He actually coined the term years ago when he couldn’t find a name, and I love what he came up with and am going to use it forever.
He calls them “runts.”
Ha!
Hyphen Control
BTW, those settings he mentions in that article are awesome. Drastically reduced weird hyphens, which reduced time formatting.
What do the big boys control for?
Furthermore, I noticed something in the big time author Stuart Woods volume I happen to be reading. And then I checked it against a James Patterson and a Lee Child.
1) They don’t care about most runts. As Blatner said, there’s a runt zone, but the zone where they control for runts appears to be less than 5 characters if that includes the end punctuation.
For example, I just opened a random page of the Woods book and see the following runts:
a) results.”
b) entry.”
I flipped to another page and saw:
a) said.
b) trunk.
c) them.
And the thing is that I DIDN’T notice them in the least while I was reading. Only when I started looking for them.
Of course, there were no runts that were smaller than those. Nothing like “tie.” or “do.” or “for.”
2) They don’t control for orphans either.
3) They DO control for widows. However, when you’re not controlling for orphans and most runts, controlling for widows is easy. And sometimes the control is just to increase the tracking just a tiny bit to make it span the whole line.
I spent a number of hours on Saturday formatting my book only to find when I finished that I had set the leading at 18pt instead of 16pt. That meant I had to reformat the whole bleeping thing.
But I adopted the Big Boy rule, allowing all runts that end at or beyond the first line indent of the paragraph. I ignored orphans. And I controlled for widows. And it took me a fraction of the time and still looks great.
Many artists think you can’t. And not simply because they envy those who are selling hundreds of thousands of copies.
The reason they think this is for the simple fact that the creative process is fueled by following the zing. It’s ruled by passion. You have to care about AND believe in what you’re writing. You have to because if you think it’s boring or unbelivable, then it’s likely everyone else will as well.
For example, let’s say you are deeply bored by vampires, but see that vampire love stories are making piles of cash and decide to write about one with smoldering eyes and a bad habit of chewing tobacco even though it leads to dental problems with the fangs (hey, why would her man-toy care?), then you’re substituting passion (that which springs up from within) for graphs and plots about marektability (stuff that’s imposed from without).
And so many folks think that there’s a continuum. On one end is writing for passion. On the other is writing for money. And the two don’t cross. But this is a false dichotomy. The truth is that money and passion are independent factors.
Lon Prater, a writer friend, recently expressed it this way.
Not a dichotomy, but rather an X and Y axis, the way I see it.
There’s:
low love, low money (SEO writing?)
low love, high money (For me, this would be tech writing, or media tie-in to a universe I didn’t care about)
high love, low money (unfortunately too much of my writing!)
high love, high money. (Loftiest of goals) 🙂
You can find datapoints for every quadrant, and of course “love” is highly subjective and individualized, as are what counts as low and high for each writer.
If we put labels to the quadrants, we get something like this, along with common emotions they tend to evoke in other writers. (Although I will say that envy seems to want to run amok in the author quadrant as well.)
If you want to learn how to write stories that move and entertain, you will do whatever it takes–crawl across broken glass, mortgage your dog, eat brown bananas–to get into Card’s week-long, literary boot camp.
This is the workshop that changed everything for me. And while Card will say it had nothing to do with him, he’s just trying to keep his head from bloating and making it so he can’t walk straight. I’ve spent almost the last 20 years in some form of teaching. Card’s workshop employs all the key principles that make it a killer environment for learning complex cognitive skills, i.e. writing fiction. And this year it’s in San Diego.
Eric James Stone is a successful short story writer. You can read my review of his excellent “Like Diamond Tears From Emerald Eyes” here. Now, in Tips on Keeping Short Stories from Becoming Long Stories he shares excellent insights on how to keep those short stories from growing out of control. As someone whose stories always tend to go long, let me say that I know from experience that these tips work.
How would you like to sit down and get writing tips from someone who created or co-created nearly 40 television series? Someone who wrote more than 450 episodes for those and other series and then went on to produce around 1,500 more. Oh, yeah, and then after his thirty or so years in television, he published 18 novels. Whoa–eighteen. Like I’m shaking, right?
It’s not like the guy knows much about telling stories. I mean, millions of viewers entertained–big deal. Still, do you think you might be interested in seeing if he hasn’t maybe one piece of advice that’s useful?
If so, the guy’s name is Stephen J. Cannell. He wrote about 9,000 words on developing stories and called it his Writing Seminar. I thought it was pretty good. Well, for a piker.
