Writing with consistency

Consistency throughout the whole story or novel is crucial.

Copy editing is the perfect platform for checking your consistency, and you'll need to be thorough. Have a jotter pad handy, and make notes as you go.

Many words have fairly recently entered the English language, and are not yet set in stone. T-shirt, teeshirt, tee-shirt, tee shirt, for instance. Footwell, or foot well? Stair well or stairwell? Pajamas ... pyjamas. Jump drive ... jumpdrive. Car yard ... caryard, carpark car park, and so on. Bookshop, book store ... parking lot, high rise, hi-rise, highrise.

Many American/Canadian terms are becoming more familiar in British/Aussie/Kiwi English, as the language becomes more cosmopolitan. Aeroplane ... airplane, BBQ, barbecue, motorway, clearway,freeway, peanut butter, peanut paste.

We've reached a point where international boundaries are blurring. It no longer matters which term use use. What matters is being consistent. Whatever you use, use it throughout. Don't swap and change back and forth.

Make your own decision on how "bluejeans" and "teeshirts" will be referred to. Will you be saying sneakers, joggers or trainers to refer to a pair of athletic shoes? Will you be referring to the breakfast food as porridge or oatmeal? Lollies, candies or sweets? Unless you have international characters who are using their own national references in their dialog, you'll need to standardize and stick to it. Copy editing comes to the rescue here.

Try to choose terms which are understood right around the world. For instance, US readers probably won't know what a skip is, in the context of a large rubbish bin ... but thanks to the movies, everyone knows what a dumpster is. They're the same thing, but you might not want to give your story an American flavor by using the US term. Revert to the ubiquitous "bin" and be safe. Do you say garbage, rubbish, or trash?

Which term you choose is much less important than your consistency, and the process of copy editing is the time when you'll grab the whole manuscript by the scruff of its neck and shake it into shape.

Have a jotter to hand and when you read a term which could go either way, make a note. Check your usages when next you see the term. Did you use teeshirt or tee shirt last time? This is a good copy editing habit to get into. As you go on, you can also choose to keep a jotter on the desk and scribble notes as you write. This makes for less editing to do later.

If you're writing speculative fiction or fantasy, you'll be inventing a whole vocabulary to describe the worlds you imagine. Now, it's especially important to be consistent, not only in your terms and how you use them ... but also, in how you spell them. (Again, copy editing to the rescue: it's indispensable.)

We asked Mel Keegan how the ongoing HELLGATE series is kept under control. At this point, it's four big novels, with a couple more to come, a vast cast of characters, two species, speaking two languages, and more locations than Lara Croft could imagine! Over to MK, for insights into how the long-time professional works:

"Consistency is, to the writer, the same thing as continuity to the filmmaker ... and they give awards for the best continuity in the year's movies. The techniques for controlling continuity between the two industries are simlar. The writer uses scrap paper, or a notebook, or if s/he's a tech head, opens a file in the computer. For myself. I use a 10c notebook, though it might make you shudder. Yes, guys, those vast reaches of the Deep Sky, the elegant and sensual Resalq people — it's all marshaled in a 10c notebook.

"When I create a new term, or a line of alien dialog, or a new relationship between various characters, perhaps a new location, or a new part of an existing location, I scribble a few notes. Sometimes I index the notebooks; some of them are divided up, page by page, alphabetically, to make it easier to find my way back to difficult, abstract items.

"Alshien'ya ... Ellstrom StarCity ... San Marco Space City ... Borushek Sector Command ... the Deep Sky, and the DeepSky Fleet ... OnRabi ... Jai Serrano ... Mahak Cher'ytt, who changed his name to Mark Sherrat ... Lai'a ... IntelScan ... the Mare Resalq, known to the Resalq as El'arne, which translates out as 'The stormy side of the sky.' Rabelai Space, named for Ernst Rabelais — who is exactly what relationship to Colonel Rusch, the current commander of the super-carrier Kiev, though Rusch is actually a Shackleton (after which pioneer family the Shackleton Void was named). And so on."

The process of creating deep, complex, believable, compelling science fiction and fantasy can become very complicated, very quickly, and it's a copy editing nightmare. None of the terms, places, relationships or alien languages are real. They exist only inside your own head and, soon, in the minds of your readers. If you don't your ducks in a row and keep them there, you'll find yourself contradicting yourself, and readers do notice!

Get a notebook. What's more important ... use it! Later, when you get into the copy editing, you'll be so glad you did.

Global editing ... what in the world is it?

Freelance editing begins here: work local, think Global

This is editing (freelance or otherwise) on its most 'gross' scale, where the grammar and punctuation don't matter, and the storyline itself is under the magnifying glass. Global editing also verifies the integrity of the plot: events have to follow in a logical order. If a character who was killed in Chapter Five shows up again in Chapter Twelve, there had better be a good reason! At this level, continuity is also addressed: a character who was Californian when introduced can't be from New York eight chapters later. A blond(e) should stay blond(e), unless a 'new do' is part of the plot. At this level of freelance editing, you can also check to make sure there's a good balance between dialog and narrative, with enough of each and not too much of either. And so on.
Global editing is the first stage in the process. Most writers do it 'on the fly,' and there's a way to make it dead easy, even if you're not a 'natural' at this.

