Ten Top Tips to Instantly Improve Your Writing

A ‘Happy Sunday’ quickie – and a chance to catch some old posts too. A few ideas on sharpening up your writing – great tips and snippets of advice I’ve received over the last four years.

Learn how apostrophes work; and semi-colons.
Well, it’s really rather important that you just do this. Run search and delete on every instance of the following words: really, just, quite, rather, very, oh, so, well and suddenly. Check out my post ‘One Word At A Time’ for this and other editing tips.
Practise Show vs Tell the Anton Chekhov way: Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Take a chunk of back-story or exposition and rewrite it into a dialogue. Then repeat. Then repeat again. Dialogue is much more engaging than flat-text exposition and a page of conversation is easier to read than a thumping boulder of a paragraph.
Focus on sensory detail. Not just sight, but sound, taste, touch and smell. It will enrich your reader’s experience. I blogged here about using all the senses.
Every time you see two clever, descriptive adjectives side-by-side, delete at least one of them. Yes, every time. Writers can publish with excess of adjectives, but only once they’ve sold a gazillion books and are unassailable. (If you doubt me, check out J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith – but then go and delete half your adjectives, because you won’t so easily get away with it.)
Review your work for any not-so-perfect tenses (past perfect, past continuous and past perfect continuous) and opt for something more immediate. I blogged about how this works here.
Delete the first paragraph of every chapter. There’s no need for foreplay, dive straight to the action. Hmmm, personally, I appreciate literary foreplay, so I’m not sold on this tip – but better writers than me will endorse it.
Delete the last paragraph of every chapter. Don’t hang about after the action. Get out, fast. This, I can vouch for.
Clichés – avoid them like the plague… Yes, you guessed it, I blogged! This one might actually hit the mark (doh!)

Going Down

You thought it was finished? So did I. But the word-cull continues

Last autumn, when I drew a line under my 6^th or 7^th redraft of Singled Out, I honestly thought it was finished; finished as far my neophyte novelist’s abilities would allow at least. But armed with some insightful observations and having taken a few months away from the words, things look different.

I’m around two-thirds of the way through yet another edit – the one I didn’t realise I needed. And here I am deleting not just words, but whole sentences, whole paragraphs too. Here I am turning a paragraph into a sentence and still… still… deleting adjectives and adverbs. Yes, the more you look, the more you find. It’s wordy Whack-a-Mole.

When I began submitting Singled Out to agents it stood at 97,600 words. This summer in response to feedback, I’ve added three new sections, perhaps a total of around 1,500 words. But the word-count is down to 94,000.

How did that happen?

I think, at last, I’ve begun to relinquish my grip on those favourite sections – those darlings – which have thus far had a free-pass from the editor’s pen; those (not so) clever turns of phrase that looked so… so… writerly when they went in; those extravagant why-use-one-word-when-twenty-will-do descriptive sections; and those parts of the story where I’ve failed to trust the reader to get what’s going on.

This is what you need distance for; to develop the ability – and willingness – to be dispassionate. At last I’m editing as if it wasn’t me but someone else who has written Singled Out. I can cull great chunks I couldn’t bear to part with before because, somehow, they don’t feel like mine any more.

Frustrating though it is to have not seen immediate success with submitting my manuscript, I can see why I’ve not made the cut (no pun intended). I don’t know if I’ll have done enough to see a positive outcome when I go back to agent submissions in a few weeks time – the odds are against me, after all. But I continue – in a perverse and yes, almost sadistic way – to draw satisfaction and even joy from the learning process.

At this point, I want to get Singled Out out there in one form or another – because I want to see the job finished. More than that, I’m now straining to get started on my next novel, the one where I think I can bring all my learnings into play and create something better and sharper – hopefully in somewhat less than four years.

When will it ever end

Last September, I dotted the last ‘i’ and crossed the last ‘t’ on my final final final draft of SINGLED OUT. Or so I thought.

Last September, I believed I’d taken My First Novel as far as I could in drafting and editing terms. I wrote my synopsis (a traumatic experience) and carved off a chunk of text into a sample document. I took a set of fluorescent markers to my copy of ‘Writers’ & Artists’ Year Book 2014′ and lined up a shortlist of lucky, lucky agents who were to be the priority recipients of my masterpiece.

Then I sat back and waited for the offers to flood in. I waited, I blogged about the wait, and I waited some more. Instead of a flood, there was a trickle, and what trickled in was not overawed, enthusiastic ‘oh my word, this is magnificent, send us your full manuscript and come in and see us at once, and by the way don’t talk to any other agents until we’ve explained what we can do for you’ emails. What trickled in was – yes, right first time – a smattering of polite and kindly worded ‘sorry, not for us’ rejection emails.

