Three great tips for fiction writers #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

There is so much advice for new writers it must be quite bewildering for anyone starting out on the long journey to successful publication.  For this month’s #AuthorToolboxBlogHop I’ve therefore had a think and here are my top tips:

Develop your own authentic voice

Finding your ‘voice’ as a writer is what can make your work stand out from the rest. Think of your favourite authors - and why you look forward to their next book. Best-selling author Jeff Goins says, ‘Once you’ve found your voice, make sure you continue to develop it. It’s a discipline, one that can’t be overlooked if you’re going to have the impact you desire and that your words deserve.’ Find out more at Jeff’s post 10 Steps to Finding Your Writing Voice.

Show don’t tell

Don’t groan – even after writing eight novels I find this advice useful when reviewing a first draft. ‘Telling’ has its place, as there are times when you need to tell the reader something and ‘showing’ is about using all the senses to make readers feel what your characters feel. Creative writing expert Emma Darwin says, ‘Understand their respective strengths, and use each to your story's best advantage. like everything in writing, it isn't even binary, but a spectrum, from the telliest tell, to the showiest show.’ Find our more at Emma’s useful post Showing And Telling: The Basics.

Never state what you can imply

I’ve put this in the header of my current work in progress as a reminder. Like showing and telling, there are times to be flexible but it’s always good to involve the reader more by making them do some of the work. Award winning author Peter Selgin says, ‘Telling readers what to think or feel is the job of a propagandist. A storyteller’s main purpose, on the other hand, is to create experiences for the reader, to involve us so deeply, so convincingly, so authentically in those experiences that we feel what characters feel..’ Find out more at his post In Storytelling: Never State What You Can Imply.

Happy writing!

Tony Riches

Do you have some great writing tips you would like to share?

Please feel free to comment

The #AuthorToolboxBlogHop is a monthly event on the topic of resources and learning for authors. Feel free to hop around to the various blogs and see what you learn! The rules and sign-up form are below the list of hop participants. All authors at all stages of their careers are welcome to join in.

My Top Tips for Completing a Novel #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

Let's start by assuming you have your great original idea, amazing locations and cast of compelling characters - how do you now turn all that into a wonderful manuscript?  There answer is different for everyone, as some like to wing it, others obsessively plan every minute detail. 

There is no shortage of well-intended advice, from Stephen King's 'shut yourself away from the world' to my own favourite,'write just one a page a day and that's a book in a year.'

I replaced the word 'writing' with 'completing' in the title of this post, as we all have so many distractions, it takes self-discipline to write a full length novel. I've written at least one novel each year for the past nine years, (three of which have become international best-sellers) so I'm happy to share what works for me.

1. Put together a simple outline in Excel for 25 chapters of 4000 words, with columns for progress and notes. This should enable to you arrive at a first draft of 100,000 words for editing. The actual chapter lengths can be whatever you suits your writing style (mine range up to 4500 but never less than 3000, although I read a book recently with some chapters of a single page.)

2. Set yourself an achievable word count target to reach every day.  As I write historical fiction, there is a lot of fact-checking and research, so my minimum target is 500 words a day. (Sometimes I've passed 500 before breakfast and others I might do more than 3,000 - but by sticking to my minimum I know I can have my first draft in 200 days.)

3. Keep a simple tally of how many words you actually write each day. I use another page of the same Excel file, as I find it motivating to see I'm ahead of target.

3. Keep going forward and avoid doing too much revision as you write. There's plenty of time for that later. (I picked this up from doing 50,000 words in 30 days for NaNoWriMo.)

4. Make sure you have a reliable back-up system and use it. Ever since I lost a few chapters when a laptop crashed, I've been a bit 'belt and braces' with a solid state drive for my daily backup and weekly versions to the cloud. (Never overwrite old backups, as you never know when you might want to restore something.)

5. This approach suits the way I write, but its a good idea to develop your own writing routine based on what works best for you - and make sure those around you understand and respect it. 

Happy writing!

Tony Riches

Do you have some great writing tips you would like to share?

Please feel free to comment

The #AuthorToolboxBlogHop is a monthly event on the topic of resources and learning for authors. Feel free to hop around to the various blogs and see what you learn! The rules and sign-up form are below the list of hop participants. All authors at all stages of their careers are welcome to join in.

