Basic Mechanics of Dialogue

Dialogue. What would fiction be without it? Well, we can make a fair guess at that by looking at the Foundation trilogy. And yes, I know it was very much admired, but still, not as fun a read as it might have been. I think it mainly appealed to those grim types who take their fiction ever so seriously. Which, as we both know, is not the case here.

I'm a big fan of lots of dialogue myself. I've been known to treat lengthy action sequences in a film as if they were commercial breaks. The way I see it is, 'if no one ain't talking, ain't nothing happening.' While this may be a little extreme, novels are, after all, about people, and the main way in which people interact is by talking to each other, so unless you're doing some kind of very unusual novel where no one needs to talk, you will need to be comfortable with writing lots of dialogue. A lot of novice writers have trouble with this, so today I'm going to look at the basic mechanics of how it works.

Now I'm not going to talk about content today. Content in dialogue is a vast and perilous estate, having to do with the use of inflexions and dialects, character exposition, and a whole raft of issues. I may or may not address it another time. Today we are concerned with the nuts and bolts.

1. Indicating Speech

The first thing to consider is that you must show your reader that someone is speaking. In written English, we use quote marks to do this. Quote marks are the text equivalent of the speech bubble in a comic.

I'll be using the convention of double quotes for speech and single quotes for quoted material. It can also be done the other way around, but the double quotes are more commonly used.

To indicate that someone is talking, you wrap the speech in quotes, so: "I hope that fireman asks her out soon. This is getting old."

See how, when we repeat the speech from the illustration above, the quotes take the place of the bubble? That's all that needs to be said about quotes.

2. Termination.

Pattern 1 - Speech is coextensive with sentence.

Ordinarily, a sentence is terminated with terminating punctuation - a period, question mark or exclamation point. This is, of course, also true of sentences in dialogue. An added complication however, arises when a sentence of dialogue is not coextensive with a sentence of your narrative.

Consider the following:

"I hope that fireman asks her out soon."

In the above example, we may note that the spoken sentence is coextensive with the written sentence. It fills up the whole sentence; there is no 'he said', and the single sentence of speech is in every respect identical with a sentence of narrative except for the fact it is enclosed in quotes. This is the simplest form of dialogue.

Pattern 2 - Speech is contained within a greater sentence.

"I hope that fireman asks her out soon," said Fluffy.

Here, there is more to the sentence than just the speech; there is a speech verb, too, and a subject. This is a well-formed sentence; it has a subject, verb and object. The object of 'said' is the entire speech. It is what Fluffy said.

Notice that, unlike the first example, Fluffy's speech is here terminated with a comma, not a period. This is because the end of the speech is not the end of the sentence, as it was in the first example. When a speech ends before the end of the sentence, the period is replaced with a comma. Note that this will not be the case if some other termination is used - a question mark or exclamation mark. In those cases, the punctuation remains unchanged:

"I hope that fireman asks her out soon!" said Fluffy.

Pattern 3 - a sentence contains more than one sentence of dialogue.


"I hope that fireman asks her out soon. This is getting old," said Fluffy.

Here, you can see that only the last period in the speech is replaced with a comma. Any other terminating marks within the speech retain their normal values.

3. Other punctuation.

There is more to punctuation, of course, than terminations, and in dialogue this is even more the case than in narrative, for punctuation, as I've mentioned before, adds inflexions and intonations to the spoken word. You will probably find you're using more punctuation, ceteris paribus, in dialogue than in narrative. Consider the following examples, where ellipses are used to indicate less than total concentration on the part of the speaker:

Fluffy is falling off his branch and struggling to hold on as he speaks:

"I hope... that fireman... oh, help! ...asks her out soon," said Fluffy, scrabbling about for a better view, and almost losing his grip on the branch.

Fluffy is relaxing in front of the fire and drifting off to sleep:

"I hope... that fireman... asks her out soon..." A gentle snore indicated that Fluffy had given up the fight to stay awake.

