Inkless

Some Microsoft Word Macros To Help You With Common Tasks

I’ve just added a new page to the site that will be a central area for ideas and macros to help you with common tasks in Microsoft Word.

I will try to think of others that are within my VB programming ability and time constraints. Of course I love suggestions, so if you’ve got one, please respond. Maybe I can come up with something.

One final word: since I’m on the subject of useful writing and editing macros, I should point you as well to the many detailed free macros offered on Roger J Carlson’s website.

rhythm is more important than spelling in imitating regional dialect

In Reading Like a Writer, a book on literary analysis for aspiring writers, Francine Prose quotes Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (pg 16). Part of the quote is this piece of dialog:

“Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed towards Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer my conscience if I did.”

As Prose points out, the word “aloose” alone goes along way towards conveying “the rhythm and flavor of a local dialect”. I’d add that the flow of the speaker’s voice, with run-ons and sentence-fragments and the little repetitions of casual speech (look here…see here… Here this fellow) is smooth enough and genuine enough that her unfamiliar word combination doesn’t throw us off. Like many of Flannery O’Connor’s characters, the speaker has a convincing regional accent because O’Connor does most of her work with diction and grammar, and gives us only occasional, well-chosen re-spelled or re-structured words to deal with.

Diction is the focus here. The word means “word choice”, but includes the sense of “enunciation” and “pleasing speaking ability”—word choice that is about words in context, not just words on their own. A character’s speech doesn’t just need to reflect their origins of the speaker, it also has to be smooth enough that readers can slip into the new context. If O’Connor had played too much with the spelling, even if her new words better reflected the proper pronunciation, readers would have to spend much more time sounding out the words and would be less able to get into the feel of the writing. As an analogy, think about how much harder it is to read a Shakespeare play than it is to listen to the play performed (after a couple minutes slipping into the context).

Avoid Being a Bad-Grammar Maven

Take another example of O’Connor’s regional dialect, from Wise Blood. The main character, Haze, a young man from the country, arrives in a city not really knowing where to go, copies down the address of a woman written on the door of a bathroom stall and takes a taxi there:

They had driven a few blocks before Haze noticed him squinting at him through the rear-view mirror. “You ain’t no friend of hers, are you?” the driver asked.

“I never saw her before,” Haze said.

“Where’d you hear about her, She don’t usually have no preachers for company.” He did not disturb the position of the cigar when he spoke; he was able to speak on either side of it.

“I ain’t any preacher,” Haze said, frowning. “I only seen her name in the toilet.”

“You look like a preacher,” the driver said. “That hat looks like a preacher’s hat.”

“It ain’t,” Haze said, and leaned forward and gripped the back of the front seat. “It’s just a hat.”

They stopped in front of a small one-story house between a filling station and a vacant lot. Haze got out and paid his fare through the window.

“It ain’t only the hat,” the driver said. “It’s a look in your face somewheres.”

“Listen,” Haze said, tilting the hat over one eye, “I’m not a preacher.”

The taxi driver says the woman “don’t usually have no preachers for company”, which is fine, many writers use double-negatives to give a feeling of uneducated southernness to a story. But Haze doesn’t say “I ain’t no preacher” he says “I ain’t any preacher”, which feels like the correct grammar for his response to the driver, in a cracked sort of way. He also uses the correct “I’m not a preacher” at the end instead of “I ain’t a preacher”. Both of these instances give the reader the sense that Haze is exerting extra effort to make sure he’s being clear and correct, and the southern context comes through even more clearly than if O’Connor had applied the “rules” of poor grammar more consistently.

Stoning Your Readers

In contrast: take a look at this bit of dialog between two gypsies in Tim Power’s The Anubis Gates:

Responding to the dog’s summons, a dark man in a striped corduroy coat stepped out of the tent and strode across the grass toward Fikee. Like the dogs, he halted well short of the old man. “Good evening, rya,” he said. “Will you eat some dinner? They’ve got a hotchewitchi on the fire, smells very kushto.”

“As kushto as hotchewitchi ever does smell, I suppose,” Fikee muttered absently. “But no, thank you. You all help yourselves.”

“Not I, rya—my Bessie always loved cooked hotchewitchi; so since she mullered I don’t eat it anymore.”

