“As.” A tiny two-letter word so innocuous it shouldn’t be threatening to anyone. Especially novelists, right?
“As Jake was wiping the windshield, the view was clearer all the way to Boston.”
What’s often overlooked is that “as” has a very specific meaning all to itself. It means “while” or “concurrently in time”–that is, an action or event going forward simultaneously with somthing else.
So for our example to work correctly, “the view was clearer all the way to Boston” would have to be some sort of event going forward at the exact same time as Jake’s wiping the windshield.
But that doesn’t make logical sense, does it? Regardless of when Jake wiped the windshield, the view just…was.
More examples:
“As the flash fire burned up everything of value to Jim, a major effort to fight it was organized and put into action.”
“Karen made her way through the swamp, as she had always been afraid of snakes.”
“As the summer night was begging to fall, games were organized at lunch for the entire afternoon.”
I know, I know, any of these sentences can be easily fixed so that, with minimal changes, they work just fine. I agree. But my problem is simply that they so seldom are fixed. And that (taking a further step back)violators of this principle tend to be serial offenders. They do it A LOT.
To me this can only mean the writer is in a hurry or lacks dedication, thus again and again grabs the one word that seems to allow so many different ways of enriching a sentence–when most often it’s actually doing just the opposite: actually impoverishing the sentence by make it imprecise, which in turn attacks its clarity, its ability to render events in time with accuracy.
Fiction must be written with great care. Where overuse of “crutch” phrases like “as…..etc.” Writers and editors should train their eyes to spot these annoying lapses into sloppiness and find creative ways to replace them.
Even if it’s true that the average fiction writer doesn’t attend closely to fine points, I will stake my life on believing that unconsciously they are ever so slightly turned off with each successive violation. Which means that, by page 50 or 60 of your novel, many of your readers (though they would say they didn’t “hate” the book) will just be gone.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Bill, I’m not going to blame you because I can’t focus, but I was certain I was guilty of overusing “as” in this way and I had to check. First, I found one of the Tag Cloud applications (there are a bunch that take a website or a block of text and generate a list of words, showing the frequency of use). That didn’t help because I think it takes out all the short common words. Then I opened up my Dickens Challenge work in progress and used the find function in Word and specified it should find whole words only and highlight them. I had 114 occurrences of “as” in a 28,343 word sample. I scanned through and to my surprise, I didn’t use “as” in the way you’ve described more than a couple of times, but I had a lot of similes. I thought that was worth looking into and I found a cool site called similepedia.com and spent some time there. And while I was at it, why not do a little research on metaphors? I found a site called metaphorobservatory.blogspot.com/ that not only tracks new and emerging metaphor use in the media, but has top metaphors of 2005, 2006 and 2007 listed (top metaphors being overused/don’t use them metaphors — or at least that’s what I think George Carlin, may he rest in peace, would want). So in short, thanks for pointing out this easily fixed problem and there went another two hours
Thanks for those links, Lisa. One could well waste hunks of time on either one. But if you love language, it’s never wasted time. Some might find it excessive to devote entire blogs to these matters, but years ago I came to the conclusion that to be a novelist with a full set of skills, you really have to be obsessive about every odd detail of the language you use. Great athletes think nothing obsessive attention to tiny details of the game. A tennis pro will spend hours and hours on one combination. A serious basketball player will practice the same move a thousand times, for hours on end.
As for “as,” yes, there’s the meaning I didn’t address, namely: “similar to”– which leads to a whole other question: Is it best to use “like” or “as” in various kinds of similes. I won’t take that one on right now, but note that fiction writing complicates the question by introducing on its own layer of uncertainty. When you’re writing in the voice of a person who mis-uses “like” and “as” (as many do), is it correct to be…incorrect? Sometimes the answer has to be yes, because that’s THE WAY PEOPLE TALK. Otherwise you risk compromising your character’s authenticity.
Whew. Fiction is a rough walk through tough territory and certainly not for the linguistically frail!