Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for the ‘editing’ Category

Are You Writing a Dictionary or a Short Story?

I’m a simple guy and I tend to prefer writing that is direct, economical that doesn’t require more of my attention span than writers earn by virtue of their talent. 

So when I read a story in which the characters are woefully underdeveloped and the prose is wooden yet painfully overwritten with lots and lots of three-dollar words, I cringe and breakout into  a cold sweat.  You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Using ten words where five will do or writing something a general audience might not understand without consulting a dictionary like “Plantar Fasciitis” instead of saying “foot inflammation” or “heel spur”.

There might actually be an occasion in a story or poem where using a big, fancy word or some jargon might work and be absolutely necessary — but the key word here is necessary.  If your prose/poetry is otherwise un-engaging and is laced with cumbersome vocabulary, then you risk making your writing read like an SAT exam instead of what you intended. 

The trick is to find a balance. Ask yourself why you are using so many big, fat hairy words. Is there no better word choice available or are you just insecure and trying too hard to show everyone how smart you are?

If it’s the latter, keep in mind when you submit something to a literary publication, you are not writing to impress your high school English teacher and you’re not involved in a 5th grade spelling bee (which is not to say you shouldn’t know how to spell).  I’ve yet to meet an editor who’ll accept a story based on the size of a writer’s vocabulary.

There Are Days When Calling It a Slush Pile is Too Kind

It’s Saturday morning and normally you wouldn’t be caught dead reading submissions on a weekend.  But, you’ve got a lot of balls in the air and you can’t afford to drop any, so in addition to maybe pounding out a blog post or two and persisting with working on a new issue of one of your ezines, you decide (against you’re better judgement) to spend an hour early this A.M. trudging through the slop.  Okay, there is one decent poem that you think you might want to squeeze into the very ezine issue you’re working on, but the rest are pretty goddamn awful, and worse still — almost none of these wannabes has followed you’re submission guidelines. One guy has sent his poems, written in mouse print, in red ink on paper so thin it’s almost like that tissue paper they use to wrap gifts before stuffing them into a box.  His cover letter (at least you think it’s a guy. His names is not written on his submission and you cannot read the chicken-scratch on the envelope. You think the name reads, "Chase" or "Carr" or something like that)  is a one liner that says, "Here’s a few for you."  Yeah, okay, Hoss. As if he’s doing you some major league favor by sending these crappy poems in this crappy, unreadable condition.  As if you’re supposed to whip out a rubber stamp and just accept them just because he decided to send them.  Christ! There’s not enough rubber stamps in the world to make his submission remotely acceptable. Dream 0n, Bucko!

But, you’ve mellowed somewhat in recent years.  Sure, you’ll bitch about this submission on this blog — a guy’s got to vent, after all, but in the past, you’d really tee off on an individual like this.  Back in the day, you would’ve really lost it! You’ve said things that have brought writers to the brink of suicide.  But you’re a kinder, gentler version of yourself.  You’ll send this dude as polite a rejection as you can possibly manage and leave it at that unless he decides to be a complete tool about it.

Still, you’d think these people would learn.  They keep sending these poems out. They aren’t any good, but even if they were, if they’re sending out in an unreadable format on material that isn’t much more substantial than toilet tissue, how can they expect an editor to associate their writing with anything other than shit? You’ve been doing this for a long time and it never ceases to amaze you how brain-dead some of these fuckers are.

Isn’t That Ironic?

I accepted a poem earlier and had just finished contacting the poet about it when it occured to me that the poem’s title kind of sucked. The poem is called, “Irony” — a less than sparkly title to begin with, but worse still, the poem isn’t even ironic. Since I’d already accepted the poem, I really didn’t want to fire off another email saying, “Your poem’s title sucks and btw, you obviously don’t know what the word ‘irony’ means . . .” — but, of course, understood that I was going to have to do it eventually. I read the poem again and tried to discover something in the poem I may have missed but — no, no irony there unless you consider it ironic that a poet who doesn’t know the meaning of the word would call a poem “Irony”.

It occurs to me that lots of people out there misunderstand and misuse the word “irony.” Many people assume that when you are expressing rancor or contempt you are expressing irony. Not always so.

Irony specifically refers to a literary device in which there is an incongruity between reality and perception. There are roughly seven classifications of irony found in literature:

Verbal irony is perhaps the most narrowly defined and the most common type. It is defined as a verbal exchange in which what a speaker says is the opposite of what the speaker actually means: “Jeez! You’re a regular Dirk Diggler, ain’t you? You best holster that Magnum ‘fore somebody gets hurt.”

Structural Irony is created when you have a character who consistently misperceives reality due to arrogance, naïveté, stubborness or some other character flaw which shapes their viewpoint. Examples of this are Voltaire’s Candide and Jane Austen’s Emma.

Dramatic Irony occurs when the author and the audience are aware of some fact that the protagonist is oblivious to, and is usually revealed later in the story. The Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex is probably the most famous example of this.

Situational Irony is a device in which the outcome is unexpected but shockingly appropriate. For example, a poem that appeared in an issue of Devil Blossoms one time was about a wealthy industrialist and known polluter who retired with his wealth despite the harm he’d caused only to die from a horrible form of bone cancer caused by pollution. Another example of this might be a soldier who returns from war without so much as a scratch only to get hit by a truck (with a “support our troops” bumpersticker) in his hometown.

Cosmic Irony is similar to situational irony except that the cause of the tragic event is attributed to fate or some deity. The story of Job in the King James Bible is a famous example.

Socratic Irony is a rhetorical device in which a speaker plays dumb in order to expose the intellectual weakness of his opponent. Aside from the dialogues of Socrates, in popular culture, the old TV detective, Columbo depended on this device to expose the murderer each week. Similarly (and perhaps, more importantly) Porfiry uses this device to provoke Raskolnikov into confessing to murder in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Romantic Irony is a self-referencial form of storytelling in which the narrator creates the illusion of reality then undermines the illusion by revealing the “truth” to be a fiction. Tristam Shandy and Don Juan are famous examples of this. In contemporary literature, Metafiction is a form of this device. The writings of Barth, Calvino, Rushdie, Fowles and Coover are all good examples.

Anyway, hope this helps.