The Editor Pontificates: Past Perfect

Double-Stuf-OreosNo, I’m not talking about the perfect past – you know, where your grandma keeps going on about the Good Old Days in the Past, When Everything Was Perfect. What I’m talking about here is the grammatical “past perfect” tense.

Bear with me for a moment here. I keep stumbling over this matter in my work as editor (ahem – I almost feel like I should capitalise this: My Work As Editor. Spoken with a suitably declarative intonation, so that the capitals become evident and everyone is duly impressed. Anyway…). Now, most of you probably don’t give a rip about grammar. If so, just ignore me. But some of you might actually care, and for those, allow me to pontificate for a moment.

“Pontificate”, incidentally, comes from the Latin “pontifex”, which was an early word for “bishop” (the Pope is still called Pontifex Maximus today). So, to pontificate is, quite plainly, to preach. Speaking of Latin, “perfect” is, of course, also Latin, from “perficio”, “through + make”, or “finish building”. Something that’s perfect is completed, all the way. So in grammar terms, something that’s “perfect” is something that’s finished, over with.

I was in an online discussion the other day on this very topic, and one participant, who is an ESL teacher in Asia, said that when he talks to his students he calls the past perfect the “double past”. That’s a great term, because it describes exactly what it is. Like a Double Oreo cookie, where you get twice the filling (the Oreo of Oreos, as it were), the double past means you get the past of the past.

So, when I’m talking about today, I use, of course, the present tense. “Today I waffle on about grammar matters and bore my readers to tears.” If I talk about yesterday, I use the simple past: “Yesterday, I thought of this topic.” Now, if I want to talk about something that happened before the past, I use the past perfect: “Yesterday, I thought of this topic, because the day before yesterday I had discussed it with other writers online.” When I thought of the topic yesterday, the discussing was already in the past. Double past, or past perfect.

In English, to put it simply, the past perfect is formed by “had” and the appropriate verb form: today I eat, yesterday I ate, the day before that I had eaten. (There are some convoluted verb forms where you end up with stacks of “had”, but we’ll ignore those here.)

In daily life, we rarely use the double past. But in writing, it does become relevant. Most fiction is written in the past tense (“It was the blue bowl that started it all…”), so if you describe something that happened before that moment you’re describing, you’ve got to put it in past perfect: “It was a turquoise blue, very much like the eyes of the weird guy that had stared at Cat so disturbingly in the Room of Local Antiquities.” If that “had” wasn’t there, it would mean that the guy is standing there right now, staring at Cat – but it happened earlier, before she walked into the Ceramics Room and saw the fateful blue bowl. Because the whole story is told in past tense, anything that happened prior to it requires the double past. (If you want to know what else happened with Cat and the blue bowl and just who that weird guy was, go read Seventh Son. End of advertisement.)

The most common mistake in this regard is to have your story told in past tense, but forget to use the double past when you’re telling of events prior to your “narrative present” (i.e. the time the story takes place in), which can leave the reader scratching their head as to exactly what’s happening when. But I’ve also seen stories that are told in present tense, where the author overcompensates: the “narrative present” is the present, so anything that happens before then should be in the simple past tense (single Oreo) – but then the author tries extra-hard to get the tense right and ends up putting in an excess of “had”. Nope, you don’t want that. If you’re telling it right now, a prior event goes in the simple past – single Oreo. If you’re telling everything in the past, a prior event goes in the past perfect or double past – it gets the double Oreo.

Make sense? Good. I’ll get off my editor’s pulpit then and stop boring you.

Life, the Universe, the Past Perfect and Double Oreos. Pass the milk.

Slow Writing

You know we’re in the first few days of Camp NaNoWriMo. And NaNo is all about cranking out the word count. Fast writing! The quicker, the better! NaNo has word sprints, NaNo has word wars (who gets the most words written in the shortest time, that sort of thing). There’s a Wrimo in one of the local groups who can produce something like 1000 words in ten minutes – she literally sounds like a machine gun when she’s typing (I was at a write-in once where I experienced that live. It was impressive).

Now, all of that stuff is fun. It’s all good. We’ve named our Camp NaNoWriMo cabin the Word Count Slayers (you can follow us on Twitter under that hashtag), because we’re gonna slay those word counts, dontcha know.

But… (you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you). Fast writing, writing in the pressure cooker, cranking out the lines, slapping together descriptions, slaying those word counts – do you hear the language? Pressure. Cranking. Slapping. Slaying. It’s all rather violent. What about growing, simmering, steeping, incubating?

I might have mentioned a time or two (hundred) that I like food. Scratch-cooked food. Homemade food. Slow food. A few months back, I was in the bookstore, and I ran across this book: The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft and Creativity, by Louise DeSalvo. I don’t often buy books off the bookstore shelf sight unseen (I usually get them from the library first, and then if I like a book enough, buy a copy for keeps), but this one grabbed me. So I took it home, and (slowly) perused it. And it talks about Slow Writing on just the same principles as Slow Food. Let your work mature. Let it grow. Simmer it, steep it, let it ripen.

I loved it. I want to work on those principles. Not rush, not feel pressurised. And just now, in the rabbit trails of Internetland, I ran across this excellent little video that makes the point very, umm, pointedly. They did a little experiment with kids: they gave them the beginnings of a simple drawing and asked them to complete the picture in ten seconds. Then they did it again, but this time they gave the kids ten minutes to finish the drawing. The results are well worth looking at.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPbjSnZnWP0]

Don’t rush the creative process. Give yourself the time to turn those clock hands into something more, maybe even something entirely different. My favourite of those drawings in the video is the one that turns the rudimentary clock into a cat. Forget the ticking timekeeper, get a kitty instead!

