Oops! Lie vs. Lay

These two words are in no way interchangeable.  “To lie” is an intransitive verb (in other words, it doesn’t take an object) meaning “to recline”.  “To lay” is a transitive verb (it needs a direct object) meaning “to place”.

Lie:  I will lie down.  (no direct object)

Lay: I will lay the book on the table.  (the direct object = the book)

The mnemonic device to help distinguish the two goes like this:

To lIe is to reclIne. (Both have a long “i” sound.)

To lAy is to plAce.  (Both have the long “a” sound.)

The lie/lay confusion mainly stems from the fact that “lay” serves as the past tense of “lie”.  It doesn’t help when popular culture mixes them up, either:

If I lay here

If I just lay here

Would you lie with me

And just forget the world?

–Snow Patrol, “Chasing Cars”

Thanks a lot, Snow Patrol.

Here are the forms of each verb:

lie, lay, lain; lying

lay, laid, laid; laying

Here’s what they look like in the wild:

LIE:  The gorillas prefer to lie on banana leaves.

Yesterday, I just lay around the house.

The dog has lain there for two whole days.  I hope he’s okay.

How long has this suitcase full of money been lying in the driveway?

LAY:  The gorillas like to lay banana leaves on the grass to make a bed.

Yesterday, I laid the book on the counter, but it’s not there now.

She’s laid her new cocktail dress on her bed.

Are you still laying out the napkins for the guests?  What’s taking you so long?

So, now, can you find the mistake in the Snow Patrol lyrics?

>>>29APRIL2012 UPDATE: Thanks to the sharp eye of commenter Clarice, Snow Patrol’s reputation as wordsmiths has been salvaged.  The “lay” in the if-clause above is perfectly acceptable as it is indeed the past of “lie”–the necessary form for present unreal conditional. My apologies to Gary Lightbody and the gang.<<<

Wednesday’s Word Compost

For today’s word-compost (free-writing), let’s get sensual–with a twist.

Today’s direction: Write the details of your immediate surroundings without using any visual references.

 

Remember, the purpose of word-composting is to shove aside the editor and let the creative part of the brain have free play.  Here’s a review of the guidelines:

1. Keep pencil/pen/fingers-on-the-keyboard moving

2. Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation, sentence structure

3. If you get stuck, repeat the last word or phrase as many times as you have to until more words come.

Ten minutes to delve into four oft-neglected senses.  Go!

 

Here’s what I managed, seated in my favorite local cafe:

The low lazy voice of the indie artist over the stereo. The hum of the refrigerator cases, the growl of the industrial coffee brewer, brewing industrial amounts of house blend.  The undifferentiated rumble of conversation breaking for a differentiated snippet: house… Elvis… apparently… yeah… Americano…  

The clink of spoon against ceramic, glass stacked into glass.  Warmth, stirred by ceiling fans, swath of cool when the side door yawns.  Clack of boot heels across the worn wooden floor.  Papers fold and unfold crisp news articles.  The shriek of the milk steamer settles into a mutter.  It has to work so hard at the beginning to find its stride.  

The smell of coffee is lost in long acclimation.  I know it’s there, but I can’t smell it.  The wash of baked muffins, panninis, breads, lays down a base coat of fragrance.  

Earl Grey steeping, its bergamot signature scrawled around my face for the first scalding sip.  Soy milk lending it substance.  Soft mutter of dozens of fingers putting keyboards through their paces.  Everyone has a deadline.

 

Okay, go ahead and reread what you’ve written, observing without judgment (I know I sound like a yoga teacher here).

At this location, in this particular moment, I notice that I’m connecting most with sound.  If I’d tried this exercise a few months ago (at the beginning of my pregnancy, incidentally), it would have been smell.  Most of my first trimester, I was assaulted by smells, a common symptom that often is the cause of nausea in early pregnancy.  Today, I’m tuned into sound.

What sense are you plugged into today?

