The insertion of doubt
Mar. 3rd, 2014 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI have this habit at the start of the working day, where I read through the last couple of paragraphs from yesterday and pick at them lightly, just to get myself worked back into the warp of it.
This is how I left things yestreen:
Mr Kipling was too rigorous a patriot. He would never sanction anything so disadvantageous to us, so beneficial to our enemy.
Which there's nothing wrong with that, except it's a bit ... assertive for me. Certain of its ground. Almost without thinking, I salted it with question:
Mr Kipling was too rigorous a patriot. He would never sanction anything so probably disadvantageous to us, so apparently beneficial to our enemy.
Now that's a Brenchley sentence. Sometimes I think I overdo the hesitations - if I subjected any novel of mine to one of those thingiegrams that count the usage of individual words and display them proportionally, I suspect that "perhaps" would come out a shade too prominent - but if a character gets to trust his own judgement of the world, then where's your story?
This is how I left things yestreen:
Mr Kipling was too rigorous a patriot. He would never sanction anything so disadvantageous to us, so beneficial to our enemy.
Which there's nothing wrong with that, except it's a bit ... assertive for me. Certain of its ground. Almost without thinking, I salted it with question:
Mr Kipling was too rigorous a patriot. He would never sanction anything so probably disadvantageous to us, so apparently beneficial to our enemy.
Now that's a Brenchley sentence. Sometimes I think I overdo the hesitations - if I subjected any novel of mine to one of those thingiegrams that count the usage of individual words and display them proportionally, I suspect that "perhaps" would come out a shade too prominent - but if a character gets to trust his own judgement of the world, then where's your story?