Guest Post by Apple Gidley, Author of Fireburn

 New from Amazon UK and Amazon US

Fireburn tells of the horrors of a little-known, bloody period of Caribbean history. Anna weathers personal heartache as she challenges the conventions of the day, the hostility of the predominantly male landowners and survives the worker rebellion of 1878.

Writing is an intensely personal business. Until, that is, the manuscript is ready for someone else’s eyes. Letting go of those neatly typed pages, or pushing send, is achieved only after an agony of indecision. What, in the weeks and months of diligent research, in allowing the characters to invade every waking moment, to getting the actual words down, leads up to that pivotal moment and coalesces into a maelstrom of doubt. Is it good enough? 

What seemed lyrical prose becomes saccharine; witty dialogue dribbles into cliché-ridden twaddle and the plot line becomes riddled with holes, non sequiturs and repetition. And so procrastination sets in. A tweak here, a rewrite there, the deletion of tracts of what at one stage seemed integral to the story.

Finally courage is grasped with both hands, the stamp licked, the button pushed and the waiting begins. If lucky, encouragement is given to continue along the path started with a vague idea.

My first book, Expat Life Slice By Slice, was relatively easy to let go. It was memoir and therefore could either be enjoyed, or not, believed, or not. It was the story of a life spent in twelve countries as diverse as Papua New Guinea and Holland, Equatorial Guinea and Singapore, with another eight thrown in for good measure. It told of the ups and downs of a nomadic life, it offered encouragement and admitted to errors made in a world where traversing cultural differences can sometimes be fraught. And it had a ready-made audience. Other people like me, or who were about to embark on a global adventure.

The launch of Fireburn on October 1st this year was a wholly different affair. Those initial agonies returned tenfold. This wasn’t fact, this was my imagination on sale. Until writing this novel I had never truly understood Graham Greene’s words in his memoir, Ways to Escape, when he wrote, “there is a splinter of ice in the heart of the writer” and that “a writer’s job demands an aloofness”. That most prolific and wonderful of writers, is right.

In Fireburn, writing violent scenes between Anna and her husband, a rather unpleasant chap called Carl Pedersen, was straightforward at the time but reading them later was hard. Did people wonder if I’d ever been treated so brutally. I haven’t. But at the time of writing, the words flowed almost unbidden as Anna took over. 

And that is the trick I have learned to writing believable dialogue. The characters must be heard. Not just the actual words, but the nuances. 

Fireburn, set in 1870s St Croix (Croy) in the Danish West Indies, now the US Virgin Islands, is written in four voices: Anna, a young Anglo-Danish woman; Ivy, her lady’s maid from the East End of London; Emiline, a West Indian cook and weed woman; and Sampson, the black estate foreman. Each speaks in a different manner and Sam is able to switch between Crucian patois and standard English with an ever-increasing ease.

I have always been an inveterate eaves-dropper. To the extent my husband has at times chastised me for not listening to him but rather a conversation at an adjacent table. I am that person who does not mind being delayed in travel. I love airports for the endless mix of people and cultures, and even accents between the only language I speak with any great facility, English. As my imagination has run riot, innocent men, women and children have been turned into conniving, murderous villains, or cuckolded spouses, or stolen infants unaware of their true heritage. Just sometimes they have a happy life.

I use public transport to listen to conversations around me - no plot or incident ever written, certainly in historical fiction, hasn’t happened somewhere in the world. Just read the agony aunt columns. There is no end to our ability to disappoint, to cheat, to be cruel just as there is no end to the kindness and compassion around us - we just have to listen for it and then transpose it into words coming from our characters.

I have always loved to read, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful excuse to read. And research can be both fact and fiction. If we fudge history it doesn’t matter how believable our characters, we are doing our readers a great disservice. Our imagination might be at play but the facts must bear scrutiny.

So the novel is finished, the button pushed. The elation is as effervescent as champagne when the manuscript is accepted. The bubbles can though evaporate very quickly as the editing process begins. If you’re lucky, as I have been, arguments for keeping certain passages, certain phrases and words are respected, though at times a graceful acceptance that the editor knows best is by far the wisest option. They are the professionals and want only to showcase the writer in the most favourable light possible.

