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Oh yes, I remember that gent, and his habit of taking other people’s writing and, unasked for, eviscerating the piece, stripping it of every possible nuance and subtlety to leave a lifeless skeleton. You mean he once actually admitted he was wrong?
I’ve just edited out the opposite problem (sort of) to the one you mention in your first para. I spotted my MC thinking about something I knew she was going to know, but she didn’t actually know yet. You really do have to be careful about these things.
Hmm, crossed with everything after Libby’s post. Hence my repetition of the point about the transitivity (Is that a word? Sod it, it ought to be…) of those speech tags.
Afterthought: to draw a parallel with music, you don’t need to know what the notes are, or the intervals between them, to spot a discord.
I think part of the problem here is that the author is concentrating very hard on the laudable aim of putting as much as possible – that he is comforting her, that he is speaking with his mouth close to her hair – into as few words as possible. Which can be very effective and satisfying when it works, but unfortunately this doesn’t.
It’s also a good illustration of why fancy speech tags are unnecessary. Jacob’s words, ‘Don’t worry,’ already strike an unmissable note of comfort. You don’t need ‘comforted’ or even ‘soothed.’ The idea’s there already.
I agree that ‘against’ is ambiguous, and ‘into’ is better. It’s what I would have used.
Personally I do have a problem with ‘comfort’ being a transitive verb. Yes, the verbs Libby quotes can be transitive, but they’re often used intransitively too. ‘Comfort’ isn’t, and so it jars.
I think the comma is optional: not really necessary as long as you use good old ‘said’ as the speech tag, thus removing any idea of conditioner. I would have written, ‘”Don’t worry,” Jacob said into her hair.’ I might stretch to ‘murmured,’ to add a note of gentleness.
But to answer the original question, it sounds wrong, and yes, that is enough. Never mind the rules of grammar. I broke one in my first para, by starting a sentence with ‘which.’
I did actually consider putting in something about rationing, but decided that I’d make my point more vividly by keeping it simple and sticking to one issue.
Rather more distressing than your neighbour, I had an e-mail argument a few months back with my oldest friend (I haven’t seen him for a couple of years, and perhaps it’s just as well), who believes that ‘Governments around the world are using covid as a reason to become more dictatorial,’ and that our government is using the BBC to spread ‘scaremongering propaganda’ to ‘terrify’ people into doing what they’re told. After he’d said that ‘the longer Lockdown goes on, the more that people will rightly rebel against the restrictions,’ I lost my rag and blasted back, ‘Restrictions are necessary for the sake of everyone’s safety. People who rebel against them are selfish, self-deluded, or plain stupid (or any combination of these) bastards who are making things worse for everyone by spreading infection and prolonging the pandemic.’
Living in a noir movie? Yes, especially since June 2016, and even more so since December 2019. Though perhaps, living on a pension in a remote(-ish) village as I do, maybe it’s more like watching it from the audience. But it’s still profoundly saddening.
Let me be the first to give you a huge thank you for all the hard work you’ve obviously put in.
The new navigation is a huge improvement over the old impenetrable one. I think you’ve addressed all the concerns I raised. I particularly like the little explanation boxes that pop up when you hover over a heading. Finding your way around the site should be child’s play compared to what it has been.
I agree that having all the replies present and correct on the wall is far more important that what it looks like, and I don’t mind the change anyway. The only problem I have is that I can’t see any reply buttons, or indeed any means of posting a reply should I wish to. Or is it just me being thick?
I’ve never had any problems with logging in, so I can’t comment on that aspect.
All in all, a great improvement. I only hope your work hasn’t been wasted. In the last few weeks the Den has been overtaken by such tumultuous apathy that I’ve been wondering if it’s on its last legs. The fact that I’m the first to reply to such an important, nay vital, topic, over 24 hours since you posted, doesn’t exactly raise my hopes.
Lucky? Yes, and I didn’t even mention the boat trip out of Mallaig, again in beautiful weather, where we got close up to a school of dolphins. Magic.
Actually, I feel quite privileged every time a kite comes over our house, even though they they are about the biggest conservation success story of the past century. It’s simply because they are so beautiful.
As for ‘We are not natural,’ I am in emphatic agreement with you both. This does particularly apply to the case of the sea eagle, as its extinction was entirely due to deliberate and calculated killing by humans. As the RSPB website puts it, ‘habitat loss was not an issue.’
I don’t know it it’s still there, but there used to be a notice in Regents Park Zoo that read, ‘This is the world’s most dangerous animal.’ It was hung above a mirror.