4. Fragments.

No discussion of dialogue would be complete without mentioning that, in dialogue, it is not necessary that sentences be well-formed. As the fundamental requirement of narrative is that it be correct English, so the fundamental requirement of dialogue is that it be, or at least sound, 'natural', and therefore, in well-written dislogue, the well-formed sentence is conspicuous, if not by its absence, at least by its rather spotty attendance. Just as humans do not speak in a controlled sequence of perfectly formed English sentences, neither should your characters, unless there is a good context- or character-driven reason for it. Human speech is full of sentence fragments, and becomes fuller the more casual the situation.

Time - it's on Your Side

Writers are always moaning and bitching about time. We all have stacks of unfinished projects, and many of us have 'day jobs' that take up a good deal of our week, or children to look after, or what have you. There are whole courses and books written about time management for writers, and how to carve out writing time from a busy schedule (combat), and how to make the time you have count for more with techniques (subterfuge), and in general we've a rather adversarial notion of time. Literature is full of it - the White Rabbit's pocket watch, Kiplings 'unforgiving minute', the fateful sound of midnight striking as Cinderella rushes from the ball. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair, says time, and we accept this as our lot.

But time is just time. It has no personality, no axe to grind. Time can be your friend, if you know how to make it work for you.

The Value of Rotdown

Let's talk about cooking. Bear with me; it will have something to do with writing, eventually.

You know how when you make a stew of any kind, or any made dish really - spaghetti sauce, soup, anything like that - it's always better on the second day? Thicker and with a richer flavour. This is such a truism that if I have time, I'll make something like that the day before I plan to use it. A subtle alchemy takes place in cooked food when it's allowed to stand. No, Virginia, not going off. I am referring to what I believe people in the culinary world refer to as 'the flavours combining'.

This is just one  way in which you can make time work for you, without your having to put in any effort at all. With the passage of time, your casserole gets better and better, and all while you were sleeping/going out and getting wasted/reading your Bible. Of course there are limits - it doesn't go on getting better forever. All food has a finite lifespan. But up to about 24 hours is usually a good thing.

As with cooking, so with writing, there are ways in which you can make time work for you, and foremost among these is what I call Rotdown.

When you have finally finished the first draft of your novel (or novella, short story, screenplay, etc), the first thing on your mind is probably celebrating. I know it is for me, especially when I finish something substantial, a novel or novella. I've been working on it for a long time and my immediate thought is to pour myself a tall glass of something congratulatory, put my feet up and binge-watch the television for the next 48 hours.

If the thing I've finished is something less impressive, such as a short story, I tend to think coffee is sufficient.

Coffee is enough if I've finished a short story

Because otherwise Ferret is going to be silently judging me.

Be that as it may, at some point in the following day or two you'll be sitting back at your desk and saying to yourself, "What's next, self?" And yourself may well reply something along the lines of "Let's get that mother published!"

This is where you need to stop. Stop right there and have second thoughts. Fools rush in, and all that. Of course you were going to do edits and revisions before actually publishing, submitting or whatever. Of course you were. But you can make the time spent on edits and revisions count for way, way more value if you wait.

That's right - just wait. You need to put that manuscript away - whether you put your printed ms in a drawer, or just close the folder on your computer, whatever. Tidy away all your notes and any physical materials you have associated with this work. And then you leave it to rot down.

The reason this works for you is that, after you've been away from your finished work for a considerable time, you will have an emotional distance from it that you cannot hope to achieve right after you finish your draft.

Now it's not just the passage of time. If you are sitting there and looking at your watch and looking at your calendar and thinking about your finished book and just itching to get on with your rewrites, then you're not going to get the full value, or perhaps any value, out of your rotdown period. It needs to be out of sight, out of mind. That's easy for me, because I was brought up by cats, but if you're a proper human, you may need some help with this.

The best way, I have found, to get anything right out of your mind is to fill your mind with something else. If you're serious about your work, this will mean working on one of your other projects.  That's going to drive the one you just finished out of your thoughts for sure. If you haven't got another writing project (a state I can't imagine, but different strokes), perhaps you've a reading list you've been meaning to get to (I have several), or a really special television series you are dying to binge-watch, or you've been meaning to remodel your kitchen or go on a spiritual retreat. There's bound to be something absorbing awaiting your attention, and now is the time to give yourself to it.

