First Person

Though the First Person narrative mode has been used throughout the literary ages, the particular style has recently come back into vogue, perhaps spurred by the rise of two particular genres—blogs and memoirs. Like both of these mediums, the First Person narrative makes use the first person pronouns “I” and “me”.

With regards to informational limits, the First Person mode is exceptionally restricted. As the narrator is a character in the story, the narrator’s knowledge is limited to what the character knows, sees, hears, feels, or is told.

This narrative voice is exceptionally flexible and can go very far to illustrate the personality of whoever is telling the story. However, this mode can also create confusion for the reader, blurring the line between character and author. While this might seem trivial, bear in mind that you will likely have to defend your character’s actions to your mother.

Third Person

The vast majority of stories are narrated from the third person. As First Person makes use of the pronouns “I” and “me,” Third Person uses the third person pronouns like “he,” “she,” and “they,” as well as proper names. To boil that down to an easier explanation, a story told in the Third Person is a story told about someone else.

Third person is a very common form of storytelling, and because of that, there are many different narrative modes within the greater realm of the third person.

Limited

Third Person, Limited has a great many similarities with First Person mode. The two methods are largely identical, albeit with a pronoun shift. The Third Person, Limited mode also bears similar knowledge constraints as First Person. When using this narrative mode, it’s important to remember that if the character does not witness something, then the narrator didn’t either. This compartmentalization of knowledge extends all the way to the reader. Because of the limited knowledge scope, this mode works exceptionally well for creating anticipation and frustration through unknowing.

Selective

When employing the Third Person, Selective mode, the narrator shifts from scene to scene, and even within scenes, based upon the characters which are present. This type of narrative mode allows for the showcasing of multiple viewpoints while still allowing for compartmentalized information.

To understand the difference between the Limited and Selective modes, picture a conversation between two characters. In a Limited mode, one character can provide internal monologue about what she is saying and about what she is hearing, while the other character in the conversation can only be taken at their word. When using Selective mode, insight can be gathered from both characters, but only by the audience. Each character is still isolated from the thoughts of the other, but the audience would thus be privy to the information possessed wherever the narrative currently resides.

Omniscient

As the name suggests, the Third Person, Omniscient mode sees and knows all. While Selective can be a significant jump up in knowledge from Limited, an Omniscient storyteller possesses an exponentially larger amount of knowledge. Every insight of every character is fair game. Every action anywhere in the plot can be used to tease and taunt the reader.

This type of narrative is very difficult to master. With the narrator knowing everything, the role of doling out that knowledge is left up to the author. Displaying too much information too soon will spoil the mounting pressure of the work. Giving away too little knowledge will leave your story sluggish. However, strike that perfect balance within the Third Person, Omniscient mode and you can play the reader like an instrument, inducing emotion at your whim.

Objective

The roles of differences between Limited, Selective, and Omniscient modes all deal with how much insight into the internal works of characters that the narrator has. Objective, on the other hand, provides insight into none. This very restrictive mode is ultra precise and relies on description. In this sense, the Objective mode is very close to a cinematic or documentarian standpoint. Without insight into the thoughts or feelings of characters, the narrator merely records what is seen.

Second Person

I would be remiss if I did not address the Second Person mode. In the second person voice, the narrator is speaking directly to the audience, making explicit use of the word “you.” This means that the narrator is narrating the actions of the audience. If the idea sounds cumbersome, it is because Second Person is cumbersome. While it works in articles and self-help books, the second voice usually feels out of place in works of fiction that aren’t published under the “Choose Your Own Adventure” banner. To that end, my advice regarding the Second Person mode is simple: do not use it.

When telling your story, it’s important to choose a narrative mode which does the most justice to that story. Remember, as the author, you are already in the omniscient role, but that doesn’t mean your narrator has to be. The greatest source of drama stems not from knowing, but rather from not knowing.

I have maybe two or three albums that I can honestly say I like in their entirety. Most of the albums that I own have a few good songs, but there’s always that one song (or two, or seven) that gets skipped any time I hear its opening chords. Even with albums by artists that I love, I can’t stand the filler songs—songs that were only recorded so that there would be enough tracks to justify the price tag.

You can apply the principles of a great album to the rules of good writing. Think of your entire work as your album, and the individual scenes (or chapters, if you’re working on a novel) as your tracks.

