Fewer words does not mean quicker to write

An Amazon review of one of my ebooks some time ago - it was either Write a Great Synopsis or Dear Agent, I don't remember - says something along the lines of "probably written in a weekend." It goes on to praise the book and I seem to remember it had four stars. Which is good.

But that remark reveals a common misconception about the skill of writing. It does not necessarily take longer to write more words. A first draft, for example, is almost always longer than the final version because time spent chopping is almost always time spent improving.

For your interest, that's one of the things that highlights the skill of the children's writer: the ability to express a complicated concept in a few words, and often restricted ones.

Several well known writers are credited with apologising for writing such a long letter on the grounds of not having time to write a shorter one. It's an important point, whoever said it.

Anyone can write lots of words. A skilled writer says exactly what he or she wants to say in a few, because each one has been well-chosen.

As it happens, both Write a Great Synopsis and Dear Agent took months to research, write and edit. And that's why the books have clearly helped so many people

(I'm away at the moment so may not be able to reply to comments. Don't let that stop you, though!)

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 forgotten memories."

It illustrates two things. (Well, two for starters.)

First, one of the most common problems I see in the work of aspiring writers is over-writing, and particularly the horrible use of similes. And wow, is this a horrible simile! Similes should only be used when needed. Similes must enrich; they must give a sense of, "AH! Now I can picture that. Now I can feel it in my heart." If something is clear and obvious and familiar already, it doesn't need a simile to enhance it.

Good similes hit us in the heart. Bad ones grip us somewhere nearer the bowels.

What does a good simile look like? There's an example I use and I apologise to the writer in one of my workshops who wrote this, because I can't remember who it was and therefore can't credit her. If she sees this, I hope she will tell me!

She was describing a funeral procession going up a hillside in Sicily (I think) and she used the image of "a black centipede against the white hillside". It's perfect - apt, necessary, enriching. She doesn't need to say "crawling" or "winding" because we already know those things about centipedes. And that's the point about writing: every word you use brings more than simply that word to your reader's mind. The word brings with it a whole cohort of attached and unavoidable meanings.

And that is the second point: the writer's magic weapon. Every time we use a word, the reader or listener pictures it, and pictures it along with a load of aspects of that word or image. (I'm going to blog further about that magic writing weapon soon.) This is an incredibly important point to remember: every word you use has more power than you think, and that power is one you must control. Bad similes are examples of very poor weapon control by the writer.

So, let's go over that awful simile and you'll see why understanding points 1 and 2 will show you exactly why it's so wrong.

• "mind turned like the vanes" - how does this help? Can you picture a mind turning like vanes? Do you not already know what it feels like when thoughts come fast? So, neither necessary nor apt.
• "wind-powered turbine" - so, now we have a wind-turbine in our mind, and it is so not helping. Neither necessary nor apt.
• "chopping her ... thoughts into bloody pieces" - why bloody? How does it help the image to have thoughts becoming physical things that can be chopped? Are we any closer to the desired meaning?
• "her sparrow-like thoughts" - with sparrows in our minds we're now thinking of aspects of sparrows: small, brown, chirping, common, bird. 
• "bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile" - and the sparrows in our mind are now chopped into bloody pieces. We are further from the desired meaning than ever. And feeling sick. Besides, while you can have a pile of chopped birds, you can't really have a growing pile of thoughts.
• "of forgotten memories" - why? Why is her pile of "forgotten memories" growing during this small moment of wind-turbine-like thinking? Are they immediately forgotten as soon as they hit the pile? How? Why? WTF is going on?

In short, far from being closer to understanding (which is the whole point of a simile), we are completely confused, as our brains struggle to process the chopped birds and blood all over the hillside where the wind-turbine sits.

But I am very glad that Sue Sondrie wrote this simile because I can now use it: when I do workshops, I'm always looking for examples of bad similes (and other horrors) and I find them very difficult to invent. So, please help me! Can you give me examples (with permission to use them) of poor similes? Not necessarily outrageous ones, but just "not very good" ones, ones that miss the point and don't help.

Bad writing is not as easy as it looks. Congratulations to Sue Fondrie!

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 major goals and obstacles, or not obviously.

Ask yourself some questions:

1. Is my MC's goal interesting and important enough for this genre and for the readers I aim to snare? For example, the MC being desperate to own a dog might be sufficient goal for a gentle book for six-year-olds but not for most other readers. (Though it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that a good writer could create an exciting story out of this premise, by adding a great deal of extra interest.)
2. Have I put sufficient obstacles in the way of this goal? Have I paced them well, increasing suspense? Do the obstacles hang together within the story, rather than being completely random-seeming?
3. Do my readers care sufficiently about my MC that they are desperate for him or her to achieve the goal? The creation of a rounded character who we have strong feelings about is essential to keeping us reading. We must care and believe.
4. Have I created enough complexity by having more than one goal, and perhaps by running a sub-plot which will conflict and even become part of the obstacles? Secondary characters can be very useful in this. 

Let's look at different types of obstacle. They can be:

• caused by the MC's own mistake
• caused by the MC's enemy
• caused by a secondary character accidentally getting in the way
• caused by external influences
• caused completely by accident - don't overdo these or you'll end up with a mishmash of things and the reader will think you're just making it up as you go along. Which of course you are, but not in a good way. 

Obstacles should be:

• interesting
• relevant
• congruous
• sometimes seeming insurmountable
• frustrating for the reader but not too frustrating - you don't want the reader screaming at you. Much.
• generally increasing as the MC reaches the goal
• overcome at just the right speed, generating the amount of suspense you want. Too quick and it's a let-down; too slow and it can become frustrating.

One of the problems I most often see in aspiring writers' work is lack of focus on the goal and the obstacles, lack of real effort to ensure that this goal is genuinely interesting and exciting for the reader. You must define and sharpen the goal and obstacles otherwise your story becomes a walk in the park instead of the gripping adventure it usually needs to be.

So, leap out at your MC and give him the shock of his life. But make the readers suspect you're going to leap out, so that the reader hangs around, fingers over his eyes, hardly daring to read on and yet being unable to stop.

Get the goals and obstacles right and you end up with a novel that is likely also to have suspense, pace and narrative thrust. And most novels benefit from an awful lot more narrative thrust than I see in most unpublished (and some published) work. In fact, it's one of the main things I'll be talking about in my workshops and talks over the next months - including at the York Festival of Writing.

Talking of workshops, there are no spaces left at my What's Wrong With your Manuscript evening in Edinburgh but there ARE spaces on the Secrets of Writing for Children and Teenagers one. If you come to that, you will get an invitation to the launch party!

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 and hugely useful. It can get a first draft down more quickly than you're likely to achieve on your own; it forces you to switch off your internal editor and is often a very good way to remove a writing block, because it doesn't matter what you write as long as the words are there. (Within reason.) It can also be fun to be part of something that others are doing and the encouragement and friendship that participants offer each other is wonderful.

And, in a minute, I'm going to give encouragement to some writers I know who are doing it. And a treat for everyone...

But. First. Hang on.

Here are some other things about NaNoWriMo:

• It's entirely optional.
• It is not right for everyone.
• You should only do it if it suits your life, your writing, what else might be going on for you, your mood at the time.
• It is not the only way to write a first draft and for many people it is not even the best way.
• It doesn't make you a better person. Or, quite possibly, a better writer.

