I assume that you're not talking about writing "it's" for its" and vice versa, or using apostrophes where they aren't needed, as in "we have apple's on sale for a quarter apiece." One thing I've noticed in amateur fiction is an author's shifting from past to present tense and back. I assume they wrote the passage in the present tense and decided to change it to the past tense at some point, but forgot to make all the necessary changes.
When writers who obviously never consumed any form of stories aside from video RPGs and comics with a focus on superpowers, spectacular fights, chosen one prophecy, yelling out the name of your attacks, etc. write novels. And I'm an avid gamer and manga reader! I get it, these kinds of stories are fun and exciting on your screens or printed in full-page graphics. But some of the tropes which made them exciting are specific to the media form they were originally developed in. Novels and short stories are entirely different beasts. I cringe every time I saw a synopsis of a novel with a plot entirely focused on sequences of one-on-one colorful energy beam fights the protagonist must carry out before they can defeat the big bad.
To be fair most of the time when I write stories based on RPGs it's almost exclusively to poke fun at these tropes and cliches. The narrator knows it, the characters know it, even the dark lord of the week knows it. Even my next project has the main goal of showing just how much nonsense RPG's get away with strictly due to being a game of videos. Expect to see some less than kind jabs at Xenoblade in particular and Tales of if you ever read it :3 I personally find it more frustrating when someone pops in just to say 'I'm clearly in the wrong discussion, RPG to me means rocket propelled grenade' Like yes I get that y person doesn't play video games, but even a non gamer can understand the basic concept of an RPG with like five minutes of googling. Even ignoring the game mechanics, an uninitiated person can still contribute to the story aspect of a project inspired by this stuff.
Females not wearing their corsets in historical fiction. That's not wearing your bra... Corsets by themselves are not particularly dangerous. It was the invention of the metal eyelet in 1830ish that created the health hazerd. Before than it was impossible to tight lace a corset because the fabric would break. Even after tight lacing became common, the issues we associate with corsets became more pronounced. However, there were still those who either did not tight lace or did not to the extent portrayed in fiction. Again, corsets where the bras of the time period and further, the muscles in the abdomen and lower back tended to atrophy due to the corset offering the support they were meant to. Not to wear a corset would also have branded a woman a prostitute or at the least risked her reputation. So basically, the deal with historical fiction heroines not wearing their corset makes no sense for a great many reasons. I have so many other pet peves, but I'm going to leave it at this one. It's hardly the most important, but it bothers me and I wanted to say that.
Mine is twists for the sake of twists which don't necessarily make sense. Since The Last Jedi has already come in for its obligatory drubbing, I'll mention a book I read once instead. The protagonist was a special forces/spy type, who had crept onto a boat with a bunch of arms dealers. He got found out, and things were looking bad for him. To his rescue came a waitress who was really an undercover spy. They had a romance, and near the end of the story she betrayed him because she was working for the bad guys after all. And all I was thinking was "why did she help him escape when we first met her?" He had no useful information or McGuffins on him, so she should have just left him to die.
Poor mechanics. Let’s take this godawful excerpt as an example. To this day, it is the worst translation I’ve ever read. Superficially competent (the words make sense) but on the page it’s as dead as a cadaver. Let’s carve it up! Behind him, suddenly there is a light, and with a clarity and logic that is unusual for dreams, Artyom sees his own shadow on the floor of the tunnel. He turns around and from the bowels of the metro, a train is heading towards him without stopping, gnashing and rattling its wheels with deafening sound and blinding him with its headlights . . . And his legs refuse to budge, they’ve lost all power, and they aren’t even legs anymore but empty trousers stuffed with rags. And when the train has almost reached Artyom, the visions suddenly lose their colour and disappear. Instead, something new appears, something totally different: Artyom sees Hunter, dressed in snow-white, in an unfurnished room with blindingly white walls. He stands there, his head hanging down, his gaze drilling into the floor. Then he raises his eyes and looks straight at Artyom. (Metro 2033.) The dramatic suddenly is too telegraphed to serve its purpose. The action is more sudden without suddenly. Mentioning that the MC sees the environment is a given. It should seldom be said explicitly unless the “seeing” is as important as an action. Overuse of phrasals. “He turns” is usually better than “He turns around.” It’s a harmless thing to do until you do it every paragraph. Trust me, this book does. Overuse of –ing phrases. This is actually one of the calmer paragraphs. Ellipses make sense in dialog. Try to keep them out of the narration because they’re just too melodramatic. Beginning a sentence with a conjunction (and) is okay, but don’t overdo it. This excerpt does, naturally. It is done hundreds upon hundreds of times in the story. "Then" is also used as a conjunction here, which doesn't surprise me. “Something” is possibly the most empty, vague word in existence. It means “an indeterminate amount of an indeterminate object.” It says less than nothing. Avoid it by default. Only use it when the work around is an obvious convolution. Overuse of eyes and looks and sees, etc. It makes some sense at the end of this paragraph, but once again, this book will carry on about eyes in every single paragraph. Pointless use of "there." It has a purpose, but when it keeps getting used for dramatic emphasis, it becomes silly. Authorial repetitions. One structure gets used and then repeated inadvertently soon after. There are others here, but they mess up my coloring. Using a character's name after you've switched to pronouns. Please don't do this unless disambiguation is needed. There's so many flubs that I ran out of good colors. I consider these first draft edits, and yet this is a published work. (I was walking through a field and reading this trash and I almost threw my Kindle at a cow. I'm not exaggerating. I had started the windup.) It makes me so angry that this kind of laziness gets published. I'm not even going to mention that this is all a dream and is pointless, because at least a visual was indirectly happening to the MC. The rest of the book is pretty empty. There's other weird aspects of this too. Why isn't "floor of the tunnel" just "tunnel floor?" What does "instead" refer to? It seems weirdly conversational. The visions suddenly disappear (of course, how dramatic), but then there's another vision, so the visions didn't really disappear as stated. Unless your character is rising from a coma, having them "stand" as an action is pointless. The comma after Hunter makes it sound like Artyom is dressed in snow white. It's being used stylistically, but it's cluttering the message. This book is terrible. I didn't mark them all. I'd catch the others in the second draft.
