Thee, Thou, Thy, Thine: A Guide for Writers

I am a writer and reader and watcher of speculative fiction. At one time I was a fancypants academic with training in the literature of the English Renaissance. Mostly these two things go together very harmoniously but every once in a while they clash horribly, as when I am reading or watching a speculative story in which the writer has failed to grasp correct usage of old timey words. The most abused words are "thee" and "thou." These two words are not interchangeable if used correctly, but rather serve two distinct purposes when used in a sentence. Likewise "thy" and "thine," although these two are less likely to be abused and a little more flexible, at least with regard to each other.

Mary Tudor does not approve of your old timey language usage. (Via.)

You might think this doesn't matter, but if your reader happens to be someone who has read a lot of Shakespeare or those other guys from the Renaissance, she might have absorbed correct thee/thou/thy/thine usage on a subconscious level. In this case, your clumsy attempt to sound old-timey will rocket her right out of your story as surely as a comma splice, using the word "exhort" when you mean "exert," or any other grammatical shoddiness. 

So, here's how to use "thy," "thine," "thee," and "thou" correctly, with examples from Shakespeare.

"Thy"

"Thy" means "your." Here's a quote from Cymbeline Act 4 Scene 1. The speaker is Cloten:

Posthumus, thy head, which is now growing upon thy shoulders, shall within this hour be off.

"Thine"

"Thine" is a little bit tricky. It can mean "your" or "yours." 

Polonius's famous speech to Laertes, from Hamlet Act 1 Scene 3 includes this line:

This above all, to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Here, Polonius is using "thine" to stand in for "your." Note that "thine" is sometimes (but not always) preferred if the word following begins with a vowel sound. So we have "thine own," but in Cloten's speech above, "thy head." The "n" sound in "thine" closes the word off so you don't end up with vowel sound soup. 

"Thine" means "yours" in other contexts. In Sonnet 40, Shakespeare writes, 

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;

What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;

All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.

You can't go wrong with "thy" and "thine" if you use "thy" to mean "your" and "thine" to mean "yours." You can also use "thine" to mean "your" if you want.  So long as you never try to use "thy" to mean "you" or "thine" to mean "you," you will be fine. 

"Thou" vs. "Thee"

In our modern English usage of today, we have one word, "you," that serves many purposes. It is the second person pronoun, used to refer to any number of people whom one is addressing, no matter where "you" sits in a sentence. This is inconvenient and leads to all kinds of imprecision, but so it is. (When you shout, "Hey you," you might find yourself clarifying whether you mean one "you" or a bunch of "yous." It's sad, really.)

Old timey English users had a way to differentiate between a "you" who is the subject of a sentence, and "you" who is the object. This is where "thou" and "thee" come in.

If the "you" starring in the sentence is the one doing the action, i.e. is the subject of the sentence, the word you use is "thou."

Here are some examples: 

Wilt thou ever be a foul-mouthed and calumnious knave? (All's Well That Ends Well, Act 1 Scene 3)

Thou losest thy old smell. (As You Like It, Act 1 Scene 2)

Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself? (Romeo and Juliet, Act 3 Scene 3)

 "Thee" is what you use when the "you" is the object of the sentence, the one unto whom something is being done. "Thou" is the action person; "thee" is on the receiving end. Examples:

I would not be thy executioner; 

I fly thee, for I would not injure thee. (As You Like It, Act 3 Scene 5)

But he that temper'd thee bade thee stand up,

Gave thee no instance why thou shouldst do treason,

Unless to dub thee with the name of traitor. (Henry V, Act 2 Scene 2)

There are exceptions to this that you will find on occasion, where a writer will use "thee" instead of "thou." It is more rare to see "thou" used as a substitute for "thee." However, it's important if you're using old timey English to know that "thou" and "thee" were not interchangeable. If you indiscriminately use "thee" all over the place, as seems to be the favourite choice of modern writers, you will be sending up a burning flag that says "I don't really know what I'm doing." That is something thou shouldst not do, no matter how much it tempts thee.

Wooooo!! Woooooooo....

No I am not a ghost. I am just trying to get up some excitement for March and meeting March goals. April is A to Z month again. Woooo! Are you guys doing it? I'm hoping to prep a little bit ahead of time this year so I can spend April visiting people's websites. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then go over here to the blogging from A to Z April challenge site. Their countdown clock is terrifying me for some reason, but I suspect it's mostly because right now it's day 28 and you can watch the milliseconds zipping away and imagine that we are almost at the zombie apocalypse.

Are we still worried about the zombie apocalypse? Maybe we're more worried about meteors now.

This guy isn't worried. I want to be like this guy.

Somehow I feel like I was really scattered through January and February, or maybe spread out a bit too thin, or spread out in the wrong way, or just unfocused. I got stuff done but too slowly. My constant lament.