So, do not feel you "should" do this or that you are somehow inadequate if you don't. And, if you've started and find that it's not working, or that life has got in the way, or if for any other reason your heart and/or head tell you to stop, STOP. For goodness' sake, there are people dying around the world and whether anyone begins or completes this mad and exhausting but often enormously fun, exciting and fulfilling exercise is neither here nor there. Calm down - it's not even a commercial. (OK, so some people raise money for charity doing it, but obviously there are many other ways to raise money for charity, so don't cite that as a reason for feeling you should give yourself RSI and caffeine addiction.)

Why am I saying this? Because there's been a suggestion that some people feel pressurised into doing NaNoWriMo or guilty for not doing it. I can't imagine why anyone would feel pressurised, because it's not the sense that I get from the participants. Yes, they get a bit carried away sometimes, and yes, the internet in November is full of them sending messages to each other, but so what? Why shouldn't they? They're part of something difficult, something they want to do, something they're proud of. Why shouldn't they talk about it?

No, I suspect that if any writers feel pressurised it's not because of anything the NaNoWriMoers have said or done, but by something internal. A misplaced feeling of inadequacy or a lack of understanding about the point of NaNoWriMo. There is no good reason why you should feel you "ought" to spend a month of your life writing something you don't want to write in a way you don't want to write it. That's pointless. There's enough pressure on us as writers without feeling that we have to do something which may not be right for us. NaNoWriMo is not a rite of passage. It was cleverly and pointfully created by people who wanted to do it, for good reasons and with good results for them and many others.It was never intended as a tyranny except as a voluntary and self-imposed one

I feel it's rather like marathon running. It rightly gives some people satisfaction but doesn't suit everyone. I don't believe runners run marathons because they think they ought to. They want to; it suits their personalities (and their bodies); it's difficult and lots of people - me, for example - don't want to and couldn't do it, which gives a sense of achievement to those who can, and who make the effort.

In conclusion: do a NaNoWriMo if you actually want to. Personal satisfaction, desire to experiment, enjoyment of camaraderie, an idea that is ready to be wrenched from you and spewed out in a month of mayhem - whatever, you have to want to. And if you don't want to, don't. But don't waste time feeling that anyone else thinks you should. No one cares whether you do it or not. If you do, they'll welcome you; if you don't, just go away and write in your own way. Besides, what successful writers do you know who do it? Nowhere in any publisher's submission criteria does it say, "Do a NaNoWriMo".

And now, let's hear from a few mad Nanoers! They do, in my view, deserve our encouragement. It's not an easy thing they're doing, and if they're in it for the right reasons, they'll get a lot out of it. You'll see from their comments the variety of feelings and reasons and stories.

Kirsty Stanley @kirstyes on Twitter
I've signed up for NaNo since 2004 and have never completed. I've planned more this year and for extra inspiration I'm writing for Cancer Research UK. If this is a charity close to your heart please check out my justgiving page. http://www.justgiving.com/Kirsty-Stanley.

Xandra James
I'll be doing Nano for the first time this year - not quite sure what I've let myself in for yet but I'll be regularly updating my blog with my triumph and pain at www.xandrajames.com

Sheila Perry @ceciliapeartree
I am doing it for the 5th time in a row, have succeeded all the previous times but it is still an uphill struggle at the start, and a daunting thought with (now) 49,393 words to go! My working title is A Reformed Character and it's a mystery with the underlying theme of 'can people really change?' I live in Edinburgh and there is a lovely NaNo group here with lots of real world meetings and write-ins.

Sally Quilford @Quillers
Sally's NaNoWriMo novel is The Thirteenth Passenger, and started as a joke, when she said she intended to write a romance about a Martian Trillionaire. Sally is also serialising her efforts on this blog http://thirteenthpassenger.blogspot.com/ and asking people to give her plot ninjas. You can find out about them on this page and see a selection of those already given on the sidebar of the blog. Her intention is to try and cram every plot ninja into her story by 30th November.

Rebecca Brown @rebeccaebrown
I'm about to tackle NaNoWriMo for the first time, with a teething six month old and a three year old and I need all the encouragement I can get!

Lev Parikian  @LevParikian
You may remember that when we met you mentioned NaNoWriMo. I thought little of it at the time, but when I got home I developed acute NaNoWriMo fever. It took me a couple of sessions to put down an outline, and I realised that I couldn't wait for November. So I started. 30k words later other things took over and I put it to one side. As this is what NaNoWriMo is designed to avoid, I decided to crack on and finish what Emma Darwin calls the 'shitty first draft' during November. It will be shitty. It will almost certainly be unpublishable, even when polished. But it will be finished. And it will be mine. And at least a little bit of it will be your fault. [NM cackles madly.]

Christine Mosler @christinemosler 
I am doing Nano and need all the encouragement I can get!  I am chrismos at Nanowrimo and I blog at
www.christinemosler.wordpress.com

Catherine Hughes @CatONineTales
Here's my NaNo page: http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/524796.  As you can see,
the novel has a title already, which is a very positive feeling for me (I struggle with titles).

Joanna Cannon @Sethsmummy
This is my first nano and it feels like a terrifying interview for a job I've wanted my whole life ....

Kath Eastman @katheastman
I'm taking part in NaNoWriMo for the first time, largely thanks to encouragement from Twitter pals. I'm looking forward to being part of the NaNo community. Most of all, I'm looking forward to having fun with my writing and seeing where turning off my internal editor gets me. Hopefully not in a whole heap of trouble! I'm writing a psychological mystery/thriller about a stalker who infiltrates and manipulates a celebrity fan forum.

Louise Kelly @mllouisekelly
I'm doing it. The characters and setting I've got in my head might end up being a YA novel, but won't hold them to it if they think otherwise. The whole nano-concept has already helped as it made me get two other projects finished for the end of last month so my decks were cleared for this - I'm a real deadline junkie.  But I'm procrastinating now . . . better go!

Denyse Kirkby @djkirkby
Participating in NaNo forces me to put writing at the top of my priority list every day in November.  I am not foolish enough to believe that I will produce writing of publishable quality during that time but I do believe that no writing is ever wasted.  The words I write during NaNo may someday end up as part of  another novel or short story I am working on.  I like having words written that I can dip into like the literary equivalent of a savings account.

Lisa Ward
This is the first year that I have done NaNo. I used to be a staff nurse in A&E, then I qualified as a solicitor and I am now attempting to write! I am planning to write a YA novel about first love across two different centuries, with a few smugglers and pirates thrown in. It sounds a bit strange, but the area where I am from was rife with smugglers and wreckers a few hundred years ago, and it is an area of local history I am rather fascinated by. The story will be loosely based on it. Oh and I have managed 1889 words today, so off to a good start!

Louise Santa Ana @louloulou

I'm doing NaNoWriMo for the first time. I have an unfinished novel sitting in my Scrivener projects so am procrastinating, obviously. I'm writing a chick lit novel with a geeky heroine, set in London today. Heroine meets Mr Oh-So-Very-Wrong. He breaks her heart. She refuses to recognise Mr RIght for what he is. Tries online dating, speed dating, flirting with her brother's gay housemate etc. Tears, trauma, everyday challenges, obnoxious co-worker, steadfast friends and so on. All working its way to a happy ending. Aah. 

