Every Word Is Gold

Gold-Panning

By Elaine Viets

1. “He felt like a panhandler who had just seen his first speck of gold.”

That lucky dog. Most panhandlers never see any gold. They’re lucky to scrounge pocket change.

But panners have a real chance of finding gold.

During National Novel Writing Month, aspiring writers, as well as hard-working pros, are pounding the keys. It’s easy to make mistakes when we’re cranking out copy at high speed. Here are few phrases that have tripped up good writers for major New York publishers. Don’t let them happen to you.

2. “I don’t believe it was money your mom squired away.”

I don’t believe it, either. Bet Mom squirreled it away, like this furry devil hid that acorn.

Squirrel-with-acorn

3. “There was something she couldn’t bare to look at.”

We couldn’t bear to look at the naked abuse of that word.

Striptease_movie_poster

4. “His jaws were taught and clamped.”

The Terminator taught us what taut jaws look like.

Terminator-5

5. “South Carolina was the first state to succeed.”

At what? Leaving the Union? In that cast, the state was the first to secede.

south carolina

 6. “This is why you should wear a helmut.”

A helmet would protect your head better.

german helmet

That’s a German Donald Duck holding up the winged golden helmet. According to the Wall Street Journal, in Deutschland the beaked Donald is a philosopher. “Germany, the land of Goethe, Thomas Mann and Beethoven, has an unlikely pop culture hero: Donald Duck,” says the paper. “Just as the French are obsessed with Jerry Lewis, the Germans see a richness and complexity to the Disney comic that isn’t always immediately evident to people in the cartoon duck’s homeland.”

7. Some phrases are impossibly twisted. Consider the police officer with deep seed suspicions.

I suspect the writer meant deep-seated suspicions and mixed up deep seeded plants

seedling-fertile-ground-e1284564039611

with the tennis term top seeded, planted at the top of the heap.

venus

8. “He and his wife are strange.”

Possibly. But when they separated, they were estranged.

Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris

Consider this couple. Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris were engaged Christmas Eve, 2010. They were all set for a June wedding in 2011. But Crystal called off the wedding five days before Hugh walked down the aisle for the third time.

They were estranged. But the couple reconciled and were married New Year’s Eve, 2012. Hugh was 86 and Crystal was 26. Love is strange.

***

Suspense Magazine named Checked Out, my latest Dead-End mystery, a top cozies of 2015. I’m celebrating by giving away a large print Checked Out. To win, click Contests at www.elaineviets.com

 

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About Elaine Viets

Elaine Viets has written 30 mysteries in four series, including 15 Dead-End Job mysteries. BRAIN STORM, her first Angela Richman, Death Investigator mystery, is published as a trade paperback, e-book, and audio book. www.elaineviets.com

7 thoughts on “Every Word Is Gold

  1. I’ve been seeing more and more of these — often from Big. Name. Authors. Where are the editors? These were some I found in recent reads (I used them in a blog post of my own a couple months ago:

    Rowdy lit­tle hoard
    His jacket was pealed back
    He’s cool­ing his heals in the lockup
    A sin­gle star shown brighter than any other
    The plain of his abdomen
    Ran her fin­gers down his chest toward his naval
    The bul­let had come to rest against the sev­enth vertebrae
    Emerged like a breach birth
    “You saved his life today. He’ll prob­a­bly give you an accom­mo­da­tion or something.”
    “The state trooper gave the chil­dren law enforcement’s uni­ver­sal anec­dote: orange juice and candy bars.”

    • Some of these are not intended for grammatical precision, I think. Likely, some are stylistic or Idiosyncratic.

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