Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 23:37:46 EST From: "tick, tock, tink..." Subject: [WRITERS] TECH: minor distractions (was fill: minor distractions) On Sun, 25 Jan 1998 00:02:22 CST, Fred Phillips posted (I'm including the whole thing for those who may not have seen it): :) :) I'm currently reading "Lord of the Isles" by David Drake, and I was really :) starting to get into the story line and the book until I came across a :) minor distraction last night. In one particular passage, the following line :) appeared: :) :) "In human terms, yes," she said/agreed. :) :) It looked to me as though the author couldn't decide which word he wanted :) to use, and no one caught it in the editorial process. I couldn't :) understand why anyone would use something like "said/agreed" on purpose. I :) continued to read for the next two pages, but found my mind drifting back :) to that one minor point instead of following the story. So I put the book :) down, and I'm sure I'll pick it up again tonight and forget about that :) little point, but it made me start thinking about how a minor thing like :) that might interrupt the reader. I'm admittedly a bit odd, so it may not :) strike anyone else in the world in the same way, but it definitely picked :) me up out of the story and put me back in the real world. Any thoughts? This is arguably the hardest job of the writer--making sure that there is NOTHING which destroys that "willing suspension of disbelief" by the reader. Awkward grammar, a confusion about where things are, slight problems with physics or science...anything that makes the reader stop and say "huh?" needs to be smoothed out. I'll tell you one that got me (in Warriors of Spider or some such). The author puts the main character on a spaceship, and says it will take several months to get there. In the next chapter, there is reference to a few days to get there. Somewhere else, there's another, different time reference. In the meantime, the scenes in the ship are piling up... and as I remember, when they finally land, there is a final reference to the short time it took--which seems to discount all the scenes in the ship, plus the transformation from "lost colony native" to slick well-educated member of the fighting squads... the whole time sequence should have been set and all the references worked out. Good point. Catching those stumble points for the reader, and taking the time to smooth them out so that the reader doesn't notice the writing, just the story...it's hard! It's also one of the important things that can be included in a CRIT:--since it is often so easy to see these inconsistencies in other people's writing, even though they are invisible in our own. Anyone else trip over this kind of thing? and how do you detect it in your own writing? tink