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/730800

Joanna Robinson @joellaviscount 
This is my first ever NaNoWriMo and I'm both nervous and excited. Good Luck and happy writing to all those taking part. We can do it!

And a good news story from Julia Crouch
My second Nanovel, written in 2008, is Cuckoo, which is being published in March 2011, as part of a three-book deal with Headline. (It did take the subsequent year to bash it into second draft shape, though) Today, the start of the new Nanowrimo, I'm off to meet my editor and publicist at Headline, which seems fitting. I thought it might be nice for people to know that it is possible! [Indeed! Hooray!] This year, I am sticking with Nanowrimo, but using the impetus and camaraderie to really finish off the first draft of novel #2. But I'll be missing the arc from start to finish of a story that the novel in a month gives you.

Ans now, a treat for all of you, whether you're a Nano Nutter or not: 

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 things when you used a simile or a metaphor? And you came to believe that using similes was Essentially A Good Thing and the mark of A Writer?

Well, sorry. You are all growned up now. Do not add similes to your writing because you think you should. You don't get points any more. At all.

There is only one occasion when a simile really makes your writing better: when it really does make it better. A simile must ADD to what you've just said. It must make what you've just said clearer, and better. If what you're trying to say is very simple and is already clear, don't clutter it up with a simile. Only when the situation is complex, unusual, interesting, extra vivid or strange, does it need a simile to inspire and excite the reader. A simile is special, and should be used for special occasions and for special effect.

Why am I going on about this? Well, I have recently read several manuscripts which are passably well executed in many ways. Until the writer has thought, "Gah! I remember now: Miss Scroggins always used to praise me for using similes. Better put one in. NOW! Why? Oh, because. Because it would be sooo cool to get extra points, just as I used to when I was eight."

People, Miss Scroggins has forgotten you. She retired long ago and is now shacked up in Spain with  Juan, about whom she has been passionate since at least the Wars of the Roses and with whom she longed to run away, a dream which she was delayed from realising by her over-lengthy career teaching children such as you, whom she adored at the time but over whom her pension and some well-deserved sunshine now take precedence. Miss Scroggins has no hold over you now. She has no hold over her waistline, either, and has allowed herself to go gloriously to seed. Forget Miss Scroggins and her exhortations to simile.

Here are some examples of completely unhelpful and pointless similes:

His words paralysed me. I was like a deer that's been transfixed by an arrow, right in its spine, so that it was alive but could not move. [The first sentence says it all. The simile simply adds some wholly unhelpful and, frankly, bizarre, extra images. We learn nothing extra and yet are bombarded with extraneous images of a dying Bambi.]

He leaned over the counter and watched me like a diving hawk. Then he laughed, throwing his head back so that I saw his teeth. [Why diving? How is that like someone watching over a counter? And then the juxtaposition of him laughing and then having visible teeth conjures a weird mixture that does NOT have the effect of making anything clearer in the reader's mind.]

And here's a proper, useful simile, though not spectacularly original:

He moved slowly, like a lion. He knew where he would find them. [The lion simile means that the reader thinks of all the other things to do with lions: that they are strong, dangerous, hunters. You can imagine the lion moving slowly because he's powerful and confident. So, this simile ADDS to the image.]

That is the point: a simile adds.

Importantly, it adds everything about that image, so you'd better make sure you get the image right. The clue is in the word "image", because the point about language is that every word you use creates an image; the reader cannot help but picture things connected with that image.

Let me show you. If I say the word fire-engine, you will think of these things: red, something loud and something large, indicating danger. So, if I say that her lips were fire-engine red, you will think of her mouth as large, red, and probably loud. Possibly even dangerous. Or at least sexy in a loud way. (Not that I have anything going on with fire officers' uniforms, you understand.)

If I say the word strawberry, you think of these things: fruit, sweet, small, strawberry-shaped. So, strawberry lips, make you think of small, sweet, gentle, tasty, strawberry-shaped lips.

Letter-box red lips: bright, loud, large. Cherry-red lips... You get my point?

And so it is with similes: every part of the simile creates pictures and if you use an image with the wrong connotations you utterly wreck or disturb the reader's picture. It becomes a confusing mess.

My final point about similes is that they must be exactly right for the voice, the style of the piece. So, in a colloquial voice you don't want to insert a poetic or literary simile. Or vice-versa. Incendiary, by Chris Cleave, is a brilliant example of a book with an exceptionally colloquial voice, and here is an example of a wonderful colloquial simile in it, which is pitch perfect for the context:

We never did eat that sushi. I mean why would you? All seaweed and raw tuna sushi is. More like a fishing boat accident than a lunch.

That is deliriously clever. I love that book, love it. So much so that I have to give you another simile from it.

They were shocking vicious things those helicopters. They were like fat black wasps looking outwards through their glittering eyes.

If it had just said wasps, we'd have thought of stripy yellow thigs, so the author cleverly specifies fat black wasps, and glittering eyes, so we still have the insecty nasty connotation but our mental image perfectly conjures those helicopters into fat black wasp-like things, and we find ourselves absolutely being able to picture them in the way the author wants. We have a sense of, Yes, they are exactly like that.

Three learning points about similes, then:

1. Only use one at all if you haven't made yourself clear already. A simile is supposed to add meaning, to make something clearer, to elaborate and enrich an incomplete picture in the reader's mind.
2. The reader, whether you like it or not, will take every aspect of your image and process it. So, make sure your image only has the connotations you want it to have.
3. And the simile must be chosen for its aptness for the voice, the style and the context.

 And leave Miss Scroggins out of this. The Sangria has addled her brain and she Does Not Care any more.

Meanwhile, I am not going to be able to give you the attention to which you are accustomed for the next few weeks. I have a leaky building situation which is as big as a mountain, as wet as the sea, as expensive as the Tah Mahal, and as irritating as a roomful of mosquitos with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, and which I need about as much as a dose of dysentery before a school event.

Which is probably what I'm going to get if my leaky, rotting bathroom isn't sorted out.

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, muttered or expostulated. The main reason for this is that it’s too easy to be tempted to tell the reader how the speaker spoke, but often more satisfying for the reader when the attitude is revealed in action. Dialogue tags are just a bit lazy and spoon-feed the reader too much. At the same time, they give the instruction after the reader has read the dialogue: too late, in other words. Sometimes, they're necessary, but you should only use them when they really are.

Let me illustrate with an example of an over-use of dialogue tags:

“Do you want to come in for coffee?” she suggested.
“Is coffee all you mean?” he wondered.
“What else would I mean?” she scoffed.
“Well, just that I thought you might have some biscuits as well,” he responded.
“Aye, right!” she laughed.

Do we really need any of the words outside the speech marks? No: we can manage perfectly well with just the speech, if the dialogue is strong enough. And that’s the key: your dialogue needs to be strong. If it is strong enough, it is strong enough to do the job on its own. Then you will need very few dialogue tags, and then usually only to show who is speaking. (Young children need more dialogue tags, as it is harder for them to follow who is talking.) Dialogue tags should show who is speaking, not how he spoke, unless that feels absolutely necessary.