It is now nine days since the launch of Fireburn, the terror of rejection for a story from my imagination has not yet abated - perhaps it never will, but that fear will not stop me from writing the sequel, Transfer of the Crown. As I said, writing is an intensely personal venture, and I love it!

Apple Gidley

# # #

About the Author

Apple Gidley is an Anglo-Australian author whose life has been spent absorbing countries and cultures, considers herself a global nomad. She currently divides her time between Houston, Texas and St Croix, in the US Virgin Islands. She has moved 26 times, and has called twelve countries home (Nigeria, England, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Papua New Guinea, The Netherlands, Trinidad and Tobago, Thailand, Scotland, USA, Equatorial Guinea), and her experiences are described in her first book, Expat Life Slice by Slice. Her roles have been varied - from magazine editor to intercultural trainer, from interior designer to Her Britannic Majesty’s Honorary Consul. Now writing full time, Apple evocatively portrays peoples and places with empathy and humour, whether writing travel articles, blogs, short stories or full-length fiction. Find out more at Apple’s Blog and find her on Facebook and Twitter @expatapple.

Tips for new writers Part Four - Consistency, by Wendy Janes #AuthorToolboxBlogHop #writing

 As a proofreader I come across the same types of errors over and over again and thought it would be helpful to group some by theme and share them. The themes are repetition, dialogue, rules and consistency, and although they’re not intended to be comprehensive guides, I hope they’ll help you improve elements of your writing.

These suggestions are things you can do when you’ve finished pouring the first draft of your story onto the page/screen and you’re revising, editing or proofreading prior to sending your work to an editor or proofreader. The more polished your work is before it goes to the professionals, the better job they can do.

Here’s the fourth post in the series: Consistency

In this post we’re venturing into nitty-gritty proofreading territory. Your work will have been edited to ensure consistency of all your characters’ descriptions, their hair and eye colour, their ages and the spelling of their names. And you’ll have ensured there are no anachronisms and that your timeline works.

I’m focusing here on the final checks I recommend authors run prior to sending their manuscript to a proofreader. They’re all things I do myself as part of a professional proofread. Using the ‘find’ facility on a Word document can help you carry out these types of checks.

Make sure you’re using the right length of dash. Unspaced en dashes are correct for number ranges. In UK English spaced en dashes should be used parenthetically (i.e. instead of brackets), and in US English, the unspaced em dash is correct. I strongly advise not using spaced hyphens.

You should either choose straight quote marks or curly ones, not both. Also, you need to decide whether you’re using single or double quotes for quotations and speech. If you’re using single quotes for speech, then you should use double quotes if there’s quoted material inside the speech. If you’re using double quotes, then you should use single inside double.

Both of these are correct:

“Marianne’s story, ‘The Visitor’, is one of my favourites,” said the teacher.

‘Marianne’s story, “The Visitor”, is one of my favourites,’ said the teacher.

There is a perfectly acceptable style where quotations and speech are presented in double quotes, but words picked out for emphasis are set in single. Some authors also put thoughts, texts and emails in quote marks. It helps to decide whether you’re going to show them in the same way as speech or choose an alternative way to differentiate them, for example, single if speech is in double, or perhaps in italics. You just need to be consistent.

I suggest you look through your manuscript to check your font. Ideally your manuscript will be in one font, but if you have than one font, make sure there’s a reason. For example, some authors put prelims (the pages before the start of the story) and end matter (the information put after the end of the story) in a different font. Others will put things like telegrams or flashbacks in a different font.

Clarify whether you’re using US or UK English. Or if you’ve chosen a mix, for example, US spelling, but UK punctuation, then use them consistently.

I’m guessing you’re probably relieved we’re now going to move on to look in more detail at words.

Some words have alternative spellings – different but both correct. The following is far from exhaustive, but I hope you’ll find it useful to begin searching your document for the following: among/amongst; learned/learnt; realise/realize; while/whilst; toward/towards.

