WRITING FOR THE READER���NOT JUST FOR OTHER WRITERS

Since I joined a couple of writer critique groups back in the early 1990s, I learned a lot of basic guidelines for good writing. The majority of them made a lot of sense to me. And as a reader as well as a writer, I now notice some awkward, clunky writing that miss the following points.

��� Stay in point of view���no head-hopping inside a scene.

��� Write as much as you can in active voice; don���t be passive.

��� Leave out the boring stuff.

��� Use modifiers sparingly (some say not at all, but I don���t agree with that���see below).

��� Never use a semi-colon in fiction. (I break this one every so often, just because I���m a rebel.)

��� Learn and use all the rules of grammar.

��� Spell check over and over again.

��� Get critiques and edits.

Then there were other rules I had trouble with:

��� Show, don���t tell. In my opinion, this can lead to choppy writing and lack of interesting details. Yes, show action, but tell descriptions.

��� No prologues. Come on. Sometimes they���re exactly what���s needed. They can pull the reader in and explain some backstory so there���s no ���info dump��� later on. I agree, though, that they need to be done very well. Many best-selling authors use them. Why shouldn���t the rest of us?

��� No epilogs. I have two reasons for using them in my Paula PI books���one is that as a reader myself, I like to know what happens with some of the characters later on. In a mystery in particular, it���s hard to wrap up all the loose character threads during the hopefully action-packed ending. The second reason was simply because it was a senseless rule. (There���s that rebel again).

��� Don���t use he said/she said. Have the character do something instead (cough, sigh, drink coffee, drink beer, whatever). Sorry, after a while of reading all these small actions (especially the coffee drinking) it gets old AND intrusive AND boring. He said/she said is invisible to most readers. It doesn���t stop them. So, why not use it? I do both the saids and the small actions, mixing it up.

��� Split infinitives are evil. Only if you���re an English teacher who hasn���t kept up with the times. When Latin was in use, this was a necessary rule. It���s not one for those of us who speak English. And sometimes splitting the infinitive makes the sentence much stronger: ���to boldly go where no man has gone before��� has a much better cadence than ���To go boldly where no man has gone before.��� Right? Right. When we were motorhoming I found a great bumper sticker that we promptly put on the couch: ���Boldly going nowhere.���

But I digress.

One warning about head hopping:

If you do head hop between scenes, be sure the reader knows right away whose head you���ve hopped into if you���ve changed it since the last scene. The book I���m reading currently has made this mistake several times, and it always make me stop in order to figure out I���m in a different head.

So, the biggest rule is to do what works. What works is smooth writing that doesn���t in any way make your reader stop reading to figure something out. This is okay for non-fiction. Not so much for fiction. Thus the rules about using good grammar and spelling in particular.