So You Want To Be A Writer - Part 1
13 Tips for Writing a First Draft Novel
I spent 30 years as a technical and copy writer and editor. I’vealso written and published nine books, with two more ready to go before the endof the year. During that time I learned a lot about the business of writing,enough that I could share my wisdom with others. I’ve taught creative writingclasses at a community center and heard the same questions from aspiringwriters. The following is Part 1 of my series to answer those questions.
1.Rule Number 1should come etched in stone with heralds singing from the mountaintops. Thebasis for all writing, regardless of genre, category, or audience, comes downto one simple thing–the ability to create a cogent sentence. Without that, toquote author Chuck Wendig, you’re fucked.
At the risk of dating myself, when I was a kid (which, bythe way, is my own kids’ least favorite opening to a sentence) we had to learnto diagram sentences in English class. It was boring. It was tedious. It waslike pulling teeth without Novocain.
It was also BRILLIANT. They don’t teach that in schoolstoday. Know how I know that? Because if they did, more people would know thebasic rules of grammar and how they apply to putting together a sentence thatactually says what you want it to say. At the risk of sounding like you mother’sgrammar school teacher, here’s a quick remedial lesson in grammar usage:
A. Subject-VerbAgreement. This is it–Newton’s Law of Sentence Structure. Learn it, own it,use it. Certain subjects go with certain types of verbs. For example, he/she/it(third person singular) requires a present tense verb that ends in s.Example: He understands, she learns, it does.
Subjects that are not third person singular (they/we/I/you)require a present tense verb that does not end in s. Example: I know, wewalk, they see, you learn.
Naturally, this rule only applies for action occurring inpresent tense, which leads to…
B. Know Your Tenses. Past,present, future. Past tense: she walked, he saw, we ran. Present tense wecovered in A. Future tense: We will walk, she will learn, I will win.
C. The MisplacedModifier. Example, the infamous “Throw Momma from the train a kiss”sentence. When starting a sentence with a verb, place the subject immediately(or as close to immediately as possible) after the verb. What are we throwingfrom the train–Momma or the kiss? Correct: “Throw a kiss to Momma from thetrain.”
D. The DanglingParticiple. This has to be the number one most abused grammar rule andinvolves adjectives ending in ing and ed. A participle is a verbthat modifies a noun or, as we say in grammar-speak, an antecedent. Thedangling part comes when there’s no clear antecedent for the participle. Forinstance, take the sentence: After being whipped fiercely, the cook boiled theegg. What is being whipped, the cook or the egg? The way the sentence iswritten, it isn’t clear. The word whipped in this sentence is a danglingparticiple. Correct: The cook fiercely whipped the egg before boiling it.(Better would be leaving out the adverb fiercely altogether.)
2. Pronoun Referents.First of all, you do know what a pronoun is, right? A word used in place of oras a substitute for a personal noun. He/him, she/her, who/whom, it/its,they/them/their. The simple definition of a pronoun referent is the noun towhich the pronoun is referring. Take this sentence: “Sparta attacked Athens andthey won.” Who is they? Sparta and Athens are cities, not people. Thepronoun they refers to people, plural. So the correct form of thesentence should be “The Spartans attacked Athens and they won.”
3. Adverbs. Onesimple rule: If you want your writing to be strong, don=tuse them. Weak: He walked quickly. Strong: He raced. Don’t know the right word?Get a thesaurus. Or use one online.
4. Adjectives: (see 3). Use as a few as possible to get your point across. If you need a lot ofadjectives to describe your noun, find a better noun.
5. Prepositions andPrepositional Phrases. A preposition is a word that links nouns, pronouns,and phrases to other words in a sentence (example: on, about, after, beneath,against, over, under, during, with, without, beyond, but, by, except, for,from, of, in, out, since, beside, etc.). A prepositional phrase is comprised ofa preposition, its object, and any associated adjectives or adverbs, and canfunction as a noun, an adjective, or an adverb. Example: “The children climbedthe mountain without fear.” In this sentence, without fear is aprepositional phrase.
The most well-known rule involving prepositions is never enda sentence with one, which, depending on the sentence, can create a correctsentence that is even more awkward than the one you are correcting. Therefore,if you find yourself facing this conundrum, just rewrite the sentence to avoidthe entire situation. And if you can’t do that, go back to START, do notcollect $200.00.