I also recommend using a dictionary (I usually refer to the Oxford English Dictionary for UK English and Merriam-Webster for US English) to double-check words when you’re not 100% sure if they should be one word or two words or hyphenated, and then make sure you’ve been consistent. Words beginning ‘long’, ‘mid’, ‘out’, ‘over’, ‘under’ can catch you out. For example, the following are from the OED:

longhand (noun)

long shot (noun)

long-standing (adjective)

Run a check for easily confused words such as: through, though, thought; woman, women; them and then, and those that have different spellings depending on meaning, such as; there, their, they’re; to, too, two.

I find searching for repeated words is very handy too. It’s amazing how many times a word can be repeated by mistake. Here’s my quick list: the, he, him, his, she, her, that, than, an, as, at, in, is, it, of, on, no, to, up.

Focusing on this level of detail and running these types of checks might seem a little lacking in creativity for some, but your readers will really appreciate it.

Wendy Janes 

# # #

About the Author

Wendy Janes is a freelance proofreader for a number of publishers and many individual authors. She is also a caseworker for The National Autistic Society’s Education Rights Service. Author of the novel, What Jennifer Knows and a collection of short stories, What Tim Knows, and other stories, she loves to take real life and turn it into fiction. She lives in London with her husband and youngest son. You can connect with Wendy online and discover more about her via her Facebook author page, her website, Amazon author pages (UK/US) and Twitter @wendyproof.

Do you have some great writing tips you would like to share?

Please feel free to comment

The #AuthorToolboxBlogHop is a monthly event on the topic of resources and learning for authors. Feel free to hop around to the various blogs and see what you learn! The rules and sign-up form are below the list of hop participants. All authors at all stages of their careers are welcome to join in.

Tips for new writers Part Two - Dialogue, by Wendy Janes

As a proofreader I come across the same types of errors over and over again and thought it would be helpful to group some by theme and share them. The themes are repetition, dialogue, rules and consistency, and although they’re not intended to be comprehensive guides, I hope they’ll help you improve elements of your writing.

These suggestions are things you can do when you’ve finished pouring the first draft of your story onto the page/screen and you’re revising, editing or proofreading prior to sending your work to an editor or proofreader. The more polished your work is before it goes to the professionals, the better job they can do.

Welcome to the second post in the series: Dialogue

I don’t like to begin with a moan, but I can’t tell you how much time I spend correcting punctuation of speech. Honestly, you really don’t want your editor or your proofreader to be adding masses of missed commas and quote marks when they could be using their skills more efficiently and effectively. So, I’m going to start with some basics.

As a general rule, if you have a dialogue tag following speech, the dialogue ends with a comma, or question mark or exclamation mark, followed by the close quote, and the dialogue tag begins with a lower case letter. For example:

‘I seem to have forgotten my wallet,’ said Vincent.

And if you have an action tag following speech, the dialogue ends with a full stop, or question mark or exclamation mark, followed by the close quote, and the action tag begins with an upper case letter. For example:

‘I seem to have forgotten my wallet.’ He patted his jacket and trouser pockets.

Although the differences between action tags and dialogue tags seem very clear, readers and writers have different tolerance levels when characters are doing things like laughing or crying or sighing. To demonstrate my own preferences, let’s continue with Vincent and Anton.

‘I can’t believe I’ve done it again, Anton. This is so embarrassing.’ Vincent laughed.

‘Oh,’ sighed Anton, reaching for his credit card.

I would suggest that the above is correct because Vincent couldn’t have laughed all those words, and so his laugh is something that happens after his speech. I also think it’s quite reasonable for Anton to sigh a single word.

Modern dialogue tends to avoid too many he said/she said tags, and definitely shuns anything flowery such as ‘she implored beseechingly’. Ideally the words themselves will convey the drama, not the dialogue tag. A neat way to get around too many tags of the he said/she said variety is to choose an action tag instead. Let’s continue the story of Vincent’s missing wallet:

‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Not again,’ said Anton, crossing his arms and fixing Vincent with his ice blue eyes.

The above could be altered to:

‘You have got to be kidding me. Not again.’ Anton crossed his arms and fixed Vincent with his ice blue eyes.

Another issue I often come across is when the author states the obvious, and the dialogue is merely taking up space on the page. For example:

‘Hello,’ said Carla.

‘Hello,’ replied Duncan.