Does this convince you of anything except that Mr. Powers looked up at least four words of Romani language? Perhaps when you were reading it, your reaction was something like mine: “Ok, ‘rya’ means ’sir’, so ‘Sir, there’s hotchewitchi’, some food or another, doesn’t really matter, so ‘Sir there’s some food. It’s very kushto.’ ‘Tasty’, obviously. ‘Sir there’s some food, it’s very tasty.’ Then the other guy, ‘As kush–as tasty as h– as that food ever does smell, I suppose.’ What a waste of my time.”

In Snatch, the itinerant, indigent, “Pikers” use diction and a manner of speaking that clearly reflects who they are, and contributes to the natural flow of their speech (so well that it’s funny). In The Anubis Gate, the foreign words are tossed into the flow of speech like large rocks. The rest of what the gypsy characters say includes none of the peculiarities of grammar or diction that might convince us that these are non-native speakers from a culturally isolated community.

However, Power’ has not subjected us to the worst form of cheater’s dialect: apostrophication (doin’ nuthin’ but talkin’ and cussin’) .

Rule #1 for Dialect: Do not cut off bits of words and dress the wounds with apostrophes unless a madman forces you to do so at gunpoint. Should a madman do so, you are still obliged to try and talk him down first.

Cataloging Dialog

Fiction includes many great examples of dialog in dialect, but in preparing to write stories, we should also analyze our chosen dialects outside of fiction examples in order to increase our authenticity. In a later post, I will try to do something like this for Russian, based on my knowledge of the language and my native-Russian-speaking friends.

Highlighting Paragraph Length

Many of the writing books I’ve read recommend varying paragraph size. The goal is to establish a natural rhythm and flow to sections of text—avoiding both lulling readers into a stupor with enormous blocks of text, or pummeling them with punchy one-sentence paragraphs.

Here’s how Self-Editing for Fiction Writers words its advice (in a chapter called “Breaking Up Is Easy to Do”):

So be on the lookout for paragraphs that run more than, say, a half-page in length. Whether it’s because readers feel lectured to, or because they feel crowded, or simply because some white space on the page is visually inviting, lengthy unbroken chunks of written material are off-putting… paragraphing more frequently can make your writing much more engaging.

And in contrast:

…a page-turner beginning to end is more likely to leave its readers feeling weary—and manipulated—than satisfied. When you want to create a more relaxed mood, or give your readers a chance to breathe (or reflect), or simply lull them into complacency before you spring something on them, try paragraphing a little less frequently than usual.

Sculpting your paragraphs for variety and rhythm can greatly help the flow of your prose.

Black Box Paragraphs

One easy way to study paragraphs as shapes is to select all of the text in the story (or in a portion if you’ve divided the story up to avoid word processor glitches) and then highlight it in black or dark gray. In addition to making your story look as though it’s been reviewed by the world’s strictest censor, this will provide you with black blocks instead of text, allowing you to focus your attention on the shape of the text without being distracted by the content.

To avoid having your notes also highlighted, consider using Microsoft Word comments instead of simply writing notes in the body of the text. When you’re done looking at paragraph size, you can simply select everything again and get rid of the highlighting, then go back and make any changes you left notes about.

Hopefully in the non-too-distant future, I will be able to make the time to create a simple macro that will allow you to search for paragraphs or sequences of paragraphs you feel may be too long or too short.

Overly Leadable Characters in Speculative Fiction

I’ve just finished reading The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold, quite a shift in gears after James Joyce’s Dubliners. Like much speculative fiction it was rather like a ride in a hovercar: the interesting technology was (mostly) able to carry the story, keep our belief suspended, across the plot holes.

While the book is enjoyable, there was one aspect of it busted my hovercar: Miles Vorkosigan’s followers are simply too easily lead (almost as easily led as Captain Phule’s legionnaires in Robert Asprin’s Phule’s Company). Many of Vorkosigan’s main associates seem to act like a single self-help seminar was all that stood between them and greatness: an out-of-work pilot and drunk not only stays sober after meeting Miles, but contributes both to strategy and to fighting, a thuggish commander learns restraint apparently by osmosis, a hermaphroditic mercenary becomes a great field commander (and manages to get a crush on Miles). One deserter becomes a brave war hero simply because Miles gives him the old “we’re all afraid; it’s not about losing your fear but about learning to control it” speech.