6. Punctuation. Learn to usepunctuation correctly. We used to have a saying among technical editors:don’t make your writing look like someone used a comma shaker over it. Itamazes me how one little curlicue can be so severely misused. There are onlytwo uses for a comma: to separate items in a list, or to indicate a naturalpause. Taking the first part of that statement, there are two schools ofthought on the correct way to structure a comma-separated list: the Oxford orserial comma, and the AP Stylebook comma. Let’s take Oxford comma first. Takethis sentence: “Jane had an apple, an orange, and a banana in her lunchbox.”The comma before the and is what is referred to as an Oxford comma.According to the AP Stylebook, however, the comma before the and (or theor) in a list is understood and therefore unnecessary.
Now, I don’t care to which school of thought you subscribe.Personally, I like the Oxford comma. It’s familiar and cozy and appeals to myorderly sensitivities. The important thing is to know the difference and use itconsistently. If you use it one way once, use it that way all the time. Nowaffling back and forth. Legal documents prefer the Oxford comma to remove alldoubt as to what that and or or is joining. I leave it to you todecide.
The natural pause comma, however (and see what I just didthere?), is less contentious. Here’s an easy way around it. Say the sentencealoud. Wherever you naturally pause, place a comma. If you don’t pause, don’tplace a comma. Simple. Move on.
Semi-colons and em dashes. Semi-colons are used to join twoor more sentence fragments. What is a sentence fragment? A phrase that cannotstand alone as a sentence (i.e., it does not contain a subject and a verb). Andlength has nothing to do with it: “He ran.” is a complete sentence. Semi-colonsare NOT used like serial commas to separate items in a list.
Em dashes are used similarly. I like to think of them as aless formal colon. You rarely see colons used in fiction, but em dashes are allover the place. I use the hell out of them myself and love them.
7. Know the Rules.You have to learn the rules before you can break the rules. I=ve heard newbie writers say this allthe time–“I don’t have to follow the rules. I’m creating my own voice.” That’ssweet and all that, but don’t use it as an excuse for not learning how to do itright. How do you know you’re breaking the rules if you don’t bother to knowwhat they are?
8. Voice. Useactive as opposed to passive voice in your writing. This is the key tocompelling writing. Passive voice is weak and wishy washy. Active voice isdecisive and in control. Passive sentences often use words like was and isto describe action. Example: The party was attended by ten guests. Active: Tenguests attended the party. Own it, write it.
9. Dialogue. Thisshould be easy for writers, and yet I can’t tell you how many times I readstories where the dialogue is wooden or forced. Listen to how people talk. Youhave conversations, or have heard conversations (hopefully). You watch TV andmovies, listen to the radio, play video games. You KNOW how people talk. Usethat. Say the sentence out loud. Hell, act it out loud. If it sounds off orwooden or forced, rewrite it. Have a friend run the lines of your dialogue withyou. Dialogue is meant to be spoken, so speak it. And for God’s sake, don’tmake everyone sound the same. Little Janie might talk with a Southern accent.Martha might be old-fashioned and proper, never using contractions or cursewords. Bobby might be a foul-mouthed mafia hitman from Brooklyn. Each has hisor her own voice. Learn it and use it.
And while we’re at it, learn to write dialogue correctly. Quotation marks are for dialogue. Each line of dialogue should becontained within them, along with any punctuation (periods, commas, questionmarks, exclamation marks). Each new speaker in a dialogue should begin on a newline. If a speaker’s line spans more than a paragraph, the ending quotationmark is not necessary, however, the beginning one for the next paragraph is inorder to identify it as dialogue.
While on the subject of dialogue, don’t overuse dialoguetags. He said, she said, etc. If there are two people speaking, you canprobably get away with dispensing with tags altogether. If it’s a long span ofdialogue, throw one in now and then to clarify.
And speaking of tags, you don’t necessarily need the hesaid/she said to indicate who’s speaking. You might just describe an action.Example: Robert rubbed his chin. “Okay, you’re right.” There’s no dialogue tagnecessarily because we know Robert is the one talking. Nothing makes writingsound more amateurish than a dialogue tag on every sentence.
10. Exclamationpoints. I keep this one standalone because it’s a pet peeve of mine. Simplerule: don’t use them unless absolutely, positively necessary, and ONLY fordialogue. Yeah, maybe you like sprinkling them in your tweets or Facebookposts, but this is literature, and everyone isn’t screaming with glee or terroron every line. The occasional “Look out!” is okay, but I have seen writersstick them on the end of perfectly innocuous sentences that have nothing to dowith dialogue. In fact, I recently started reading a book in which everysentence on the first page ended in an exclamation point. Needless to say, thefirst page was as far as I got. You want to encourage readers, not piss themoff.