I kept going, still fairly selectively. But those rejections kept on coming. The current tally is 17 agent submissions and 13 rejection emails. Of the remaining four, three date back to February/March and can thus be regarded as time-expired, rejections by omission. (Happily, the majority of agents have proved to be more courteous than this.) To date one agent, in theory, still has my novel in review, but as this agent accepted it as a courtesy following a seminar, I’m not holding my breath.

There was the odd flicker of interest. Two agents requested the full manuscript on the back of my submission, prompting palpitations and a wave of misplaced optimism in yours truly. Their rejections followed in due course.

But here’s the thing. Pithy though their feedback was, those two agents made broadly similar observations in their rejection emails. Not only that, but a very welcome latecomer to the beta reader party (you know who you are…) and a much loved and valued writing buddy both offered more detailed critique which, blow me down, highlighted the exact same issues.

I went away for a few days last week with these critiques much on my mind. The original plan had been to spend a few days rereading my manuscript and sharpening up a few lines here and there. But I’d begun to realise the ‘problem’ with my story was more fundamental than scrapping yet more surplus adverbs (though the volume of those infectious little critters you have to steel yourself to eliminate across layers of editing is a revelation in itself).

As I grappled with my folder of curiously comparable critique, I confess I grew frustrated. Having been so close to my novel for four years, I just didn’t get it. Intellectually, I could grasp what they were saying were the shortcomings. But when it came to addressing them, I couldn’t see how without throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Worse still, I couldn’t see why my story seemed to need such fundamental changes. Cue a gnashing of teeth and much grizzling and pouting.

In the still of the night I lay awake, frustrated, fretful. True to form at around 4:00am, my brain at last began to shift into the right gear. I began to get my head around what they’d all been saying. I started to find my way from I can’t towards how can I?

In the morning I got to work, identifying sections which screamed out for more tension and scenes which demanded more mystery; I earmarked pages where the pace dipped, weighted by too much unnecessary detail; I hunted down paragraphs where the language had to be nipped-and-tucked to better fit the character.

I decided two of my main characters will undergo a name change; I’ve finally conceded they have too much of the stereotype about them, and it begins with their names. But that’s mind-bending for me, as I’ve lived with them for upwards of four years. Oh, and talking of characters, I’m introducing a new one.

If this all sounds like a major rewrite, I don’t want to mislead you. This is far more than the tweaking I’d originally planned, but it’s not a rewrite. The story is essentially all there and all the pieces matter. Everything fits together and the plot is – I still believe – strong. What I’m dealing with is tone and pace, adding suspense in places I hadn’t realised it was needed, keeping up the tension instead of allowing it to fade away, injecting moments of uncertainty, deleting yet more extraneous detail – that sort of thing. This means I’m back in murder your darlings territory – not just words and lines, but paragraphs, great chunking paragraphs, sometimes one after another – and it hurts. But I know what I’m doing and at last I can see why it’s needed.

So that’s my job for what remains of the summer – to carry on culling whilst I meld new and modified material seamlessly back into the story. Then the plan is to approach a few more agents in the autumn months. As to what happens after that… Well, without suggesting anything at all about my more grounded expectations for this part of the process, I’m booked into a ‘how to self-publish’ seminar towards the end of the year. So we’ll just have to see.

The Dating Game: Debut novel seeks ambitious agent

My name is: Singled Out

I am: A debut novel

I am seeking: An agent

My location: A singles holiday in an unspoilt village on Turkey’s seductive Lycian Coastline

The sun scorches the earth. Exotic rhythms pound out along the beachfront. Strangers mingle, thrown together in pursuit of pleasure for a single week of their lives. A dangerous individual circles the unwary group like a wolf. He begins picking off victims, playing a sordid private game. Can he be stopped? Who will dare to get in his way? And what will it cost them?

Hi there! I’m Singled Out. I’m a debut novel and I’m looking for a soulmate.

Not so long ago I was a wretched mess of a draft – half-baked, blistered with plot holes, scarred by cliché and rambling all over the place. I would spend my days splurged on the sofa, stuffing my pages with excess adjectives and downing bottle after bottle of purple prose. Things got so bad that my author staged an intervention. I couldn’t put it off any longer – it was time to straighten myself out.