I'm giving NaNoEdMo a try this month. This is a challenge to do 50 hours of editing in March. I thought I would give it a whirl last year, but I just sat in a stupor any time I tried to edit any of the longer projects I've got. It seems to me like the longer a manuscript is, the greater the chance that it is profoundly broken in ridiculous ways. Anyway I got myself together and thanks to the promptings and rave reviews of my friend Chris, I decided to try Holly Lisle's How to Revise Your Novel course. I'm still working my way through the first lesson, but so far it is brilliant. I am not paralyzed with fear and confusion about how to proceed. Basically the course is like someone who's been through it before holding your hand while you try to edit, and coaching you: here, don't try to do this all at once, take one baby step at a time. It is all do-able a tiny chunk at a time. The way you build your notes, you can put the down, go deal with other stuff, and come back to it. No rush, no emergencies, no fear.

What about you all? What are you writers doing these days?

A Non-Review of Mama, and Some Further Thoughts on Horror

Spoilers ahoy in this post!

So Dave and I went to see Mama the weekend it came out. We had a great conversation about it afterward in which Dave elucidated a theory about ghost stories the main point of which I'm going to relate here.  He's an engineer, so structural concepts come pretty easily to him.

I'm not going to exactly review it here, except to say that it was visually great, and if visually great stuff amuses you, then you should see it. Jessica Chastain looked amazing, as did Handsome McCutiepants, the male lead (I know I should just Google it but to do that would freak out my ancient laptop and I'd never get back here to finish this post). I often find kid actors noxious, but the little girls were really terrific. The ghost looked great, as did her retro run down cabin in the woods. So yeah: Mama is very pretty.

Structurally it is flawed, albeit in interesting ways. So after we watched it we came to the conclusion that there's a problem with ghost stories, and that problem has in part to do with the lore of ghosts and in part with the narrative imperative to wrap things up in a tidy package at the end.

The lore of ghosts has to do with understanding them. There's this idea that you can solve a haunting if you can just get the ghost to go into the light, or figure out why they keep moving great grandma's brooch, or whatever. I'm not talking about actual hauntings here, of which there are many different kinds and different ways of dealing with them. I'm talking about predominant cultural notions.

Here's the thing though: if your ghost story falls under the purview of horror, and you at some point in the story reveal, for example, through elaborate and awesome looking dream sequences, why the ghost is so upset that it needs your babies (hint: you took away her baby, or someone did (or some nun did)), you drain all of the energy out of your plot. Then you no longer have a horror story: you've got a science problem. Give the ghost the brooch / the corpse of her baby / the more feral of your wolf children, and you'll solve the problem. (Child protective services might have a few questions about what happened to the more feral of your wolf children on that cliff that night, but that's a problem for a different story.)

In essentials, if you allow your horror story to devolve into a science problem, you're joining the ranks of Ghostbusters and Scooby Doo. Nothing wrong with that - horror comedy is built on a foundation of ghost-stories-as-science-problems. It's just if you want the story to remain a horror piece, maybe best to leave your characters haunted.

What haunts us? The missed connections, the unresolved puzzles, the things we said we'd do that we never did, the promises we broke, the lies we told, the secrets we hid? Or: the cruel things we said and did, the hurts we inflicted and never apologized for, the confrontations we failed to stage, the ways we rolled over and gave in? I can think of many things. Some of the better haunting stories I've read recently never resolve the haunting, and indeed, revolve around the utter failure of the main characters to engage with their ghosts in anything like an effective manner.

Discuss, preferably with examples. Or: write your own unresolved haunting story this week and let me know how it goes.

Unusual Plots of the Early 20th Century

So there's this idea out there that every story that can be written has been written, and there's no truly new or innovative story left. It may be true that there are some well-worn paths through the Forest of Story, and it may even be that there's a superhighway shooting through it (I think I'll call it Chosen One Road, with major routes through the towns of Don't Go Down There It's Not Safe and Happily Ever After....Or Was It?). I am even a champion of the idea that you don't have to be original in your ideas and plots in order to tell a good story. Shakespeare wasn't. It's just that he knew how to treat a story right. (Most of the time. I still think Much Ado About Nothing is a bit of a hot mess.)

Anyway, I've been doing my best to do a lot of short story reading lately, and in the name of having complete coverage in the field of horror, I picked up The Century's Best Horror Fiction (Vols. 1 and 2), edited by John Pelan. This monster of an anthology is unwieldy, my friends. It is not the kind of book you take with you on the bus. It is a commitment.