Please don’t stop the music

If you were recording an album, you’d work hard on every song to make it evocative and memorable. Once the tracks were recorded individually, you’d look at the big picture: How do the songs sound when transitioning to one another? Do they all come together as a cohesive whole? Or do one or two stick out while the rest sort of fade off into the background? That’s how singers create great albums (like Jagged Little Pill, my favorite album). By following the same logic, you can create a strong work of art that, while composed of robust individual scenes, stands on its own as a singular piece.

The song remains the same

You wouldn’t want to buy an album where every song sounded the same. If every track had the same pacing, identical melodies and harmonies, and similar lyrics, they would be indistinguishable. In writing, you also don’t want the scenes in your story to be clones of one another. Some tips you can try to make scenes more individual are:

• Change the pacing. Slow down some scenes that are more introspective by using longer sentences, creating pauses, and using more narration. Make more action-oriented scenes move at a faster pace by using shorter sentences, more emphatic words, and skipping the narration.
• Describe something quickly, and then move on. A long descriptive paragraph is likely the “track” that your reader will skip. Don’t get too caught up in writing the main character’s thoughts about the sunset, or describing every room in the character’s house.
• Don’t write more than one scene that is meant to convey the same idea. If you were writing a novel about a new single father who has no idea what to do with his newborn and then rising to the challenge, it would be enough to show him flying to the ER with the sick baby. We wouldn’t need that and a scene where he finally figures out how to change the baby’s diaper. The second scene not only becomes repetitive, but it takes power away from the first scene.

Much too much

A mediocre album has two or three great songs, and then a few that were rushed to be recorded to give it enough tracks. You don’t want to do the same thing with your writing. If you put in an extraordinary amount of work into a few of the scenes, but then dash out the rest to fill it out to meet some arbitrary length requirement, you’ll have mediocre writing. It is better to have a shorter piece that is strongly written in its entirety, than a longer work that has filler. Here are some tips to ensure that you aren’t writing too much:

• Cut any scenes that have no relevance to the story. (Yes, that includes those flashbacks you think are so great for the character development.)
• Shorten transitions between scenes. You don’t need to string your reader along on a leash to make him follow you from one point to the next. Let one event flow into the next.
• Rewrite scenes that don’t reach their goal. If, in that new daddy novel I described earlier, the scene with him rushing to the hospital wasn’t compelling enough or didn’t show that he’d finally figured out fatherhood, then it needs to be made stronger.

The final countdown

By strengthening every single scene in your writing, you can eliminate any trace of filler. You won’t have to fear that your reader will hit the “skip” button on a part of your work. Go listen to your favorite album—what about it makes you able to stand every single track? And no, it’s not slacking off—if anyone asks, it’s research.

Adjectives are tricky little buggers. While usually limited to modifying nouns and pronouns, they sometimes modify other adjectives as part of compound adjectives. These compounds should be hyphenated when they appear before the noun or pronoun they modify, and unhyphenated when they appear after it. For example:

John is a second-rate dancer.

but

As a dancer, John is second rate.

Why hyphenate?

These compounds should be hyphenated to avoid confusion. Consider the following sentence:

I’m concerned by my blue-green pee.

As written, we are well aware that the urine in question should be somewhere between clear and yellow. But if it weren’t hyphenated

I’m concerned by my blue green pee.

We’re a little confused. That’s because adjectives modify the whole noun that follows it. In this case, “blue” modifies “green pee.” Why should his pee be green? If green pee turns blue, is that really any further cause for concern? 

My favorite example is from Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I paraphrase:

The pickled-herring vendor.

The hyphen transforms the vendor in question from a drunk fish monger into a monger trafficking in drunk fish.  It’s very important to know who, exactly, is drunk. (That’s not what pickled herrings are, idiot—ed.)

But what about the adverbs?

Sometimes adverbs come together with adjectives to form supermodifiers. The process is quite similar to the one employed by Voltron. They generally work the same as adjectives:

Well-fed zombies pose no threat.

but

There’s no reason to fear a zombie that’s well fed.

There is one exception: Adverbs ending in -ly are not hyphenated. Ever.

I hit the hungry zombie with a roughly hewn rock.

Go forth and hyphenate

Now that you know the rules, you can keep your readers from accusing innocent merchants of looking for love in the bottom of a bottle. Improperly hyphenated compounds are not just aggravating to grammar snobs, they are potentially confusing. 

One last thing: If you’ve been eating copious amounts of red velvet cake, you shouldn’t be too concerned by the color of anything that leaves your body. Trust me on this.

