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Sunday, 11:05 am in Furc!

I like this one.  I like this one a lot.

So, anyone who reads this crap regularly will know that I’m quite fond of producing over-intellectualised pseudo-essays on writing, directly stemming from my experiences on Furcadia.  No shock there, right?  Well, the other day I got bitten by the bug again and wrote up something explaining the four most common writing mistakes I see at furc.  It was written in the usual abusive, acerbic style but nevertheless this was stuff I’d researched.  In order to make sure it was really noticed, I scoured through weeks and weeks worth of furc logs looking for appropriate descs and rp posts to illustrate my points.  I de-identified my examples, the re-wrote them to (hopefully) illustrate how following the Four Simple Steps I’d explained make writing clearer, more eloquent and more enjoyable to read.  Many people have, for a very long time, harped on about various things (mostly the dreaded ‘thesaurus humping’) but few examples I’d seen had either given direct reasons as to why certain things were bad.  It was always just “NO THESAURUS HUMPING!”; there was never any explanation as to what this is called (purple prose), what it actually is (over-writing), why it’s considered bad (dress up a rotting corpse in a dinner suit and you’ve still got a rotting corpse, now with grotesque dinner suit) or an illustration on how not using it can make prose much more effective.  So that’s what I wrote.

Somewhere halfway through writing I knew it was going to make people upset.  Someone was invariably going to recognise themselves or a friend in the examples, and throw a fit.  Not only that, but certain groups of furcers tend to be, well, insecure to the point of paranoia.  I knew a lot of people would automatically assume I was talking directly about them; that I was there, looming over their shoulders, judging their rp (I IS IN UR DREAMZ, I IS JUGING UR RP).

So, instead of simply posting the rantette to my blog and letting it be consigned to obscurity, I posted it on the Golden Tether forum.  And sat back to watch the fireworks…

Here, preserved in stasis forever, is the original post.  You’ll see why in a moment.

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The FURCer’s Guide to Do Rite More Guderer, or, How to RP Like You Mean It

I admit it; I’m a consummate RP eavesdropper.  There’s nothing I like more than to kick back, sit myself in a public place, put on a movie and eavesdrop on other people’s RP.  At least, in theory.  Too often I find my voyeuristic enjoyment of someone else’s drama ruined by shitty fucking writing.  You’ve all seen it – some of you probably do it – so you all know what I’m talking about; whether it’s pronoun avoidance, obtuse purple prose, bad tenses or incomprehensible run-on sentences.

I’m going to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that the vast majority of the bad writing I see around the place is the result of people simply not knowing any better.  So, as part of my ongoing and mostly futile effort to spread better writing practices around furc’s RP community, I present to you a short guide.

Because they’re a handy-dandy teaching aid, I’ve tried to illustrate each of my points with live examples of bad writing pulled right out of my own furc logs.  All names have been changed to protect the guileless, of course, and if you recognise someone, keep it to yourselves (unless it’s you).  And before someone asks; what gives me the right to re-write other people’s words?  Editorial comment.  I’m no Hemingway or nufin’ but – false modesty aside – I know I’m a damn sight better writer than most people that will be reading this…

Let’s begin, shall we?

Rule #1: Purple Prose != Erudite Writing

Let me introduce you to a little friend of mine.  His name is purple prose and he’s a literary criticism used to describe writing that is overly extravagant to the point of distraction.  If the style of your writing – generally over-use of adjectives, archaic words and melodramatic pathos – makes it difficult for a reader to make sense of the substance of what you’re trying to say, you’re guilty of purple prose.  In furc, this kind of writing most frequently manifests itself as over-use of ridiculous pseudo-archaic words (auds and occulars are everyone’s favourite examples, but things like ‘pon, ‘neath and tresses also count) and an overly formal writing style.  I most often see it in descs.  It comes about, I think, when people who – let’s face it – aren’t very skilled at writing attempt to sound Ye Olde Worlde; like Tolkeinesque high fantasy medieval noblemen.  I’m going to state this simply; it doesn’t work.  In fact, very few professional fantasy authors manage to pull off this style of writing.

