When Good Cliches Go Bad

“You, sir, are a masher and a cad!”
“Who shall hold me responsible for being beguiled by such a nymph?”
“Yeah, well, your approach really threw me for a loop.”
“You’re in the major leagues now, fair maiden.”

Er, what?

Imagine you’re reading a romance novel set in a place and time that requires a specific parlance: Regency English, for example, or early-20^th-century American English, or even that funky-formal-high-fantasy speak. Now imagine falling into the unfamiliar but intriguing rhythms of the language, feeling it lull you into a cozy state of sleepy receptivity. And then, out of nowhere, BAM!, an idiom squeaks its way into the symphony, jarring you back into the real world.

Alas, the dreaded novelist trap has been sprung: you as a reader have become aware of the mechanics of the story.

As authors, we should of course be wary of slipping into the verbal shortcuts of clichés, colloquialisms, idioms, and slang. It’s an English 101 lesson, sure, but clichés diminish the impact of our writing by doing the thinking for our readers. A reader presented with a colloquialism fails to use her imagination, meaning she becomes less emotionally and mentally involved with our carefully-crafted story.

Okay, that said, I have to admit I’m not opposed to characters employing the occasional slang; heck, using clichés or platitudes may become an endearing or annoying trait of a particular character. Nothing wrong with that, right? The keys are authorial awareness and intentionality.

So, unless used with intention, I suggest we remain vigilant against those insidious idioms, clichés, and slang terms. And, it must be said, this is especially important for those of us who write stories set in different places and times. In historical and fantasy realms, there’s just something especially eye-twitch-worthy about encountering modern, regionally-specific concepts and phrases. I mean, let’s get real: Nothing says amateurish like a Victorian heroine discussing her “excess baggage,” amiright?

Cliches and idioms can be powerful instruments in our authorial symphony, but we need to make sure and wield them wisely and well.

GODDESS ELLE, or, Why I Write

As writers, we sometimes feel like gods. Not just of our make-believe worlds -- where we decide on the parameters of existence and, if our characters and situations comply (as gods everywhere can attest, subjects don’t always do as they’re told), of the ebb and flow of action and feeling – but of this world we all inhabit. And isn’t that part of the seduction of writing? By decoding our worlds into paragraphs, sentences, words, and punctuation, we define the boundaries, decide how to interpret events, choose what matters and what doesn’t.

Our lived worlds aren’t neat or tidy. Single emotions are vast enough to inspire countless paintings, poems, and essays, and that’s just one component of our lives. Approximately 80 billion things are happening every single second. Living in this world and deciding how to navigate its vast complexities is difficult and often frustrating. From the time we’re children, we have to learn what to recognize and ignore, value and not, touch or look or eat. And all the while we categorize and catalog, trying to tear into understandable, bite-sized chunks a world that lives and breathes and moves in glorious four-dimensionality.

Like a painter who captures a scene – emotionally, realistically, abstractly, multiply – we writers choose our frames for each literary moment. Similar to our painter, who decides which colors represent the reality, we choose our vocabulary, our words. And also like our painter, we exclude so much more than we include, and what we choose to frame and describe says just as much about us and our audience as it does the moment we are ostensibly describing. We decide what to mention and what not, what words will classify the messiness of each second into something we not only can understand but relate to. I am in awe of the grand power of words, how these lines and circles and bars can translate the chaos of one breathable moment into something that we all agree to pretend adequately represents a knowable reality.

 

In short, we writers transform the tangible into the intangible and, in so doing, play god in deciding which of the 80 billion sights, sounds, tastes, events, and feelings to use to paint our verbal picture. And what power resides therein! What power in telling ourselves and our audiences how to make sense of the vastness of being, both in our fictional and our lived worlds.

It’s good to be a god.

The Romance of Betas

I papered the walls of my adolescent and early adult existence with the pages of romance novels. As I got older, I expanded to other genres, but romances will always mean safety, comfort, and reliability to the adult Elle. I love romances: their predictable narrative format, their feel-good happily-ever-afters, their celebration of relationships as the most crucial aspect of human existence. I have great affection and nostalgia for some of the more common romantic staples: the initial dislike and distrust that hides bubbling passion, the BFF who represents the shero’s and/or hero’s id, the shero’s stumble or fall from a tree root or from a ladder (oopsy-daisy!) and into the strong arms of that oh-so-insufferable man. I even find adorable some of the impossible euphemisms for orgasms. Overall, I’m a flag-waving fan of the genre. Only one thing causes a slight snag in my overwhelming devotion to the genre: A preponderance of alpha men.

