have a hard time asserting themselves? Some of these things you’re assuming everyone has done –- I haven’t done, when maybe I wanted to. Some people are timid and I think you should mix these up with much smaller life victories…”

    Trying to listen and smile at the same time, a wonderful thought hit me: Yeah, this might feel bad in the moment but it was no different than notes from a first reader.

    Plus – dang it! – She was absolutely right. My opener needed work.

    Over my ringing ears I visualized a slew of very personal essays I’ve written for newspapers and magazines. I recently contributed a story about my father to The Adoptee’s Handbook. My memoir about growing up with a toxic mother includes neglect and abuse. With over 5,000 printed articles under my byline, I’d earned my writer’s thick skin, hadn’t I?

    First readers, those smart people you pick to be your second set of eyes, are usually trusted fellow writers. They should understand you and your topics but also look at life a bit differently than you.

    Native Cover.4417111.inddWhen I was writing Toxic Mom Toolkit, I chose five first readers. My team included a couple of writers I’ve known for over 15 years, then I added some wild cards: my friend the dairy rancher who is an avid reader, my friend the landscaper who always wins at Trivia Pursuit, and my husband, Mr. Logical. After three years of writing and double-checking and editing, they each found typos and logic breaks and repetitions of parts of stories I had missed.

    It is in trusting first readers to help you, that you can feel confident with your final manuscript.

    I looked up and made eye contact with the woman giving me feedback. Realizing she was no different than a blessed first reader, I smiled and felt the rush of nerves subside.

    Listening to criticism with an open heart is hard, but it always pays off. At the end of the four-day conference I drove home with a big smile and a folder full of great feedback from very generous fellow writers.

    Rayne Wolfe will be the presenter at the October 15, 2015 Writers Forum, talking about The Art of the Interview.

  • Ruminate is ready for your submission

    ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse; to meditate; to think again; to ponder

    Ruminate is an award-winning quarterly literary arts print magazine engaging the Christian faith.

    Ruminate publishes poetry, short stories, photography, visual art reproductions, short fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, essays, reviews, and interviews.

    Ruminate sponsors four contests each year—poetry, short story, nonfiction and visual arts.

    Ruminate suggests slowing down and paying attention. “We love laughter. And we delight in telling the truth, asking questions, and doing ‘small things with great love,’ as Mother Theresa said.”

    You are invited to submit your work.

    Note from Marlene: Writers Forum of Petaluma presenter Rayne Wolfe, October 15, 2015:
    Newspaper reporter and columnist, Rayne Wolfe will share her methods for identifying sources, mining for quotable gold and turning interviews into stories.

    Whether you are focusing on non-fiction, fiction, historical fiction or memoir, Rayne will share her tools for enriching all writing by becoming an ace interviewer. Attend this forum, learn the art of interviewing, then submit to Ruminate.

    Ruminate

  • Suffering from a creativity dry spell? Look to your nighttime dreams.

    Guest Blogger Susan Audrey writes:

    I didn’t begin paying attention to my nighttime dreams until my dreamscapes started showing up in my waking life.

    The first instance was fairly benign: I dreamt of a man with dark hair, wearing a white, button-down shirt, standing to my right and talking on a pay phone (yes, this was awhile ago). And the next morning, after I dropped my kids off at daycare, I saw this exact scene: the same man, same hair, shirt, and pay phone. This really got my attention!

    I found out later that these are called precognitive or premonition dreams –– they show you the future. I wasn’t sure why this was happening at this time in my life. I was in my thirties and a single mom of two grade schoolers. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that our nighttime dreams are more abundant and more easily remembered during difficult and transitional times.

    Curiosity inspired me to read about, research, and train in dreamwork in the upcoming years, and most importantly, to keep a dream journal. I discovered that by exploring the images, metaphors, and feelings that emerged through my dreams, I had access to a wondrous, self-revealing and self-empowering stream of wisdom. One that’s always there –– and free! And, using this simple approach to cultivating “inner knowing” has helped me to better navigate my life and to get my creative juices flowing for all kinds of creative endeavors, including writing.

    Dreamwork helps us to jumpstart our creativity and keep it flowing in several ways. One is by providing a sort of emotional and physical house cleaning. The messages from our dreams can give us clues about how to work through emotional baggage we may be carrying, remedies that can heal our physical ailments, and ways we can let go of beliefs that may no longer serve us –– freeing us up to give our full attention and energy to embracing our creative sides. If we’re not obsessing about a love we lost or worrying about what to try next to soothe a backache then we’re more present when we sit down at our computer to write or in front of a canvas to paint.