So how do we avoid it?  Well, for starters, stop using all those fucking dumbass words.  If you need to make a choice between tresses and hair, for godssakes say ‘hair’.  Nine times out of ten black is a perfect substitute for the word ‘black’.  Things are on and under.  This is one of those walk-before-you-run things; we all love creative writing and whatever, but you need to learn to write in a way that is simple and readable before you can start throwing around inventive adjectives and wordings.

Believe it or not, I actually had a hard time finding a suitable example of purple prose in my logs; which might go to show that this sort of writing is less common than the number of people who rant against it might suggest.  Either that, or I just can’t find an example in between six straight days’ worth of chat in *ooc (logging off is for noobs k).  Anyway, after much scouring I eventually came across:

Laucian would blink and turn his gaze to the Jötun. “Hnn? Get wot fixed?” He asked. Hell had it been so long since he’d seen Loki? Indeed it had been. Indeed. Since before the disownment. He was still sour about that. He took another deep chug of his drink and settle it down. He’d rub his hand over short messy locks of Ebony and Azul. Ears plainly seen carring bars and studs and such. Left eye was the scarring one, which was dulilng some with the Wine/Blood mix. He’d sigh and tilt his head some, Arctic hues clouding.

Ouch.  Just… ouch.  I like this example, mostly because it’s largely free of the kind of pacing and voice issues I’m planning on talking about below, so we can focus instead on the language used.  If a reasonably intelligent and educated reader (such as your truly) needs to look up a word that you have used, and that word has a less archaic equivalent, you are guilty of bad writing.  This passage contains a few obvious examples; disownment, locks, ebony (a noun semi-incorrectly used here as an adjective; the proper word is ‘ebon’), azul (a Spanish word whose English equivalent is ‘azure’; a particular shade of bright sky blue), dulilng (possibly supposed to be ‘dilating’ from the context; expanding or contracting pupils), Arctic hues (either white or blue, or blue-white; take your pick).  There are also some less obvious examples; phrases made from common words that, when strung together, just don’t read right or make sense.  To me, this passage reads as if the author isn’t particular confident in their writing abilities or vocabulary, and is using difficult, florid prose to overcompensate.  Let’s try a re-write:

Laucian blinked and turned his gaze to Loki.  “Hnn?  Get wot fixed?” he asked.  Hell, had it really been so long since he’d seen the jötun?  It certainly seemed like it; by his reckoning they hadn’t crossed paths since before the Disownment.  He was still sour about that.  He took another deep swig of his drink before settling the tankard down on the bar with a hollow thud, running a hand through messy black and blue hair as he did so.  The studs and bars in his ears glinted coldly in the candlelight as he sighed, tilting his head back a little, cold eyes hazing over slightly as the bloodwine started to take effect.

Phew, there’s quite a lot going on here.  So, what did we change?  Firstly, I got rid of the excruciatingly awkward past perfect tense (something which I think might get its own section since it’s so common and so hideous) and re-set it as simple past.  Secondly, I switched around the two references to the other character (here played by Loki); in the original they were descriptive first, name second.  In this, they are name first and descriptive second; I thought it worked better to establish who were were talking about first, though note this is out of the original context (ie. as part of a conversation).  I’m not sure what I feel about this ‘disownment’ thing; it’s an odd word but if it’s referring to some unknown past event which is called The Disownment it’s quite clever, but if it’s just thesaurus humping for something else it’s unnecessary.  I’ve kept it in and given it a capital, giving the benifit of my doubt to the original author.  I like the He was still sour about that line a lot, so that stayed, but I couldn’t quite get myself to keep in the ‘indeed indeed’ bit, which seemed overwritten.  ‘Chug’ got replaced with ‘swig’ because I think it sounds smoother, and I tried to get rid of the ambiguity (and bad tense) of settle it down.  Ebon-azul locks have gone back to being black and blue hair (thank gods).  I’m assuming carring bars is a typo (‘carrying bars’), and tried to re-word this sentence to be a bit more poetic (‘ears plainly seen’ by whom, exactly?).  Left eye was the scarring one was just too mangled to fit in, so instead it’s been replaced by a run-on sentence (d’oh) incorporating the general feel of someone relaxing as the alcohol sets in.  Oh, and I’ve taken the ‘mood’ of the word Arctic (cold) rather than the colour (which is what exactly?).

