# https://paul-carlucci.com ## Posts - [How This Style Works: Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber](https://paul-carlucci.com/how-this-style-works-lesser-ruins-by-mark-haber/): How This Style Works: Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber What that synopsis doesn’t reveal is how hysterically funny this book is. With almost no plot developments to speak of, it’s a stream-of-consciousness rip through the mind of a roundly isolated intellectual, and what makes it work so well isn’t just the tumult of striking insights but also how they’re packaged in skeins of discursive sentences, like this one right here, with the parts we’ll talk about in bold: And the chirp of the phone once again removes me from these reveries, the coffee no longer warm, the tangle of gaping pages […] - [How This Style Works: Peter’s Troubled Interiors in Intermezzo by Sally Rooney](https://paul-carlucci.com/how-this-style-works-peters-troubled-interiors-in-intermezzo-by-sally-rooney/): How This Style Works: Peter’s Troubled Interiors in Intermezzo by Sally Rooney Twenty-two-year-old Ivan, a chess prodigy, was closer to his dad than Peter, a thirty-three-year-old lawyer. Mourning, Ivan hooks up with Margaret, a thirty-eight-year-old divorcee, while Peter tries to balance his newish relationship with Naomi, a girl who happens to be Ivan’s age, and his old one with Sylvia, an ex from Peter’s own peer group. Yes, age is a thing. With three third-person-limited points of view—Ivan’s, Peter’s, and Margaret’s—Rooney uses sentence aesthetics to distinguish Peter’s interior, offsetting it from the others in a way most readers will immediately sense […] - [How This Theme Works: Transition in Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan](https://paul-carlucci.com/how-this-theme-works-transition-in-mayflies-by-andrew-ohagan/): How This Theme Works: Transition in Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan We’re in Scotland. It’s 1986, and Thatcherism is at its peak. We see a defeated and embittered father wander away from his son’s soccer game to stare forlornly at the Firth of Clyde, where the Clyde River flows into an estuary before dumping its waters off the coast of Scotland. Tully Dawson made himself new to the world, and ripe for the glories of that summer, by showing he was unlike his father. It wasn’t a matter to fight over: some families are made up of strangers and nothing can change it. But […] - [How This Setting Works: Rural Montana in Winter Range by Claire Davis](https://paul-carlucci.com/how-this-setting-works-rural-montana-in-winter-range-by-claire-davis/): How This Setting Works: Rural Montana in Winter Range by Claire Davis The plot traces a messy, slow-burning love triangle and revenge opera between sheriff Ike Parsons, an outsider from Wisconsin; his locally raised and range-bred wife, Pattiann; and Chess Stubblefield, the man she dated in her chaotic, booze-soaked youth before a battery of scandals drove her out of the state, after which she managed to exorcise her demons and return reformed.   In the opening pages, a freak snowstorm settles over the rangeland, an ominous event that both caps off the tribulations of a seven-year drought and promises, once it’s passed, […] - [Part 3. In Praise of the Passive Voice: Where to Use It and How to Explain Your Choices](https://paul-carlucci.com/part-3-in-praise-of-the-passive-voice-where-to-use-it-and-how-to-explain-your-choices/): Part 3. In Praise of the Passive Voice: Where to Use It and How to Explain Your Choices This is the third post of a three-part series. The first is available here, and the second is available here. For guidance, there are loads of instructive cliches you can turn to online (e.g., when politicians note that “mistakes were made”). For something more official, language and style authorities can help, and we’ll explore a couple at the end of this post. But the short of it is pretty straightforward. Often enough, the subject of a sentence just doesn’t matter enough to merit […] - [Part 2. In Praise of the Passive Voice: Ergatives and Other Commonly Accused Verb Phrases](https://paul-carlucci.com/part-2-in-praise-of-the-passive-voice-ergatives-and-other-commonly-accused-verb-phrases/): Part 2. In Praise of the Passive Voice: Ergatives and Other Commonly Accused Verb Phrases This is the second post of a three-part series. The first is available here. Complex Verb Tenses First, in part one of this series, we brushed up against a few scenarios that tend to rile up some of the errant scolds who police our writing: complex verb tenses. For example, it’s not uncommon for a prof or advisor to see an auxiliary “to