You can plan your next big project...

Go on the tiles and then spend three days recovering...

Reconnect with your spiritual side...

Start your next book...

Catch up on your reading...

Or just take time to smell the roses.

How Long Should Your Rotdown Be?

Stephen King, if I remember rightly, advises at least six weeks. I'm too lazy to go and look it up, but I think that's right. Terri Main, of the Writing Academy, says a month. Remember, though, these are minima, not best case. I myself recommend leaving things for at least six weeks, and preferably several months, especially if it is a full-length novel. I commonly leave a book for a year or more. Of course, I'm writing other stuff during that time. What you are aiming for is to be able to read your work in the same frame of mind that you would bring to it if it had been written by someone else, and that requires a substantial amount of time. It's not wasted time, though. Once you have a number of completed first drafts, you'll find they all interleave quite nicely.

Other Applications

It is not only on completion of your draft that you can take advantage of this technique. There are many places in the life of a project where it's of benefit:

• After edits, and before you start on first revisions. This is something I learned from Terri Main in her wonderful course, Macro Editing. You make your notes of what you need to do, and then you let it sit for a few days, Main says. It works well.
• When your book is three quarters written, but you're having trouble with the ending. This is a big one for me, because endings are my cross - they always give me trouble. I find leaving it for a few months, or a year, can make the ending quite easy to write; it all shakes down in my brain and comes together.
• After you've come up with your concept, before you start on your detailed outline (or your draft, if you don't outline). This is like brainstorming in your subconscious.
• After you've had beta feedback, before you start on Second Revisions. This gives you space to overcome any defensive reactions, if your betas criticised something, and to bring a fair and impartial mind to your assessment of what, if anything, needs to be changed. Remember, too, always thank your beta reader. Even if you think he missed the point, or your feelings are hurt. That person took time and effort to read your book and give you feedback; it's an incredibly generous gift, and should always be appreciated. 
• When you have run into plot troubles - you've written yourself into a corner and can't see a way out, or you feel some major part of the book isn't working.
• When you have the Writer's Funk - that crisis of confidence that often overtakes us half, or two thirds, of the way through the draft. You know, the one where you think it's all rubbish and you can't write for toffee and you should just throw it out and forget it. It happens to us all. For this one, a shorter period is all you want - perhaps a week, or even a long weekend.

If you don't believe me, and you question the value of leaving your work to lie fallow, I suggest you try one of these in the list above. Just see if it doesn't help. I am very confident that it will.

Killing Your Darlings - it may not be what you think

I don't know of any successful writer who has been more consistently taken as a role model by tyros than Stephen King. And that's not surprising given the sound practical advice he gives in his valuable book, On Writing. It is one I frequently recommend, despite the fact that I find the autobiographical part of it deeply irritating. But it's worth slogging through the personal disclosures of someone you don't know to get to the good stuff. If you're not OCD-inclined, you can even skip straight to it. 

A great role model for novice writers - but make sure you're emulating the right behaviours.

Personally, I think that if you're going to adopt Mr King as a role model, and you could do a lot worse, skipping the beginning is the better way. There has been a lot about his personal journey that shouldn't be emulated. Drinking, for example. I don't care what stupid rationalisations you come up with, working while drunk is not a good idea. Even with that first glass, your edge is blunted, your critical faculties impaired and your judgement skewed in the direction of optimism. Save the vodka martinis for when you've got your wordcount and knocked off for the day. Getting both your legs broken is another one to avoid. Keeping Maine Coon cats, while harmless, isn't going to help your writing in any material way. St Francis de Sales talks about this at some length in Introduction to the Devout Life. Having a role model can be great, but before you emulate aspects of your model's behaviour, you need to be sure that they are relevant to the work.

So, let's focus on the craft part of King's book. It's stuffed full of good, even great, advice. If you follow Mr King's blueprint, the only variable will be your talent. And luck, of course, once the book is finished. You can't avoid that.