Often, you can make the dialogue speak for itself, without any dialogue tags. Take a look at the same conversation re-written:

Carmelle looked straight at him. “Coffee?”
“Just coffee?” He stared back, streetlight shadowing his jaw.
“As opposed to?”
“Well, biscuits. I was thinking you probably do a mean chocolate digestive.”
“Aye, right!” How did he manage to make the word digestive sound so desirable? Carmelle felt herself begin to blush.

Finally, just in case you haven’t quite got the point, here is an example of too many dialogue tags with the extra burden of unnecessary adverbs. (I've written about lazy adverbs here. Remember that there's nothing wrong with adverbs per se, just with their lazy use.)

“Listen,” she whispered conspiratorially.
“What?” he interrupted eagerly.
“Nothing,” she replied, hesitantly, deciding that she was not going to tell him after all.

And here is how you could re-write that without dialogue tags or adverbs:

She leant towards him, her hair brushing his cheek. “Listen. I ...”
His pulse quickened. “What?”
Carmelle took a breath. She paused. What if her informant was wrong? She shook her head, looked down at the stem of the glass pressed between her fingers. “Nothing.”

Well? Please tell me you think the second one is better. Yes, the second one uses more words, but it uses them better. It uses verbs and action, shows us how the two characters behaved, allowing us to feel that we are there, to experience what they do. It draws the reader into the conversation, relegating the author (me) to a very appropriate sideline. After all, when you go to a puppet show, do you want to see the puppeteer?

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 poor dialogue is most unlikely to be the only thing wrong.

The first thing to know about writing dialogue is that you should not try to write exactly as people speak. If you did, you’d have lots of ums, vast tracts of nothingness and many non sequiturs. At the same time, you mustn’t write dialogue that the characters would actually never deliver. So, we devise a kind of stylized representation of speech, something that feels very natural. In essence, good dialogue is not about writing as we speak; it’s about not writing as we would not speak.

Dialogue is usually best broken up into sections, separated by narrative. You are not writing a film script or a play – unless, of course, you are, in which case you are boiling a whole different kettle of fish. You do not have to relate the whole conversation; in fact, you shouldn't. Most parts of a conversation are way too boring to set down. Yes, no, I don't know, and OK should all be reduced to their absolute minimum.

Oh, God - so should Oh, God. Amateur writers put loads of standard minor expletives in their dialogue but, again, the fact that a real person might have used a word doesn't make it deserve a place in your book. This is not about being prudish and avoiding swearing - probably the topic of another blog post - but about creating flowing, strong dialogue.

Some other big bad things to avoid:

• As I say, too many yeses and noes. Better to replace some of them either with nodding / shaking of heads – though that can quickly become repetitive – or with the rest of the sentence and context indicating positive or affirmative.
• The blatant provision of information for the reader, which the characters would already know and therefore not say. For example, “Gosh, Sally, I hardly recognized you. You used to have dark hair with a fringe and now it’s a blonde bob. Did I tell you I recently saw Samantha, your younger daughter, the one who went round Australia? Lovely girl. She’s married now, of course, and they have a baby on the way.” Bleurgh.
• Dialogue tags – I'm going to tackle this in the next post, but dialogue tags are when we say, for example: he replied, she opined, he queried, she reiterated. Where possible, stick to said, asked, or nothing. I will show you how on Friday.
• Anything which makes it hard for a reader to hear the words in his head – this means that using dialect of any sort becomes very tricky for writers. You have to be very confident in your reader and in your writing to get away with the heavy use of an accent which that reader doesn’t speak. Trouble is, sometimes it would be absurd not to use dialect to some extent, if that’s how the character would speak, but do try to keep it toned down. Think of your reader.

The key to writing dialogue is to read it aloud, preferably imagining yourself acting it. If you’re not an actor, as I’m not, this is difficult but it’s the very difficulty which will help you think more carefully. If there’s a bit of dialogue that keeps jarring every time you read it and you can’t find another way to express it, turn it into narrative instead. Better no dialogue than poor dialogue.

I admit that dialogue is not something I find easy or something I shine in. Perhaps that's why I'm extra careful with it and extra aware of when I get it wrong. I spend a lot of time trying not to get it wrong. Good dialogue sings and makes your story sparkle and come alive. Bad dialogue is horrible and drags a book right down.

She opined.

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 publishers reject books. Conflict is the thing we care about, that threatens the main character, that the character struggles against. So, whether it’s unrequited love, unrevenged hatred, unatoned remorse, or unattained zen, conflict is central to your book and must be central when you pitch the book. Multiple conflicts (within reason) are also a good idea, because you can solve one fairly early on, giving the reader some pleasure, but keep the others till later, ratcheting up the tension.

Conflict is not literally a conflict between two people. Two characters hating each other does not make a conflict, in the context of a novel. Conflict is what carries and drives the story forward: who will win? Will the MC discover she's being stalked before the stalker kills her? Will the detective find the murderer before he strikes again? Will the woman manage to find strength to leave her abusive partner? Will the boy die of leukaemia or not? Will the girl find the strength to stand up to the bullies / stop taking drugs / speak out about her rape? Will the estranged son find peace with his father before it's too late? Conflict is the struggle in the reader's mind as he desperately wants a particular thing to happen but fears that it won't.

Think of conflict as the obstacle(s) in the way of your hero. The more daunting the obstacle, the greater the struggle, and therefore the greater the excitement and pleasure when the conflict is overcome.

Make sure your conflict is one the reader will believe in and care about. Set problems in the way of the conflict and don't deviate from the path as your characters work around those problems. New plot strand? Is it relevant to the conflict? It must be. Everything in your story should focus on either moving towards or slipping back from resolution of the conflict. The reader needs to worry all the time about whether resolution is goign to happen. Readers should be on the edge of their seats, rooting for the MC all the time, desperate for everything to work out. We do not want to be diverted by loads of irrelevancies. Or even any irrelevancies.


Don’t only think about conflicts in connection with your MC, though. You can also have bigger conflicts: for example, conflicts between races and religions; between good and evil, male and female, emotion and logic, luck and talent, superstition and science, Aristotle and Plato, red wine or white – anything that’s right for your story and your theme.

The conflicts must progress in a controlled fashion. Not in a straight line and not always in the same direction – setbacks will increase tension. But you must be absolutely in control of how quickly, slowly, smoothly or bumpily your conflict develops.

The conflict should worry the reader but also create ambivalence. For example, if the girl needs to break away from the control of her parents, don’t make those parents too starkly awful: paint some different shades so that the reader can see both sides. Things and people are rarely all good or all bad; things wished for rarely bring unadulterated joy; events feared are rarely exactly as expected; death is rarely entirely sad or survival entirely marvellous. Be subtle in the strength of your conflict and in subtlety will be your strength.

But the most important thing about conflict is, as I said at the top, that the reader should care. Different readers will care about different things. An eight-year-old child might care very much about whether she’ll be able to save up for a new Barbie; a grown man won’t. This sounds obvious, but too often writers pitch novels where I question whether anyone would care enough or whether this conflict is anything other than run-of-the-mill. Yes, in real life I care very much whether my family appreciate the casserole I am making this afternoon, and we could well have some major conflict if they don’t, but that doesn’t mean that it’s sufficient conflict for a reader.


Different genres have different needs for conflict, both in terms of level and type of conflict. In a romance, for example, a personal conflict will suffice; whereas in a high-concept thriller, you'd usually need something which threatened or affected a wider population. In a crime novel, you'd expect high conflict, because if a major or violent crime is committed there would need to be not only major motivation but also dramatic fall-out.