Grammar Tip Tuesday–Hat Tip to Oxford

I went through my grammar school days apathetic about the Oxford comma.  My teachers and textbooks declared that  you can—but you don’t have to—include a comma before the “and” in a series.  Therefore, both of the following are just fine:

A.  For the road trip, we packed corn nuts, three ipods, two body pillows and a semi-feral ferret. [a, b, c and d]

B.  For the road trip, we packed corn nuts, three ipods, two body pillows, and a semi-feral ferret. [a, b, c, and d]

The “Oxford comma” is the third comma found in B.  Deleting the comma or keeping creates no confusion in the sentences, so there was no reason to slavishly adhere to one or the other (except, of course, for matters of consistency within a single project).  I tend toward A in my own writing.

Well, all that changed when I saw this:

 

That does it.  No more apathy.  I’m sold, albeit with reservations.

I also ascribe to the school of minimizing the use of commas.  Nothing is more annoying than the overuse of the unassuming little comma.  Some argue the Oxford comma should only be used when its deletion would cause the confusion as shown in the graphic.  The trick is to be aware of where the deletion might result in ambiguity.

The case is not settled.  Oxford comma devotees will use the serial comma every single time.  Minimalists will rearrange the sentence to reduce ambiguity rather than slip one more freaking comma in there.  I may be an extremist in many areas of my life, but this isn’t one of them.  For me, the Oxford comma has its place in removing confusion; otherwise, it’s not necessary.

Where do you stand?

The Writer’s Space

For me, the writer’s space is wherever there is a notebook and pen.  I’ll write on the bus, on the train, (in a box, in the rain), in a garage while waiting for the mechanics to finish tuning my car.  When I did a turn as movie extra, I got all kinds of writing done in the down time.

The wild mind can work just about anywhere–except home.  It takes a tremendous amount of will for me to focus on writing at home.  And when I get to editing?  Forget it.  The moment I hit a snag while revising at home, domestic chores suddenly become dire.  I notice there are dishes to do, the floor is a disaster, I really should make the bed.  (Why don’t I ever have this compulsion when I’m playing computer games?)

Cafes are my best bet.  My most productive sessions get done with a sweet, caffeinated soy-something sharing a corner table with my laptop. Ever since university, I’ve discovered I work best in semi-noisy, active places, places where I can create my own bubble of silence.  Libraries stifle me, every sniffle or swallow is amplified a billion times and is sure to summon a horde of vigilante silence monitors.

All through college, I was a nightclub-and-notebook writer.  Wrote tons, but never really polished anything.  I graduated to cafes when I was working on my thesis.  SB had yet to spawn the cafe culture, so pickings were limited.  Fortunately, San Diego had the Pannikin–one in Flower Hill and the other on PCH.  I visited the PCH one just recently while spending the holidays with the family.  Tucked under a mermaid painting on the second floor, I spent every spare writing moment.

While living in rural Japan, I was hard-pressed to find a location willing to let me plug in and camp for hours on end, never mind the availability of soy milk.  Starbucks was a crap-shoot option.  Some of them allowed plugging in, some didn’t.  Note: the one in Nagoya, across from the Hilton, did.

Now, back in Vancouver, the cafe of choice is Our Town, with its great staff, soy chais, a happy array of vegan muffins, wide windows, and evenings of open mike and ukeles.  I just now got back from a several-hour stretch of revisions.

I should coast on the great momentum I built up at Our Town today, but I’m home now.  I should probably make dinner.

Writing Prompt-O-Rama

Writing prompts help hone the infinity of story choices out there and help lift the curse of the blank page.

My love of writing prompts was affirmed last May when I participated in the May Story-a-Day challenge over at Forward Motion for Writers.

FM has a huge list of story prompt generators for registered members (it’s free), with pictorial options for those more visually inspired.  I stuck to the written prompts, myself, as I tend to be too literal with pictures.

One of my favorite generator sites is Seventh Sanctum.  Their Writing Challenge Generator (with at least three elements) spawned several stories during that wild month.

Another fun one, geared toward speculative fiction (as I am), can be found at the Speculative Muse.

Also, FM Writers has their Zettercise generator, which can be used for writing prompts or writing fun.