    Our nighttime dreams also offer us an amazing resource for creating –– both as actual themes to work with or, metaphorically, as clues for how to proceed with our work. When we take actual images from our dreamscapes and write about or draw them, they come to life in ways we could never have imagined, revealing things about us we may have never considered. Yet, as we dive in to explore further, either with words or through visual art, what emerges can often feel quite familiar, like switching the light on in a forgotten room of a home we’ve always known. And rather quickly, we can find ourselves in that delightful and precious flow state from which our best creative work emerges.

    Viewed metaphorically, our dream images can also guide us in choosing subjects and approaches for our business writing and projects. We just need to do a little more digging to unearth these gems. For example, if you need to write a promotional piece or an article, you can “seed” your dreams the night before to discover how to start. This is an exercise in which you clearly ask for the information you are seeking by writing your request on a piece of paper and placing it under your pillow before you go to sleep.

    I know that to some, this may sound like an exercise in wishful thinking (one you might share with a child), but through years of experience working with dreams and much research in the approaches of renowned philosophers, psychologists, and authors, including pioneering dream analyst, Carl Jung, I’ve come to trust this process whole-heartedly and have seen amazing results transpire for clients and dreamwork circle participants as well as for myself. The answers to these nighttime inquiries will come, and they arrive in the form of metaphors, symbols, and, sometimes, strong emotions.

    For example, perhaps you’ve asked your dreams to tell you which approach you should take in writing a piece for a client, and a tiger walks through your dreamscape, slowly and methodically circling you. As you learn to work with your dream images and to trust the insights your dreams bring, you’ll learn to view such a scene as a clue, a suggestion as to how to proceed with your writing… slowly, methodically and going around and around your subject to see it at all angles. Or, the tiger itself could suggest the tone of your piece –– should it be colorful, lean, and wild? Should it be written from a hunter’s point of view (metaphorically, of course). You’ll know. Your gut and an inner aha! will be your guides.

    Dream images have led me to the best remedies for physical and emotional challenges; they’ve helped me to change my perspective about a situation to one that is more beneficial for all involved; they’ve provided a heads-up on future traumatic events, so that I could handle them with greater ease and skill, and they’ve kept my enthusiasm for life (and it’s many dimensions) alive. And, they continue to provide me with access to the infinite flow of creativity hidden in my unconscious and just waiting to break free.

    You can learn much more about dreamwork and how it can jumpstart your creativity at Susan’s Writers Forum presentation, “Learn How to Access Your Infinite Creative Flow Through Dreamwork,” on June 18, 2015, in Petaluma.

    Susan Audrey Susan Audrey is a multi-disciplined Dreamwork Practitioner who specializes in guiding individuals and groups through the fascinating and transformative journey of discovering the wisdom of their dreams. She has also worked as a writer and editor for various forms of media for over 20 years and is currently a writer for The Shift Network located at The Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma.

    You can find out more about dreamwork at Susan’s Blog, The Night Is Jung.

     

  • Keep Calm, Carry On And Let the Magic Begin

    Guest Blogger Karen Hart reveals secrets about how to Keep Calm, Carry On and Let the Magic Begin:  How To Breathe Life Into Your Work Through Revisions.

    During my thirties, I wrote my first novel, Butterflies in May. It tells the story of a 17-year-old high school senior, Ali Parker, who discovers she’s pregnant. I gave her characteristics, created a family, a best friend and boyfriend, and described where she lived. I effectively created a situation and characters, and the mechanics were in place. After nine months of work, I had a novel, but the story was flat. It was discouraging after all that effort, but in the words of Hemingway: “The first draft of anything is shit.”

    The goal in writing a novel (or any body of work) is to capture the magic, give it a heartbeat and touch your readers in a relevant way. Revising and editing are essential to breathing life into your words.

    So how to capture the magic?

    There’s no clear formula other than to learn how the magic manifests for you. For me, it begins with the mechanics, then somewhere along the way, an idea takes hold and takes over. That “idea” could be a word, a phrase, a scene, a scent or snatch of dialogue. While revising Butterflies in May, a scene between Ali and her newborn baby woke me up at 5 in the morning. I got up, went to my computer and started writing. Today, teen girls often tell me that passage makes them cry. The passage still brings tears to me, because I cried as I wrote it. Here are a few ideas to get your writer mojo on and capture the magic.