So, take a look at your book now. Is strong conflict central to it AND have you made it central to your pitch to publishers? If so, hooray – you’re on your way. If not, back to the drawing board.

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 have a character who absolutely has to exist, in order for the plot to happen. However, she also has to leave almost immediately, and not reappear for the rest of the book. To me, this screams “PLOT DEVICE” in a big way and I was struggling with how to make her pull her weight more, and therefore have a more satisfying role in the story."

It brings me to the important issue of other things that scream PLOT DEVICE. This is very much something to watch out for in your writing. It often happens that we need to get character X from A to B; or we need a reason why he performs a particular act; or something about the plot doesn't quite work or feel believable. So we think to ourselves, "Hmmm, what could I slot in to deal with this?" But things slotted in can be horribly obvious  and readers do not like them because it makes them feel manipulated. They see the hand of the author instead of the line of the story.

Yes, we use plot devices but we must disguise them.They should be neither seen nor heard, just do their job.

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 unputdownable. Racing action is only one of them, but Nick knows what his potential readers want. You need to know what your potential readers want. If your readers want something slower, something that digs its way deeper into the mind and is unputdownable because of how it traps the reader in some other way than desperately needing to know what happens next, that's fine. But whoever your readers and whatever sort of book, surely we all want to hear the words, "I just couldn't put it down."

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.

1. Nowadays, we are told, readers don't have time to hang around.
2. Publishers demand page-turnability because page-turnability sells more copies and more copies are what they MUST sell, because the income on each copy sold is so much less than it was. (As I said here and here.)

Reason 1 may be rubbish. Certainly, many readers are happy to sit with a deeper and slower book. But a) there is some worrying evidence that the attention-spans of many people are shorter; b) there are certainly more demands on most people's time, so books are in stiffer competition; c) crucially, whatever the truth, publishers believe that shorter and faster are what readers want, and since publishers are the ones selling our books, that's what goes.

Reason 2 is undoubtedly true. More readers will read your book if it has page-turnability than if it doesn't. You need more readers - wherever you stand on the art / commerce continuum, if you want to be published, you need to be able to attract more readers than you would have done five years ago, because of falling unit income. (No, I don't like thinking about "unit income" either, but I find that published writers tend to be far more realistic than unpublished ones.)

So, how do you achieve page-turnability? Here are the methods - apply them more rigorously or less rigorously, depending on your wishes, your genre, your book, and just how much page-turnability you're after.

STAGE ONE - apply the machete

• Shorten chapters, unless they are already stupidly short. Alter the places where they begin and end so that they usually end mid-action. Give every chapter a knife-edge beginning and ending. Do not let your reader stop reading.
• Remove much more description than you want to.
• Ditto with back-story, philosophy, scene setting and world building. Just because you know it, doesn't mean the reader needs it. Think iceberg.
• Remove at least two of the first five chapters. Just do it. See what happens.
• Remove all your favourite sentences.

STAGE TWO - apply filler
Now that you've cut so much, see if there are any holes. Fill the holes with action. No murder for forty pages? KILL someone. No threats, sinister appearances, ghosts, car chases, unsheathing of knives, MC hanging off a precipice, revealing or touching erogenous zone (if age appropriate), thunder storm, escaping tiger in this chapter? WHY NOT?

STAGE THREE - stand back and admire

Read it. What do you think? The reason I ask is that I'm doing this at the moment and I am surprised at how much I like what's left. That's what I'm offering my readers: something I like and I really want them to like. If, however, thinking as a reader - and thinking as a reader who is less keen than you are as a reader - you really, really, really, want to put something back in, do.

But I bet you won't. Because what you'll be doing then is spoiling a clean piece of writing which has true page-turnability, and you will not be making it more likely to be published.

If being published is not what you want, ignore all my advice.

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.

1. Where too many consecutive sentences begin with the subject immediately followed by the verb.
2. Where too many nouns are immediately preceded by an adjective.

Here's an example of both. I have highlighted in bold examples of 1 and italicised examples of 2:

Loretta ran through the thickening twilight, calling his name. Her breath came in painful gasps and her straggly hair was plastered to her sweaty forehead. Her legs were tiring now and black specks rained across her vision. Thick clouds were gathering, rolling in across the darkening moors. Loretta collapsed, unable to run any further. Laughter rose up in her chest. "That's like bloody Wuthering Heights, you stupid woman!" she cried, "Except badly written." The looming rain-clouds opened and she was soaked within seconds. Loretta didn't care. It would make her look much sexier when he came back, as she knew he would. She adjusted her silken top somewhat, and waited.

Lazy, yes?

Now, don't become too paranoid about the subject+verb sentence starts: this is the natural way in which the English language works. But do try to vary it a little. Certainly make sure you don't have too many consecutive She/he/name+verb or anything that sounds too obviously similar.

The easiest way to vary this is to make the occasional sentence start with a participle. For example, "Adjusting her silken top somewhat, she waited." Or a subordinate clause, such as: "As Loretta ran through the twlight, she called his name."

The obvious way to avoid the repetition of adjective+noun is simply to use fewer adjectives and make them work harder. You can do this by choosing stronger verbs, or by trusting your reader to understand - for example, in the second sentence, at least one of those adjectives is redundant. (Straggly, I suggest.) You don't need looming rain-clouds because you've already said they are gathering. In the last sentence, you could have omitted silken and said something like, "As the rain fell, the silk clung to her body." Or something.

There's an easy way to spot any of this: read it aloud and listen for the jarring repetition of pattern.

Here endeth today's top tip.

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 all. (That wasn't one of the questions, but you get my drift.) The writer was trying to make the point that we need to know our characters inside out - true enough, but the point would have been made much better if the reason for needing to know was properly understood and then the questions were designed to reflect this reason:

that it is the character who drives the story and therefore that without knowing our characters we can't control the story.

I do think that interviewing our characters is a good idea but the questions should be ones which will genuinely help us with the story. So, I thought I'd try to come up with my serious, non-facetious list. If you want to understand the relevant things about your MC and simultaneously grasp your plot by the short and curlies, ask of your MC:

What is your worst fear? And your second worst? (Likely to be part of the conflict and tension.)

What would you most like people to know about you? (Make sure it's obvious, then.)

What would you most like to hide? (Every hero has a flaw.)

What would you most like to change about your life? (Could be part of the conflict and motivation; could be sub-plot.)

Why should we care about you? (Because if we don't, we won't read on.)

What were you doing before this story started? (This informs your back-story.)

Do people understand you? If not, what do they get wrong? (Makes your character more real because it informs interaction with other characters.)

If I met you for the first time, would I immediately know what you were like or would it take a while to get to know you? (As above.)

What sort of people like you? Do adults like you? Do boys like you? Do girls like you? Why? Or why not? (Helps place your character within the real world instead of just on the page. It may also inspire some ideas for painting your character richly but subtly.)

Are you happy on your own? (As above.)

What are you going to achieve in my story? (Crucial for plot, since character drives action.)

What trivial but annoying habit do you have? (Makes character more real. Character can show this habit when angry / sad / stressed - helps you show without telling emotion too much.))

What trivial but annoying habits do you dislike in other people? (As above.)

What four (or three or five) adjectives best sum you up? (Helps you remember traits to paint most strongly.)