The key for me in working with generators is not to fall into the trap of regenerating prompts when inspiration doesn’t immediately come to me.  That trap will have you back at blank-page-stare state, which is what we’re trying to avoid.  Dedicate yourself to one prompt, free-write on it, then pull up a fresh page and get to work–er, play.

For me, writing-prompt writing is a step away from the wild freedom of free-writing in that I’m looking to create a story with a beginning, middle and end.  I allow a lot of leeway in there, though, because the focus here is creation.   The imagination gets free play, but it’s within certain loose boundaries.  At the same time, the internal critic gets a voice but doesn’t get to dominate.  There is plenty of time for the critic to go to town in a later draft.

Another option is to visit an anthology market site and use one of their calls for submissions to create your own possible submission (and give yourself a real deadline).  I recommend Duotrope and Ralan’s.

At the Duotrope market search page, narrow the focus by choosing a genre, and make sure you click on the “Anthologies only?” button.  Ralan’s is primarily specfic.  At the top of the page click on “Antho” or “Antho–4theLove” to see their list.

Happy Word-Crafting!

 

 

 

 

Oops! Possessive vs. Contractions

Remember how I mentioned on Tuesday that the finer points of grammar are often a matter of personal style?  Well, not today.  The mistakes I’ll be pointing out in the “Oops” series are pretty much indisputable wrongs, which can make a manuscript look slap-dash and unprofessional.

The mix up between possessives (its, your, their, whose) and their homophonic contractions (it’s, you’re, they’re, who’s) stands out to an experienced reader like pasta stains on the page.  Fortunately, though these pairs result in some of the most common mistakes, they are also easily corrected.

The basics:

A. “its” = third-person singular gender-neutral possessive adjective.  Don’t worry about the terminology.  That’s a grammar-nerd way of saying “its” should be used like this:

I would have bought the green convertible, but its windshield was cracked and its tires were worn.

it’s= a contraction for “it is” or “it has”.  It gets used like this:

I wanted to buy the green convertible, but it’s pretty dilapidated and according to the title, it’s been in an accident.

 B. “your” = second-person singular or plural possessive adjective:

Get your ugly mug out of my bar.

“you’re” = a contraction for “you are”:

If you don’t get out of my bar, you’re going to be sorry.

C. “their” = third-person plural possessive adjective:

The dragons soared our across the ocean, the setting sun flashed off their metallic wings.

“they’re” = a contraction for “they are”:

“They’re not coming back,” she sighed as their flashing silhouettes receded.

[To add more oops to the mix, there is the adverb “there” to deal with.]

D. “whose” = interrogative possessive adjective:

Whose bagpipes are these?

“who’s” = contraction for “who is” or “who has”:

Who’s going to the Highlander festival?  Who’s been there before?

 

Simple, right?  Try it out with a few excerpts from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (my current reading material).

1.  “Hello, Kalle Blomkvist,” she said to herself.  “(Your/You’re) pretty pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

2.  “(Its/It’s) all I can spare.  (Its/It’s) my own money, and I can’t really deduct you as a dependent.”

3.  Vanger smiled.  “As to (your/you’re) career, we might agree that for the moment (its/it’s) somewhat on hold.

4.  She had postponed (their/they’re/there) most recent scheduled meeting with the excuse that she had to work, and a vague sense of uneasiness gnawed at him.

5.  “So (your/you’re) full of hope that you can somehow recover (your/you’re) power over me right away.  Am I right?”

6.  “I want you to do (your/you’re) damnedest to identify as many as you can and see to it that (their/they’re/there) families receive suitable compensation….”

I know it’s too much to hope for that chat rooms and text messages will ever be free of such errors (especially when “ur” stands in for both “your” and “you’re”).  However, we can hope that fewer essays and manuscripts come across our desks suffering from such obvious mistakes.

 

Free-Writing Wednesday (aka Word-Composting)

Free-writing is wonderful in its simplicity.