Ouch, it is pretty bad, but in it's defense, it's a translation. I tend to give it a bit more leeway because I can't judge the original words, so I judge the ideas in those cases. But yes there can be some atrocious translations at times. As someone who consumes manga/anime/foreign movies/foreign book translation, it makes me cry at losing some of the masterpieces to the translators. Anyway, my point is that metro has so many cool ideas that reading the original must be good right?
The overall tone of this excerpt is such that it hardly matters, but ad hoc compound nouns often sound a bit clumsy. When editing or critiquing pieces where the writer is careful about tone and has a good ear for it -- particularly but not exclusively if the work is literary or semi-literary -- I often recommend changing something like ...just beyond the cave entrance. or ...just beyond the cave's entrance. to ...just beyond the entrance to the cave. Either of the first two sounds jarring if embedded in writing with polished tone. Of course it depends on the specific nouns and the rest of the sentence. For instance, one could hardly get away today with "the light of the moon" -- nor should one want to. Tunnel floor, floor of the tunnel... I'd have to hear them in a context where the unpolished choice would stand out. But I would certainly strike "Avoid of the" from any style guide for writing fiction above the mass-market level. Of the and ad hoc compound nouns should both trigger at least a moment of reflection leading to a mindful choice. Ad hoc compounds tend to sound like business or technical writing.
I always enjoy @Seven Crowns' posts, and I am super happy to see that they are now in full technicolor™
I feel that it depends very heavily on context. I think “just beyond the cave’s entrance” is the most “polished-sounding” of the three.
Every paragraph was like this. I can't stress that enough. I know some of the things I marked seem harmless when you're just seeing one excerpt. For example, the phrasal above; it's not hurting anyone. It's just chilling on the street corner. You walk up to it and you're afraid it might ask for change, but it's bent over a scratch ticket and you pass by with relief. Then you notice another guy on the next corner, and the next, and the next, etc. The most irritating thing was the -ing phrases. They are so powerful in writing that they're going to show up no matter what, but (my God!) there are other structures. I'd say that over use of -ing phrases, especially as a sentence starter, is the number one amateur mistake. That's probably all I should have mentioned. Whenever I pick up a self-published book, they're swarming like ants at a picnic. Pick up a best-seller, and their frequency drops to maybe a quarter that amount. I feel like the most tightly written works have even a little less than that. Those are difficult to quantify though. Really good writing is so smooth in its delivery that you only see the story. I edit as I read, so I really like it when there's no extra work to do. It's very rare for me to find nothing, but it does happen. It's not like I'm smarter than the author. I'm just a new pair of eyes and I have a habit of remembering words and phrases. I was reading Dan Simmons's "Hyperion" (5 stars), and in all of those pages, I only found one edit to make, but it was 100% there. The editor dropped the ball. The author can't be expected to fix all of these slips because many of them creep in during revisions. Every edit demands a careful re-read of at least the chapter. (Well, maybe there was a second issue now that I think about it. I found it distracting, but it was optional.) I kind of wonder how much blame the translator deserves. I think some, for sure. I read a lot of translations. Here's a recent list, which I have ranked: --> Perfect! | Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Suskind) | Ficciones (Borges) | The Metamorphosis (Kafka) | Ghachar Ghochar (Shanbhag) | --> Excellent. | Complete Short Stories of Chekhov | Oblomov (Goncharov) | Woman in the Dunes (Abe Kobo) | Caging Skies (Leunens) | --> So-so. | The Memory Police (Yoko Ogawa) | The Three-Body Problem (Cixin) | The Box Man (Abe Kobo) | Daughter from the Dark (M & S Dyachenko) | --> Bogus, non-triumphant. | We (Zamyatin) | Beasts Head For Home (Abe Kobo) --> Cesspit of prose. | Metro 2033 (X) Mr. Abe lands all over the place, and that has to be the translators' doing. I'm tempted to find Suskind's translator and see if he/she has written a book on their own, because that was simply phenomenal. There has to be natural talent there, otherwise you get this:
Basically, you want your text to be like a clear, glass window. These mistakes are like cracks, pictures, and tape plastered all over that window, which make it harder to see what's inside. I imagine most regular readers are intelligent and college-educated these days. So on average, they're probably going to notice these issues.
Translations are a quandary. On the one hand, you want to convey the words of the original writer as accurately as possible. But if you end up losing the "feel" of the work, the translation will not fly. Two examples of translations that worked are John Ciardi's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.
I just re-read Jay Rubin's translation of Murakami's breakthrough novel Norwegian Wood. While I can't say anything about the elegance of the original, the translation has a marvelously transparent feel to it, and I had to remind myself on several occasions that the quality of the English is Rubin's rather than Murakami's — though one can hardly make an intelligent, elegant translation of something that does not have those qualities in the original.
True dat. Ciardi and Heaney were both accomplished poets in their own right, and knew the dangers of literal translations that come off as scholarly and dry. Ciardi remarked, too, that there were limitations imposed by the English language. In Italian, he said, everything seems to rhyme with everything else, so rhymed triplets are no problem. In his version, he resorted to rhyming only the first and last lines of the triplet, leaving him with more freedom to convey the intent of the original.