be” and assume the construction is passive even though it’s actually an active present- or past-continuous verb phrase, like “Timmy is eating a […] - [Part 1. In Praise of the Passive Voice: Effacing the Subject to Showcase the Object](https://paul-carlucci.com/part-1-in-praise-of-the-passive-voice-effacing-the-subject-to-showcase-the-object/): Part 1. In Praise of the Passive Voice: Effacing the Subject to Showcase the Object This is the first of a three-part series. But here’s what they don’t know: Even though the active voice is usually the better choice, the passive isn’t just some awkward design flaw of the English language. Actually, it can be a helpful device that crafty writers and speakers use when they want their audience to focus on the object of a sentence, not the subject, for any number of perfectly valid reasons. If you’re a writer looking to push back against excessive policing of the passive […] - [How This Symbol Works: Blue in The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller](https://paul-carlucci.com/how-this-symbol-works-blue-in-the-land-in-winter-by-andrew-miller/): How This Symbol Works: Blue in The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller First, it helps to know that Eric is the village doctor, and because of his poor upbringing, he’s got some class preoccupations that his caring wife, Irene, was inoculated against during her own, more privileged childhood. They live in a nice cottage down the lane from Bill and Ira’s drafty, rundown farmhouse, a site where the former is devoted to making a success of himself far beyond the orbit of his rich father’s brash corruption, and this is an agenda he’s imposed on his pregnant wife, who has […] - [Spike That Comma: When to Mess with a Compound Predicate](https://paul-carlucci.com/spike-that-comma-when-to-mess-with-a-compound-predicate/): Spike That Comma: When to Mess with a Compound Predicate These are the commas that come between a subject and the conjunction coordinating its second verb, and once you know how to recognize them, you’ll start seeing them everywhere, sometimes multiple times per page. Which is when the scowling starts. In this post, we’re going to learn how to spot them, why they get so overused, and how to deploy them with crafty restraint. Come. Let’s be geeks. Compound Predicates Defined First, we need to get a grip on some terms. English sentences are built of subjects and predicates. Basically, the […] - [How This Symbol Works: Billy Devine's Birdhouses in Mystic River by Dennis Lehane](https://paul-carlucci.com/how-this-symbol-works-billy-devines-birdhouses-in-mystic-river-by-dennis-lehane/): How This Symbol Works: Billy Devine’s Birdhouses in Mystic River by Dennis Lehane It celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this year, and one of the things that makes it so enduring is Lehane’s subtle literary touch, which he uses to add depth and resonance without ever letting it hijack the story and bog down the pacing. If you’re looking to bring some dimension to your genre fiction, you might linger over the birdhouses Billy Devine makes while angry at the world and resentful of his wife and son, Sean. In this article, we’ll figure out how such a quiet symbol manages to […] - [Stressing Out: Using It-Clefts for Argumentative Emphasis](https://paul-carlucci.com/stressing-out-using-it-clefts-for-argumentative-emphasis/): Stressing Out: Using It-Clefts for Argumentative Emphasis On the page, however, intonation and mannerisms can leave us wanting. But fear not: We can always pull from a weather-beaten shed of text-based tools, like intensifiers, punctuation marks, redundancies, passive constructions, inversions, rhetorical devices, and cleft sentences. In this post, we’re going to explore that last little hammer, with the it-cleft as our particular focus. A What Sentence? Simply put, a cleft sentence takes an idea you could get across in one clause and recasts it using multiple clauses. In grammar parlance, it often turns—or cleaves—a simple sentence (one independent clause) into a […] - [How This Dialogue Works: Speech Tags in Skippy Dies by Paul Murray](https://paul-carlucci.com/how-this-dialogue-works-speech-tags-in-skippy-dies-by-paul-murray/): How This Dialogue Works: Speech Tags in Skippy Dies by Paul Murray Published in 2010, this is a sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing, and often heartbreaking novel about a group of kids at a Catholic boarding school in Dublin. Skippy is Daniel’s nickname, and Daniel dies during a donut-eating contest in the opening pages. The rest of the book follows the events leading up to his death as well as how people cope in the aftermath. At