I first learned of it in college when my TA turned me on to Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life.  The purpose of free-writing is to let loose our limitless creativity, which we keep buried under our routine ways of thinking and which is often at the mercy of our internal critics.  In the book, Goldberg calls this internal critic/editor the “monkey mind” (which doesn’t exactly work for me as a metaphor because monkeys can get pretty wild in their play).

The guidelines go like this (notice that I didn’t say “rules”):

1. Set yourself either a time (five minutes to start) or space limit (half a page to start) and KEEP THE PEN/PENCIL MOVING until you reach it.

2. Yes, really: KEEP THE PEN/PENCIL MOVING.  Write upside-down or in circles if you want, just keep it going.

3. Don’t erase or cross out.

4. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, etc.

5. Be fearless.  Don’t shy away from anything.  Dumb, dangerous, dry, disgusting–it all goes into the compost heap.

That’s right: banish the inner editor completely.  If you get stuck, write the last word that came out again and again until you get back in the flow.

Most orthodox folk (yes, I’m well aware of the irony here), insist on writing utensils and paper, but this also works on a keyboard.  If you want to test it out on your computer, check out Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die site; it has a “Kamikaze Mode” that starts erasing words if you break guideline #1.  If you opt for the download version, there’s a “Disable Backspace” setting that makes sure you follow guideline #3.

Free-writing is fabulous for brainstorming and is a great way to warm up before sitting down to more (ahem) serious writing.  In fact, those of you who have come in contact with The Artist’s Way, might recognize the technique from “morning pages”, which works in a similar way: you write out all the first layer debris that scums up the surface of your mind, so that you can start working deeper into the imagination.

Your non-fiction writing can benefit from this as well.  I’ve used this successfully with essay topics, where it has helped me find a direction for a certain topic as well as flesh out my ideas.  The first five minutes of an essay test has me on a piece of scratch paper, spilling out whatever comes to mind in an effort to get past the obvious.

For fiction writing, the possibilities are endless.  Stuck on a character?  Free-write from his/her POV.  Can’t think of a way to describe a basic setting to make it come alive?  Free-write every last detail of that cafe down to the dead ragged moth coated in window-sill dust.  Having trouble with an action scene?  Free-write every physics-defying possibility.

Okay, try it.  Set a timer for five minutes.  Here’s a prompt to get you started:

“I remember…”

Again, if you get stuck, rewrite the last word you wrote or go back to the prompt:

I remember I remember I remember the ugly brown goat at the petting zoo.  It lunged at my peanut bag, tore it open in one snap.  Peanuts tumbled across the tray of my stroller, but before my hands could catch them, the intruding grey goat snout lipped them all up.  I remember that I screamed, anger, frustration.  I was saving those peanuts for the cute black baby goat over there.  Not this fat farting leviathan of a goat.  My mother hustled me away. I think she interpreted my howling as fear.  Nope.  All year and a half of me wanted to strangle that foul bug-eyed beast.

Time’s up.  Shake out your hand.  Read it over.  Anything interesting or unexpected?  Now, now, stuff that hyper-critic back in the box and nail it shut.  Just notice what you wrote without getting judgmental.

I was struck by how violent my reaction to the goat was.  I remember wanting to really hurt that animal, and that was before I had the language to articulate that kind of violence.

How did it go for you?

Grammar Tip Tuesday: Punctuating Interrupted and Continued Speech

Fun with dialogue and the em dash (—) as it interrupts continued speech with some kind of action.  This specific tip holds my interest as I’ve been trying to settle the question in my own writing.  As with many grammar tips, the finer points are often subject to personal style.

Most are familiar with the use of the em dash for interrupted speech:

Jan said, “Don’t you know you shouldn’t mix ammonia and—“

“I know what I’m doing,” Marvin snapped.  “I’ve done it lots—“

Overcome by fumes, Marvin slumped to the floor.

But what happens when the speech is interrupted in the middle of a sentence and then continued?  Here’s what the Chicago Manual of Style has to say about it:

If the break belongs to the surrounding sentence rather than to the quoted material, the em dashes must appear outside the quotation marks.