Simple greetings usually aren’t needed. However, greetings can be useful when they convey significant information, such as something unusual or interesting about the relationship between the two characters.

I suggest you also cut down on exclamation marks as much as possible. Ideally the words should convey the drama.

In order to avoid writing unrealistic dialogue, it can help if you read it out loud. Most characters will speak using contractions and it’s only very well-spoken formal or historical characters that will require the usual contractions to be written out in full. And when writing dialect, it’s a good idea to try and make it accessible and not stereotyped. Too many dropped aitches for your Londoner could be difficult to read, and slightly irritating too.

Make sure your characters speak in the language of their time. A word such as teenager has only been around since the mid-1930s, so if your book is set any earlier it’s important that none of your characters use that term to refer to anyone of that age.

Thinking carefully about your characters’ voices will really enhance your writing. Their style of speech can convey their personality or mood. For example, while it would be great for a professor of English to use the word ‘esoteric’, it would be out of character for someone who hadn’t completed high school or picked up a book since then. It’s also important to consider how each of your characters differ in their speech in terms of choice of language, vocal tics, style and length of sentences. If everyone in your novel sounds the same it’s difficult for the reader to tell them apart.

I hope you’re now ready to return to your manuscript with lots of ideas about the words you want to put in your characters’ mouths.

Wendy Janes 

# # #

About the Author

Wendy Janes is a freelance proofreader for a number of publishers and many individual authors. She is also a caseworker for The National Autistic Society’s Education Rights Service. Author of the novel, What Jennifer Knows and a collection of short stories, What Tim Knows, and other stories, she loves to take real life and turn it into fiction. She lives in London with her husband and youngest son. You can connect with Wendy online and discover more about her via her Facebook author page, her website, Amazon author pages (UK/US) and Twitter @wendyproof.  

Tips for new writers Part One - Repetition, by Wendy Janes

Lady Writing - Albert Edelfelt (Wikimedia Commons)

Previously Tony invited me to write a post for his blog about how to have a positive proofreading experience. I’m so pleased to be invited back to write this series of four posts for new writers.

As a proofreader I come across the same types of errors over and over again and thought it would be helpful to group some by theme and share them. The themes are repetition, dialogue, rules and consistency, and although they’re not intended to be comprehensive guides, I hope they’ll help you improve elements of your writing.

These suggestions are things you can do when you’ve finished pouring the first draft of your story onto the page/screen and you’re revising, editing or proofreading prior to sending your work to an editor or proofreader. The more polished your work is before it goes to the professionals, the better job they can do.

So, let’s get on with the first post: Repetition

Discover, search for, and eliminate your crutch words – words we overuse in our writing. We all have them. My worst one is ‘just’. I just can’t stop using it (see what I did there?), closely followed by ‘smile’. When I’m writing a first draft, my characters smile all over the place, whether it’s to show happiness or to cover anxiety, you name it, they’re smiling. After a good edit, they’re no longer so smiley!

Here’s a short list of common ones: believe, feel, felt, glance, grin, just, look, nod, now, realise, really, that, think, turn and very. These can be deleted or replaced, sometimes with minimal reworking of a sentence. The word ‘just’ can often be deleted or it can be replaced by ‘only’ or ‘merely’, depending on context.

Many authors have their characters repeatedly sitting or standing or laughing or walking, or biting their nails, running their hands through their hair, raising their eyebrows. This type of repetition can be almost invisible to authors, but it can irritate readers and take them right out of the story.

I’ll pause here to say that when handled carefully, repetition of words and phrases can work wonders to help set a scene, bring out a character trait, create an atmosphere, add drama, anticipation and pathos to a story. There are some wonderful examples of the effective use of repetition here: http://thejohnfox.com/repetition-examples/

Back to repetition that doesn’t enhance anyone’s writing: repeating the same words within the same sentence or paragraph. Let me introduce you to Daisy and Horatio to illustrate this:

Daisy heard a knock at the door. She walked to the door and opened it to find Horatio standing in the door, a huge bouquet of roses in his arms.

You could turn the above into something like:

Daisy answered a knock at the door to find Horatio standing there with a huge bouquet of roses in his arms.