I’m sadly sure it still goes on at a reduced scale on the sly, but for many years the biggest cause of scarcity and sometimes outright extinction of predatory birds and mammals was gamekeepers. Gamekeepers gibbets, where they’d hang the corpses of the birds and animals they’d killed, used to be a common sight in some parts of the country. And why? Because they were perceived to be a threat, often on minimal or no evidence, to the game birds the keepers were paid to look after – so that the game birds those predators might just possibly have killed so that they could eat and survive could be slaughtered by some bunch of self-entitled toffee-nosed bastards, just for fun.
Likewise, some years back we (actually it was mostly MrsB) got into an argument in the rugby club bar with a member of the angling club that had stocked the pond behind our house with fish. He was seething because a cormorant had taken to hanging around the pond and ‘stealing’ ‘their’ fish. In vain did we point out the cormorant was killing to eat and survive, whereas coarse fishermen do their thing (again) just for fun, throwing everything back rather then eating it. But no, the bloody bird ought to be shot. A week or two later, while taking a stroll round the pond, we saw the cormorant’s body slung over a fence.
Credit where credit is due: I believe it was Libby who first used the phrase ‘instinctive writer,’ even if she was replying to me.
I’m probably too instinctive for my own good. I’ve been told at various times that I have a natural feel for plot and pace, that my characters speak with their own distinctive voices, even that I’m good at that notoriously difficult thing, sex, but I never step aside and coldly think about any of these things. When I see phrases like ‘transformational arc’ my eyes glaze over. As for writing for the market, well…
I take your point about writing with nothing to recommend it. That MS that gave me so much heartache had a quite fascinating, nay chilling, presmise (think John Wyndham meets Alfred Hitchcock) and a strongly drawn, believably flawed heroine, but it also had clunky writing and massive plot holes.
I don’t reckon myself as much of a beta reader either. Partly it may be lack of confidence in my own opinions, but mostly I think it’s because I seem to have trouble thinking analytically about writing, including my own. Years ago when I did the S-E Course, I repeatedly had the experience of Debi, or one of the others, telling me I’d been clever and thinking, ‘Really? Is that what I did? I just banged it down that way because it felt right.’ When I’m writing I don’t think about plot structure schemes or character arcs but play it by ear, pants it if you will. Maybe that’s one reason I’ve never got anywhere with my submissions…
I am in awe of Libby’s check-list, as Jane calls it. I could never think that clearly and hold all that in mind as I read.
Also, I worry about hurting people’s feelings, especially since I know I react badly to negative criticism. You’re not doing any favours if you gloss over imperfections and problems, but how do you break it gently if the writing is really bad?
A year or two after my S-E Course one of my fellow students asked me to beta read her novel, now more or less complete. I readily agreed, for she’d come over on the course as articulate and intelligent and I knew the book had a compelling concept, but when I came to read it – oh dear. The honest verdict would have been, ‘Sorry, but this hasn’t a hope.’ I agonised for ages over what I should say. I even asked Debi’s advice. And when I did finally reply the lady said she’d now decided to abandon it! Not that I blamed her.
The experience rather put me off beta reading.
Yes, in my first passage my MC was being smitten at his first sight of a young lady, and in the second someone was getting blasted with a shotgun. Hmm, content…
Now there’s interesting, as we say in Wales. Based on two short extracts from the last novel I wrote, I write either like James Joyce or (wait for it) Dan Brown. Not much difference…
Even after a year-plus of lockdown in various degrees I don’t do social media at all, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Zoom, no anything, so the Silence of the Denizens has been quite saddening for me. Not that I’ve been better (except in one respect) than anyone else. My problem is the opposite of that of several leading lights here: having (regretfully) given up all hopes of being published and indeed of finding any kind of audience for my fiction, I no longer consider myself a writer and have had nothing to say. I’m still up for a bit of chat though, only there hasn’t been any, to speak of.
To be brutally frank, the Den has never really got off the ground, has it? When I first discovered the Cloud it had already been going for a few years and was chugging nicely along under its own steam, but we’ve never built up that sort of momentum. A glance at the Members column on the right-hand side of the page says it all: in the past two years we’ve had exactly four new members. A small tight-knit band of brothers and sisters is nice in its own way (Hello, Randoms), but you can hardly call a site with only four new members in two years a living, breathing forum.
I don’t know what we can do about that, but making the Den more welcoming would certainly be a good start. The chat-inhibiting bugs on the Activity pages are certainly one problem (I really used to enjoy the idle chatter that went on in the Cloud’s heyday), but I don’t have the techie knowledge to suggest any cure. Just as important to my mind, though, the navigation is, bluntly, a disaster, and here I do have some suggestions.