11. Tense. Thismight sound obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times I see, when editing abook, a writer jumping between past tense, past perfect tense, present tense,hell, even future tense. The majority of books are written in past tense, as ifthe action has already happened. If you want to amp up your writing (this isespecially effective in urban fantasy and action/adventure-related books) writein present tense. It takes a little more concentration, but the effect is worthit. The point is, however, whatever you do, chose one and stick to it.
12. Point of View.First person, second person (rare), third person limited, third personomniscient are all forms of point of view employed in fiction. Writing in firstperson is very popular right now. It gives the reader a greater sense of thestory and gets them more involved, particularly in the narrator’s mind(usually, but not always, the protagonist of the book). The problem is, theaction is limited to what the narrator can personally experience or is told.And if you have an unreliable narrator, the plot, as they say, thickens deliciously.
Third person offers greater freedom in telling the story butthe trade-off is a watering-down of the readers’ involvement in the story. Mostthird person books are written in third person limited, which means that whileit is third person, the point of view is limited to the thoughts of only onecharacter in a particular scene, chapter, or even the whole book. The biggestmistake in this instance is switching between viewpoints within a scene orchapter. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be writing third person fromJohnny’s POV and suddenly be treated to what Mary is thinking. And that’s wherea lot of writers screw up point of view. If that’s what you want, then you needto be writing in third person omniscient.
Third person omniscient is like playing God. You know theinnermost thoughts, feelings, and motivations of all the characters. This canbe both good and bad. Good in that the reader knows everything that’s going on,even the stuff other characters don’t know. Bad in that the reader knowseverything that’s going on, even the stuff other characters don’t know. If thatsounds redundant, it’s because it is. If third person is a watering down offirst person, third person omniscient is a drop of water in a bucket of thirdperson. Not a whole lot of compelling going on.
See, part of the tension of a story is NOT knowingeverything. You want your reader to keep reading, to have something to try tofigure out. If you tell them everything, what is there to figure out? Which iswhy few books use this point of view anymore. It was popular in books beforethe twentieth century when readers weren’t as sophisticated with theirentertainment as they are now.
13. Characterization.I saved the best for last because no story, regardless of plot, theme, grammar,sentence structure, or flowery verse is going to succeed without characters.And those characters have to make the reader want to care about them. To dothat, the writer has to know his or her characters inside and out. You have toknow not just what they look or sound like, but where they were raised, whatfood they like, what are their favorite colors, movies, songs, seasons, books,etc. Did they break their arm falling out of a tree when they were ten andtherefore now have a fear of heights? Did their father drink too much, theirmother like to dance, their first bicycle get stolen on their birthday? Do theystutter when nervous, have nightmares after watching scary movies, fear clowns,get heartburns after eating tacos?
These are details you, as the writer, must know in order tocreate a convincing character. Ninety percent of what you know about yourcharacters will never make it into your books. Doesn’t mean you don’t need toknow it. Try this exercise: Go to the store and pretend to be your character.Look at things the way he or she would, buy what he or she would buy, interactthe way he or she would interact. Get into your character’s head.
Method actors use this exercise to become the charactersthey’re going to play. You’ll often hear them say, “What’s my character’smotivation?” If someone asked that about your characters, what would you say?If you can’t answer, you need to get to know your characters a little better.
And while we’re on the subject, give your characters someflaws. No one likes perfection in people. It’s intimidating. Plus it doesn’tinspire sympathy. And you want your characters to be sympathetic. You also wantthem to have obstacles to overcome. After all, that’s the point of the book,right? If it isn’t, you need to rethink your plot, because the only reasonpeople are going to care about your story is because of what happens to thecharacters. Make them care about your characters, and they will follow themanywhere.
And this applies whether the character is the protagonist orthe antagonist. We’ll all agree the villain is more fun to write, but do weknow why? Think about the characteristics that make your antagonist more fun,and use that knowledge to beef up the appeal of your other characters.
And that’s it in a nutshell; the combined advice I’velearned from writing and editing. In Part 2 of So You Want To Be A Writer, I’lltalk about preparing your masterpiece for publication. See you tomorrow.