    • Set your first draft aside. Save your original, then save it again under a different file name so you can be freely ruthless with changes later. Refrain from showing it to your friends who will most likely find a polite way to tell you it’s awful. (Remember what Hemingway said? It’s not ready.) Return to it one day at the time you work best.
    • Take a look at your book chapter-by-chapter. Print it out and pull it apart. Eliminate slow starts, and tighten descriptions. Check for the following: Does the story move forward at a good pace? Do the characters engage you? Do they have flaws your readers can relate to? Can you clearly see who they are? Next, fill in sensorial details to breathe life into your work. Can you smell the coffee brewing? Feel the sweat along your character’s hairline? Hear the door creak open?
    • Make sure your dialogue flows. Eliminate unnecessary dialogue. Make sure your characters sound natural, not stiff. Be sure your characters don’t all sound the same. Let their use of language, word choice, slang or cursing set them apart.
    • Follow your instincts. Trust what comes to you. In my first novel, I gave Ali’s newborn son a name, Jonah. I’d heard it one day, liked the sound of it, not giving it any more thought than that. Later, Ali has a dream in the hospital about him. In the dream, Jonah is a young boy and says, “It’s okay, Mommy. I’ll always love you.” Then I wrote that he turned into a bird and flew away. Months later, I learned that “Jonah” means dove and made changes so Ali would discover this, too. (This is the stuff of magic, and a story writing itself.)
    • Allow your characters to take over. In my second novel, I’d written about a character named Beau, whom I originally planned to be an all-around nice man. Later, as I worked on revisions, Beau came more fully to life and I didn’t like his behavior. I stopped writing; the novel came to an abrupt halt. When I allowed Beau to take over, the writing flowed, I followed Beau’s lead and the story changed for the better.

    Karen will be on a panel of editors at Writers Forum in Petaluma on May 21, 2015.

    Join us and learn how to keep calm, carry on and catch the magic.

    Karen Hart.180Award-winning writer, editor and novelist, Karen Hart, has served as the editor for two corporate magazines and a newsletter and continues to be slightly obsessive-compulsive about all writing endeavors.

     

     

  • You are the person you are intended to be . . .

    “Do not obsess about flaws and shortcomings. You are the person you are intended to be . . . You were put here for a reason. No one else has your unique talents. No one else sees the world through your eyes and experiences. Be yourself and share with others. No one can tell your story but you.”   B. Lynn Goodwin, “Celebrate Your Uniqueness.” Originally posted in Inspire Me Today, January 2, 2014

    bookshawlNote from Marlene: Do not obsess about whether or not you are a writer. If you have something you want to write about . . . simply pull out a chair, sit down and . . . Just write!

    Lynn Goodwin is the owner of Writer Advice, www.writeradvice.com, which is currently holding its 10th Flash Prose Contest (deadline 4/21/15). She’s the author of You Want Me to Do WHAT? Journaling for Caregivers, and a YA called Talent, which Eternal Press will be publishing this year. Her short pieces have been published in local and regional publications.

    Lynn will be on a panel of editors at Writers Forum in Petaluma, California on May 21, 2015.

  • Why Keep Writing When No One Is Listening

    Guest Blogger Brooke Warner writes:

    One of the most powerful things an author has ever said to me was a comment by Mark Nepo, reflecting on his personal journey over the past three years, which, due to the support of Oprah, has been pretty meteoric in nature. He told me, “I’m just so glad that I kept writing back when no one was listening.”

    This reverberated in me, perhaps most profoundly because of the number of clients I work with every year who reach a crisis point, led by the voices of their inner critics that say things like, “Why are you bothering?” “No one is going to want to read this.” “Who cares?!”

    In my work as a writing coach, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of a single client who hasn’t struggled with messages like this at some point in their process—some more than others of course.

    Mark’s simple statement spoke to me for a number of reasons:

    1. You never know when people are going to find your work. Oprah found Mark’s book, The Book of Awakening, ten years after its first publication. The fact that he had so much work already out in the world is undoubtedly what’s allowed him to soar. You can get a big break like an endorsement from Oprah, but even with a big break, you have to have done (and continue to do) the hard work and discipline of writing.
    2. If you let the critical voices get the best of you, you’re accepting defeat on someone else’s terms. Your inner critic is a bastard, so let’s just get that out of the way. It does not want you to succeed. It wants to keep you small. I’ve witnessed a lot of writers allow the inner critic to talk them out of pursuing their creative dreams. It’s the single most widespread creative tragedy I know of.
    3. It’s important to find your own grounding in your work. This one is big. So many writers want to be heard, but they’re looking for outside validation to tell them that they’re good enough, or they’re only measuring success based on who else cares about their work. Writing whether or not anyone is listening means that you are writing for your own expression, desire, creativity, gifts—and people finding it, and/or finding it important, is secondary.
    4. The only way to be successful as a writer is to publish. This is obvious in terms of how we measure success, but so many writers are just sitting on their work—waiting for what? Mark published lots of works on very small houses over the years. He’s incredibly prolific, and he writes to publish, as well as to process, to teach, to connect, to commune. But in this mix must be publishing because this is the only way to gain readers (listeners). Be consistent about getting content out into the world. (And it’s good that social media, blogging, guest posting, or digital only strategies be a part of this—content is content!)
    5. You have to be your own best listener. If and when no one is listening, and whether it’s true or not that no one is, you need to feel the way your message affects you. If you know the feeling of flow, then you know the feeling of connection and resonance with your own words. It’s powerful stuff. Addictive even. Feed on this rather than the words of your inner critic.

    Of course, the number of people who are listening is going to shift as you grow. Part of your growth will come from practice; part of it is gaining confidence that what we say matters; part of it is owning that we want to be successful and that’s okay. You may start with ten listeners and grow to a few hundred and then to a few thousand and then much more. Even the most famous and widely published authors started with a first piece of writing and a first published book.

    Brooke WarnerBrooke Warner is publisher of She Writes Press, president of Warner Coaching Inc., and author of What’s Your Book? and How to Sell Your Memoir, and the co-author of Breaking Ground on Your Memoir. Brooke’s expertise is in traditional and new publishing, and she is an equal advocate for publishing with a traditional house and self-publishing. She sits on the board of the Independent Book Publishers Association, the Bay Area Book Festival, and the National Association of Memoir Writers.  Her website was selected by The Write Life as one of the Top 100 Best Websites for Writers in 2014 and 2015. She lives and works in Berkeley, California.

    Brooke will be a presenter at Writers Forum in Petaluma, California on April 16, 2015

  • Before you publish, take one more vital step: Invite a very important person to the party.

    Guest Blogger Linda Jay writes about copyediting.

    In 2012, Joel Friedlander asked Linda Jay to offer readers of his popular blog, The Book Designer, advice at that time, on “one of the most important decisions a self-publisher makes: hiring a copyeditor.” Here’s her reply, still pertinent today:

    Agreed.  You’ve spent months (or possibly years) writing the manuscript that will one day be your book. You’ve distilled all those handwritten notes from pages or scraps of paper, those often-incoherent e-mails to yourself, and those ideas racing around in your brain, and typed every one of them into the computer, in some loosely organized format that vaguely resembles a book. Then one day… hooray… it occurs to you that… you’re done!

    Now you can’t wait to get your little gem “OUT THERE” for all the world to marvel at. You are indeed a writer (which nobody can deny, which nobody can deny)!

    Oh, yes, you’ve given a sneak peek at your masterpiece to a few people whose opinion you trust—relatives, longtime friends, business colleagues. And, sure, they may have spotted a few misspellings, or a weird sentence construction here or there, but what the hey—everybody makes mistakes.

    They’re just tickled that you’ve had the audacity, capacity and tenacity to write a book; a few glitches only show that you’re human. After all, who’s perfect?  It’s time to send your “baby” on its way to possible fame, and reap the glories of being a published author!

    Are You Serious?

    Oh, but wait… if you really want to be taken seriously as a writer, stop and listen to that little nagging voice in your head that keeps saying, “Shouldn’t you be running the manuscript past an experienced professional copyeditor before you send it out?”

    Yes, you’ve read that in order to make your book as good as it can possibly be, you must take that vital step of investing in the services of an editorial pro. And just think—in the twinkling of a well-trained eye, a topnotch editor could burnish your precious prose so it sparkles in the sunlight.

    But if you submit (interesting, the ramifications of that word “submission” when it refers to sending in a manuscript, isn’t it?) your pages to the hyper-scrutiny of a nitpicky copyeditor, won’t your authentic voice be changed or deleted or mangled beyond recognition?

    The answer is… no, not if you properly vet the copyeditor to make sure you can work together well, and if the copyeditor stipulates that one of his or her goals is to make your manuscript publisher-ready… but not change your unique voice.