I joined the Cloud all those years ago because I wanted critiques on my writing and advice on how to improve it. I imagine this must be the case for the vast majority of people who join writers’ forums, and this stuff is surely the life-blood of any such forum. And how are they going to find that here?
At the top of the page the main tabs are About – Writers’ Forum – Activity – Members – Groups. Okay, fine. Writers’ Forum looks like what we want, so let’s click on that. And what do we see? A list of forums with (mostly) enigmatic names, none of which seem to have anything to do with critiquing or advice. Where the hell is what we’re looking for? Oh, wait. What’s this mass of small print, halfway down the page under ‘Den of Writers’? Oh, it’s a list of sub-forums, only it doesn’t look like a list, because it’s all run together in a single para. Ah, here it is, ‘Critiques’. But what’s ‘The Writers’ Lifeboat’?
In short, what should be the real meat of this place is hidden about as effectively as it could be, short of not displaying it at all. There are many who won’t be as persistent as this. People are impatient. They’ll open a page, and if they don’t see what they’re looking for at a glance they’ll pass. Once a new member was looking for the blogs and couldn’t find them until I supplied detailed instructions.
Which of course is a particular bee in Richard B’s bonnet. On the Cloud the category ‘Blogs’ was one of the main tabs and a fruitful area of opinion and discussion, but here it’s hidden away and if Denizens miss the notification of a new blog on the Activity page they’re most unlikely ever to read it. I feel like I’ve been keeping the blogs going almost single-handed (to be precise, out of the 59 blogs posted so far 20 are mine – I’ve just counted). I’ve persisted, because I enjoy writing them (and because I have precious little inspiration for anything else these days), but I freely admit I’ve more than once sadly wondered why the hell I bother.
I believe I’m right in saying that all the stuff other than ‘Den of Writers’ on the Writers’ Forum page relates to groups, and its presence is unnecessary duplication, as they can be accessed just as well (and more logically) by clicking on the Groups main tab. I suggest that this stuff should be banished from the Writers’ Forum page, and the page restricted to the list of the main Den forums, which should be laid out in proper list form, preferably with a little note as to what each forum is about. Or at the very least, make sure that list stays at the top of the page.
Phew! I would like to see the Den persist in some form or other, not least because there are people here whom I have virtually known for years, and hope that things will improve (or can be improved) over the next year. As for the note of personal grievance that’s crept in from time to time, well, sorry about that, but it’s all part and parcel.
That’s probably one reason it was chosen as a refuge for the band. And yes, it does sound worth a visit.
If you’re curious, this page has a photo of the house as it was when the band was there, though it appears to have been taken from the back garden. A click will blow it up.
Libby said:
Thanks, Richard. Have you been to Farley Chamberlayne? It’s worth a trip for anyone in the area. I can’t remember what the house looks like, and the internet isn’t obliging, but FC is a deserted medieval village with a pretty church. It feels remote and wild despite close proximity to Winchester.
R
The house in Hampshire was Farley House, in Farley Chamberlayne, near Winchester. They didn’t record there, just worked out their new music and rehearsed.
On a slightly tangental note, my career as a bus driver kept bringing me into contact with places in Sandy Denny’s early life. One route I drove went past the hospital where she was born, another along the road where she grew up, another past both her primary school and the hospital where she died, and the one I drove for my last ten years or so past her secondary school. The masses of girls congregated at the bus stops around three-thirty every afternoon were the bane of our lives…
Libby said:
Thank you for the blog, Richard.
A school friend was a fan of Fairport and Denny. I enjoyed listening but not enough to keep up an interest after school. Was the house in Hampshire Headley ?Grange. Led Zep recorded there. I still listen to them occasionally but after I left school I switched to classical and have stayed there ever since.Tony Prince! ‘Your royal ruler.’
Yep, under the bedclothes. And trying to read books under the bedclothes too, with a torch, but it was just too stuffy and uncomfortable to make much progress. Cass Elliot’s voice still does it for me. When I was a child in the 60s her voice and songs seemed to be all about the future.I don’t think that parallel had occurred to me until I heard it pointed out by Ashley Hutchings himself. I recently found a video on YouTube of the song being performed at Cropredy, I think about five years ago, and before they begin Hutchings chats about how they discovered and recorded the song, ending with, ‘It was to take on a new meaning shortly after that.’