Are you going to die in this story?** Should you? (Informs plot and interacts with reader's engagement.)

(** Edited to add: on second thoughts, and after a v useful comment by Miriam Drori, I have changed my mind about this. It's certainly not necessary for the writer to know if the character is going to die - I often don't know things like that. But asking whether the character should die is useful, as Miriam says. That will add to the tension and suspense, and get you thinking about that plot aspect. Of course, if this book isn't one where death is going to be at all relevant or appropriate, you'd omit this question.)

When you can answer all these questions, you know your character and you know your story. Your story will be infinitely easier to write and immeasurably more human.

Or canine, if your character is a dog.

And now, a challenge for you: do you have an even better question to add to that list? If I think it's a superlatively brilliant question, I may add it to the list when I come to that bit in Write to be Published - but hurry, because I'm writing it NOW. You'll get your name in the acknowledgements but you'll get nae dosh.

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 end before you get there? Use Moleskine notebooks? Talk to yourself? Drink lots of coffee? And I have answers to these questions but the answers and the questions are entirely irrelevant to you.

Entirely

irrelevant

to

you

and

to

everyone

except

me.

This is because how a writer writes is entirely irrelevant to anyone but the writer. All that matters is the result: what you write, what the words sound like when you've written them, what readers think of them, whether they work.

The method, the route you take, matters zilchly. No one cares whether you plan or whether you fly by the seat of your pants. No one cares whether you interviewed your characters or spent the night dreaming of them. Well, OK, they might care, but only out of weird reader interest. If you are asking these questions in order to find out how to write yourself, you are barking up the wrong tree.

Please. Just write your book in whatever way works for you, even if that means hanging from a chandelier naked. It will be judged only on the result. Don't get hung up on method, or at least on other people's methods. You will find what works for you and that's all that matters.

Fair enough; sometimes another writer's method is worth trying, to see if it might work better for you than the one you use, and for that reason the questions are not entirely pointless. But only as long as you never get hung up on the answers, and never worry if you are doing it differently from others.

Just write, eh?

When you look gorgeous, I do not need to know how you got dressed.

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 his brain that engages fully with the characters. A novelist can make a reader believe that a character can fly, read minds, turn spinach into brandy, or live forever; but if you get it wrong ... even the most ordinary and highly possible act becomes unbelievable. And it matters, really matters.

This art of the suspension of disbelief is the mystery of the fiction writer. There are certain keys, but after that you have to sprinkle magic fairy dust. I think I have so far omitted to mention that you do need magic fairy dust if you are to be published.

The keys to suspension of disbelief

• Consistency of character. Your characters must behave consistently, even if inconsistency is common in real life. (I, for example, am consistently inconsistent.) If your character does something that he or she would be unlikely to do, just so that you can drive your plot in the direction you want, your readers will see through this and they won’t like it. They will stop believing whatever happens next.
• Consistency of magic. If you have anything supernatural / impossible-in-this-world going on in your book, the magic must be consistent and follow a pattern, even though magic is a damned stupid thing to believe in. You have to set the magic up, and give it rules. The more wacky the rules, the harder it will be to believe. For example, a magic power that only works on Tuesdays between lunch and tea, and not if it’s rained more than three times in the last nine and a half days, and only if the empowered person had half a boiled egg and mango chutney for breakfast and washed her face in the dew while wearing blue chiffon, is hard to believe. The reader will think you’re making it up. Which, of course, you are, but not in a good way.
• Consistency of plot. Does this incident fit the storyline or does it feel out of place? If you have created your world well, and then you insert something that jars, we may not believe it. For example, since you believe that I wear fabulous shoes, if I told you that I'd borrowed Jane Smith's shoes, you would not believe me. And you would be right.
• Reason. If you make it clear why something happens, then your readers are more likely to believe it than if you simply say it is so. For example, if Jeremy’s special ability to see the future comes because he is descended from a long line of wizardy people going back to the year dot, or because a special amulet was left in his cradle as a baby, or because … well, you get my drift: humans need to make sense of things, and when something has an explanation, we tend to believe it.
• Your strong narrative voice. If you have drawn your readers in and lulled them into a true sense of security through the real strength and consistency of your writing, they will tend to believe more. If you are all over the place, revealing your weaknesses at every turn, they will roll their eyes and accuse you of making it up as you go along.

Important point: just because it has happened in real life does not make it believable in a story. If someone says she doesn’t believe such a thing would happen, it is no defence for you to say, “Oh, but that did happen! In 1982 I was walking along…” It pains me to say that I fell foul of this in Wasted. There’s a scene where a pigeon comes smashing through a window. One reader said she hadn’t believed that bit. It was no defence that I could truthfully say that this has happened to me twice, despite the fact that my pigeon incidents are well documented on this blog: the fact is that I’d failed to convince that reader that it would happen. Slapped wrist and abject apologies.

(Yes, I know - newbies amongst you really want to read the pigeon stories. Well, go here (my dormant silly blog) and here.)

The point is that it is not enough that a certain thing could happen and even has: the reader must believe that it would and did. There are many extraordinary things that happen in real life about which one says, “If you write that in a story, they’d never believe you.” So, don't write it...

This, to me, is the whole magic and beauty of fiction: the mysterious thing that our brains do to fiction when reading well-written made up stuff, where we will believe the impossible and yet disbelieve the perfectly ordinary. The skill is in getting that right.

Because fiction is stronger than truth.

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 would have only one meaning. Only a shallow writer would have such a simple theme that there was no room for the reader's mind to go down some different paths of thought, because if a book has rich characters those characters will have rich minds, and, when readers enter those minds properly, they will live those lives beyond the pages of the book.

The deeper the book, the more opportunities for readers to take different interpretations. On the other hand, if many readers took the completely opposite meaning from the writer's intended one, either the writer would have failed to express the meaning properly, or the wrong readers would have found the book.

Once the book is out there, however, it belongs to the readers as much as to the writer and we must give up control.

After all, without readers there would be no book, and therefore no meaning at all.

So, I worship at the feet of readers. Even when they get it wrong!

THIS WEEK, I'm in London, talking at Bishop Challoner's School about Wasted, and then speaking at a conference in Berkshire about young people and risk-taking. I should also be writing, and if I don't I will be behind on a certain deadline and Emma at Snowbooks would be cross with me. So, I probably won't be able to do much commenting, but I will be watching you. I am always watching you.

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. And once in a post about the importance of showing more than telling.

It would help if you were to skim those posts to see the contexts, but I will quote from the second post here:

1. Go easy on the adverbs. Adverbs, used lazily, are an immature writer's stock in trade. Yes, they roll off the tongue, but so does dribble.

Let me elaborate on why it is absurd to claim, as I have heard people do, that adverbs are bad. (And after that I will show you how bad they can be in the hands of certain writers.)

Take the second sentence of that extract: "Adverbs, used lazily, are an immature writer's stock in trade."

The adverb is, of course, "lazily". (By the way, "of course" works as an adverbial phrase, as you'll see if you replace it with a true adverb: "obviously". Are you going to tell me that using it was bad? It's not bad, because it says what I want to say accurately and succinctly. OMG - two more adverbs! Slapped wrist, naughty author!)

Anyway, back to lazily. "Adverbs, used lazily, are an immature writer's stock in trade." Would you suggest that I should have avoided this adverb?

