What words would you put in your writers’ Room 101? Are you an exponent of the “said is dead” campaign? Would you ban all adverbs, ruthlessly? My leading candidate for the dictionary naughty corner is “could”.
It seems harmless. I even put it in the title of this post, but as a former print editor, I’ve red-penned countless instances of this word simply to fit copy into the page. The writing did not suffer.
What bothers me as a writer is that “could” is a distance word, one which pushes your reader away from the story. I mark them up as zombie language that will shamble through draft after draft unless you stop it. Very often, “could” ropes in other zombies, as accessories to its crimes: words like “feel”, “see” and “hear”.
Hang on, you say, I was told to that good writing needs sensory descriptions to put the reader inside the character’s experience. That’s true, but “could feel” and its undead siblings do the opposite.
How to kill the “could zombie”
Here are three simple rules, and three examples that might improve your writing:
If it could happen, it happened.
THIS IS BAD:
I could feel the chill wind sucking the warmth from my bare fingers.
I you felt it happen, it happened.
THIS IS BETTER:
I felt the chill wind suck the warmth from my bare fingers.
Tell your reader what happened.
THIS IS BETTER STILL:
The chill wind sucked the warmth from my bare fingers.
You can do even better than that if you’re willing to risk some purple prose. Write about the wind numbing your fingers, turning them blue, or into icicles, or all of those things. Describe the consequences of your numbed fingers, like dropping a fragile object or losing hope that they will finish this climb.
You can take it too far for some readers, falling out of the other side and tumbling down a cliff face of analogy and metaphor. At least you tried.
How should I use “could” correctly?
“Could” is a conditional word, and the best context in which to employ it is to mark a condition or a change of condition:
“In the dense fog, I could barely see the shambling undead.”
“As the fog cleared, I could see the zombies shambling towards me.”
I’d still question the need for “could” in the second sentence — “saw” is equally good — but it’s valid if that’s how you want to write it.
The other valid context is a negative condition:
“I could not see the zombies shambling through the dense fog.”
It’ll do for the first draft.
So set your Find And Replace for “could” and see how many zombie words you can eliminate. If you’re feeling brave, add it to a Regular Expressions search in Scrivener.
Do you feel that I’m right to hate on “could” and its distance-word siblings? Which words or linguistic tropes would you cast into Room 101? Tell me in the comments below.
Photo by Yohann LIBOT on Unsplash
2 replies on “Could? Do better. Destroy the king of the Zombie Words”
My new reading list is too long for every book I’d like to re-read, but one book of writing tips that I often come back to is How Not To Write A Novel.1
My dog-eared copy of How Not To Write A Novel
If you’re embarking on a Nanowrimo project, now is a good time to dig into a short book that could make a big difference to your writing.
How Not To Write A Novel
Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark don’t tell you how to be a good writer; they just want you not to be a bad writer. It’s an entirely selfish goal: they’re publishing professionals whose daily lives are clouded by manuscripts that aren’t ready to publish. Some of them are beyond editing, and agents remember those authors for all of the wrong reasons. No-one wants to be on that list.
If you’re very precious about your writing, you might think this a sacrilegious take on your right to witter on as your heart desires. I disagree. When I started out in creative writing, How Not To Write A Novel was the first writing guide to set a standard that I knew I could achieve.
It’s a simple promise: take note of these two hundred tips and your writing will not be shit. It still might not be good writing, but you can’t get to good without getting past not being shit. And it takes longer than you’d think to integrate that many tips into everyday writing practice. I’m living proof.
A practical writer’s guide
It’s also aggressively accessible. Seven sections cover plot, character, basic style, perspective and voice, setting (The World of the Bad Novel), sex, jokes and postmodernism (Special effects and novelty acts — do not try this at home), and getting published. Each part is broken into chapters that illustrate common writing mistakes through bite-sized examples and pithy advice.
The examples are entertainingly bad, drawn (we can be sure) from manuscripts the authors and their colleagues have endured. You’ll laugh at many of them, then cringe with them as you see your own mistakes. If you’re not amused, you probably need this book.
Despite the title, there’s a lot of positive guidance, from specific tips on style to general advice. The lessons begin on the first line of page one:
And if you think that’s obvious, you haven’t read The Essex Serpent.