It’s become a sitcom cliché: A shy guy is called upon to speak in public and is advised to imagine the audience naked. Of course, he winds up imagining himself naked on the podium. Hilarity ensues.

Personally, I’ve never understood the advice. Sure, there’s likely to be a few people in the audience I’d rather not imagine naked, but I’d be too wrapped up in imaging the pretty ladies my wife undressed to say anything. Heck, I’m a guy — I spend a not-insubstantial portion of my day imagining pretty ladies my wife undressed.

Lechery aside, I have a point: Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be naked while writing. Even people with the body of a Greek god Buddha such as myself tend to get done with things quickly when wearing a birthday suit, and writing quickly is a great way to preserve your voice and develop your style.

Why so speedy?

We’ve all got lots of little voices in our heads telling us reasons we can’t write. They ask us questions like “Are you even qualified to write about that?”, “Is that the best way to phrase this?”, and “You didn’t leave the house dressed like that, did you?” There’s only one voice saying we can, and that’s us, standing on the podium, feeling a draft. But if you start pounding out the words, maybe you can get finished before the hecklers in the audience can even open their traps to question your writing and dressing abilities.

Aside from the questions, the most insidious thing the little devils do is edit your voice right out of your own words. Those chances we take and flourishes we make define us as writers and set us apart from the thousands of factory writers willing to write the same thing for a penny a word. But If you listen to the voices, you’ll take these idiosyncrasies out for fear of embarrassing yourself. After all, if it were a good idea, everyone would be doing it, right?

Taking shortcuts

Part of doing things quickly is not stopping. Not even to look up little things like facts. So you’ll have to use TKs. TK is a journalistic shortcut which means “To come.” (Go figure.) So when you’re going along, dropping bombs like the Bible’s got psalms, and get to something you don’t know or want to write, slip in a TK and move on. For example:

I was TK years old when I wrestled my first shark.

Or

It was a dark and TK night.

Or even

He cackled as he laid out his nefarious plan. Plan TK.

When you’ve run out of steam, you can do a search for TK and fill in the blanks. Just don’t forget to replace them! Letting a TK get published is mighty embarrassing.

Peeling away the layers

 If you’re not as confident blissfully ignorant as I am, the nudity should probably be metaphorical. You don’t want the kids wandering in and seeing exactly where a Big Mac goes after you eat it. (Pro tip: Nowhere good.) Tell yourself that you’ll burn the first draft as soon as you’re done and no one else has to see it; there’s no reason not to take chances if you’re the only one who knows, right? The trick is that you don’t actually burn it. You take that draft and polish it, taking out what didn’t work and building upon what did. You might be surprised how many things you felt uneasy about not only work, but mark the piece as definitively yours.

If nothing else, just think of the new friends you’ll make when you put “I write naked” in your Twitter bio.

Wrapping up

Conclusion TK.

The most beautifully crafted characters in the world are missing a large part of their reality if they are devoid of conflict. The same piece of advice extends equally well to the plot of your story. Why? Conflict is what breeds motivation, what defines drama, and what draws in readers.

So, what is conflict?

The definition of conflict encompasses both the obstacle which stands between a character and their desire, and much of the process the character undergoes in overcoming it. It’s a bit of a cumbersome concept, so perhaps it is a bit easier to understand by looking at the broad classifications commonly assigned to conflict.

Internal Conflict

Internal conflict is more commonly referred to as “Man vs. Self” and, as the name suggests, deals with a character having to overcome and change something about his or her being that they are struggling with. Common types of internal conflicts include overcoming fears, will, and ego-flaws. These types of conflicts are often difficult to pin down and rely heavily on emotion.

The External Conflicts

Once the conflict moves outside of the character, identifying it becomes a much easier process. The pure variety of conflicts, when external, also expands.

Man vs. Man

Man vs. Man is the common terminology for any conflict in which a character is directly opposed by another character or characters. The most common form of this conflict is the protagonist-antagonist relationship. Or, in the case of what seems to be every action movie made in the past few decades, the protagonist versus the antagonist … and his entire army.

Man vs. Nature

Man vs. Nature is the third in what is known as the classic conflicts, dating back to days of the sailing Greeks and perhaps earlier. In Man vs. Nature conflicts, it is some facet of the world—be it inclement weather, a great distance, or harsh terrain—that is the source of the conflict. A perfect modern example would be the storm in A Perfect Storm, which provided the external conflict for those aboard the fishing vessel.