(At this point, because it’s come up, I’m going to point out the difference between a proper noun and everything else.  In English (unlike, say, German) nouns, verbs and adjectives are spelt with a lower-case letter and refer to something generic.  Colours, for example, do not get capital letters when used as generic adjectives, no matter how Spanish they are.  Proper nouns, on the other hand, refer to something specific and get a capital letter; Dee, the Second World War, the Arctic, Operation: Write More Better.  If I am talking about the slave pit known as the Golden Tether, I use capitals.  If I am talking about a bunch of slaves tied up with golden tethers I use lowercase.  Get it got it good.)

Anyway, the point of all this was hopefully to demonstrate that you can get a lot more out of your writing if you ditch the fancy words.

Rule #2: Active Voice, Passive Voice

This is a personal pet hate of mine, specifically because I’m 99% sure I know what people are trying to do with it and seeing so many kids fail so miserably just makes me squirm.  It’s an overuse (and abuse) of the passive voice.

I’ve lost a whole bunch of you, haven’t I?  You’re all sitting there nodding at the screen going, “Yeah, yeah fuck I hate the passive voice too!” and you’ve got no freaking clue what it is.  That’s okay; no-one teaches grammar in school nowadays, so it’s not your fault.  Seriously.  Insults aside, passive and active voice are two different ways of describing how something happens to an object.  With the active voice, the subject does something to an object.  With the passive voice, the object has something done to it by the subject.  Consider the following:

Loki lit the cigarette.

That’s a sentence using the active voice.  Someone is doing something.  The same thing could be re-written in a passive voice as:

The cigarette was lit by Loki.

The ‘by Loki’ bit (the subject) is optional in the passive voice, incidentally, but not the active.  This is where we start running into our furc problems, but before I go into that, a few more words on the use of the passive voice.  So when should you use an active voice and when should you use a passive voice?  Good question; and there’s no real answer.  Some of you out there may have heard the old adage that gets tossed around discouraging against the use of the passive voice; forgeddaboutit!  More memes spread by undereducated English teachers (they didn’t get taught grammar either).  It’s true that the passive voice can cause ambiguity about who is doing what; that’s the whole point.  As a rule of thumb, if you want to emphasize the subject of a sentence (the doer), use the active voice.  If you want to emphasize the object of a sentence (what is being done) – or when the subject is unknown, implied elsewhere, or irrelevant – then use the passive voice.

In furc, passive voice abuse generally manifests itself as a weird avoidance of pronouns (he, she, it, they), articles (the, a) and adpositions (to, for, on, of).  It should be noted that this kind of writing isn’t technically passive voice per se, but I’m lumping it in here because the thing that I’m 99% sure of is the fact that pronoun/article/adposition avoidance is a badly botched attempt to use the passive voice for literary effect.  I’m going to bring out my three words again; it doesn’t work.  When done well (or even simply adequately), passive voice can add to the mood of a set of actions.  I say this self-servingly, incidentally, because I do it all the time.  Har ha!

Anyway, it’s example time.  Here is an original, random desc I’ve pulled from my logs.  I didn’t have to look far, incidentally, to find something:

Handsome rogue: Lengthy blonde tresses cascaded to waist, flowing over pale flesh and open alabaster shirt revealing lean stomach, scar about chest; trousers and boots upon legs, cutlass at side. Occuli of a greenish hue would be the only noticible color on male’s body besides jeweled rosary, crucifix, and many silver rings ‘pon fingers. Pinkened lips curled up into a smirk, obviously proud of his latest plunder.

