Hey, I've got two sentences I don't like, but I can't manage to change properly. Had Eddie driven to the restaurant himself, he wouldn’t have drank too much. The sentence works fine, but it leaves room to interpret that Eddie still drinks, even though he's driving. The guy gives no shits in general, but he does not drink at all when he's driving, and I want that clear. Preferably in one concise sentence. I've tried removing "too much," but that makes the sentence look unfinished and "can't talk de English." If that's the fix a real English speaker would make, I'll do it, though. For context: His father-in-law was driving in this case. Don't know if that matters, just wanted that clear. “Not ‘oh.’ ‘Oh’ isn’t gonna cut it. I want an explanation!” In the same scene, Eddie's girlfriend wakes him up because she would really like an explanation for finding another woman's panties. Upon realizing whose they are, all Eddie comes up with is: "Oh..." How do I make the sentence look better? The abundance of apostrophes and other punctuation I can't name makes it look like a mess.
Eddie didn't drive himself to the restaurant. So he drank too much. "Oh? Oh, you say. Not gonna cut it. I want an explanation!"
@Bakkerbaard -- Your examples actually work fine for me. The only thing I would do is to take the inner quotes out of the Ohs. You don't need them, and the sentence will be stronger without them. But it seems like you're doing okay. I completely understood everything I was supposed to from each of your sentences. Good job, I say.
I agree you don't need quotes around the Ohs, but if you want to set them off maybe use italics. Helps keep things a little clearer.
Yeah, it's weird. I tried this before and even within the hangover scene it looks like he didn't drink anything. Probably has something to do with that I don't drink (and in the context of this thread: I'm not anti-booze, I just can't handle my booze). Eventually I'll just put one of these suggestions down and let readers deal with it. ;o)
Had Eddie driven to the restaurant himself, he wouldn't have drank so much. Too is too much like an admonishment. Also a relative term, like that apocryphal story of the drunk driver takes the witness box to contest the case. "15 pints, your honour, and I wasn't drunk!" The other sentence reads fine, and better without all the quotation marks as others have said. You could labour the "oh" repetition a bit more if you thought it added to the sarcastic humour, dumb-oh. Or not, still reads fine.
So Eddie didn't even have water or some other drink? Unless there's some context missing here, it sounds like he simply ate and had nothing else. If you wish to keep that sentence in there, I would probably have written "Had Eddie driven to the restaurant, he wouldn't have drunk any beer/wine/whiskey" (use whatever he did drink)
Yeah, I've tried variations, but they all leave room for some drinking. As petty as it is, I don't want the suggestion that he'd drink any alcohol when he drives. Nevertheless, it's already better than mine. Yeah, in the context of the scene it's gonna be pretty clear he's hung over. But I have the same problem with the term "drinking." It's generally supposed to imply alcohol: "Nuh-no... I didn't drink, occifer." But to me it always kinda sounds like the road to dehydration. So, yeah, this would be a good solution. I appreciate all the suggestions, but for now I'm leaving the scene for what it is. I'm completely stuck on the story, and I'm gonna try a different angle entirely, which will likely kill the scene. Too bad, though. It's funny. But I guess I'm better off losing a good scene than keeping a good scene in a bad story. I think. Unless I manage to find a way to pass shit for peanut butter. ;o)
Your sentence does suggest that Eddie has been drinking alcohol, though less when he's driving. I'm not sure you can keep the structure of that sentence without leaving that implication. You could change it to: Had Eddie driven to the restaurant himself, he'd have stuck to soda. (Perrier, lemon squash, coffee, 0%, whatever he chooses but not coke) which may be moot if you've set it aside.
I'm thinking you might need to expand it into two or three sentences. I think you're trying to do too much in one sentence—something like 'Eddy never drank if he knew he was going to be driving, but this time he didn't know it, and so he got loaded.' Huh, well lookee there. I ended up doing it in one anyway. Honestly thought it was going to be two.
I try to avoid it as much as possible. But you're right, starting a sentence with it makes my face twitch. Had is BAD, Mmmmm-kay?
Except he knew he wouldn't be driving, because his father-in-law insisted on taking the wheel. In a scene that was taken behind the shed somewhere around draft four, he states to Eddie: "I'm a cop. I don't ride in the back." Then there was a bit during the drive over where Eddie is being left out of the front seat conversation and resigns himself to waving at other people in backseats. But I remembered I stole that from a comedian whose name I forgot, so it had to go. Far be it from me to make people's faces twitch, but it is actual English, right? "Had I known I wouldn't have brought the flamethrower." Do I need to stop saying stuff like that?
It comes down to personal preferences, I guess. I would tend to avoid starting a sentence with "had" followed by a negative. If I had known...
We can all agree that starting a sentence with "had" is very amateurish. Take this example, for instance: Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, It goes on a bit more but you get the idea. Bloody amateur!
All this talk got me researching conditional sentences. The one in the OP is considered a third conditional sentence, since it combines the past perfect tense in the condition clause and the present perfect tense in the result clause. I read that conditional sentences are usually identified by the if ... then ... format - and that was an a-ha moment for me. That's always how we wrote hypotheses in school, and maybe that's why the if ... then ... format feels more familiar to me.
Well, it's different if it's done purposely by a really excellent writer (whichever sense of Had is involved).
Ah yeah, I was just poking a little fun. Had, whether possessive or past perfect, as the opening to a sentence seemed such a random thing to find objectionable, but we all have our pet peeves. Not so long ago I commented on 2 different workshop entries for use of "traverse", just seemed wrong to me. Why did the chicken traverse the road? To show off his vocabulary to his readers. Willie B's poem is one of my favourites and was the first thing to come to mind reading the posts, good enough for him then it's good enough for me.
Had at the beginning of a sentence to me sounds pretentious, like when somebody says "Had I known, I would never have (whatever)" But of course, as I said earlier, it can be done well too. Like any of the 'rules', if you know what you're doing you can break them.