Man vs. Other

There are three other minor conflict types which should be noted, though they are most often found in genre and niche works. Lumped under the Man vs. Other banner, the two conflicts are those of Society, the Supernatural and Technology. These types of conflicts can largely lump in any other type of conflict from the religious to the dystopian society.

More than One

The trick for the writer isn’t often which conflict to use, but rather, how to mix and match your conflicts. Conflict is by no means something that is limited to one at a time. The steadying building of conflicts is an effective tool for creating drama in a story. Vonnegut perhaps said it best with his sixth rule of short story writing, “Be a sadist. No matter sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” In other words, layer on a steady stream of conflict which is ever-increasing in difficulty.

The operative word is character

No matter what mixture of conflicts you choose for you story, the operative word in the definition of the tool is “character.”  As noted in each of the examples, a conflict is classified not by what it is, but by how the character relates to it. The conflict can, and ultimately should, help to define the character. And defining the character is both what conflict, and writing, is all about.

Appositives are nouns or noun phrases that represent the same thing and sit next to each other in a sentence. For example,

My wife, Jenny, should know how lucky she is to be married to me.

Here, My wife and Jenny are the same person; Jenny serves to explain my wife.

Apposition is a technical concept. In fact, I consider it a demarcation: If a grammar book deals with it, it is a technical book and therefore overkill for the average reader. But by understanding how they work, you can avoid implying that some poor faithful husband a bigamist.

Restrictive and nonrestrictive appositives

As with phrases,  appositives can be either restrictive or nonrestrictive. Restrictive appositives narrow the meaning; nonrestrictive ones do not.  

Restrictive: My sister Sally still has powdered donut mix from her Y2K-scare days.

Nonrestrictive: My favorite book, Crime and Punishment, still gives me chills.

The difference in the two examples is that the first implies that I have more than one sister. Sally, therefore, limits My sister to one person.  But I have only one favorite book, so Crime and Punishment is not limiting it, only clarifying it.

Nonrestrictive appositives should be set off by commas; this makes the meaning clear. Restrictive constructions should not be.

Common appositive errors

I often see constructions such as this:

John and his wife Jenny relaunched her blog, Jennifermroach.com.

Of course, that implies that I have more than one wife, which I don’t, nor do I want to. Set off Jenny in commas and move on with your life.

There you have it: You now understand appositives and can impress friends and loved ones at dinner parties. Just remember to use your powers only for good.

photo credit: jez`

Last time, we talked about the importance of getting your work critiqued . Hopefully, you have taken that first step — but now, you may be wondering what to do now that your work is all marked up. The next step is revision — by which, I don’t mean changing a word or two here and there, or switching around some paragraphs. I mean heavy-duty, hardcore, brutal revision.

Why you should revise

If you don’t revise, then there was no point in getting your work critiqued. The critiquing-revision process will make your writing stronger; no matter how resistant to change you may be, you need to accept the fact that no writer creates the perfect short story or novel in the first draft.

Don’t be scared

The days of typewriters and quills are thankfully over. Just because you’re revising doesn’t mean you have to lose all your previous work. Keep all your drafts and mark all your revisions. Try out something new with one of your scenes, characters, or plot lines; think of it as walking a tightrope with a safety net. Feel free to dance around unharnessed without fear — those old words will be there when you get back.

Tips for revision

Your peer critique hopefully provided you with some good feedback for places to start tinkering. Look at what your critics had to say and start playing around with ideas. Other things you can do to revise are:

• Identify the weakest scene in the work. (By weak, I mean one that serves no purpose to the advancement of the story or characters.) Cut it. Do it quickly and it will hurt less. You may have other weak moments in the story that can be revised and saved, but if you can recognize one part that does nothing to help the story, then you don’t need it.
• Try a completely new draft of the story told by another character’s point of view. This is obviously easier to do with a short story than it is with a novel, but even in a novel you might find that writing some chapters in one POV and other chapters in someone else’s POV might benefit the work. You will never know unless you try.
• Change major details in the story. The second draft of my husband’s most recent short story killed off the main character’s wife and daughter, whereas in the first draft, only the wife was deceased. He revised it because he realized that the double loss would affect the main character must more drastically than just the wife’s death alone, and it also eliminated issues I the reader had with the main character explaining his remarriage to his daughter. Find some big changes you can make and try them on for size.
• Try a draft of your story where you completely delete all traces of some element of storytelling. Trash all the dialogue, or try telling the story without any description. In the end, you don’t have to stick with the entire draft as such, but you will find that you’ve probably rewritten a trouble scene so that it suddenly becomes effective. Sometimes as writers we get so bogged down with words; take the minimalist approach and see what you come up with.
• Replace narration with a scene. You may have a paragraph or two in which the narrator goes on and on about something: how she and her husband haven’t been getting along lately, how much she loves to go shopping and buy designer duds even when she’s broke, or how he feels so overworked lately and barely sees his family. Cut the narration and write a scene that shows the reader the same thought. Show her and her husband having a fight. Show her going to Barney’s and getting her credit card declined. Show him at the office typing away like a drone while staring at the photograph of his wife and child on his desk. Do this revision wherever you find a long block of narration in the story.
• Delete your flashbacks. You don’t have to lose them all, but you will need to examine each flashback carefully. If the flashback’s only purpose is to give background information or to characterize someone, then you don’t need it, no matter how funny or wonderful you think it is. If it doesn’t flesh out the story, then it needs to go. Nothing drags down fiction faster than an irrelevant flashback.

Again, don’t be afraid to rewrite. It may look like a lot of extra work, but it will be worthwhile in the end. You will produce a more polished and more effective second draft — and if not, you can always go back to the original and try again.

What is the biggest, most painful revision you’ve ever done?

Writers only need a pen, a piece of paper, and an idea. But, at least in my house, by the time you’ve found the pen and the paper, the idea has fled for warmer climes.  So here’s a look at a few somewhat-essential tools for the writer.

This list has two ideas behind it: 1.) Money is tight, so the tools should be free whenever possible, and 2.) the tools should be tailored to writers. 

Software for writers

1. Dark Room - word processor

Sure, Microsoft Word has lots of bells and whistles, and OpenOffice does a good job of being a free alternative, but they’ve both got lots and lots of buttons. Dark Room fixes that, and how! It is also designed to be run full-screen, so no new e-mails, instant messages, or tweets can distract you.  

2. Sonar — Submission tracker

Want to know how long your story’s been sitting on Tales of Extreme Awesomeness’s slushpile? Need to know how many of your stories weren’t extremely awesome enough? Enter Sonar, the submission tracking tool. 

3. Evernote — Notes

Your muse is a cold, heartless shrew. Tame her by keeping copious notes with Evernote. You’re not limited to text: Pictures, web pages, and audio files are all fair game.  It also syncs across multiple devices.  So the next time you’re in the shower and have your next great idea, you can whip out your iPhone to capture it and get back to lathering. (Please don’t use your phone in the shower —ed)

4. Freemind — mind mapping

I’ve already written about mind mapping with Freemind. Go read that and come back. I’ll wait.

Services for writers

5. Imagination Prompt Generator — Writing prompts

The Imagination Prompt Generator has writing prompts. If you don’t like the one it gives you, you can press the button and get a new one. 

6. Wordpress.com or Blogger — online publishing

I’m torn between Wordpress’s hosted option and Blogger. Wordpress is nearly the de facto standard, but has lots of whizmos and doodads to distract. Blogger has a much simpler interface, but its commenting system is atrocious, so it may cost you interaction. Either way, both are free ways to get your otherwise-unpublished work in front of readers, so take your pick and roll with it.

7. Lulu or CreateSpace — Self-publishing

I couldn’t possibly help you choose between the two. CreateSpace gets you on to Amazon with no upfront fees (save for buying a copy to proof) while Lulu can get you into more outlets for a price. But these seem to be the two heavy hitters in the print-on-demand arena. Ultimately, the decision between the two comes down to your needs.

So, which of your favorite tools did I leave off? Leave a comment and let me know.

Maybe you’re worried about putting these people in your fiction because they would recognize themselves. Maybe they would get mad at the not-so-pretty picture you paint of them. Maybe your relationship would be ruined, or at the very least, strained and awkward. Maybe you’re afraid they’d go so far as to sue you for defamation. So far, you’ve held back.

If there’s an intriguing character sitting in your living room just screaming to be let out, then go for it. Here’s how.

Fictionalize the people

There are ways to hide real people so that they (or at the very least, their neighbor) won’t recognize the character as a portrayal of themselves. Change details about the person. Keep in mind that you aren’t required to change every single little thing in this list. You’ll find what works and what doesn’t as you build your character.