Let’s ignore the ubiquitous occuli and ‘pon there for a moment (and incorrect use of a colon, but who’s counting), and concentrate on the complete and utter lack of pronouns and articles.  Ick.  I wave my magic keyboard over this mess and we get:

A handsome rogue.  Lengthy blonde tresses cascaded down to a lean waist; flowing over pale flesh and a white cotton shirt open to expose a jagged scar.  Trousers, boots and a wicked cutlass finished off the look.  Brilliant green eyes shone in otherwise pale fur, accented by a jewelled rosary, crucifix and an abundance of silver rings.  Rosy lips curled up into a smirk, obviously proud of his latest plunder.

Hrm, still a few run-on sentences and awkward descriptions in there, but overall we’re preserving the original ‘style’ (the passive voice description) without overtly raping the grammar of the reader.  Notice we’ve done it not by knocking out articles (in fact, we need a lot more indefinite articles than we normally would) but by removing all but one pronoun.  There’s a kind of trick to this style of writing, and the rule of thumb is that if you’re going to knock out a pronoun (‘his eyes’), you might need to then pad out the sentence with an article (‘the’ if you want to sharply emphasise that particular noun, ‘an/a’ if not) and/or an adjective. So:

Large ears bowed tall over skull, and mismatched eyes glanced side to side.

Which sounds very awkward (not to mention ‘bowed tall’ makes no sense), becomes:

Large ears loomed over a sleek skull, mismatched eyes glancing side to side.

See how the ‘over skull’ part, which is grammatically jarring, becomes a lot smoother when an article and an adjective get thrown in the middle?  Welcome to the English language.

Rule #3: Pacing

Okay, it’s time for Grammar 101 again.  Today we are going to ask; what is a sentence?  To put it very, very simply; a sentence is some words in which something (a noun) does something (a verb).  Loki leapt. is a fairly simple sentence.  Sentences can get more complicated when we start adding in objects (Loki leapt through the window.), adjectives (Loki leapt through the broken window.) and adverbs (Loki made a running leap through the broken window.).  They get more complicated still when we start tacking other phrases onto the end of them, forming compound and complex (or compound-complex) sentences; Loki made a running leap through the broken window, dodging the many grasping paws as he did so.  The exact specifics of what is a compound sentences versus what is a complex sentence and so forth are a bit irrelevant here, but hopefully you get the gist.

Note that not all things that start with a capital and end with a full stop are sentences.  Shit.  That, for example, is not a sentence; it’s an expletive sitting there all on its own, emphasising something.  This gets important later.

There are a couple of things I want to address here.  The first one is the dreaded run-on sentence.  A run-on sentence is generally formed either when compound/complex sentences are missing their punctuation, or two or more independent sentences are strung together into one.  Loki made a running leap through the window his fall on the other side broken only by shards of shattered glass. is a run-on sentence.  We can fix this in a couple of ways; adding a semi-colon, (… the window; his fall…) or full stop.  If this was a slightly more generic example, I could even use a comma and a conjunction (‘and’, ‘but’).

Like all punctuation, we can generally tell where one sentence ends and another one begins by reading it out loud and listening to where we put the ‘breaks’.  Most of us were never actively taught written grammar, but interestingly I’ve met very few people who speak with incorrect punctuation (a comma or semi-colon is a short breath or emphasis, a full stop is a more substantive break).  If we read a run-on sentence out loud it sounds wrong; it sounds rushed, hurried.  In fact, some authors use run-on sentences (especially in dialogue or first-person narration) deliberately for exactly this reason.

Welcome to the wonderful world of pacing.