The climax of leadability is when when Miles’ crew of five, with only one fit and trained military person, overcomes two-dozen mercenaries and then manages to convince them that they (Miles’ five) are an inspection committee, rather than a bunch of smugglers. The reason we are given for why the the mercenaries believe the bluff (despite having one of their crew killed by the “inspectors”) is that doing so would make them feel less humiliated by their defeat. This is a level of psychological vulnerability almost as unbelievable as the physical vulnerability of the Star Wars stormtroopers to Fightin’ Ewoks.

Leaders Created by Followers

The plot of The Warrior’s Apprentice is dependent on the supernatural leadability of secondary characters in a way that brings to mind the the dependence of the Tarot character of The Fool on his luck. Phule’s Company can at least be defended as a book targeted at younger teenagers meant for simple pleasure reading (I loved it at 15, but couldn’t enjoy it nearly as much at 25). Since it doesn’t try too hard for seriousness, the supernatural leadability of supporting characters can be just part of the way the world works. Bujold gets into trouble because her book does try for more: such as seriously addressing political intrigue and war crimes. Because of this, each instance of Foolish leadability is an example of bathos—a fall in the story from the serious to the absurd.

Why did Bujold, like many other writers, make this mistake?

My best guess is that to become a writer, a person must have an exceptional ability to see other people’s points of view and value them as their own, as well as the time and the inclination to go off in a room alone to create for much of their lives. Good leaders need to pursue goals with single-minded determination and consistency (that’s vision), and must be constantly in the public eye, inspiring their followers to follow same these few goals. A fiction writer-leader is quite nearly an oxymoron.

Writers writing about leadership are describing people totally unlike themselves, so it is understandable that even good writers sometimes resort to propping up their weak leaders with unrealistically impressionable followers.

Real Leaders

Trying to create realistic leaders is central to a number of the stories I want to write. However, I am a typical writer with little experience myself with leadership to work from. That means a concomitant increase in research. I’ll add more on this topic as I come across it. Some of my ideas follow, but if you have any, please comment:

1. Don’t make a charismatic leader as reflective as you are. A person who interacts with a couple coworkers and meets about one friend per day for a couple hours is going to be able to do a lot more reflection, relative to talking, than someone who is leading and talking morning to night. Also, just because some leaders are successful does not mean their self images are free of major inaccuracies. Let your overworked leaders fall into misconceptions more easily than you do.
2. Give leaders slogans and core concepts to repeat. Good leaders often “read” their audience and adjust their messages, but they succeed most when the fundamental part of the messages remain unchanged. In Colleen Willis’s fabulous To Say Nothing of the Dog, “God is in the details” is the slogan used by Lady Schrapnell to push around an entire Oxford faculty, to the point where the main character flees through a time machine centuries into the past just to escape her attention. Giving your leaders ideas and slogans they hold on to relentlessly will help explain how they can guide large numbers of people, many of whom they may never meet directly.
3. Don’t make your followers abject worshippers. Another way that To Say Nothing of the Dog gets Lady Schrapnell right is by making many of the characters dislike her. By definition, a good leader is someone who can get other people to do more than they would without the leader. That often requires pressure, and few people respond well to pressure. Even if a leader is greatly admirable, lower-level officials may misinterpret the leader’s vision, and this will also compromise the leader. If follower reactions cover a range from bitterness through grudging respect, with only a select number admiring the leader, the leader will seem more real than one worshipped by otherwise not-overly-impressionable people.

Insurmountable Disadvantage in Science Fiction

Everybody loves to think that it’s the size of the fight in the dog, not the dog in the fight, that determines things. I like them so much so I was probably one of the only people who could really suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy the Ewoks in Star Wars, Return of the Jedi. Of course, I was eight at the time, and mostly I’m still able to enjoy them due to a combination of nostalgia and contrarianism against the Empire Strikes Back crowd…

The little two-foot teddy bears of Star Wars are the icons of Plucky Baseline characters: creatures or people that are hopelessly technologically backwards and yet still manage to overcome their hyper-advanced technologically- and sociologically-developed opponents (link is to the Orion’s Arm - a cooperative sci-fi universe project, a decent argument against the character type, though laced with the group’s own jargon).