    A good copyeditor will offer to edit a few pages of your work as a sample, to see if you two are, literally and figuratively, “on the same page.”  You can usually judge from his or her edits whether you would be able to work together happily or not. For example, if you question some of the edits and the editor responds in a haughty or rigid “only my way is right” tone, run as fast as you can toward another editor.

    If your manuscript is about the life and times of the artist Edward Gorey, and the editor you’re considering has never heard of Edward Gorey and, furthermore, has no interest in learning anything about Edward Gorey, bid farewell and turn quickly on your heels.

    6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better

    A good copyeditor brings so much to the party. He or she can:

    1. go over grammar, punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure with a fine-tooth comb;
    2. check for consistency of verb tense, tone, and mood;
    3. find instances where sentences or paragraphs could be moved to make more logical sense;
    4. ask questions about clarity of idea, or accuracy of fact;
    5. call attention to parts of the text that could be tightened, expanded, livened up or deleted;
    6. make suggestions — synonyms for overused words, deletions of redundant words or phrases.

    With a good copyeditor on your team, misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, its/it’s, to/too and other hair-raising/hare-raising errors will melt away. Skilled editors say that mistakes “leap off the page” at them. And potential readers of your book will not be distracted by sloppy copy.

    You can find professional book manuscript copyeditors through organizations such as BAIPA and the Bay Area Editors’ Forum (BAEF), through online editorial sites, through ads in magazines that are targeted toward writers, and through looking up “copyeditor” on search engines.

    A good copyeditor can make your book’s message shipshape—and that’s not just editorial spin!

    Originally published as “6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better,” a guest post on Joel Friedlander’s popular blog, The Book Designer, on May 25, 2012.

    Linda Jay is a manuscript copyeditor with decades of experience, specializes in business, novels, memoirs, spirituality, women’s issues, academic topics and fantasy (vampires, zombies).

    Linda Jay will be on a panel of editors at Writers Forum in Petaluma, California on May 21, 2015.

  • Self-editing and Wordsmithing

    Guest Blogger Linda Jay writes about self-editing and wordsmithing:

    I’ve noticed a topic popping up more and more in books, workshops and seminars, even those offered by Writer’s Digest. Targeted mostly toward indie authors (perhaps you’re in that category), these books, workshops and seminars encourage writers to self-edit their own work before they self-publish.

    Now, self-editing is fine. Going through your manuscript’s rough drafts several times over a period of weeks searching for errors and omissions, perhaps even reading the text aloud to catch awkward phrasing or redundancies or overcomplicated construction, is certainly not going to hurt—and possibly might even improve—your writing.

    But let’s face it, there’s only so much self-editing an author can do. Frankly, you as the author are too close to the subject matter to be objective, even if you take a break from the material and come back to it later.

    In my opinion—and I’m not just saying this because I happen to be an experienced book manuscript copyeditor—an author truly needs an editor’s fresh perspective to make his or her writing as excellent and polished as it can possibly be.

    Recently I made editorial suggestions to an author, pointing out missing information and details in her novel; of course, she hadn’t left out facts intentionally. But on the other hand, she hadn’t noticed that she needed to “fill in the blanks” in that particular section of text so that a reader could understand the characters in-depth.

    I also offered specific ideas for improving the text that the author hadn’t thought of, but was happy to implement immediately:

    • short titles summing up each chapter,
    • translations of Latin terms and phrases so that the reader will understand their meaning,
    • clarification and explanation of obscure historical points,
    • easily understood transitions between scenes.

    The Role of Traditional Publishers?

    Traditional publishers no longer pay for the routine editing of manuscripts, and self-publishers often believe that they cannot afford to hire a professional editor.

    If you as an author have done your best self-editing but are still convinced that you want a professional editor to work with you, ask the editor to work on just a few chapters at a time. That way, it’s within the realm of financial possibility.

    Far beyond being merely a spell-checker, a good copyeditor is essentially able to “hear” what an author has written, and sense how a piece of writing will be received by other readers. An experienced copyeditor will also notice if the writer has made unfounded assumptions about the subject matter or the intended audience.

    In other words, self-editing is indeed useful, but it will never take the place of the opinions and comments of a professional wordsmith.

    The two processes should be used in tandem.

    Originally posted in Joel Friedlander’s blog, The Book Designer, on October 5, 2012

    Linda Jay is a manuscript copyeditor with decades of experience, specializes in business, novels, memoirs, spirituality, women’s issues, academic topics and fantasy (vampires, zombies)

    Linda will be on a panel of editors at Writers Forum in Petaluma on May 21, 2015.

