can find a passel of these in Gary K Wolfe's CRITICAL TERMS FOR
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY: A GLOSSARY AND GUIDE TO SCHOLARSHIP
(Greenwood Press, 1986). But you won't find them in here. This
lexicon is not a guide to scholarship. The Workshop Lexicon is a
guide (of sorts) for down-and-dirty hairy-knuckled sci-fi writers,
the kind of ambitious subliterate guttersnipes who actually write
and sell professional genre material. It's rough, rollicking,
rule-of-thumb stuff suitable for shouting aloud while pounding the
table.
THE LEXICON
PART ONE: WORDS AND SENTENCES
"Said-book" ism. An artificial verb used to avoid the word
"said." "Said" is one of the few invisible words in the English
language and is almost impossible to overuse. It is much less
distracting than "he retorted," "she inquired," "he ejaculated,"
and other oddities. The term "said-book" comes from certain
pamphlets, containing hundreds of purple-prose synonyms for the
word "said," which were sold by aspiring authors from tiny ads in
American magazines of the pre-WWII era.
Tom Swifty. An unseemly compulsion to follow the word "said"
with a colorful adverb, as in "'We'd better hurry,' Tom said
swiftly." This was a standard mannerism of the old Tom Swift
adventure dime-novels. Good dialogue can stand on its own without
a clutter of adverbial props.
Brenda Starr dialogue. Long sections of talk with no physical
background or description of the characters. Such dialogue,
detached from the story's setting, tends to echo hollowly, as if
suspended in mid-air. Named for the American comic-strip in which
dialogue balloons were often seen emerging from the Manhattan
skyline.
Burly Detective syndrome. This useful term is taken from SF's
cousin-genre, the detective-pulp. The hack writers of the Mike
Shayne series showed an odd reluctance to use Shayne's proper
name, preferring such euphemisms as "the burly detective" or "the
red-headed sleuth." This syndrome arises from a wrong-headed
conviction that the same word should not be used twice in close
succession. This is only true of particularly strong and visible
words, such as "vertiginous." Better to re-use a simple tag or
phrase than to contrive cumbersome methods of avoiding it.
Pushbutton words. Words used to evoke a cheap emotional response
without engaging the intellect or the critical faculties.
Commonly found in story titles, they include such bits of bogus
lyricism as "star," "dance," "dream," "song," "tears" and "poet,"