I like alphas; they’re great peeps and all. And sure, I realize romances are all about ideals, from romantic relationships themselves to the people who populate them. But, you know, I also dig gender diversity. Is it just me, or does your heart go pitter-pat at the thought of a tender, nurturing man with a far bigger IQ than gun collection? Or, and maybe this is just me, but I’m seduced by the thought of a nerdy, bespectacled hero, ala Spencer Reed inCriminal Minds or Daniel Jackson in Stargate: SG-1, who use their brains rather than a bullwhip to help the shero save the day.

I don’t write alphas, I don’t write alphas, or at least not traditional ones. At folks’ urging, I’ve written semi-alpha men, but they tend to read more like moody brooders. My question for you: Am I the only one who wants to read about heroes who look like hot nerds and sensuous poets rather than arrogant business tycoons and vampire lords?

Alpha males are great, but is there also room for nurturing, sexy, and soulful heroes with backgrounds in quantum mechanics? Yum!

Paranormal Romance: Celebrating the Beauty of the Common

I like the different. I like the weird. I like things that don’t quite fit, that look a bit too large or taste a smidge too bitter. I celebrate ugly and find inspiration in dissonance. If I wanted to be like everyone else, I would have become an accountant. Instead, I write paranormal romance.

Like many readers of paranormal romance, I like characters who don’t fit the archetypes. My heroes aren’t all alpha males, my sheroes are sometimes fat and happy about it, my female villains (gasp) don’t always sexually smolder to prove they’re powerful.

I wrote my very first published piece of paranormal fiction, Hunted, after pondering, “What would a world look like if women were the warriors and men the healers and thinkers?” My second novel, Hunted Past, grapples with definitions of beauty: Can people with scars – inside and out – be beautiful? Is beauty a noun, an adjective, or a verb? In my third, not-yet-published, novel, Hunted Dreams, my main couple is interracial, interspecies, and intersize.

Paranormal fiction, romance and not, seems the perfect place for wrestling with reality: its multiple pasts, its infinite present, and our hopes and fears for its futures. What an opportunity we have to explore the borders between beautiful and plain, ideal and corrupt, real and fantastic. As for me, I want more discordance, more ambivalence, more category-defying prose and more characters whose commonness and plainness charm us with reminders of our own complexity. 

We Westerners are bombarded every day with representations of unachievable ideals. I think we’re right to expect more from paranormal fiction. In mixing reality with fantasy, we have a unique opportunity to reexamine our relationship with our worlds.

How exciting to begin to explore the beauty of the mundane and the weird. 

Let's Not Make Nativism an American Tradition

You, like me, may have stumbled several times across the op-ed entitled “Christmas 2011 – Birth of a New Tradition.” Its chief message?: “Buy American,” a sentiment many of us can support. It’s the writers’ reasoning, as well as their repeated, and disdainful, waving of the phrase “the Chinese” like a nativist, pro-American flag, that knots my granny panties.

Below is a response I posted to a listserv of which I’m a member. Enjoy.

Hey, all.

Thanks for sharing this call to action. I, for one, am a huge fan of not buying people more stuff, since that's the last thing most of us need. My own personal philosophy is to either eschew presents or else buy people experiences, especially dinner with an amazing person like, well, me. :-D  Also, I'm deeply annoyed by our consumerist culture, which thrives on making people feel the answers to all of life's questions can be found in the aisle of a store. It also actively promotes sizeism, looksism, and other inequalities in hopes of "inspiring" hatred of self, only assuageable by purchasing products. I feel good when I don't participate in the economy of body hatred.

I also think buying local and national is a fantastic project, especially since U.S. corporations outsource to countries like China, Honduras, and the Philippines, because many of those countries don't have unions and don't have to pay their employees a living wage or provide safe and humane working conditions. Also, we have huge unemployment rates in the U.S. and could use the work, but corporations consistently use outsourced labor in order to keep prices low. I don’t like supporting companies that exploit these desperate workers. Given all this, I think it's amazing to support American workers, many of whom are experiencing pay stagnation and mandatory furloughs, instead of buying cheap stuff from mega-stores. 

