BAD FICTION

You probably saw this announcement of the winner of the Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad writing. The winner - and note that this is for deliberate bad writing! - was American academic, Sue Fondrie, for this very short but very awful sentence:
"Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of

GOALS AND OBSTACLES DRIVING YOUR PLOT

Every novel needs goals and obstacles. Or, rather, the main character does. So, I thought I'd offer you a practical lesson in this, in case it's something you haven't properly thought through. It may not just be the main character who needs goals and obstacles - there may be a secondary (and tertiary) character to focus on, too, though it's fair to say that minor characters don't have to have

NANOWRIMO NUTTERS

Last year, I blogged about NationalNovelWritingMonth, NaNoWriMo. My views haven't changed, so, before I say what I want to say today, please go and read it. I'll wait for you. (And if you don't know what the whole thing is, here's the main website.)

Dum de dum de dum, tra la la. *whistles and writes 167 words while waiting*.

So, you get the message: doing a NaNoWriMo can be inspiring, exciting

AS POINTLESS AS A POINTLESS THING: CARE WITH SIMILES

Remember when you were at school and you were learning Creative Writing? (You know - the bit squeezed between Passing Exams and Spelling. The bit where you got your story read out in class and your head stuck down the toilet in break.) Yes. Remember when the teacher got to Similes, and then Metaphors? And you were the only one who knew the difference? And then you got extra marks and ticks and

DIALOGUE TAGS

Following from my earlier post on dialogue, I now come, as promised, to dialogue tags. Dialogue tags are the he queried / asked / opined bits that come between the spoken sections. Once beloved of Enid Blyton and many others, their unnecessary use is now regarded as a bad habit and poor style. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s better to repeat he said, than to vary it with questioned, opined,

DIALOGUE TECHNIQUES

Good dialogue is very hard to do and some writers are much better at it than others, just as some actors are much better than others at doing accents. Good dialogue is dialogue that a reader hardly notices as good or not, but bad dialogue sticks out painfully, dragging the whole book down. Poor dialogue is certainly one of the things that can contribute to rejection, not on its own but then

CONFLICT – WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

Because readers care and publishers care. So, if you want readers and a publisher - or even just one of those - you must create conflict for us to care about.

Without conflict, there’s no story. That’s not quite true. I’ll rephrase: without conflict there’s no story that anyone would actually bother to read. Therefore, lack of sufficient conflict is a very important and common reason why

SECONDARY CHARACTERS OR PLOT DEVICES

I've just happened upon this really useful and important post by Julie Cohen about secondary characters.

Once you've read it, come back here. No, go on - READ IT.

Done? Right, well, she says everything you need to know about secondary characters having to earn their place, so I need say no more. But I want to mention a tangential point.

Julie says: "... I’ve been struggling today, because I

AND NOW UNPUTDOWNABILITY (via Nick Cross)

Nick Cross, whose writing blog I really really like, put a link to his post about Unputdownability in a comment under my recent post on Page-turnability. And his is such a good and relevant post about making your writing zing with unputdownability that I simply want to send you over there.

Of course, as there are different sorts of readers, there are different things which make a book

TOP TIP 2: PAGE-TURNABILITY

It's the new mantra. Of course, lots of readers have very understandably looked for page-turnability ever since pages existed. Now, it's virtually essential if you want your book published. There are two reasons for its new necessity. The first reason may be spurious. The second is not.
Nowadays, we are told, readers don't have time to hang around.
Publishers demand page-turnability because

TOP TIP 2: VARY SENTENCE STRUCTURE

One common fault I see in less-than-fab writing, and one which could easily be rectified, is the repetition of sentence structure. It's a style thing rather than a grammar thing, but it's still important for the feel of your writing.

There are two very common varieties of this problem.Where too many consecutive sentences begin with the subject immediately followed by the verb.
Where too many

NAILING YOUR CHARACTER

The other day, I came across a list of questions an author should ask his character, in order fully to understand that character. I am not going to send you to it because I was unimpressed. The questions were facetious and the fact that they were deliberately so didn't make them more pointful. Why would I want or need to know whether my character prefers milk or dark chocolate? This tells me sod

THERE ARE NO RULES FOR WRITING - JUST RESULTS

You want to know how to write? Well, I cannot tell you. Yes, I have written more than half a million words on this blog; yes, I've had a large number of books published; and yes, I am writing a book called Write To be Published. And yes, aspiring writers ask me and other writers things such as, do you plan? Do you talk to your characters? Do you outline? Keep spreadsheets of characters? Know the

SUSPENDING DISBELIEF

Crikey - I can't believe I haven't spoken about this before...

The weird thing about fiction is that the reader knows perfectly well that you are making it up – you are a professional liar – and yet demands to believe utterly in the whole story. Novelists can have impossible things happen, which the reader knows are impossible, and yet you must simultaneously make him believe, in that part of

MEANINGS AND CONTROL

I am away this week so I am taking the easy option by drawing your attention to a relevant post on my Wasted blog here.

As well as the points I make there, about control, power and the themes of Wasted, I find it interesting and important how very often readers will take meanings that are different from those we intended.

We mustn't be upset by that. I'm certainly not.

Only a very shallow book

REALLY, ACTUALLY, ABSOLUTELY, ADVERBS ARE MUCH MALIGNED

Some people have so got the wrong end of the stick about adverbs. Adverbs are not bad - using them lazily is.

Did you spot the adverb in that sentence? Should I have expressed that better? Differently? Ooops - "better" and "differently" - there go two more!

I have blogged about the poor use of adverbs before. Once in a post about "over-writing", because adverbial diarrhoea is part of that.

PACE - IT'S NOT A RACE

Let's talk about pace. The word is fairly explanatory. Speed. How quickly the plot develops. But it’s not as simple as that. For a start, not all types of book need to be “pacy” (fast) and not all types of reader require the same level of pace. “Pacy” is not necessarily a value judgement, either, simply a statement that this book moves quickly. Yes, many (most?) readers like a story to move

HOW LONG IS A BOOK?

You quite often ask "How long should my book be?" and I've been meaning to blog about this. Then I belatedly came across Linda Strachan's vg post on ABBA, on the subject of lengths for children's / YA books, and it reminded me of my negligence to you. Do go and read it and pay attention to the comments beneath it, which answer the questions that Linda poses.

Writers worry quite a bit about how

TO HIRE AN EDITOR OR NOT

Stupendous good sense here from Rachelle Gardner. I cannot exaggerate how much I agree with everything she says in this article. Please read it.

Let me highlight some bits for you:
"Using a freelance editor can be a great idea - if you use it as a learning experience." [Her bold, but I'd have bolded it, too.]
"It can be very helpful for an editor to give you an evaluation of your first few

THE GREENGROCERS' APOSTROPHE'S SOLVED

As in The apostrophe of greengrocers IS solved. That is the only meaning of that sentence written in that way. A word (in this case apostrophes) can only have an apostrophe if it "owns" something that follows or if something is missed out (in this case the first letter of is).

I could equally well have written greengrocer's as greengrocers', because it's up to me whether I mean one or several.