Most people know this, or seem to have a dim grasp of it, at least, and King has achieved almost a demi-god status in writers' groups. I have lost count of the times I've seen him quoted to gain a definitive win to a dispute. It's nonsense of course - an appeal to authority, however great, is never a valid argument- but people who haven't mastered the English language can hardly be expected to have mastered the art of logic. 

Because of the extreme veneration in which the indie community tends to hold Mr King, a number of his sayings have become aphorisms with the status of ancient proverbs. One of these is 'kill your darlings'.

Many people have taken this expression to mean that you need to kill off your protagonist, or your most sympathetic character, or even, God forbid, the dog. I have often seen George Martin's work cited in support of this dark vision of a stage littered with corpses. This is NOT what 'kill your darlings' means. Your characters are not supposed to be your 'darlings'. They are your creatures, existing only to serve your purposes. Do not be in love with your protagonist, unless you want to make a complete tit of yourself, as Dorothy Sayers did with her Lord Peter Wimsey books. And yes, Virginia, it does show.

This isn't what 'kill your darlings' means

What King actually means when he says 'kill your darlings' is that you have to be prepared to let go of techniques and habits that you cherish. Perhaps you overuse a word or phrase. Perhaps you're convinced that writing in present tense and first person gives your work a fresh immediacy that will make it appeal to readers (it doesn't). Perhaps you love to give minute descriptions of bodily features, clothing or food. These things, not things you just happen to have done but things to which you are inordinately attached, are the 'darlings' of which Mr King speaks.

And he doesn't mean you always have to kill them all, either. By no means. Perhaps some technique to which you're very attached is actually working well for you, at least in the context of the instant work. That's not the thing you have to kill.

It's important, too, to recognise that when he talks about 'killing your darlings', King is talking about revisions, not your first draft. The phrase is meant to sum up the proper attitude to take on commencing your read-through for first revisions - that ruthless willingness to strike out anything, anything at all, that is not contributing, or that is, God forbid, actually making your book worse. And if that means you need to cut out your whole gay inter-species romance subplot, then you need to do that, even if it means your finished book isn't going to make the political statement you'd envisaged.

If religious allegory isn't working for your book, ditch it.

I cannot stress this enough. You need to get rid of anything that is bringing your book down. You also need to get rid of anything that's irrelevant. As the size of the work under consideration comes down, this need to eliminate widens its scope, until in a short story, you will need to dispense with anything that is not directly necessary to the main story, no matter how good it is. And that's what it means to kill your darlings.

Three Easy Fixes to Improve Your Writing

Got your attention, did I? Good.

Today's post, as promised in the title, will give you three easy things you can do to improve your writing. None of them is a positive thing; they are all things to avoid. That's why I can say for sure that they are easy, for you do not have to learn any new skill to apply any of them.

1 - Foreign Languages

You may think it looks sophisticated to have bits of French, Italian or some other language sprinkled through your writing. Whether it does or no (personally, I don't think so), there may be some plot-related occasions for using foreign phrases.

Now, I'm not saying you must never use any words of foreign in your writing. Sacre Bleu, non! Absit! And similar expressions. What I am saying is that you must not attempt to use foreign languages unless you speak them yourself. Or, you know, a suitable delegate can be found. For example, if I want to say something in Norwegian (a language I do not speak), I'll ask my friend Birgitta to give me the phrase I want. A friend used for this purpose needs to be trustworthy, because you are taking the grammar, etc., on faith. But under no circumstances will I use Google Translate or similar devices.

I really cannot stress this strongly enough. You can't trust Google Translate. A couple of years ago one of my clients sent me a book that was stuffed full of Latin that she'd obtained in this way. Okay, you'll say. You, as her editor, had to correct her Latin. Big deal. But I couldn't even correct it, because the mishmash produced by Google Translate was so nonsensical that I couldn't even tell what it was supposed to mean. Nor could I reverse engineer it using Google Translate the other way. That doesn't work. My client hadn't saved any record of the English she'd started with, and so there followed an agonising (for both of us) couple of days of going back and forth, back and forth, just to determine some English I could use as a starting point. It was rough on us both, and the sad thing was that it was so unnecessary. I'm not a world-class Latinist, but I'm able, for example, to read Summa Theologia in the original, and I could easily have done what she wanted from scratch.