I think maybe the saddest thing about Sandy Denny was that she had this wonderful talent, and knew she had it, and had an outgoing, bubbly personality (everyone who knew her agrees on this), and yet underneath it all she was so insecure. One of her friends once told of how they were sitting at a pavement café when a slender, pretty girl walked past. Sandy sighed and said, ‘If only I had my voice and her looks, I’d have it made.’
I’ve read a couple of biographies, and her story never fails to move me.
As per Neil Gaiman’s fifth rule of writing:
‘Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.’
Having written an entire novel in colloquial first person a la Catcher in the Rye, having made a conscious effort to break through my inhibitions about departing from Oxford (or Queen’s, or formal – call it what you will) English to do so, and having found the process liberating and rather fun, I’ll give a heartfelt ‘Hear, hear!’ to that. Okay, it’s not found a publisher and most likely never will, but the point is still valid.
Oh, and thanks for that link, Libby. Interesting.
Well bugger me. Apparently, if you just copy and paste a URL into here, without bothering with that ‘link’ button, it links automatically. You live and learn.
It occurs to me that one reason for over-use of ‘I’, or any other pronoun come to that, is filtering. This is another cause of the ‘frustrating distance’ Libby mentions, and Emma Darwin (Who else?) explains it far better than I could.
I’m having trouble linking too, so copy and paste this:
https://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2016/07/filtering.html?cid=6a00e54eced2e188330240a4a66857200c#comment-6a00e54eced2e188330240a4a66857200cMy immediate and visceral reaction to both criticisms was ‘Bollocks!’ If writing in first person, what other pronoun is there for you to use? How are you going to avoid the pronoun? If writing in third person, does the same criticism apply to ‘he, ‘she’ or ‘they?’ I suspect the real problem is not with the pronoun itself but with the style. As for the second criticism, I’ve just been struggling with a story by Henry James. The style is so flowery and verbose that several times I’ve had to go back over sentences to try to understand what he’s driving at. This is writing from a much more formal age, and yet with all that he uses those ‘forbidden’ contractions. As Jane and Sandra say, it depends on what suits. What we have here is an editor with a mind set like concrete, full of rules and proscriptions.
‘Instant hit of relateable truth’: yes, that a good way of putting it.
Jane, if you got a result you haven’t been wasting your time, have you?
Jane, I suspect that, er, somewhere on the way you too encountered that anthology, so long ago you’d forgotten about it until my post reminded you.
Yes, I like the Liverpool Poets too. It’s only one aspect of his talent, but Roger McGough has raised that lowest form of wit, the pun, into an art form. Like this, from The Mersey Sound:
The act of love lies somewhere
Between the belly and the mind
I lost the love sometime ago
Now I’ve only the act to grind.Genius!
From JaneShuff (copied from the wall)
Thank you for this, Richard. I spent my childhood and teenage years in Liverpool and The Liverpool Poets were a big part of it. I thought I hadn’t heard of Pete Roche but, amazingly, I found myself able to recite Somewhere On The Way as I read it so the poem must be buried somewhere inside the dusty old antique shop of my mind. Thank you!
I wasn’t 100% certain that the (very) occasional references I found on the Net were to ‘my’ Susie until I found that photo. Susie isn’t exactly a rare name; neither is her given name, Susana, not in Spain. And though her surname may be exotic in Britain, she’d told me it’s common in Catalonia, where she was born.
On her last day at the pub I gave her the complete set of the sub-title cards. When we met again ten years later she told me she still had them. Aah, sweet…
I don’t want to come on like a rampant egotist, but within hours of my posting this latest blog Ath’s new challenge appeared, and all the excitement has pushed my blog out of sight way down the wall. So this blog is another thing that’s going to go…………..BUMP.
That, of course, is because, while ”snwcr’ is one of the many words the Welsh have borrowed from English and re-spelt (rather entertainingly) phonetically in Welsh, ‘heddlu’ (hethly) is a real Welsh word. But the Welsh for policeman is ‘plismon’, and for policewoman – wait for it – ‘plismones’.
Ath: ‘Herald of Free Enterprise’, Grenfell Tower…
Libby: When we first moved to Wales we did a Welsh language course for a couple of years. It’s a hell of a hard language to learn (for example, there are at least a dozen ways of turning a singular noun into a plural and there are no hard and fast rules, so you have to remember each noun’s plural individually) and I’ve forgotten a lot of it, but I do pride myself on being able to pronounce the names I see on signposts. I wince when I hear English people pronouncing that well-known place in Snowdonia, Betws-y-Coed, as ‘Bettsy Co-ed.’ The correct pronunciation is ‘Bettooce-uh-Coid.’