Somewhere, in the so-far unseen pages of your work in progress — or the pages of WIPs gone by — somewhere lurks a phrase so graceless, a metaphor so aluminum-foil-on-dental-fillings, a sentence so raggedy-ass, a title so forgettable or a character’s name so laughable, something that made you realize you may be a writer but you’re also a doofus. Come on. You know it’s there. Maybe you’ve got to rummage through old rough drafts, crusty short stories and anguished poems from high-school or college days. Or maybe you found it in a paragraph you wrote just the other day but didn’t find until revising this morning (and, when you came to, immediately hacked out with scissors or carving knife).
‘Fess up — in the comments here, or on Twitter with the #wordsfail hashtag.
Groans encouraged — groans of empathy, damn it. Because if you’ve written nothing like this, it’s only because you’ve forgotten the key word: yet.
To kick things off, here’s one from me. This excerpt comes from close to 30 years ago, a faux-Irish-brogue poem called “Sodden, Betrodden, and Noddin’.”
I was leanin’, it seems, besides on me dreams,
Rather close to the fellow next to me.
Full six foot he sat (when not wearin’ his hat),
And his face it was tired and gloomy.
Note especially the way you need to read the second line to force the rhyme with the fourth: next TO me. Alas, at that point in the stanza you don’t even know line 4 is coming up. So you’ve gotta get to the last line, realize your mistake, and back up.
I can’t recall the exact line. I just know my agent emailed me and suggested that I might want to describe my hero as virile, rather than viral.
STD, anyone?
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Oh, so many lines… I can’t remember anything right now except for the time I turned in a paper where I write the name Aurthur instead of the word author–and it was the second word in the first line.
And I’m good at putting prepositional phrases in the wrong place. I can’t remember exactly, but I wrote something about a cemetery on a train instead of a a train passing by the cemetery.
And then there are the lines that are grammatically fine, but work like a blob of old play doh.
Kari: Ha! It’s bad enough to see that I’ve made that kind of mistake in a blog comment, say, and not be able to fix it. To find it in a submitted MS would send me straight to the bar. :)
marta: That last is the sort I hate hate hate. In my case, they show up in spots where I’ve goofed off. At the end of one chapter in the WIP — a chapter I’d been working on for a while, and needed to get past — I just punted; its last line currently reads something like “And he set forth into his future.” *shudder*
The line about the cemetery on the train actually suggests a scene from some sort of fantastickal story. I hope you or somebody else writes it, ’cause I’d love to know more about it!
This is a very courageous post. I, on the other hand, regularly purge my old writing of such mishaps so I can pretend they never happened and live on with the illusion that I only wrote the best of the best. That often backfires into total paralysis when I can’t live up to my own standards. What? I can’t write anymore? I’m still doubled over laughing about viral.
Oh me oh my. I read your response and then proceeded to compose in my head an opening paragraph to the story of the train…
Squirrel: “Courageous”? Lord no. I’d half-hoped this would trigger a barrage of not-taking-ourselves-too-seriously stories. But maybe the idea of posting confessions like these in a public place worries people.
marta: Would be interested to know where you might take the story. I, too, have thought about the idea some more!
Well, I went and started the story. It might be a bit strange…
marta: Ack! It was just a throwaway line!
But for some reason, “a bit strange” didn’t exactly knock me over with surprise.
No. I guess it wouldn’t.