The fact is, though, that it is also lovingly and knowledgeably curated. Pelan's task was to select one story from each of the years of the 20th century, the best that each year had to offer. His only limit was that any given author could only be represented once. The stories are absolutely wonderful. The results are well worth reading. (Sure, you can pick up some of the more popular early stories online for free, but you can't get them all, and you won't get Pelan's terrific editorial notes on each one. I've worked on similar anthologies in the past. It is a lot of painstaking work to put something like this together.)

What's really interesting about the earlier stories is that among them are some of the best-worn horror tropes. (He was really a ghost! Be careful what you wish for! The family curse is real!) There are also some stories that are just quirky enough or somehow maybe not easily represented on film or...something...that I've never quite seen their type before. For sheer audacity of storytelling and a pretty creepy use of a framing device, you must read Arthur Machen's "The White People." If you haven't read it before (and I hadn't), you're in for a treat. Last night Dave and I read "Thurnley Abbey" by Perceval Landon, a writer Pelan identifies as a kind of one hit wonder. Despite a long preamble, "Thurnley Abbey" is such a revelation. I was really glad that I was reading it aloud to Dave, since it has a moment of such total absurdity that I needed a witness to share it with me. Really weird ghost story.

It's just so nice to know that, once upon a time, there was something that could maybe only have been said in that storytelling moment, and it was said, and it was a pretty unique thing unto itself. I don't want to say more than that, because I don't want to spoil it for you guys if you're inclined to go read either of those stories. If you've read them, let's discuss in the comments.

Mama

Oh joy! Oh bliss! So there's this new horror movie, Mama, coming out. Guillermo del Toro produced it, and I must say I'm excited. It's been a tricky couple of weeks over here at command central, since we haven't been able to haul ourselves out to the movie theatre. Yesterday we seriously considered Zero Dark Thirty or Gangster Squad...such is our sadness. It's been all downhill since Django Unchained.

Anyhoo, a new horror movie with del Toro's thumbs up is all good to me. Here's a little taste of the short film that inspired it.

 

My Big Break

Caveat lector: this post includes some detail about physical injury. If you're squeamish about these things, please don't read this! ETA: I mention this later, but the accident I'm describing happened a couple of decades ago, so I am absolutely fine. 

In my last post (a million years ago), I mentioned that I've experienced a pretty serious accident that resulted in a lot of injury to my upper body. Some of you asked about that or commented on it, so I thought I would elaborate on it for a few reasons: first, it is a dramatic tale about me, and, uh, this is my blog. Second, if you've never suffered a serious injury, broken bone, or skull fracture, it might help you to know what it's like from a writerly perspective. If you're not a writer, it might help you to know what it's like from a human perspective. Finally, although I was a horror / grimdark fan before the accident, going through such a visceral experience really helped me appreciate body horror that much more.

Also, because of this event, I am a cyborg. (Or, at least, titanium-reinforced.)

Here's what happened. In the summer between second and third year university - about 22 years ago - I moved back home with my parents. Second year of school was the first time I'd lived away from home, and that was really good in all the ways that a first taste of independence can be. Moving back in with them, not so much fun. I wasn't having much luck finding work, and I wasn't sure how to go about supporting myself when I moved out in third year. Also, I had fallen in love with someone deeply inappropriate for me, and who I knew my parents didn't like.

To soothe myself, I got into cycling. I rode my bike all over the small town where my parents lived and deep into the concessions and farmland outside of town. I felt a sense of freedom on the bike that I couldn't feel in my living situation. It was a weird summer, full of arguments and testiness and ingratitude and the kinds of big feelings one has at age twenty.

One day in late July, my dog escaped from the backyard. He was a little white terrier, the dog my parents gave me when I was thirteen. He was pretty much the only family member with whom I wasn't chronically annoyed that summer. It wasn't anybody's fault: the gate latch just hadn't caught. My mom and I set out to find him. She took off in my grandmother's Toyota. I got on my bike. At a major intersection in town, I was trying to turn left. The oncoming car was turning left too, so no problem. As I was heading into my turn, a van pulled around the oncoming car and sped through the intersection. It struck me, or I struck it - things get fuzzy at this point. Basically, I bounced off it, flew twenty feet, and crumpled into the road.

For years, I had vague impressions of what happened in the next couple of hours. Those impressions seemed dream-like, or as if I had made them up: a certainty that I was going to die; a memory of swearing at people who were reaching to touch me; a trip in an ambulance; people shouting. Later on, I worked with a hypnotherapist to recover the memories and to release some of the trauma associated with the accident. I know now that what I thought I'd invented was the memory. It was just shrouded in a kind of veil, where I couldn't access it directly.