“Someday he’s going to hit one of those long shots, and”—his voice turned huffy—”I won’t be there to see it.”  (taken from 6.90)

In our situation, that would look something like this:

“Don’t you know you should mix ammonia and”—Sal stepped back as Marvin slumped to the floor—”bleach.”

Note, however, that if the speech is interrupted with a speech tag (said, muttered, snapped), then you need a comma after the em dash and before the closing quotation marks:

“Don’ you know you shouldn’t mix ammonia and—,” Sal started to argue, but Marvin slumped to the floor.

So with simply interrupted speech, the dash goes inside the quotation marks, but interrupted then continued speech has them outside the quotation marks.

Ah, but wait.

While delving into the use of interrupting/continuing em dash, I came across this little tidbit on the Punctuation Made Simple website:

[9] An divided quote (interrupted by something narrative rather than attributive)

 “My dear sweet friend”—sarcasm oozed between his words—“I’m so sorry.” 

“I’ll take that one”—she pointed—“and that one, and that one too.” (She is pointing while speaking, but the words were spoken continuously)

[9A] If the actual quote is interrupted, the em dash goes inside the quotes

“Because—” Linda rubbed her chin “—I just don’t know what to do.” (The spoken words are pause during the action.)

That’s a new one for me.  Has anyone else seen the punctuation differentiated this way?  I’ll have to keep an eye out for sandwiching em dashes inside the quotation marks.

 

Writing Fun 1

Let’s start with the fun stuff.  I was going to call this “writing warm up” or “writing exercise”, but I’ve found there is too much baggage attached to exercise in that most people approach working out as just plain work.  It’s not.  It’s play.

I’ve used this game with myself as well as with some of my students to jump-start the imagination and start working with figurative language.  (And I wish I could remember the website I found it on as I’ve been using it for years.)

It’s a simple exercise.

Step 1: Write a list of eight random concrete nouns.

Step 2: Choose a job.

Step 3: Write a list of eight verbs that relate to that job.

Step 3: Write five sentences, each using one of your nouns and one of your verbs.

Get crazy.  No one else is going to see this.  Part of the play is to let yourself write silly nothings just for the fun of it.  You have permission to write absolute garbage.  (Remember: garbage makes compost from which something marvelous can grow.)

Just to show I give as good as I get, I’ll do it too (using my husband as a word-generator)…

nouns–dog, cat, cheese, mouse, color, hippopotamus, windshield wiper, arrow

job=yoga instructor

verbs–lead, teach, talk, move, demonstrate, educate, encourage, enlighten

Sentence samples (my contribution to the compost heap):

1. The windshield wiper enlightened the glass by sweeping aside the snow of ignorance.
2. The arrow leads the eyes to the bullseye.
3. Demonstrating the difference between mass and density, the hippopotamus floated on the surface of the algae-scummed pool.
4. I dare you to try to educate that cat on the joys of swimming.
5. How could he stay on his low-fat diet with all that melted mozzarella cheese encouraging him to devour the pizza?

If you have a writing partner, have that person write the lists that you draw from and vice versa.  Most of my writing partners will do their utmost to make it challenging.  If you don’t have a writing partner, try to get a friend or family member to offer their ideas.  Someone who doesn’t know the purpose of the elicited words can’t subconsciously help you.

Again, don’t approach this as work.  Have fun.

Into the Matrix

Welcome to the site.

On a personal development level, I intend this to be a virtual space to splay my passion for writing.  This is me moving from the pages of my notebooks to something more public.

Good writing exercises both hemispheres of the mind: the creative right and the logical left, energy and form.  I hope to collect in these pages resources to nurture them–and if others can benefit from this e-adventure, all the better.

Stay tuned for regular posts such as Grammar Tip Tuesdays, Writing Prompt Madness, Oops! Common Mistakes Archive, Writing Fun, and more.

On a professional level, this is blog a portal for those interested in obtaining editing/proofreading services for their literary masterpieces (or unabashed pulp), whether slated for professional or self publication.  I also edit/proofread essay assignments, term papers, even resumes and cover letters.  For more details, contact me at editing.tutor@gmail.com.

Thanks for visiting.  Happy writing!