So I’ve been in therapy. I’ve been dispatched on courses and hidden away on retreats. I’ve forced my author to accompany me, dragging her away from the distractions of email, piles of washing, odd jobs, miscellaneous errands, internet retail emporia, and – horror of horrors – out of mobile coverage. I’ve been subjected to group therapy and prescribed some unquestionably excellent advice. I’ve been on a diet too. I’ve dropped a dress size, losing 9,000 words to a series of edits – that’s almost 10% of my body weight. I’ve been working out every day… working out how to make the plot sizzle, working out how to invigorate my characters, and working out how to build the tension and tighten the twists and turns. Finally, I was given a glossy makeover and now, sculpted and trimmed, I’m double-line spaced and dressed in wide margins and a curly serif font.

I may be scrubbed and pressed, but I’m never going to be a frothy party-girl of a novel. There’s more to me than cocktails and cosy poolside chats; I’ve got my dark side, make no mistake – it may be tequila sunrise one moment, but the next… oh, but that would be giving too much away, and a new novel has to protect her modesty, doesn’t she?

So my word-count is snug and my pages are in pretty good shape, but no novel is perfect; you may feel you want to smooth out some of my grittier characteristics. And that’s all fine, because you’re the expert and I’m the novice and one thing my author and I have learned over the last couple of years is how to take advice. But I want to enjoy the process, so the most important thing is that you and my author see eye to eye and get along famously – because that’s when the whole collaborative, mutually beneficial professional relationship thing works like a dream and everyone gets what they need. Happy days.

So are you the agent for me? Are you savvy and well-connected, a joy to work with, adventurous enough to take a risk with something new and a little dark? Will you nurture me and promote me and find us a publisher? Do you want a long-term partnership, not just with a debut novel, but with her future siblings? Are you the one to single me out, and turn Singled Out into a double-act?

One word at a time

I’m line editing. After almost three years of writing words into my first novel, for the last month I’ve been taking them out, one by one. With two line-by-line passes through my draft, I’ve shrunk 107,000 words to 98,000, dipping below that 100,000 word marker beyond which, apparently, novice writers venture at their peril.

Line editing is an interesting if tedious technical exercise and it’s involved a few tactics, amongst which:

Culling 99% of occurrences of these words: really, rather, just, quite, very, oh, so, well and suddenly. I said a silent prayer to the twin gods of Search and Delete.
Appraising every instance of verb + adverb and replacing many, many of them with… a more descriptive verb. Yes, you can’t escape that one. I love my well-thumbed Roget’s more than ever now.
Interrogating every adjective cosying up to a noun and consigning two out of every three to the scrap-heap. I’m ashamed to admit, there were places where an inexplicable, suffocating, weighty chain of three adjectives dragged down a noun. Oops.
Radical surgery on long sentences and complex constructions.
Repetition, repetition, repetition: Eliminating the second and subsequent instances of a favoured word of the day – over and over.
Sometimes it’s obvious who’s thinking or saying something. Deleting he/she said/thought where it isn’t needed dealt with another hundred or so surplus words.
It doesn’t always matter what a character is wearing, or what colour eyes they have. In fact, as far as I can see, it only matters when it tells you something about the character that is useful or relevant to the reader. Physical descriptions resembling witness statements have gone; only selective, telling details remain.

This literary fight-the-flab regime has been a good deal more effective than the one I’m (still) trying to impose on my extra physical pounds. Aiding the process of editorial expurgation was an e-book I purchased recently (no, I’m not going to tell you what it was). Clearly never having been subjected to a disciplined editing process, this book was overrun with an abundance of wasted words, superfluous sentences and drawn-out dialogue. Reading it (or, I confess, just the first 20% of it) made me realise how irritating – and dull – it is to plough through pages of rambling narrative, bloated with excess detail. I saw where my first novel would be without the rigour of a line edit.

It’s not perfect – how can it be? But it was a serious job, diligently executed. Doubtless if I’m fortunate enough to attract the attentions of an agent and a publisher, there will be a second and even subsequent culls. But for now, it’s enough.

This weekend, my first novel went out to two test readers. Now all I want to do is hide under the duvet and eat ice cream.

The beginning of the end – or just the end of the beginning

Last weekend was the last gasp of summer and I spent it in the garden. Not weeding and watering, but with my fingers glued to the keyboard. Yes, I have at last reached the end of my first draft. My story is complete.

Well, sort of.

I’m at a surreal moment of elation and crisis. I’m thrilled at having got this far, but keenly aware that my story is full of holes, inconsistencies and great chunks I want to change, improve and delete – and add too, I think. There are character inconsistencies and plot weaknesses, to say nothing of the sections I first wrote a year ago that today make me curl into a ball and weep. And that’s before I start on the inevitable adverb cull and punctuation review.

I’ve learned so much in the last 18 months, and come so far, but there’s so much still to do.

And you know, I’d love to write great huge blog posts, but what I really want is to get on with finishing my story. You understand, don’t you?