Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Time for specific answers to burning questions. Just what were the WTF moments IoD slapped me with? Are they legitimate?

(If you’ve just joined, here’s where you can find Part 1 and Part 2 of this conversation.)

The book I submitted was Unraveling Time, which I still feel is one of my best books. It does, unfortunately, suffer from having one of the roughest opening sections I’ve ever written. There are reasons the opening is so rough. The reasons do not excuse or justify its roughness, but they may be instructive to any writer rushing toward self-publication.

So below, after some backstory, I will examine the IoD charges, set down my verdicts, and wrap up this series of posts.

The Backstory

I wrote Unraveling Time about a decade ago. Roc Books had just dumped me mid-series, leaving me with only four books published in my five-book Fallen Cloud Saga. No two ways about it, I was bitter and angry at the publishing industry but, in an attempt to soldier on, I decided not to write that fifth book (since it would have been impossible to sell), and instead worked on another project: a standalone novel that blended romance, history, and time-travel. The result was Unraveling Time.

It’s a good book, well-crafted, and generally (imho) well-written. When I submitted the MS to my agent (I still had one, then), she suggested I change the opening. My original structure began with what is now labeled “Book One/Bainbridge Island,” but she thought it was too slow and she suggested that I take the sections about the battle in Fallujah and its aftermath (which I’d feathered in as flashbacks in Book One) and combine them into a new opening section. This became the “Prologue/Fallujah/Seattle” opening the book now has.

After making these changes and resubmitting the MS to my agent, she dropped me, also. My writing, she said, was heading in a “different direction.”

That…hurt.

When I self-published Unraveling Time, it was as good as I could make it. The opening, restructured and inelegant as it is, was my then-best-effort. It was not, however, my best ever. Not by a long shot.

The Charges

So, what errors/issues did IoD call out? What was it in that opening section that burst Smith’s immersion bubble so hard and so often? The final list comprised:

• Echoing Headwords
• Declarative Sentence Repetition
• Missing Commas
• Improper Verb Tense
• Overly Complex Syntax

That’s more than three, which is all Smith usually allows, but he admitted he charged me a WTF on “missing commas” in error, and so he went back and pressed onward, only to find more issues. These issues are unlikely to affect readers as strongly as they did Smith, but that’s part of the IoD project. Smith is highly attuned to these opening section gaffes, and his intent is to shine a bright light on what are for the most part completely avoidable issues.

Echoing Headwords

The first two sentences in Paragraph One start with “It was.”

I doubt this would break anyone’s immersion, but it might prevent immersion in what are the most important sentences in any book. Echoing headwords have been used to good effect by others (See Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities), and in this case, the repetition would have worked if the second sentence built on the rhythm and imagery of the first. Unfortunately, I did not do that. What I have is two sentences with identical openings about the same topic, but with completely dissimilar images. It’s inelegant, clunky, and amateurish.

Verdict: Guilty.

Declarative Sentence Parade

This is Smith’s term for a repetition in simplistic syntax. When you have a section of prose that repeats the basic subject-verb-object pattern, it becomes a subliminal drumbeat in the reader’s mind. This is one of Smith’s pet peeves, and he’s highly attuned to it. His charge is that each sentence in the opening paragraph begins with that subject-verb-object pattern, and he excerpts the beginning of each line to prove his point.

This is an issue that, before this smackdown, I literally could not see, or perhaps I saw it but it just did not register in my mind as an issue. I’m not sure how big an issue this is with the average reader, but once you see it, you can’t un-see it. To be precise, my sentences don’t all begin with subject-verb-object–the “object” in some cases is a prepositional clause, an adjective, etc.–but they do all begin with subject-verb.  Also, all of these sentence openings are followed with other clauses and structures, so the rhythm of the opening words is broken up and separated by other, arrhythmic syntax. Neither of these diminish the rhythm of the sentence openings. Overall, each sentences starts with a Dum-dee-Dum rhythm, and it’s annoying.

Verdict: Guilty

Missing Commas

This one Smith admits he got wrong. The sentence he cites is “Aw, shit,” Axle said from his truck in the rear. Smith felt there should be a comma after the word “said,” which is a stylistic preference of his but which he was told is not an actual grammatical error.

Verdict: Charges dropped.

Improper Verb Tense

In an effort to rectify his error on the above, Smith returned to the book and kept going. In short order, he found an improper verb tense; specifically, he found a spot where I should have used past perfect instead of simple past tense.

This is definitely one of those grey areas. The standard style, when you are telling a story, is to use simple past tense; He did this, they did that. When, in the course of the story, you need to relate something that happened in the character’s past (as in a flashback), you use past perfect; He had done this, they had done that. If this goes on for a while, all those hads get cumbersome and clunky, so after you’ve established that we’re talking about something in the character’s past, you can slip back into simple past tense and the reader will go along with it.

Problems arise when you return from past perfect to simple past too quickly. The reader hasn’t had time to establish a footing in the character’s past so, when you return to simple past tense, the reader isn’t sure if you’re switching back to the original time of the main plot, or if you’re still in the flashback.

In this case, it wasn’t a flashback, but just a few lines of backstory, and that’s not nearly enough to give the reader a temporal footing, so it all needed to be in past perfect. And it wasn’t.

Verdict: Guilty.

Overly Complex Syntax

This error is charged without evidence. I don’t know exactly which sentence caused a problem for Smith, forcing him to back up and re-parse to make sense of it. I think I know what sentence tripped him up, but I can’t be sure because they all make sense to me.

My estimation of this is that, had Smith been able to become immersed in the story prior to these sentences, he wouldn’t have found them to be much of an issue. Thus, the previous issues–the Guilty verdicts above–prevented the reader from being enveloped by the story and successfully navigating a more complex sentence structure.

Verdict: Unproven.

Conclusion

Out of the five WTF charges, there were definitely three of which I was guilty, and that’s all anyone is allowed by the IoD rules. It’s important to remember that Smith’s IoD treadmill is a microscope, and Smith himself is very sensitive to certain mistakes common to indie-published books. So, would all these issues keep the average reader from becoming immersed in the story? Probably not, but Smith’s theory is that while individually they may not affect the average reader, when the issues pile up one atop the other, they do.

Also, his report is not a condemnation of the entire book, just of the opening. Those first sentences, paragraphs, and pages are incredibly important, and I have to admit that–regardless of any extenuating circumstances–I failed in my job to craft the best opening I could. In retrospect, understanding my mindset at the time, I can see that I should have held off publishing the book until I’d had a chance to get my feet back under me.

Is it a good book? Yes. Am I still proud of it? Yes. Does the opening suck? Well, pretty much, and that’s very unfortunate as has probably turned off some potential fans.

Publish in haste, repent at leisure.

Thanks for following along. And now…a kitten.

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