  • The Silence of the L’s

    Guest Blogger Jane Merryman writes about the silence of the L’s:

                In the Danish language nearly 32 percent of the letters are silent. In French the number approaches 28 percent—I would have thought much more than that. About 16 percent of the letters in English words are silent. Think about it: would, could, should. And half. That l shows up in the strangest places. And then there’s wall—why do we need two l‘s there?

                I attended junior high and high school at a Catholic school for girls in Menlo Park, California. The nuns were Americans, but the religious order was French and operated schools around the world. All students, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, attended a French class every single day. By the time I graduated from high school I had advanced even into the dense forest of subjunctives. (That was when I learned English also has subjunctives, but we just ignore them.) In college I decided to branch out and signed up for Spanish. What a joy, what a relief, what an ace of a class! Every letter is pronounced. Yes, you have to get used to the fact that the j sounds like h, but you can depend on it—when you look at a word you know how to pronounce it. Much later, when I planned to travel in Italy and took evening school conversation classes, I found that Italian was much the same as Spanish. Of course there is the c gotcha— sometimes it sounds like ch, and sometimes has the hard c, or k, sound, but otherwise Italian has none of the silent letter pitfalls of French or English. Learning Indonesian also proved to be a similarly giddy pleasure. It has the same c/ch effect and, for that reason and its musical quality, is called the Italian of Asia. When I have to use a phrase I find in my handy little Indonesian Berlitz manual, I am confident I can pronounce the whole thing correctly and be understood.

                I commiserate with students of the French language. They have to learn to add silent letters to the end of many words, especially verbs. The only consonants that are pronounced at the end of French words are c, r, f, and l, the consonants in the English word careful. What a great mnemonic. I learned this lesson in one sitting. So we have avec with a final hard c sound; gentil and hôtel; pour and jour; and chef. However, tu parles (you speak) and ils parlent (they speak) are pronounced the same as je parle (I speak). Aaargh!

                As much as I feel sorry for French schoolchildren, I pity all those newcomers in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. As if they didn’t have enough problems, they have to contend with the inconsistencies that crowd into speaking English. For every rule of grammar there are exceptions. English seems to be nothing if not exceptions, and silent letters are typical atypicalities.

                We have that pesky combination of gh. Sometimes it’s silent on the end of a word as in though. And silent in the middle of a word: blight, slight, ought. It can change the vowel sound as in bough and thought. Then it assumes a sound quite unlike its spelling, as in rough, tough, cough, trough (which can be pronounced with a final f or a th).

                There’s the curse of the final e. It’s supposed to tell us that the vowel that comes immediately before it has a long sound: hate, delete, cite, cone. We have lone, pone, and hone, but where did gone come from? Prelate and prejudice are among the words that break the rule.

                Consider the strange case of sure. In this instance a letter is missing, the h after the s. And there’s that final e. The u is not the sound of the u in dune or perfume; it’s more like an e, but not a long e, or a short e, just something like an e, but certainly not a long u. And, speaking of u, why does u have to come after q. It makes sense in quagmire but not in mystique (from the French, so of course it has silent letters!).

                Melvil Dewey was a fanatic about reformed spelling—notice the spelling of his first name. This is the same Melvil who invented the Dewey Decimal System, which is used to arrange libraries around the world. When not sorting out books, Dewey championed the elimination of extraneous letters from English words. But it never caught on. He was just regarded as a crackpot.

                            The problem of all our silent letters stems from the fact that English is a mongrel language. Anu Garg, the guru of the A.Word.A.Day website, recently explained it this way:

    If the English language were a cake, its batter would have Germanic flour. Sugar, butter, and milk would be of Norse, French, and Latin origins, not necessarily in that order. And on top of that would be icing with little flourishes here and there made up of dozens of languages—Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, and others—it has borrowed from.

    I feel compelled to add that our condiment ketchup is a poor relation of the Indonesian spicy sauce kecap, in which the c has the ch not the k sound. I cood go on, but you wood probably be thoroly bord. And, remember, we English speakers have it easy compared to the Danes. I heard their language is impossible to learn from a book!

    Jane Merryman.1Jane Merryman specializes in copy editing: correcting grammar, spelling, punctuation, usage, and, as we say in the profession, infelicities.

    If you live in the area, join us on May 21, 2015 at Writers Forum in Petaluma, California. Jane will be a panelist on an Editors’ Forum.