I just read some of my old work, stuff I haven't looked at in six or seven years. I came across this little gem of a sentence: He took a step forward, feeling a tingling, sickening feeling twisting his gut. I can't count how many errors there are in that awful construction. Anyone have any horrendous bits of writing they'd like to impart for our humour?
That sentence isn't so bad. I've seen way worse. I've probably written way worse, but I'm not going to read through my collected works right now looking for crap.
I've hung onto some of my old, old handwritten stuff. There's a small stack of them on my shelf, all written when I was thirteen or fourteen. I shall pull out one at random and copy the worst sentence I can find. Her worn shoes slid smoothly down the equally smooth trunk, the bark worn away over time, and she jumped off halfway down, landing lightly and soundlessly on the ground in a crouch. It would seem I had a thing for adjectives and adverbs.
The only problem with your sentence is some unnecssary words and punctuation, but that's the typical stuff one revises and edits out, anyway. I would edit it to read: He took a step forward, a tingling, sickening feeling twisting his gut. I write horrendous sentences, but even worse is writing a paragrph that's all sickening and twisting and you have to find a way to completely re-write it. That happens to me a lot, too. But hey, that's writing, right?
The only flaw I see is you are saying he is feeling a feeling, which sounds kind of redundant. Just grab a thesaurus and replace one of the 'feelings'.
I sometimes look over my hand-written notebooks etc, written when I was around 14-15. It's surprising what you can find or remember, good and bad. I guess overkill of adverbs was one of my 'novice' mistakes too. Too many dialogue tags followed by at least one, sometimes two... "xxxxxxx," he said slightly angrily. Nope, not too smooth...
Well, it sure reads like "Ring-tingeling-ding-ding." in my head. Now I can see the 'avoid -ing words' rule make some sense.
I'm not going to search my old stuff, but when I first started writing I tried to replace adverb dialogue tags by describing the characters voice (in great detail) after everything they said. Icky. And your sentence isn't really that bad. Nothing a decent edit wouldn't fix.
I am an ambulance, old and turned out to retirement in the bone yard, I thought they were coming to fix me once, but they just stripped a part off of me and walked away.
This one made me laugh. I am an ambulance? One of my favorite "stupid" sentences that I wrote is - "His face registered alarm." Not quite as colorful as the -ing sentence that started this thread or the ambulance sentence but my writers' group still asks me what expression my face is registering today.
Way back in the day I was the queen of adverbs... I also couldn't seem to use just plain "he said" and "she said", had lots of "she exclaimed" and "he retorted" and "she said breathlessly"... I think I have much improved since then
I'm comforted by reading interviews with famous writers who confess to their early garbage. Eudora Welty admitted that, when she was young, she started a story with this: "Monsieur Boule inserted a delicate dagger in Mademoiselle's left side and departed with a poised immediacy." THAT is crap. But she turned out to be a wonderful writer, and was willing to laugh at herself.
I too used a lot of adjectives and adverbs. Perhaps one day I shall dig up those old gems... This discussion reminded me of "The Eye of Argon" by Jim Theis. I recommend googleing it, it's a classic. It starts with: "The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire." And the rest does not disappoint.
I read through the current draft of my story and came across: "At least I can hide here if people find the house up there until they leave." *shivers* Rewrite. Now.
I was here for so long and I knew I was here I hid fomr them and they did not know I was here and I was scared by them for they knew I was here and it was hard to hide form them when they did not know I was This is a peice of a 348 pages that is one long run on sentence. This was my GOOD work back then, after all i knew nothing of grammar.
I'm currently trying to cut my adverbs by 70% and replace 40% of those with verbs or correctly used adjectives.
Problem with it is that it is too wordy. One of the most typical mistakes a writer will make is using a lot of fillers. I'm too lazy to go find a crappy sentence lol. But I have a lot, I can assure you that!
This is out of something I never finished. At the time I was interested in "playing around" with first person. We finished the walk to her house and gave her a hungry peck outside the door. Sounds...interesting. lol.
Here is one of mine again The warter was clear and blue like the clouds, cold like dry ice and plesaent to be in. back when i knew nothing of dry ice other then it was really really cold did not know it hurt and all that also i did not know clouds where blue...
I agree your sentence isn't bad at all. I tend to use to many descriptive words in some writings, because I get so into it that I start describing everything, lol. It happens to all of us.
This is beautiful. I love the heartbreak and upset you can feel from rejection. I'd open a book with that!
I thought that was worse than the original. Five second thought He took a step forward, with a sickening tingling sensation twisting his gut. (or maybe even get rid of tingling)