Not all sentences are created equal.  Some are short, some are long, some are complex, some are simple, and some aren’t sentences at all.  Listen to someone speak and you’ll usually hear them use all of these.  A bunch of long, complex-compound sentences sounds slow, deliberate, careful.  A bunch of short sentences sounds fast, pointed, abrupt.  A short sentence in the middle of a bunch of long ones adds a specific emphasis.  A (deliberate) run-on sentence sounds panicked, messy, frightened.  When we write, we need to learn how to pick the length of sentence that can properly convey the tone and mood of what we’re trying to get across.  Both previous major examples have used different length sentences to dramatic effect (A handsome rogue., Indeed.).

Anyway, enough natter; it’s time for an example:

This would be his first sigs to keep her hands to her self as he snarled around bared his fangs as he watched her hand but contuined with his questioning of her while easing back to sit firmly down on the pillow below him. “I am impressed in that care your name is? “

Holy motherfucking McChrist someone needs to learn punctuation.  What an absolutely incomprehensible mess (not to mention the passage was actually a lot longer but I cut it out for being unreadably inane)!  I dunno about you, but I’ve got no freakin’ clue what’s going on here.  Let’s see if we can’t fix that:

The snarl was vicious – fangs and all – and a pointed reminded that she should keep her hands to herself.  Still wary, he eased back into the pillow behind him; eyes never leaving her wandering hands.  “I’m impressed.”  A brief pause, then, “And your name is?”

Christ I never want to look at that passage again; hopefully you get the point.  We’re almost done, anyway, there’s just one more thing…

Rule #4: Getting Tense

Ah, grammatical tenses!  I already covered this a little back in Rule #1, but I think it’s worth pointing out again because I see it so frequently.  I see way too much future (both simple and perfect) tense lurking around in furc.  There’s also a lot of mixing of simple past (Loki laughed.), past perfect (Loki would laugh.) and simple present (Loki laughs.) tenses.  This is a problem which is particular to roleplaying, since – unlike fiction writing where the ‘default’ narration has already happened – stuff that occurs in RP is kind of assumed to be happening right now.  Because I’m a writer before I’m a roleplayer, I tend to RP in past tense, but present tense can also work… so long as it’s kept consistent.  It’s example time:

Laucian laughs. “Yea nightmares… Fuckign running around. My head is all rainbows and flippin’ puppies.” He’d sneer and take another drink. Where was the adorable cuddly little subby? Hidden far far and deep away. Astas had made him loath it. Very few would see him as such. Very few. Though, as Loki spoke up he’d cringe and grow red. Oh that was a low blow. ” Everyone has to just unlead my entire PERSONAL LIFE don’t they! It’s just one of those fucking nights.” He’d growl and slam his fists down onto the countertop. Bloody tears anew scimmed down his cheek. “Damn it…” He’d wipe them away as quickly as he could and run for it. To the gardens, where he could bleed his tears away from the watching eyes at the bar.

Okay, to do this one I’m going to do two re-writes; one using present tense and one using past tense, just to highlight the difference.  Here goes:

Laucian laughs.  “Yeah, nightmares… Fuckin’ runnin’ around.  My head is all rainbows and flippin’ puppies.”  He sneers and takes another drink.  Where was the adorable, cuddly little subby?  Hidden deep, deep down; Astas had made him loathe it and very few people nowadays would see him as such.  Very few.  Though as Loki speaks he cringes, heat rising in his cheeks.  That had been a low blow.  “Everyone always has to unearth my entire personal life, don’t they?”  He growls, slamming a fist down onto the countertop.  “It’s just one of those fuckin’ nights.  Damnit…”  Bloody tears turn his vision a bleary crimson.  He fights the urge to wipe them away, to run for it; out to the gardens where he can bleed his shame away from the prying eyes of the bar.