Pluck in Action Movies and Fantasy Stories

For fiction set in our own world, plucky characters can usually get away with quite amazing upsets. Action heroes, especially, count on great indulgence from us in suspending our disbelief so they can win gunfights against dozens of opponents, jump vehicles over, around, and through bizarre obstacles, and generally act like one-man armies. Perhaps my favorite example of relatively believable pluck is when Sean Connery, playing Indiana Jones’ dad in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, manages to defeat a German WWII plane by scaring up a flock of geese to jam the plane’s propeller.

In fantasy stories as well, since the rules of the world are largely author-defined, writers can embed trade-offs in the rules of their universes that provide opportunities for Pluck. Usually the most powerful “technology” in a fantasy story will be magic, and thus the powers of wizards will need to be curtailed strongly in some way.

The default way to give non-wizards a chance is to make magic required extreme mental effort from wizards. I’ll mention I just finished Tim Power’s The Anubis Gate, and wizards in the story are limited both by the need to be close to “sources” of magic to perform greater feats, and the physical toll magic takes on them (pain and weakness, bleeding from the eyes, fatigue…). Role-playing games have even quantified the mental effort: a wizard has only a certain number of points of magical power which must be replenished after using magical abilities.

Other popular controls on magic are to make casting it involve inescapable vulnerabilities, or require devilish bargains, great sacrifices, virtuoso precision, vast amounts of time, or rare materials.

Moreover, at the heart of almost all magical stories are human or human-like characters with strengths and weaknesses recognizably similar to our own.

Inhuman Perfection

The major difference in space-age science fiction is that there will be inhumanly advanced characters. We are already able to greatly increase the toughness of human beings, and may soon be able to significantly increase human intelligence, and this is in the 21st century. A casually spacefaring future population will have centuries of improvement, advancement, and strengthing, and increasing of longevity behind it.

In such a battle against more recognizably “human” opponents (which would be the likely be the “good guys”, because empathizing with an inhumanly advanced group would be much more difficult), the advanced race would win every time. Not most every time—absolutely every time, regardless of pluck. The battle wouldn’t be conceptually like Drake vs. the Spanish Armada, it would be like a herd of sheep vs. Boston, Massachusetts.

If a military dictatorship has access to mass genetic modification and cloning technologies, energy weapons, and super-advanced alloys, it will not lose to Ewoks. The dictatorship would not make the soldiers’ strength or reflexes, armor or equipment, susceptible to the sticks of little savages any more than it would create them with exposed brains.

(images: walker, ewok)

Hitting Above Weight Class

Of course there are lots of tropes in science fiction that stretch believability: that’s part of the fun. So of course stories of pluck certainly can have a place in science fiction. But to really draw in readers (less credulous than I was at eight) a science fiction writer will need to put together a force better than Fightin’ Ewoks.

Readers are unlikely to believe your featherweight can take on a heavyweight in the ring, but a middleweight could do it.

Here are a few ideas for putting enough firepower in the hands of your overmatched heroes to make their upsets believable. If you can think of more, please respond with comments—I’m just improvising here.

1. if your advanced opponents are divided, a minority of them may either tip the balance by joining the heroes weakening the primary opponents
2. in a more sinister twist, a high-level third party may actually be found to have manipulated the heroes, carefully guiding them to victory for its own purposes
3. technology at the fringes of an advanced society may be sufficiently up-to-date to pose a reasonable challenge to superior opponent technology (provided you set the stage with sufficient communications to keep the fringes sufficiently “in the loop”)
4. since some technologies are so advanced and as-yet scientifically unproven to be indistinguishable from magic (according to Arthur C. Clarkes old adage), you can use the fantasy tools such as trade-offs and critical weaknesses to give them vulnerabilities (an example of this would be in Larry Niven’s Ringworld, when humans defeat more militarily capable opponents by improvising a weapon out of spaceship thrusters)
5. throttling back the technological advancement of your societies makes it easier for humans like us to compete—if you want less of a gap between us and frontrunners, set the story closer to the present
6. while it’s a recognizable sci-fi cliche, another way of making normal people important in the future is to have everyone live in the wake of the collapse of a superior civilization. Whatever destroyed that civilization or broke it up conveniently leaves some of the tools behind—allowing access to futuristic technologies without the insurmountable intellectual gulfs that would necessarily accompany them. As I said, though, this is a cliche and that means it would take more work to make a fresh story with this premise