Turkey City Guidelines

pickarooney

Just having a read through the Turkey City lexicon and there are a lot of good tips, in bullet form, of what not to do when writing.

I've been guilty of quite a number of them.

EileenG

I'm just back from a critique group where one man referred to his main character as "The woman" all through the story. When I asked why, he said he didn't want to start every sentence with "Melanie".

pickarooney

So he started every sentence with "the woman"?

pickarooney

I can count the following from the first draft of my book:

Burly detective - yep, there is even an actual burly detective and at one stage, to distinguish him from a gay Jewish character he was the 'burly goy' and his friend the 'girly boy'. What can I say...

Call a rabbit a smeerp - not sure about this one, as the plants in question may or may nto have actual English equivalents.

Gingerbread - every single sentence was made of this.

Pushbutton words - the working title has 'sings' in it, so I guess that counts?

Roget's disease - nothing washes down a mouthful of gingerbread like a thermogenic grail of atramentous jamocha.

"Said" Bookism - I've had characters expectorate and vomit words to avoid simply saying them.

Tom Swifty - goes hand in hand with Saïd Al Buqism

Bathos - once or twice for comedic effect. A polite cough echoed.

Countersinking - I saved a couple of thousand words by stripping the lily-paint.

Dischism - It's hard to know where inspiration stops and this starts (he said, taking a sip of Eau de Source Beaupré and nudging his Dell optical mouse out of the way of the keypad.)

False Humanity - otherwise known as chapters 9 to 24.

Hand Waving - used vainly to disguise the absence of an actual plot.

Show, Not Tell - a little too much of the latter.

Squid in the Mouth, on the Mantlepiece - book required round-trip tickets to Ecuador to understand some sentences.

White Room Syndrome - more or less literally the first two painful chapters.

Kitchen Sink Story - Why write one book when you can write eight at once?

And Plot - Eight stories need eight endings or at least one which ties them up.

Kudzu Plot - Happens when you combine Kitchen Sink and Hand Waving.

Frontloading - Coincidentally centred around the absence of a washing machine.

Infodump - I'll just leave this here...

"I've suffered for my Art" - More the opposite, but essentially the same.

Funny hat characterisation - A half dozen of these pointless characters got the axe early doors.

Viewpoint glitch - I still can't quite get a handle on this.

Intellectual sexiness I can only assume the only piece of paper I had on which to write down my completely unrelated idea for a brilliant invention was my manuscript.

EileenG

pickarooney wrote: »

So he started every sentence with "the woman"?

Seriously. And got very annoyed when I asked him about it.

pickarooney

Delusions of Hemingway perhaps?

EileenG

Maybe. I think he just hadn't thought his story through. He described the kitchen of an affluent Irish house, then informed us it belonged to a couple on the run in France, and he didn't bother to describe his characters because he felt their surroundings would tell all.