From vomit draft to final draft
There’s no guarantee that How Not To Write A Novel will turn your WIP from a fetid pool of word vomit into a best seller. It’s best read as a companion to didactic novelling guides like Save The Cat Writes A Novel, insightful memoirs like On Writing and the sublime Wonderbook. It’s half the size and a hundred times more enjoyable than Reading Like A Writer.
The original 2009 edition doesn’t delve into self-publishing, though much of the advice on pitching is applicable. I’d love to see a chapter updated to cover bad blurb, unfortunate book formatting and ham-fisted cover art. In fact, I’d love to see a book like this about marketing and promoting a self-published novel. I’ve found few guides which tell you how not to waste your time and money along this part of the journey, and there are many ways to do it.
Good luck to everyone who’s starting their Nanowrimo journey this year. If you’ve got a favourite writing guide to accompany your Nano, let me know in the comments below.
Looking for more writing tips? Try these posts:
Could? Do better. Destroy the king of the Zombie Words
Do or do not. There is no try. More Zombie Words
Unfortunately, the authors haven’t kept up this website so it’s not the wonderful resource it could be. ↩︎
I’ll try and begin to…ah, see how easy it is? This week’s zombies, neatly corralled in five words. The “tried to”/“began to” habit is another instance of distance words that push readers away from your story.
If you’re looking for an inspirational truism in the vein of “just write something, it doesn’t matter how good it is”, I am happy to disappoint.1My tip for stuck writers is to imagine you’re a clueless young local newspaper reporter, barraged with obscenities by a tobacco-stained alcoholic news editor as the print deadline ticks closer.Then imagine the diatribe will start again when he’s read the crap you sent over. You’ll soon fill pages with words that you’re not ashamed to read back. If you’re here for tips on double-tapping zombie words, please take a seat. We dealt with “could” in the previous episode.
“Try” and “begin” have a place in conversational dialogue. People use them frequently, but in descriptive prose they do little more than bulk up the word count. You might feel that they make your writing more accurate, but there are better ways to achieve this goal.
The begin fallacy
It’s not unreasonable to argue that events have a beginning, middle and end. “Begin” becomes a problem when it’s used to show the start of an ongoing process, instead of describing each stage.
If it began to happen, it happened.
Tell your reader what happened.
Show your reader how it began.
Yep, it’s an example of the classic writers’ rule: show-don’t-tell.
“Begin” can also be used inaccurately, to describe processes that don’t have a beginning.
It’s got to begin somewhere
Where did it begin?
The problem here is that swallowing is usually a one-way action. By the time you swallow something, it’s too late to spit it out. You’ll be gagging, retching and vomiting to get that rank meat back up. Think about the action, imagine the experience and describe that.
Try harder
“Try” is a more complex case, where you can trip over it in at least two ways.
We rarely use “try” in conversation, unless we’re going to tell someone that we failed, to soften the disappointment.
In prose, “try” is a shortcut that short-changes your reader. They’re here for the failures your protagonist endures in their struggle, or on the road to their ultimate defeat. Even Sisyphus gets his rock to the top of the mountain.
If you tried, then you did something.
There is no try. There is only do.
From a reader’s point of view, the best option here is to describe the failure. You could use the rule of three to describe repeated failures before I stumbled upon a Facebook post inspired me to look at “begin” and “try”.
The second failure mode for “try” is also when it’s inaccurate. That’s typically when someone tries to do something and they succeed, or a group is having mixed success.
If you tried, you failed
Doing does not imply success
In the second example, it’s not clear that the zombies grabbed everyone. There’s room to describe their attempts and failures, but the action is immediate.
When is it OK to use “try” and “begin”?
Beyond the conversational exception, some zombies are acceptable in a first draft. Maybe you’re on a writing sprint and you want to get a lot of story onto the page. Maybe you’re focused on dialogue or world-building, and the action is a skeleton that you’ll flesh out later.
Make a note (using comments in Word or Scrivener), or search your text when you revise your draft. Scrivener can search for regular expressions — zombies and other bad writing habits. It takes some patience to learn, but it’s extremely powerful.
This is a golden opportunity to turn zombies into heroes.
Endnote: My thanks to the writer of a Facebook comment which inspired this post. I should have noted your name and the post it was attached to.
Image: Yohann Libot/Unsplash