Michael Gallagher's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-tips"

We’ve all seen them, haven’t we? “Ten Top Tips to Improve Your Writing”. While I’m not about to make a list of my own, I will happily distil for you what these generally include:









1. Write in the active voice and avoid the passive.
2. Use fewer adjectives.
3. Avoid adverbs; choose verbs instead that describe the action.
4. Vary the lengths of your sentences.
5. Vary your sentence constructions.
6. Show, don’t tell.

If you follow this advice, your writing will almost certainly improve. It will cut out the flab. It may even turn you into the next Stephen King. Why? Because that’s exactly how Stephen King writes. And therein lies the first problem for me. As much as I admire the man’s writing, I don’t wish to write like Stephen King. I want to write like me. If I were writing a hard-boiled thriller in the third-person, then this advice would be perfect. The style suits the genre to a tee. But I write first-person cozy thrillers where the narrator is little more than a runny-nosed child. I also like their voice to be quite humorous; it helps offset the mounting body count. If I were to do these things I’ve suggested, it would squeeze most of the life out of their characters.

The second problem I have is that this advice can so easily be misconstrued (note the dreaded passive I used there, folks). I saw a recent instance on Twitter of a respondent suggesting ways to improve a perfectly good piece of writing that someone had posted. They seem to have taken the active voice to mean “the most active, unusual verb you can find”. The result wasn’t pretty. The recipient of these proposals thanked the person kindly and politely declined to use them. The pearl I took away from this is that if you overdo any of these things—any—you are likely to end up with a hideous mess.

That said, I would like to mention a couple of the very best advice sites I happened across whilst nosing around. First there’s Ricardo Fayet’s blog, a guest blogger at Bookbub. Personally, I loathe the cliched inclusion of an internal conflict, one of the many topics presented here. My heart sinks every time it crops up in a book. But hey-ho, that’s just me. Then there’s Andrew Noakes at andrewnoakes.co.uk. His post on the third-person limited voice is equally informative and revealing about the other narrative choices there are on offer. If you would prefer a slightly lighter approach, you might try one of Stephi Cham’s threads on Twitter @stephiesque, as well as another of her threads, this one @Write_Plan.

This month’s special offer is for The Scarab Heart. Egypt 1885. Lizzie deals with theft, murder, and the fall of the 18th Dynasty in the Valley of the Kings. Offer ends on November 30th 2018. You’ll find links and details on my website.

“The imagery is fabulous, the characters are likeable, and the story is believably enthralling.”—Nightwing, Goodreads Reviewer (5 stars)



Happy reading!
Michael

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