If I'd left out the adverb, we'd have been left with. "Adverbs, used, are an immature writer's stock in trade", or, more normally, "Adverbs are an immature writer's stock in trade." But they are not. So it would be wrong. What I am trying to say is very simple:

Adverbs, used lazily, are an immature writer's stock in trade.

OK?

There is no better way to express that sentence and I wouldn't want to because there is nothing wrong with it.

So, what do we mean when we CORRECTLY find fault with adverbs? Because it is the case that lazy over-indulgence in adverbs is an example of weak or immature writing - though many authors, at least in highly commercial genres where style is less of an issue, do get away with it. (Because it is partly to do with style, meaning and prose skill, not anything at all to do with faulty grammar.)

Here's the rest of the extract from that original blog post, immediately following the extract above. It shows some extreme (imaginary, because I wrote them) examples of how badly adverbs can be used. (By the way, see how I would have altered the meaning of that sentence by omitting badly).

Compare:

"Listen," she whispered conspiratorially.

"What?" he interrupted eagerly.

"Nothing," she replied, hesitantly, deciding that she was not going to tell him after all.

with:

She leant towards him, her hair brushing his cheek. "Listen. I ..."

His pulse quickened. "What?"

Carmelle took a breath. She paused. What if her informant was wrong? She shook her head, looked down at the stem of the glass pressed between her fingers. "Nothing."

Well? 

The second is so much better, isn't it?

Now, that was an example of adverbs in dialogue tags, but you will see how over-use of adverbs spoils writing in normal narrative too. Try this - I've put the adverbs in italics:

She walked slowly through the woods, stopping occasionally to pick a flower, sadly thinking back to the time she'd walked here with her young daughters. Their cheeks had glowed rosily after a late summer picnic, and she could picture the hair sticking damply to their foreheads. The air had been heavy with birdsong then, but now the silence fell eerily around her and suddenly she felt a chill pass down her back. All things pass, she told herself.

It's a rubbish piece of writing in many ways and some of those adverbs are mere tautology, but the main thing is that they are lazy, for differing reasons.  

• Slowly wouldn't be necessary if more care had been taken to choose a better verb than walked. 
• Occasionally is fine and necessary, though it would be better if we actually saw her do it once and the rest of the thoughts happened during this one moment of flower-picking.  
• Sadly shouldn't be necessary from the context of the para and if the rest of it were written better.
• Rosily is tautologous after glowed and damply is pretty obvious or would be unnecessary if the foreheads were described as sweaty (or something).  
• Eerily is not too bad but I'd rather be shown other aspects that made me know it was eery, without being told it so obviously. 
• And suddenly is a word which should only be used when there is no alternative - here, it could be omitted without loss of meaning. And, therefore, should be.

So, adverbs are not bad but careless or lazy over-use certainly is. Certainly, really, actually, truthfully, adamantly, obviously, very much is. OK?

It's worth saying, too, that lazy use of anything is an immature or poor writer's stock in trade, too. Let's not blame it all on adverbs. I have seen other forms of crapness. Really.

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 sufficiently fast, but not too fast and not all at the same speed. Your reader needs to be able to breathe.

You must vary the pace, otherwise three things will happen:

1. Your story will be monotonous and less enjoyable.
2. Your story will be monotonous and you will look unskilled.
3. The moments of climax and greatest tension and power will be less powerful.

The most important thing to say about pace is this: you must control it. This means that you must:

1. Know what you aim to achieve with the overall pace of this book.
2. Decide at which points in the story you want to speed up and where you want to slow down.
3. Know how to achieve those effects.

Regarding the first point, this is a decision you have to make on your own, based on your understanding of your readers’ needs, the requirements of your genre and what is right for this book. Some types of book allow a slower build, and attract patient readers who are happy to delve into details; whereas others need a car-chase or murder every five pages. If you don’t know this about your genre and your book, then you have a problem which I can’t solve. So, bugger off and go and do some more reading.

WHEN to vary pace

You will need to build this into your plan. If you are a formal planner, you can make a physical note of the places where you want to create a change of pace. Or, if you’re like me and not a formal plotter, you will have to learn to get a feel for these moments.

And these moments are when, exactly? Usually, either just before or just after moments of great tension or drama. Here are some options:

1. You have been building up to something, dropping clues, winding up the tension…and you take a breath, offering a slightly slower scene, trusting that your readers will stay with you, tormenting them slightly. This must be carefully handled because if your readers aren’t 100% with you, they may lose interest.There's only so much torment they'll take: judging this is part of the dark arts of being a real writer.
2. You are building up to something (as above) and then pile in a fast, dramatic scene which the reader thinks IS the culmination but actually there’s MORE to come. So, a sprint towards but not quite at the end of an already fast race.
3. After 2. you will certainly need to slow down.
4. After several scenes of drama and Big Moments, you could / probably should slow down with a more gentle scene, before moving forward again into the tension.

So, HOW to vary pace?

1. Chapter ends and cliff-hangers

This is where I get to show you my patent breathing exercises. (Not for the first time, but some of you are new to this blog). And, more excitingly, where I teach you how to control your readers’ breathing. How amazing is that? That’s real power. You, the author, god in your own world, get to control a reader's breath.

Think of one chapter as one breath, in and out. Now, you can either breathe in first and then out, or the other way round, yes? First, try the in-breath first, finishing on a big exhale. It feels complete, doesn’t it? Well, that’s like a chapter that finishes at the end of the dramatic moment, with the tension released. The reader could stop reading for the moment and pick it up again later.

Now try breathing out first, followed by a big in-breath. Not complete, is it? You can’t stop there; moment of tension; what’s going to happen next? That’s like a chapter that finishes just before the crucial event, a cliff-hanger, the reader on tenterhooks. No way is the reader going to put the book down now.

Controlling your chapter breaks in this way is your most effective single tool for controlling pace. This was a revelation to me when I first discovered it. By varying the point in the action where you end your chapters, you control whether your reader will be likely to choose that moment to put the book down for a rest, or whether he will be compelled to read on. Of course, you are supposed to allow your reader to rest at some point, otherwise you risk exhausting him at the wrong moment, but you want him to rest at the time of your choosing. This is about control, which is probably why I love being a writer: I'm a control-freak.

2. Chapter lengths

The length of your chapters (or sections within a chapter if you have chosen that device) also affects pace. Clearly short chapters create greater speed, a kind of breathlessness. I use short chapters most of the time now; this is partly because in recent years I’ve written almost exclusively for teenagers, and they are very busy creatures who need extra work to keep them reading. A more normal method, and the one I’d use for writing for adults, would be to vary chapter length, using shorter ones for greatest impact and pace.

3. Sentence lengths
Again, short sentences create a faster pace and are very useful to create suspense. If you use them all the time, their ability to create suspense lessens. So, keep them for when you actually want them. (Short sentences have other uses as well, and suit certain voices, so it’s not only about pace.)

4. Sentence style and formality

If you are using a formal, strictly-grammatical style, accurately but self-consciously juggling your subordinate clauses and phrases, incorporating participles and absolutes like a descendant of Cicero, your pace will tend towards something slower and more considered than otherwise. However, do note that long, complex sentences do not suggest pace. While you can’t pepper a Woodhousian formality with the literary equivalent of a high five or Yo! Dude!, you will need to find a way to vary your pace by simplifying your complex sentences at the right moments.