An avid reader friend of mine began reading through the books in a list called “100 books you must read before you die.”
She got to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and went to Facebook and posted the following: “I don’t get the appeal. It’s about a group of boys/men who are irresponsible, drunks, whoring around taking advantage of others and being enabled by their women. Why is this a classic and why should I have wasted my time on it? Can some of my literary friends explain? I hated a brave new world and the handmaid’s tale too.”
Is the book a classic?
Should she read it before she dies?
Is it really that important?
Let me share an edited version of my response and then provide my list of 30 books you should read before you die.
*
Annette, the unfortunate truth is that these lists of “classics” are a sham because there is no objective criteria for determining literary excellence.
Or maybe I should say that measuring quality in the arts isn’t like measuring the unambiguous, objective score of a baseball game. After books exhibit a certain level of proficiency, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the quality of one book from another, especially because much of this depends on a reader’s interests and subjective experience of the story.
When it becomes hard to rank performances, people rely on other measures. One of the most powerful is social networks.
So if two readers find two different books that blow them away, one of the books might get all the attention because the one book gets picked up by a news service (The New York Times) or a platform (the Oprah Book Club effect) or some other social network of influence. A lot of the so-called literary classics only appear on various lists because they tapped into the academic network, which kept them alive far longer than they would have lasted otherwise.
On The Road is simply a book that made a stir among some circles in the 1950s. That’s it.
Was it more important or of higher quality than Exodus? The Chronicles of Narnia? Lord of the Rings? A Town Like Alice? All published in the 1950s as well.
It depends.
If you’re wanting to understand the 1950s beat culture, it would be an important book.
But if you’re wanting to understand fantasy writing of the time, it wouldn’t.
If you’re wanting to read a book that’s had a huge impact on popular culture, well, LOTR beats On The Road like a dog.
Some people have the feeling that the so-called classics have some inherent medicinal value because someone put them on a list and called them classics.
Nope. They’re just stories. Some of which can shed light on the issues and interests of a part of the culture in a given period. But if you’re not interested in that specific sub-culture, who cares?
And if you’re reading to be entertained, moved, uplifted, or educated—which ones do that best for Annette is for you to decide.
So all that to say I wouldn’t devalue your reaction to the book
*
I’m now going to give you my list.
But it’s not going to be a list of titles. Nor will it focus on a book’s impact on some sub-culture of a given period.
It’s going to be a real list. One that focuses on what so many of us go to stories for.
The one that makes you weep.
The one that makes you giggle and snort.
The one that reminds you of what it’s like to fall in love.
The one that gives you hope.
The one that you begin to read more and more slowly because you don’t want it to end.
The one that scares the soup out of you.
The one that you can’t put down, even though you need to wake up early in the morning.
The one that makes you wish you lived there.
The one that’s so good that when you close it, you immediately start to read it a second time.
The one that gives you and your child hours of pleasure together.
The one that gives you a sacred, spiritual experience.
The one that makes you reread some of the lines because the turns of phrase are just so delicious.
The one that gives you courage.
The one that takes you on an awesome adventure.
The one that makes you want to be a better person.
The one that bores you to tears (just so know you how good the others are).
The one that introduces you to a different culture that delights you.
The one that makes you think.
The one that lingers with you for days.
The one that gives you lovely insights.
The one that inspires you to love your spouse more.
The one that introduces you to the sorts of people you normally don’t like and makes you actually like them.
The one that delights you with its characters.
The one that whisks you away to a different historical period.
The one that inspires you to give your children a hug.
The one that gets your adrenaline pumping.
The one that sparks all sorts of ideas in your head.
The one that makes you wonder and start imagining what it would be like to be there.
The one that blows your freaking mind.
The one that makes you stand up in your living room and cheer.
We could do more than 30, couldn’t we?
Like the one that makes you think people from a different time period are just like us. And the one that makes you think people from that same period are completely alien.
But I think we’ll stop. That there above is a list.
Those are 30 books I think everyone will want to read before they die.
2 Comments
I do the same thing using InDesign for page composition for my paperbacks. I only control for widows unless the orphan is on it’s own page, then I will pull it back into a larger page using leading the exact same way you do.
I do the same thing using InDesign for page composition for my paperbacks. I only control for widows unless the orphan is on it’s own page, then I will pull it back into a larger page using leading the exact same way you do.
Great minds think alike!
🙂