Present tense is kinda difficult for narration since there’s often a constant need to swap between using it for things that are happening now (As Loki speaks…), and past tense for the things that have happened previously (That had been a low blow.).  With past tense narration, this distinction becomes easier to manage since you’re talking about things that have happened in the past versus things that have happened in the more paster.  Compare:

Laucian laughed.  “Yeah, nightmares… Fuckin’ runnin’ around.  My head is all rainbows and flippin’ puppies.”  He sneered and took another drink.  Where was the adorable, cuddly little subby?  Hidden deep, deep down; Astas had made him loathe it and very few people nowadays would see him as such.  Very few.  Though as Loki spoke he cringed, heat rising in his cheeks.  That had been a low blow.  “Everyone always has to unearth my entire personal life, don’t they?”  He growled, slamming a fist down onto the countertop.  “It’s just one of those fuckin’ nights.  Damnit…”  Bloody tears turned his vision a bleary crimson.  He fought the urge to wipe them away, to run for it; out to the gardens where he could bleed his shame away from the prying eyes of the bar.

Like I said, personally I prefer past tense because I think it reads better and is easier to manage, but it’s a personal preference thing.  So long as whatever you’re doing you’re doing it consciously.

Incidentally, where do you use simple future tense?  Anywhere you want to describe a predictive action or intention (When the time comes, Loki will run.).  Future perfect is a bit more obtuse and is used to describe an action that has happened in a hypothetical future.  Confusing?  What about: In an ideal world, Loki will have gone.  Compare this to the usual, incorrect, way people use these tenses in furc (As his friend begins to storm off, Loki would have just shrugged.) and hopefully you can start to see the difference.  Future tense is a bit interesting since it’s not used very often in third-person fiction narration; however we tend to use it all the time in first-person dialogue (“This afternoon I will go to the mall”, “By tomorrow I will have gone to the mall.”), which is I think where the confusion comes from.

And there you go; four simple rules that, if abided by, will hopefully eradicate 90% of the bad writing in Furcadia.  Too easy.

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Was that really so bad?  I mean, honestly?  Some of TGT’s regulars thought it was.  You can read the resulting thread here (and page 2).  Sorry for the static copy, uploaded to my server, but shortly after my final post (I assume there was nothing more since I got no more topic reply notifications) the entire thing vanished off the forums.  Not just locked, but completely deleted; no explanation.  It wasn’t entirely unexpected, so it’s not like I’m screaming “ZOMGH CENSORSHIP!!! FURSECUTION!!!!” or anything, but it’s an interesting display of the power-politics of TGT (which, let’s face it, is one of the reasons I posted it in the first place).  It’s not in the hard copy, so you’ll just have to take my word for it, but originally after Xxys’ first post there was a post from TGT forum ‘guard’ Triss curtly reminding me that I should not be posting the RP logs of Laucian or Loki without their permission; and if I didn’t have permission I should remove all names and point the fact out.  I had a nice smartass reply which essentially was just the quote from the original text where it says exactly that (plus a bit of a snippy reply to Xxys).  When I came back the next day, both posts had been deleted.  Okay, I thought, no worries; forum mods doing their duty and all; been there done that.  I was, however, very interested to note that when Zexnon leapt in ad hominem no-one was exactly rushing back to tell her to stop attacking me personally (which Triss constantly does in other threads, such as this charming one in which a self-proclaimed pagan wants a pat on the back for publicly abusing and humiliating some Christians).

The thread itself is full of some of the most fatuous counterarguments I’ve ever seen.  Zex tries to argue that because people are teenagers they can’t be expected to write well (I’ve seen lots of competent teen writers, and lots more who honest-to-gods try and improve their writing).  But my favourite post in the entire thread is on the second page, from Olleander.  Olleander’s spurious claim is that Americans shouldn’t be expected to write well (sorry, Hemingway, sucks be to you) and because I’m an Australian obviously grammar applies to me but not to ‘American’.  Is anyone really, really stupid enough to believe this is some kind of compelling argument?

That’s not my favourite part of the post, though.  The part that really made me laugh was:

I’m a unpublished homo erotica writer […] my editor is forever calling me up at 2 am in hysterics because she’s just added fifty two commas into a chapter only to find seven pages where I didn’t even put in periods.

Quoted From: Olleander (emphasis mine)

That says it all, I think.

• Tags » deh lulz, furc, furcadia, furn, roleplaying, writing
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