Another handy search you can carry out is for sentences beginning with the same word or phrase. These and other repeated words will jump out at you when you read your work through to yourself, or better still, when you read it out loud. There’s absolutely no problem in starting a sentence with ‘He…’ or ‘She…’ or ‘I…’ , but when every sentence in a paragraph begins ‘He…’, unless it’s done on purpose for effect (see above), the writing starts to sound a bit samey.

Avoid having your characters thinking something and then repeating that thought immediately or a few lines later in dialogue or narrative. This often happens when an author has been editing and they haven’t realised that the same information has been given twice in quick succession. Let’s pop back to Daisy greeting Horatio at the door:

Seeing his sparkling green eyes peeking at her over the bouquet banished all her fears that these past weeks of silence from him meant he had lost interest in her.

‘Darling, I’ve missed you so much. All these weeks of silence, I’ve been fearful you were losing interest in me.’

Here I would advise an author to choose which information to relate in dialogue and which in narrative.

One more thing to avoid is having characters repeating information again and again throughout a novel. After we’ve heard Daisy telling Horatio that the reason her favourite flower is the rose is because her beloved grandmother grew them in the grounds of her childhood home, we don’t need to hear her saying it again in chapters 3, 5 and 8. Although, what could work is if the author ensures that it’s clear that Daisy is either oblivious to this repetition or she’s doing it on purpose and how this impacts on her relationship with Horatio. In this case the repetition is being used specifically for character development, and basically shows the reader that the author is on top of their material.

When searching for repetition, I find Word’s ‘find’ function extremely helpful.

I hope you’re now feeling ready to return to your manuscript, eager to hunt down those repeated words and phrases. If they’re enhancing your writing, then great, otherwise, off with their heads.

Wendy Janes 

# # #

About the Author

Wendy Janes is a freelance proofreader for a number of publishers and many individual authors. She is also a caseworker for The National Autistic Society’s Education Rights Service. Author of the novel, What Jennifer Knows and a collection of short stories, What Tim Knows, and other stories, she loves to take real life and turn it into fiction. She lives in London with her husband and youngest son. You can connect with Wendy online and discover more about her via her Facebook author page, her website, Amazon author pages (UK/US) and Twitter @wendyproof.  

Tracking Your Writing Using Excel #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

All writers have different approaches to outlining and tracking progress on their books, ranging from not at all, to an obsessive preoccupation with word count. After years of trial and error, I've settled on a simple system using Microsoft Excel which works well for me.

A typical novel can be somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 words - although there will always be writers who insist on at least 300,000 and others who like to push word count to extremes (in both directions).

You need to leave scope for cuts in the editing process, so I like to aim for 25 chapters of 4000 words each to arrive at somewhere close to 100,000 in the unedited manuscript. The screenshot above is an actual example from my novel 'Owen' (which ended up as 91,238 words). It's important to remember the word count for a chapter is only a useful guide, although some readers like the reassurance of fairly regular chapter lengths.

Of course you could do all this on scraps of paper or in a lined notebook. The reason is works so well for me is all my writing is done on my laptop, so Excel is only one click away - and it's all backed up to the cloud and available wherever I happen to be.

Using Excel for Outlining

Once you have the basic structure of your book set up in Excel, it's easy to add notes in the next columns to the right of each chapter. As a historical fiction author I like t have a column showing which year most of the chapter is set in, as well as key events. This can then be added to and developed as your writing and research progresses.

Adding Character notes 

I find it useful to add a separate tab at the bottom of the worksheet where the ages for all my characters are calculated for any particular year. You could have tabs for notes on each of your characters or locations.

Planning your launch publicity

I like to create another tab to keep track of guest posts, reviews, book signings etc. with dates, emails and hyperlinks. This has proved invaluable as it's so easy to forget who agreed what and when. The tracking from previous books also offers a great starting point for the next, as you can add notes about what worked best.

Tony Riches @tonyriches

Do you have some great writing tips you would like to share?

Please feel free to comment

The #AuthorToolboxBlogHop is a monthly event on the topic of resources and learning for authors. Feel free to hop around to the various blogs and see what you learn! The rules and sign-up form are below the list of hop participants. All authors at all stages of their careers are welcome to join in.