However, I would also love to see us respect the workers and citizens of China and other nations who have responded to the call of Western corporations and Western greed for useless products. The U.S. has a history of exploiting Chinese, Mexican, and others' labor and then blaming them for taking American workers' jobs and "ruining" the American economy. You can see throughout American history how we've begged these folks for help and, when we're done with them, framed their efforts as attempts to take over our country. Rather than hating on Chinese, Mexican, Filipino, Taiwanese, and other international workers, maybe we should shine the light of our disapproval on Western corporations for outsourcing in the first place, flooding our country with these cheap products, and then trying to brainwash us into believing we need them. 

In sum, I support buying stuff as infrequently as possible. When I do buy, I support buying local. I also support buying fair-trade. I do this because I'm grumpy about what corporations have done to the American worker and our economy. I would also like to see us honor our local and international sisters and brothers who continue to labor in terrible conditions so most of us can "enjoy" buying lots of stuff very cheaply. 

Happy holidays to all of you. May your Tofurky Day rock your socks. 

Hugs,

Elle

The Voices! The Voices!

I’m sure some wise person somewhere at sometime said something to the effect of, “When authors create characters, they are in fact merely articulating pieces of themselves.” The fact is, we write what we know, and, if we’ve been doing things right, we tend to know ourselves pretty well; in this way, at least some aspects of each of our characters end up mirroring our own.

That acknowledged, I want to learn to make my characters speak with extremely distinct voices. I just finished writing a book featuring a young, well-educated White woman and a mixed-raced, ex-Army vet. They have distinct personalities and have lived enormously different lives; as such, I don’t want them to sound anything like the other. I found this my single biggest challenge when penning the book. I ended up differentiating them in large and obvious ways: Katana, my shero, refuses to swear and, as a college student, has a pretty decent vocabulary, while Reed, my hero, swears a lot more and uses some slang, as I figured an ex-military man would tend to do. I also kept a certain television character in mind when writing Reed’s lines, which ended up being hugely helpful (and, given that the character is portrayed by Shemar Moore, also kind of, ahem, inspirational).

Did I succeed in making these two characters, who have very different pasts but are also mutually kind, generous, and lonely people, speak in ways unique to them? I hope so. I can’t pretend I have a secret recipe for working this magic and am, in fact, curious to hear if others have ideas on how to use dialogue to illustrate the unique personalities of their characters.

I love making my characters walk, breathe, and talk. The challenge is making their walks move differently, their breaths sigh distinctly, and their words paint unique pictures of themselves as they have been, are now, and will be.


Note: Originally posted here at the Soul Mate Publishing author blog.

November is National Adopt-a-Senior-Pet Month!

The cutest things in the world are kittens and puppies, right? Those disproportionately-large heads, those enormous eyes, that boundless energy and clumsiness, the amoral gleam in their eyes: Nothing in the world is cuter. Right? 


In spite of the obscene, cuddly cuteness of baby kittens and puplets, I admit I find something else even more adorable: An adult animal, especially a senior, that doesn't pee all over my carpet and expend enough energy to make a meth addict crave a nap. 

I LOVE SENIOR ANIMALS. They're awesome. Like me, they're low-key, snuggly, and already know what truly matters in life: snuggles, warmth, and boundless love. 


In case I haven't yet totally harshed your kitten/puppy buzz, below are some reasons from Petfinder and me listing why senior animals are a family's best friend:


1. Baby animals, especially puppies, pee a lot. Seniors have already been potty trained.
2. You're in the mood for a nap and some bad TV? Guess what? So is a senior pet. Even better, they'll probably snuggle with you throughout the whole thing.
3. I know it sounds like I'm making this up, but I swear I'm not: Senior animals somehow have the emotional maturity to understand you offered them a reprieve. They will adore you. You know how everyone says animals offer unconditional love? Imagine that plus pure, continuous worship. Yeah, it's pretty freakin' awesome.
4. According to Petfinder, senior animals are easier to teach. I've always said intelligence is part intellectual and part emotional; senior animals just seem to have the maturity to concentrate harder and succeed more.
5. I have a few cats and have found the older a cat, the likelier s/he is to concentrate more on me and less on other cats. To put it a bit more nerdily: my importance to my kitties is positively correlated with their age. Not to be narcissistic or anything, but who doesn't love being number one?
6. If you have ever wanted to be a superhero like the ones you read about, the fastest and most effective way to do that is to save those whom most others have abandoned and forgotten: senior animals.


If there is any part of you that wants to make a difference in an animal's life and give yourself the best gift imaginable, I urge you to adopt a senior pet right now. If you're unsure how, try Petfinder or message me. 


Thanks, superhero. 

This is me with Velly, a beloved companion and soul mate
who has since passed. I wouldn't trade a single day.