• Gender If your mom is a loon, then make the loon of the book be the father.
• Relationship If the real-life story involves your sister, then make the character be the brother, or even better, a cousin. Make your best friend your sister or brother.
• Physical characteristics Make that blonde in your life a fictional redhead. Add physical deformities, scars, etc., or take them away if the real person is afflicted with such. Add glasses or a big nose. Make the skinny be fat. Write the health nut as a chain-smoker.
• Jobs and hobbies Make the birdwatcher a hunter, the hunter an antiquer. Write the lawyer as a stewardess, the stewardess a teacher. Change the favorite TV show from American Idol to Maude. Every little detail helps you distance the real from the fictional.

Fictionalize the events

If the story you really want to tell is what your sister did to her ex-boyfriend’s car after he broke up with her, then that’s great. But don’t follow every detail of the true-life story.

• Real life: Your sister’s boyfriend started cheating on her with her best friend. She found out and he had the nerve to get mad at her and break up with her. In a fit of rage, she keyed and egged his car, got busted, and spent the night in jail (a horrible fall from grace from her previous goody-two-shoes life).
• Fiction: The main character’s male friend got cheated on by his girlfriend with one of his close friends. He found out and the girlfriend dumped him. In a fit of rage, he hacked her MySpace account and posted compromising photos and crazy bulletins proclaiming that she’d found her true sexuality. He got busted for cyber-harassing.

Fictionalize the life story

If your novel is entirely based on your life story, then you have some extra tweaking to do. Follow the tips above for transforming your family and friends, but then go a little deeper, especially if you don’t want to reveal to Mom and Dad all the ways they ruined your life.

• Change the family Don’t make the novel family be a mirror image of your own. If you have one sister, then make the character have two brothers. Make the family dog a cat, or three birds. Make babies be older children. Fiddle with the marital details of your parents. (Obviously, if your story is that your parents’ divorce ruined your life, then you can’t make the fictional parents be married. But change the way the met, the way they treated each other, the things they fought about, who was right, who was wrong, who got punished, etc.)
• Change the circumstances If you lived in a house, then the fictional family could live in an apartment. Change the street, city, even the state. Change the reasons why you and your family were unhappy. Modify the things you did together or the things you said to each other. Tweak them as you see fit. If you have a story to tell, tell itmdash;just try to distance yourself from it.

If all else fails, hide

If you can’t work it any other way, write under a pseudonym. Those people that you’re writing about may not be as angry when they realize that no one else will know the character is them—because they won’t know the author is you.

Fire when ready!

“you are” has been omitted from between “when” and “ready.”

Verbs can also be omitted. In an example torn from my own writing, here’s a sentence from a story I’m working on:

The jacket held a man; the man, a still-smoking weapon.

Here, I have ellided “held” from the second clause and replaced it with a comma. (I should note that the comma is for rhythm, not grammar.)

You already use it

Aside from the war-time example above, ellision is pretty common; you probably just don’t notice it. Consider the following two sentences:

Jennifer likes SpongeBob SquarePants more than I.

and

Jennifer likes SpongeBob SquarePants more than me.

In the first, you know that either “like SpongeBob SquarePants” or “do” is understood. In the second, “she likes” is understood. Of course, you’re playing with fire, because the entire meaning of the sentence hinges upon the correct usage and interpretation of the final word. If you slip, or the reader misinfers, the effect is crushed.

Which brings me to …

When you shouldn’t ellide

I used my own piece as an example, not to get a head start on awards season, but as a cautionary tale. When our own Bradley so graciously critiqued the story, he got hung up on this sentence, saying I should put in the “held” for repetition. I balked, because I had omitted it for precisely the same reason. In the SpongeBob examples, I noted that there is a danger of misinterpretation. Anytime you leave out a word or phrase, you must be careful that the reader will put it back in. Don’t use ellision when there is a risk of the reader getting it wrong. I hate to put so fine a point on it, but if the reader gets it wrong, it wasn’t their mistake; it was yours.

Should you ever ellide?

That’s not to say that ellision is something to be avoided. It is a stylistic device, and you should feel free to use it when you can pull it off. I wouldn’t use it in a press release or a résumé, but in creative writing it can be a powerful tool. Think of it as that pair of jeans that really shows off your bum: Maybe you wouldn’t wear it to a board meeting, but they’re fine on that all-important first date.