Dos & Don’ts

Do make sure your text layout is clear and clean. Choose a standard font like Times New Roman or Calibri, point size 11 or 12, and stick to it throughout. Lines should be spaced double or 1.5. Text should not be justified but ranged left so that the right margin is ‘ragged’. It’s always best to use page layout settings (Home>Paragraph>drop down menu) to fix such values and indents. Set indents to between 0.2 and 0.5. Use hyphens only within words, and en (or em) dashes to break up sentences. Don’t mix these up. Always aim for consistency in spelling and word usage.

Don’t over-write – a single well-chosen word is better than five so-so ones in the general target area. (‘He yelled’ is probably better than ‘He said loudly in response to her question.’)

And don’t overload us with unnecessary details. Give just enough information for the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest, then move on. And keep focused on your story:

Maurice had felt somewhat redundant during their conversation, so he went to the café round the corner to buy coffees for the team. He was just walking back in having brought back the takeaway latte Fiona had requested – which from the café he’d gone to was traditionally served in a china cup on a silver tray, ‘It’s been a trademark of the family-run business since the 1820s,’ Maurice told Fiona – when the phone rang with the information they had all been waiting for from Madrid (my underlining).

We couldn’t care less about the café’s historic policy regarding its tableware, it’s got nothing to do with the plot. But the info from Madrid most definitely has, so concentrate on that.

Above all, avoid purple prose:

‘Well, I certainly didn’t mean to knock you all of a heap with my devastating sexual charisma,’ he said jokingly with a salacious wink from his cornflower-blue eyes.
Petra flashed her provocative gaze towards him, which instantly made his loins start doing cartwheels.
‘You did that the first time we met and I didn’t hear any apologies on that occasion,’ she gurgled humorously, simultaneously pinching his backside rollickingly.

Too much.

Do make a qualitative distinction between dialogue and narrative. The dialogue should sound less formal; use elisions, slang, non-sequiturs. Try reading it out loud to see how it sounds then edit accordingly. If it feels awkward, or doesn’t sound like something someone might actually say, then rewrite it looser. Don’t use too many speech tags (a speech tag is a phrase like he replied, she screamed), and nine times out of ten, s/he said is perfectly adequate. Put this early in the speech, maybe after the first phrase or sentence, so we know immediately who’s speaking, and go easy on the adverbs. If the utterance is properly written in context, the reader should be able to form an instant impression of how the words are said without having to be specifically told.

And if someone is speaking and doing something else at the same time, do not try to make the same verb cover both. ‘I’ve never been to Italy,’ Jim sipped his beer. The speaking and the beer drinking may be simultaneous but the actions are separate and the grammar should reflect that. Maybe I’m too stiff and conservative here, because many authors use this construction and I’ve even seen examples of it in Hemingway – maybe that’s where they get it from – but I don’t like it myself and it’s something I would always comment on. And, of course, you can always ignore my advice, in this as in everything else.

Don’t assume the reader is going to find your main characters as fascinating as you do just because you’ve spent ages crafting them and creating their back stories or basing them on your own lovely self. Give us real reasons to feel about them the way you want us to feel about them – your reader may have different tastes and priorities. And remember to show if you can, rather than tell. In the fourth book of a crime series I once worked on, a recurring character was described as having ‘a legendary sense of humour’. The man hadn’t uttered a single funny thing over the entire 1200 pages I had so far proofed.

Do avoid unnecessary repetition: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ralph,’ said Harvey, as if the mere notion were completely absurd. The utterance on its own here is enough for us to get the picture. And we rarely use the names of people we are close to when we are talking to them.

Repetitions in instances like this are even worse: Martin crossed towards the door and pulled open the oak boardroom door. Or this: Susan raised her wine glass and gulped down the large glass of red. This is like looking at a photograph where the subject has moved, so you see a blurred image twice. It isn’t just bad writing, it’s lazy; if the author can’t be bothered to reread their own work, why should they expect their readers to?

Above all, avoid anything like this:

‘This is how I see our situation. We are down to our last few rounds of ammo, and there is no chance of rescue from the garrison,’ Jeremiah made their parlous position clear.

In other words, don’t have a character say something which is then instantly glossed or summarised by the narrative voice.

(I originally ended this paragraph with a further sentence, ‘It’s unnecessary and wastes time’, before realising I was ignoring my own advice. Always reread.)

Don’t take too literally the old chestnut ‘write what you know’ otherwise only assassins could create convincing murder mysteries and only time travellers could write credible historical novels. But just remember that if you write a scene in a setting you yourself have little first-hand experience of, and get something wrong, someone somewhere will pick you up on it. Jane Austen had one of the most refined imaginations of the 19th century, but even she never wrote a scene featuring two men only, because this wasn’t something she knew from life. Such humility is one of the nicest things about her. On the other hand, in our own era, there was a film not so long ago in which some big star was playing an eminent orchestra conductor. At the end of one rehearsal he declared his dissatisfaction thus: ‘You’re not together on the upbeats.’ Now there’s a screenwriter who didn’t know the first thing about music.

And does the following honestly sound like a normal conversation between two hard-bitten young squaddies on the front line?

‘Now listen here, Nev, when we get back to blighty I want you to wear a decent suit to my wedding please, else my Gina is going to have my guts for garters. Judging by your usual state of dress you’ve got lousy taste, so you’d better let your Veronica pick one out for you. I don’t want you making the wedding pictures look like a casting call for The Addams Family, got it?’
Mike winked at Nev who flipped him the bird.
‘Aw, now look what you’ve made me do,’ Nev complained. ‘I was playing Super Mario.’
Mike choked on his uncontrollable laughter.
‘Super Mario? You don’t play childish stuff like that on your iPhone do you?’
‘So I do. Better than Angry Birds anyway.’
Mike spat coffee, laughing at him, and had to go to the gents to get himself some toilet roll.