close to 700 pages, it’s a tome, but thanks to its stunning balance of darkness and light, Skippy Dies holds on tight and moves surprisingly […] - [Predicate Swapping: Let’s Get Weird](https://paul-carlucci.com/predicate-swapping-lets-get-weird/): Predicate Swapping: Let’s Get Weird Of course, barring an unwieldy subject, most of a sentence takes place in the predicate, so it’s prime for celebrity. Like Sally Rooney, you can omit your subjects entirely, then dismember your predicates and dangle their severed extremities like jewels on a necklace, as in this line from Intermezzo: “Down the staircase and into the room without seeing any of the others.” Or you can pull from David Szalay and write them straight, minimalist, and achingly clear, like this sentence from Flesh: “And then the moment passes, and she’s standing at the end of the jetty […] ## Pages - [Contact](https://paul-carlucci.com/contact/): Contact - [Media](https://paul-carlucci.com/media/): Media Reviews and interview, plus a few lists and the odd guest column. Times Literary Supplement Review Writing for The Times Literary Supplement, Randy Boyagoda says The Voyageur “recalls Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien in its robust prose and unflinching presentation of the costs of being a strange human in different times.” ​Check out the review. Irish Examiner Interview In The Irish Examiner, Sue Leonard asks me some questions for her Beginner’s Pluck column on debut novelists. ​Check out the article. “Visceral Voyage into Canada’s Colonial Heart of Darkness” In her review for The Irish Independent, Estelle Birdy examines The Voyageur’s philosophical underpinnings, calling it a “beautifully […] - [Writing Resources](https://paul-carlucci.com/blog/): Writing Resources This page has a collection of essays on storytelling and grammar. I update it from time to time, and you can get my sorta monthly newsletter to stay current. Want to school your prof on what the passive voice actually is? Curious how you can use absolute phrases to ramble on forever without creating run-on sentences? Feel like making a fictional setting into a character? Me too. I guess we’re both nerds. Predicate Swapping: Let’s Get Weird Remember when Dylan Thomas was all like, “Don’t go gentle into that good night”? And you were like, “Doesn’t this legendary moron […] - [Books](https://paul-carlucci.com/books/): Books The Voyageur (Swift Press, 2024; Éditions Globe, 2027) Alex is an orphaned stockboy eking out a meagre living in 1830s Montreal when he meets Serge, a drunken fur trader who promises a life of adventure in the wilderness of British North America. But their expedition quickly goes awry, and Alex is shot in the gut during a trading post robbery. Very loosely based on real-life fur trader Alexis St. Martin, The Voyageur is historical fiction by way of magic realism and body horror. Ottawa Book Award finalist. “The Voyageur is a marvellous work of art, brutal, tender and deeply moving. […] - [Editorial Services](https://paul-carlucci.com/editorial-services/): Editorial Services I work with novelists and short-story writers, traditional publishers and independent authors, think tanks and professors, and memoirists and thought leaders.  I offer beta reads, manuscript assessments, proofreads, copy-editing, line editing, developmental editing, detailed reader reports, and tailored combinations of all these services. I also help with query letters, and I offer consultations on the good and bad of the publishing industry. In addition to fiction editing, I offer academic editing and report editing, and I also work on marketing materials, from social media posts to conference programs. I’m comfortable in Canadian, American, and British conventions, and I’m familiar […] - [Home](https://paul-carlucci.com/): Paul Carlucci Editor and Author I’m an experienced freelance editor, award-winning author, and occasional journalist.  As an editor, I work in fiction and non-fiction. My clients include traditional and hybrid presses, self-publishing authors, writers preparing manuscripts for submission to agents and publishers, and academics and research professionals. I edit adult, young adult, and children’s fiction and non-fiction as well as academia, journalism, educational materials, and marketing materials. I help writers on the micro and macro levels, digging into the technical aspects of their sentences while offering suggestions on the bigger picture.  ​ As an author, I’m critically acclaimed and internationally published. […] ## Optional - [Agent (MCP protocol)](websites-agents.hostinger.com/paul-carlucci.com/mcp) [comment]: # (Generated by Hostinger Tools Plugin)