4. Taking a break

After fast-paced sections, and after or before major climactic episodes, taking a break for a more gentle scene can improve your book in many ways:
•    It allows the reader to reflect, to process better what has happened or is about to happen.
•    It gives you an opportunity to show your characters in a different, more enriching light.
•    By providing contrast, it actually heightens the drama.
•    It allows your book to become multi-dimensional.

The first time I remember consciously doing this was in Fleshmarket. One of the (many) negative comments my irritatingly perceptive editor made about the not-very-good first draft was that it was relentlessly grim. Bearing in mind that this is a book about death, surgery without anaesthetic, blood poisoning, filth, poverty and dead bodies, I took this as a compliment but I also had to deal with it. So, one of the things I did was to take the two most down-trodden and abused characters up Arthur’s Seat one hot summer evening, where they made a fire and cooked steaks, breathing the fresh air and looking down on the distant grimness of Edinburgh. This offered the reader a break from the awfulness of what happened – and made the forthcoming horror even more horrible…. (Pause to rub hands in glee.)

So, that's pace for you. It's all more or less going into Write to be Published, but you read it here first, you lucky things. Besides, you have to wait a whole year for that to come out.

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 long their books should be. And people like me worry quite a bit about how to give the right advice - because you want a straight answer, but the only true answers are quite wiggly.

As a writer in the arty sense, the truest answer I can give, though it's not the one you want, is that "the book should be the right length for the story." The story should fit beautifully inside the covers (whatever size those covers are) and the reader should not feel that you either spun it out or cut it short in its prime with a headlong rush towards the end.

As a writer in a practical frame of mind, however, I have to have some commercial considerations  in mind. These considerations are even truer for the unpublished author, who has not established an audience.

The first thing I'd say is that if you're going to look around to check out the lengths of similar books to yours, a) that's a very good idea indeed, and I hope you do, BUT b) do not consider the unusually short or long in this equation; and do not consider any books which had phenomenal success despite being extremely short or long. For example, if you're looking at the lengths of books for 10-12 year-olds, ignore the length of the Harry Potter books. Extremes and exceptions tell you nothing useful.

The second thing I'd say is that word count is a bit of a red herring. Yes, we have to use it because it's the only objective method we have, and agents and publishers need it. But publishers are perfectly capable of making a book look longer or shorter than it is - by judicious use of font size, font type and letter/line spacing. That's what they'll do, but unfortunately it doesn't help you because they do sometimes get quite hung up on word length at the acquisition stage. 

Here are some simple commercial considerations which publishers will be using and which you should therefore note:

1. Each book will be costed at an early stage in the process - often at the acquisitions meeting which is also deciding whether to accept it. The cost must account for the number of pages to be printed. The price points of particular books don't vary as much as word length, and they have to compete price-wise: so the price cannot usually reflect the different costs of production between a book of, say, 300 pages and a book of 500 pages. Therefore, an over-long book which a publisher is unsure about is more likely to be rejected than if it was a standard length.
2. Readers do sometimes consider the value of a book according to how long the pleasure will last. So, some readers will reject a book if it's too short, especially by an unknown author. I know that doesn't seem right, as a book's value is not related to length, but it's what many readers do, often subconsciously.
3. Similarly, and particularly in some genres, a book that's too long may put readers off. This is particularly the case in children's writing.

So, what are the recommended lengths? Ah, now this is where it gets tricky. I can only be very vague because it really does depend on the specific sub-genre in which you are writing. Sagas and fantasy books are often much longer than other genres, for example. There is no substitute for good research here and my suggestion is as follows:

1. Identify twelve books which you think would be your competitors - with the same readership. But do not include extremes (see above). 
2. Remove what look like the two shortest and the two longest.
3. Do a rough word count for each of the remaining eight: simply do an accurate word count for ten full pages in each and multiply by the number of pages. Make some vague adjustment for pages which only have a few lines on them.
4. Is there a very large range? For example, is the shortest 90,000 and the longest 250,000? In that case, your genre is wide open and you don't have too much to worry about as long as you keep within that range. If they all seem a similar length, work out the average and try to stick to within 15-20% of that average.

(What about a novella? A debut author is unlikely to get a novella published. The reason is that readers will generally not take a punt on such a slim volume at a relatively high price-point. Sorry.)

As an enormous generalisation, because I sense that you want me to give figures, I'd suggest that a starting-point is that a novel for adults will generally be longer 100,000 words and a novel for teenagers will be less than that. My novels have ranged from around 42,000 (Mondays are Red) to 78,000 (the Highwayman books). When you hold them in your hand - which is what really matters to the reader, who has no idea of the number of words - Mondays are Red feels too short to me and the Highwayman books feel too long, especially since they are aimed at younger teenagers, including 10+. Despite that, they both did well, but I'll never know who was put off by the length of the Highwayman books.

In my opinion as the author and a keen book buyer, my new baby, Wasted, feels like the perfect length. Mmmm, beautiful - I'm still at the stroking stage, I warn you. It feels chunky enough to last a good number of hours, but not at all off-putting. It has 352 pages and contains something not much over 60,000 words. That's the target I've given myself for the next one, and it just "feels right".

Would you like to hold Wasted in your hands and see if you agree?? You can stroke it, if you like. I've had fabulous feedback from the advance readers, including booksellers, and I am offering a weekly draw over on the Wasted blog. All you have to do is register as a follower and you'll be entered each week. The Wasted blog is launched on April 23rd and from that day on I offer you a feast of info, snippets, competitions, stories of fate / luck / chance, and lots of ways for you to get involved. Head over there now so that you are with us when we begin the fun and games!

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 chapters, so that you can then rework the entire manuscript according to what you learned. It's a terrific learning experience and can help you grow as a writer. It's almost like having a writing tutor."

I couldn't agree more - and it's exactly what I do with manuscript appraisals for Pen2Publication: I work up detailed edits, with comments and explanations, for a section of the book, so that the writer can see the problems and rectify them elsewhere, and not make the same mistakes in the future. Good editing is not about spelling and punctuation but about all the much more fundamental aspects of being a writer.

Rachelle says:

"Many agents and editors are uncomfortable with writers having too much outside editorial help prior to being contracted, because it can mask a writer's true abilities. I'd hate to get you a 3-book contract with a publisher based on that stellar first book, only to find out that you had a ton of help with it and are not able to deliver that quality of book a second time."

This is the point about getting any kind of help before submitting your work: it needs to be your work, not someone else's, and if you do not understand the suggested changes so clearly that you can implement them yourself, then this is going to bode ill for the future.

There is absolutely no shame in hiring an editor, consultant or tutor, as long as you a) choose the right one and b) more importantly, learn from it and use it properly, as a way of curing your weaknesses, not covering them up.

(Unfortunately, I cannot at the moment take on any new clients for Pen2Publication, as I'm fully booked till June. Meanwhile, I am prepared to run a very small number of Submission Spotlights. If you're interested in putting a piece of your submission up for public scrutiny, please email me at writingtutor@hotmail.co.uk. It doesn't cost anything, but you must be prepared for honest reactions from total strangers. Please see the label "Submission Spotlights" on the list on the right before contacting me. The rules for these Spotlights are here.)