Remember that readers will probably be exposed regularly to gritty soaps and realistic dramas on TV where tough dialogue is the norm, so anything as painfully polite as this is likely to ring false and ruin any sense of veracity you may be trying to establish.

By the same token, be careful with period idiom. Just because your book is set in 1812, remember you are writing in the present day: Her mentioning of their respective stations in life returned the militant erectility to his posture. This strives to sound Austen-esque but it’s clumsy, ungrammatical and tone deaf.

And on the subject of unconscious comedy, there’s this gem from another crime thriller: ‘I heard she nearly killed this one guy by stabbing him in the Trossachs.’

At least she didn’t kick him in the Gorbals.

Do choose names carefully. They come with baggage. Above all, avoid distracting echoes. I once worked on a police procedural whose cast list included two police officers called Phil and Jen (there is an old children’s programme in Britain called Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men), and a pathologist called Harold Pointer (much too close to the award-winning playwright Harold Pinter). Also, a nasty novel about paedophiles has one character working at a specific pub and another teaching in a certain named primary school, both of which were genuine places (thank you, Google Maps). Research is key to avoid lawsuits.

And while we’re on the subject of research, if you mention a specific day and date in your book, make sure they coincide. There’s no point claiming 4th August 1832 was a Tuesday when every calendar from the year in question insists that it was, in fact, a Saturday. It’s easy enough to check that kind of thing these days, and while few readers are going to be holding your book in one hand and an almanac in the other as they read, you’re not going to get such an error past me and my Excel sheets (see above), and why offer such easy meat to the green-ink brigade anyway?

Don’t neglect your own reading. You can pick up a lot of technique from reading widely, but just like learning an instrument or playing a sport, while a few gifted people have a knack that the majority of us lack, remember that even the naturals have to practise.

The most common advice for would-be writers is to read a lot and write a lot, for good reason. The one thing I see most is writing which is neither good nor bad, it’s just bland. Every reader wants to be pleasantly surprised by something out of the ordinary, something they’ve never seen before. I would advise any budding author to try and find a USP, a distinctive style or mode of expression or kind of writing that makes their work obviously theirs and nobody else’s. Use a voice which sounds natural and comes easily to you, and don’t try to imitate someone you like or admire, because you’ll inevitably fall short, and they’ve mastered that particular voice anyway.

The best way to acquire a style is to write as much as you can so that it becomes second nature. And don’t expect it to be easy. Prepare to rewrite everything – all good writing is rewriting. It’s not necessary, in my view, to ‘kill your darlings’ as some authorities recommend – this probably comes from that impulse to overwork favourite passages and the more work you put into something, the less inclined you are to want to discard it – but learn to know when you’ve ‘got’ what you’ve been aiming at, then move on. Don’t keep refining a passage you’re happy with because you’re scared to go on to something more challenging, or which you’re not sure how to write. If you’re having difficulty with a scene, decide first whether you absolutely need it – more often than not, you don’t. The reader can often pick things up far more quickly than you think, and writing lean is always better than writing long.

Do remember that good writing is first and foremost entertaining. In other words, it’s not therapy. It’s not working out your personal demons. It’s not disguised autobiography. It’s not a way to get back at your ex or your parents or that crabby old school teacher who never thought you’d amount to anything. It’s not showing off. It’s not supposed to be all about you. You write to be read and to express yourself and to inform and amuse. It should be a public performance for others, not a private exercise in navel-gazing.

As for inspiration, one professional put it like this: ‘I can never write unless I’m inspired. So I make a point of being inspired at nine o’clock every morning.’ The point is, the difference between a professional and an amateur author is the same as the difference between pros and amateurs in any other field: the professionals can do it even when they’re not in the mood. They can write a convincing smoochy love scene five minutes after losing a stand-up screaming match with their partner. The world of the book should be hermetically sealed off from whatever else might be going on in your life at the time you’re writing it.

Don’t listen to the haters. If everybody knew for sure what will sell, all publishers would be millionaires. Screenwriter William Goldman said about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything,” which is why the few really successful films are immediately succeeded by a slew of increasingly weak imitations: nobody could predict the hit would be such a smash, and nobody is clever enough to know how to work the trick twice. The same is true of books. Stay true to your own vision and don’t try to be anybody else.

Finally, there is a famous speech in the play The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard wherein the character Henry, a playwright, is trying to explain why a script written by his lover’s friend is no good. It’s not enough to have something to say, Henry explains. You have to know how to say it – and he proceeds to compare good writing to a cricket bat (he even produces a cricket bat to demonstrate, what we in the theatre world call ‘a prop’):

“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole this is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly… (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might… travel… (He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. (Indicating the cricket bat.) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lord’s. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on. ‘You’re a strange boy, Billy, how old are you?’ ‘Twenty, but I’ve lived more than you’ll ever live.’ Ooh, ouch! (He drops the script and hops about with his hands in his armpits, going ‘Ouch!’…)”

It may be a play, but it’s still prose, and good writing is good writing, whether it be destined for the page, the stage, for TV or for film. So I urge every ambitious author to take this little speech to heart because Sir Tom nails the whole unwritten rule in around 250 words. And then go on to read the rest of his plays, starting with Arcadia followed by The Invention of Love. You will laugh your socks off and cry your eyes out, and isn’t that really what it’s all about?

Good luck. Work hard. Write cricket bats.

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