Now, I still love NaNo, and I’ll remain a die-hard Wrimo. You’ll note that when the kids in the video had ten seconds to do something, they did produce – they all had a drawing in the end. Time-pressured projects like NaNo are great for getting your butt moving, getting something down on paper (or screen, as it were), doing your first draft – and some of us (ahem, Yours Truly) need that motivation to get anything done. But when the kids had ten minutes, they drew something better. And so I want to learn to draw slowly, to let my stories simmer, let them grow and solidify, and not subscribe to the rush job that, it seems, everything and everyone wants to push us into. I want to subscribe to the Art of Slow Writing.

And just as a little side note, right at the moment that I’m writing this, I have a meatloaf in the slow cooker upstairs that’s been simmering away since 9 o’clock this morning. The kitchen smells delicious.

Life, the Universe, and the Art of Slow Writing. What project have you got simmering away in your creative slow cooker?

Easter Eggs

IMG_20160328_102501Happy Easter Monday, to those of you who celebrate it (Germans, Canadians, Brits, Down-Under-ites?). Here’s Steve, being the Easter Bear, to add his good wishes.

Yes, we still have Easter eggs at our house, even though the Offspring are a few years past the Easter egg hunting stage. Much like I can’t imagine Christmas without cookies, I can’t have Easter without eggs. When we were kids, we always got some in our Easter baskets, or rather, we hunted for them in the garden. (One year, one got missed, and a friend of my brother’s found it months later in the juniper bushes beside the garage. I vaguely recall someone cracking it open; it wasn’t a pretty sight.)

Eggs were somewhat of a luxury item around our house; you got one boiled for breakfast maybe once or twice a week – one, mind you. And sometimes when you had a picnic lunch for a trip, there’d be a hard-boiled egg in it, which was always a treat. But on Easter, you got something like four or five of them, all to yourself. So very awesome.

Of course, there were chocolate and tiny sugar eggs and chocolate bunnies, too, and my grandmother sometimes got us these really elaborate caramel creations – like the hollow chocolate bunnies or lambs you can get, but made out of hard caramel (like Werther’s candies), with very intricate detailing. I recall one large Easter bunny, upright with a basket full of eggs on his back. In my memory, he’s really big, something like 8″ high, but he probably wasn’t – I was quite a bit smaller then myself, and you know how back then everything was so much bigger than it is now.

IMG_20160326_142855So yes, there was plenty of sugar to be had for my childhood Easter celebrations, but the real Easter eggs were still something special that I treasured. And so I still want Easter eggs to celebrate with, as well as chocolate and other sugar, so I always make a dozen or so. I also bake a sweet bread bunny each year now. That’s not something from my childhood, but a tradition I started when the Offspring were little. Maybe it’ll become part of their childhood memory – can’t have Easter without a baked Easter bunny?

Life, the Universe, and Easter Eggs. Have a Happy Eastertide!

Zootopia and The Power of Story

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWM0ct-OLsM]
I’ve been thinking about the importance of Story again. My friend E. L. Bates recently posted the transcript of a talk she gave at her local library on that topic (read the full thing here, it’s well worth it). “This is what stories do,” she says, “they sink into our hearts and give us the tools we need to live more fully, more richly, in the everyday world around us.” Yes, exactly.

Last weekend, we went to see the new Disney movie, Zootopia. I’d heard that it was good, so while I wasn’t expecting any great profundity of the flick (it’s a Disney talking-animal movie, after all), I went into it hoping to be amused for a couple of hours and not have too many groaner moments. And those hopes weren’t disappointed.

But what bowled me over was the message of the film. That’s right, a Disney talking-animal flick with a message that I actually found really meaningful. And not the standard follow-your-heart-you-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be one, either (which nowadays just causes an eye-roll reflex in me, but that’s a rant for another day). Now, I don’t want to give any spoilers, the movie still being as new as it is. But what I found astounding is that the makers of Zootopia, who have been working on this movie for, I dunno, years, put out a film that hits right smack-dab at the bull’s eye of the current social issues. It’s as if they’d had a premonition of what the political and social climate of March of 2016 was going to be like, and they set out to tell a story that makes its point far more effectively than any sermon or political rant could do.

And that’s something I found profoundly encouraging. Because, you see, young children aren’t going to go to political rallies. And, let’s face it, most of their parents and grandparents won’t, either. But they’ll go to this movie, because it’s Junior’s birthday and you’ve got to do something with that horde of little hoodlums he’s insisted on inviting. So you take them to the movies to see the story of a perky little bunny rabbit from the country who wants to be a big-city cop, and hope that her and her sly-fox sidekick’s adventure will keep the kids quiet for a couple of hours. And in the process, Junior, his friends, and Mommy, Daddy and Grandma, without even noticing it, are being taught some lessons that couldn’t be more important in this moment in history, lessons about the insidiousness of fear and prejudice and of the power of acceptance.

But let me quote E. L. Bates again: “But [the stories] are not instruction manuals thinly disguised as entertainment! Perish the thought! If you set out, in writing a story, to point a moral or teach people something, you have failed before you’ve even begun.” In the case of Zootopia, Disney most certainly did not fail. It’s a well-told story in its own right, full of endearing characters that will enter the Disney canon, with great animation and jokes (including quite a few that will zip right over Junior’s head, but provide Mom & Dad with a good chuckle – including the teensy little Mafioso shrew with his nasal Godfather drawl). We’ll keep watching this film for decades to come for its story, because it’s a good movie – and in the process, its profound message is going to be absorbed into our collective psyche.

The pen (or in this case, film camera) is mightier than the sword – and that is something that can give us all hope.

Life, the Universe, and Zootopia. Story wins again.