If you've never done this before ... if the book is 1,000 pages long and you lose track of the details ... if you're writing a series of books ... if you have a memory like a sieve ... if months go by between opportunities to write, and you just forget stuff, global editing can be a hassle. It still has to be done, but there's a cast-iron way to get around it. It's simply this:

Get a pack of cardex file cards and a pen. Read through your story. Write down every proper noun -- character and place names; make a note of the relationships between characters; the physical appearance of the characters, plus any special characteristics. Does someone lisp or limp, or have a scar? Is someone crazy for a specific reason? Give each character his/her own card ... and organize them alphabetically. Six months from now, pull Rhett Sinclaire's card, and jog your memory:

Rhett Sinclaire: has a Chinese grandmother, bleaches his hair, talks with a Chicago accent, is phobic about spiders and allergic to cats, but loves dogs and rides horses like a pro, he was married to Janet, two kids, Marina, 10 and Shaun, 8; divorced 5 years ago when Janet couldn't stand his job any longer; has custody of the kids every second weekend; his dogs are Biff the Beagle and Bozo the schnauzer; lives in a 30-y-o ranch house in the San Fernando Valley; worked for Eagle River Security, 6 years; has been an insurance investigator for IUA for 8 years. Loves the job; loves German beer and Chinese food; hates punk rock music...

A lot of writers can carry that lot in their heads, and do it for 40 characters in a giant novel, but there's no law that says you have to carry it all in memory. Cardex file cards are cheap, and they work!

Finding a fresh spin for old material, and being able to see when the spin either has not been done yet, or was not done well, is one part of the editing process. In fact, it's the first part. Global editing, also known as story editing.

Turn page to The Global Edit... writing and editing working in tandem

Grammar: when to break all the rules!

There's one instance when really rotten grammar will work for you. It's the ONLY time it'll work for you, however, and you'll have to be referee, umpire and touch judge. You're going to set the rules yourself, and you must play by them consistently throughout the project, or deliberately rotten grammar will fall apart into old fashioned bad grammar.

The place four rotten grammar is in the dialog of characters who come from different cultural, social or ethnic backgrounds, and this is why you must be extremely careful when you set your ground rules, and then adhere to them like glue.

People, when they speak naturally, rarely sound like they are reading aloud from a thesaurus. Every region on the planet has its own speech patterns. People who are speaking English as a second or even third language speak it with the inflection of their own mother tongues. In other words, the grammar of their native Italian or German comes through into the English.

The most attenuated form of this is Chinglish, which has virtually come to be a recognized language. It's a literal, word for word translation, of Chinese into English, leaving all the grammar and syntax of Chinese as it was, but substituting the English words, albeit pronounced according to Mandarin or Cantonese rules of pronunciation. The result is a language which is ... and isn't English. Nor it is Chinese. It's Chinglish, and both races can take a crack at understanding it.

Bad grammar — really rotten, stinking grammar! — is typical of the dialog written for "local yokels" in the Western movies. Such characters in those movies are barely educated, most often illiterate, and have just enough English to make themselves understood. For example:

"It don't make no difference when he come to town. I sez, we git together, you and me and a bunch of them good ole boys out in that there bunkhouse, and we gives him plenty of reason so's he gits right back on that train. He don't need no more persuadin' to leave here than's gonna git provided when Butch and Joe's bit by the persuadin' bug, and they whaps him up the wrong side o' the head, or maybe they even gits a mite more hornery and comes right out and shows him the wrong end of a forty-five. Yous all recalls how them boys dam' near tore up the town, while the Sheriff weren't here? They's got passels of the means and nasties, when they's riled and ready. Dagnab it, that there new guy, he'd need to be crazier'n five ole rattlesnakes in a sack, if'n he don't just run for that train and git out before he ain't got no limbs workin' good enough to run with!"

The aggression aside, you can understand every word of what was said! The grammar is execrable, but the language remains understandable. However, this kind of grammar as deliberately bad. It doesn't belong in narrative. If it creeps in there, it will appear to be a genuine error based on (sorry!) ignorance of correct grammar. If you use this, deliberately execrable grammar inside a character's dialog, however, it gives you a very powerful tool for character building. Really stinking grammar makes a character sound like a thug (as in the above example). You're off to a head start on character building, the moment the character opens his mouth!

Here is another good example of bad grammar, and how it can be turned around to build a wonderful character:

"See, I come from Milano, I get here four, maybe five year ago, and I get work every day in market. I live in heart of town, you know, where all city, every day, she is alive, fill with so much life, you wanna sing for joy of seeing. So I sing, and cuz I come from Milano ... and I gotta be saying at you, everybody, he sing in Milano! ... so I sing the opera. I sing all the song of Caruso and Gigli and Pavaroti, and one day, I am singing while I stack empty crate for to go back on truck, and he comes to the market. He listens, he stands right there where you standing this minute right now, and he say to me, "You there with curly hair and mud on shoes, where you are learning to sing?" So I tell him, "Hey, I learn to sing at home in Milano from my father and grandfather and brother and uncle," and he say to me, "You wanna sing for crowd of people, hundred people, maybe thousand even, on stage?" And I said, "Sure, why not, whole thing, she sound like big fun."

Again, the grammar is spectacularly bad, yet it conjures an image of a beautiful young man with a vast talent and a great heart, who is about to begin a marvelous career.

TIP: make grammar work for you, good and bad alike, but to make rotten grammar work to your advantage, you have to know the rules of how it all works. This way, when you have the right (the writer's privilege) to set new ground rules of grammar ... with the single proviso that you MUST stick to them!