I was taken to a burn / trauma unit. They didn't give me pain meds because I had a head injury, and they needed  to figure out how bad it was first. My experience of having a severe injury and no medication is that I seemed to retreat into a little room in my mind, where the pain wasn't really directly accessible. Whatever I was going through, I think didn't really get written into memory, or wasn't experienced directly. When people talk about prey animals going into a kind of trance as they die, I think about what happened to me during those hours. Nature has its mercies.

Eventually they took me in for surgery. I remember sucking hard on the anaesthetic. I wanted to be knocked out.

Sum total, these were my injuries: two broken wrists; one broken elbow, one smashed elbow; one broken humerus (that was a compound fracture, my only compound fracture); one broken collarbone; one broken head. I was not wearing a helmet. (Sue me: I was trying to save my dog.) My brain was pretty much fine. The fracture was hairline. It bled like a mofo, though, so much so that the blood poured out of my ear and knocked loose my bones of hearing. Those are the little bones that sit in your ear canal and amplify sounds. The accident partially deafened me. I also lost my sense of smell - caused by damage to the sensory area of the brain - but it eventually returned. (This is a pretty interesting phenomenon: more info here).

Because everything was stabilized through plates and pins, I was able to start moving my right arm very soon after the accident. There was more swelling in my left arm, which prevented me from using it at first, but it soon followed. I had a big bruise on the inside of my left leg where the bicycle seat had hit me as I flew off the bike, but that was my only lower body injury.

The doctors told my parents that I would be in the hospital for five weeks. They told them to tell me it would be three weeks (I had a bit of a bad attitude about the hospital). I was out in two. I think the main reason for this is that I was in relatively good shape when I had the accident. After all, I'd been cycling all summer. I was able to hook my feet under the metal rung at the end of the hospital bed and use that to sit up. I was soon walking around freely. Miraculously, I didn't experience any vertigo. A few days and a blood transfusion after the accident, I was feeling pretty energized. The pain was bad, the hospital food was terrible, but I was healing. I went home after two weeks.

The dog, by the way, was fine. Somehow he crossed the highway on his own without anything like the problems I'd had. One of my cousins spotted him trotting down the street. She nabbed him, checked his tags to verify that he was indeed our dog, and deposited him back in our yard.

There were a few long term aftereffects from the accident. I went on my own course of rehabilitation after the surgeon who worked on me turned out to be a bit of a dick. I took up tai chi, and that, as it turned out, opened up a huge vista of all kinds of cool stuff for me. I suffered from PTSD for a lot of years, which mostly involved feeling really nervous any time I had to cross the street. I don't much care for cycling, although I can do it and do somewhat enjoy it, so long as I'm nowhere near car traffic. I have a good sense of what it's like to be wholly dependent on others for the little things you take for granted (brushing your teeth; independent bathroom usage; feeding yourself). I was told that I would have arthritis by the time I was thirty-five. I didn't, and I still don't, mostly because I stretch all the time. I was also told that the range of motion I had six months after the accident was all I'd ever have. That was also not true - see above re: stretching all the time.

A lot of people who pursue a spiritual path (as I do) will talk about an event in their lives that really started them on their path. One of my mentors calls it your "Mac truck moment." I think of my accident as a big spiritual redirect. Without the accident, I might have taken a lot longer to try tai chi, and thus might have taken a lot longer to learn about energy and energy healing, about the holistic approach to healing, and about meditation. In the context of my life as a whole, that's how I assign meaning to this absolutely dreadful event. In the context of my life as a writer, it goes into the big bundle of things I've experienced that will probably show up in my fiction at some point.

Questions: ask 'em if you've got 'em. Stories of your own: tell 'em if you want.

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Being Lame About Posting but Focused on Writing Update

From Wikimedia Commons

Weirdness has been afoot this month, which has been a capsulized, compressed version of the weirdness that has been going on all year. Personally speaking, 2012 has been a challenging year ("challenging"). Along with the year that I broke pretty much everything in my upper body and the year that I had to finish my half-not-done-yet PhD thesis in under two months, 2012 is a contender for hardest year of my adult life. It is up there. And probably it isn't in the number three slot. November saw fit to throw all the challenges of 2012 into the pot at once.

Yet I've kept writing. I've been feeling blue and strange and discombobulated, but somehow I've still found it in me to hit the last few days of this challenge with everything I've got. I won NaNoWriMo ("won") this past Tuesday. I've just about finished with the middle of my story and I'm into the gear up to the final conflict. There will be much to flesh out. I can see myself hitting 83614, my secret personal November goal, by the end of the day November 30. These numbers in no way are representative of the serious slogginess of writing this particular book. It's dark and nasty. I'm turning over a lot of rocks for this one, even as a lot of rocks are being hurled at me in regular reality. 

It's a rock thing. 

What's the single hardest writing challenge you've had to face? I want to hear your inspiring stories. Or some spam advertisements for shoes or survivalist websites. Either way. 

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