You cannot rely on your editor for this. I did it, but it really isn't your editor's job, and you shouldn't be delegating to anyone a matter as basic as what words you will use.

The Fix:

a) Whenever you are going to write something foreign, first ask yourself why. Is it essential to the plot? Is it necessary or at least highly useful to, for example, flesh out a character? Make sure you have a good reason.

b) If you have satisfied yourself, according to (a) above, that the foreign bit is either necessary or highly desirable, you need to satisfy also one of the following:

i. You are fluent, or at least reasonably competent, in the language in question

ii. The phrase you want to use is well-known, or quoted from a reliable source. E.g. 'ars longa, vita brevis', 'semper fidelis'.

iii. You have access to someone, preferably a native speaker, who is both fluent in the language and willing to check your use of it.

DO NOT USE GOOGLE TRANSLATE.

2 - Archaic Language.

I don't care if you are writing historical fiction, angel porn, or something else. Do not attempt the language of the King James Bible unless you understand how the verbs work. Nothing, or at least hardly anything, will make you look like more of a hopeless fool than getting this stuff wrong.

A full disclosure of the paradigms for these older forms is beyond the scope of this article, but here's the present tense of 'To Go', as an example.

Present Tense

I go

Thou goest

He goeth

We go

You go

They go

Note that ONLY the singular second and third persons are different from the English we speak today. Also note the different pronoun for the second person singular. 'Thou' differs by case, as follows:

Nominative:  Thou

Accusative:   Thee

Genitive:       Thy

The Fix: Know what you're doing with this, or leave it alone. There is no other way.

YOU CANNOT JUST ADD 'ETH' TO THE ENDS OF WORDS.

3. - Baby Talk

Most adult writers will be surprised that this even needs to be mentioned, but I see this in modern novels, particularly in the romance genre. Pseudo-words such as 'tummy', 'doggy', 'bub' and so on have no place in narrative. If you want to use them in dialogue, sure, go ahead. Sometimes we just need to make a character sound cringeworthily twee.  But if you do it in your narrative, you are the one who will sound cringeworthily twee, at the likely cost of many of your readers.

You may feel that if you are writing for small children, you are exempt from this. That's your call to make. Personally, I would still avoid it. Consider Beatrix Potter. Consider, too, the enduring popularity of her books.

DON'T DO IT. JUST DON'T. 

And if you must do it, don't ask me to be your editor. I will charge double if I have to read that shit.

A Dick Too Far - Erotica and Pornography in the Modern Novel

I've just got back from Adelaide, where I went for the Adelaide Festival - specifically to see Saul, although as I had an extra night there I also saw Richard III. Both utterly stunning performances, and I thoroughly enjoyed them.

I did notice something surprising, though. Both performances, inter alia, featured naked men with penises flying. 

Now I'm not a prude, and this didn't especially bother me, but I did find it a little surprising from an artistic point of view. Neither the Old Testament nor Shakespeare typically calls to mind the idea of men's penises flying about. Casting my mind back, I recalled the Australian Opera's Ring Cycle, which I saw a few months ago. Siegfried also featured a naked man, with, I might say, a particularly impressive penis. This means that, of the last four stage shows I have seen, three have featured naked men, not one of which was essential, or even particularly relevant, to the plot. 

There are fashions in theatre, as in everything else, and it seems that the trend of the moment is to spice up the play with a penis. This calls to mind another trend, in literature, one which has been coming on for quite a number of years now: the portrayal of extremely graphic sex scenes. Now I am not speaking here of graphic sex that is necessary to plot or character development, but rather of graphic sex that seems to have been added as an embellishment.

It's not porn! It's erotica! goes the cry of practically every writer of what is nowadays called 'romance'. But what does this mean, exactly? Is there a difference? Let's look at that.

Pornography, what

The OED gives the definition of pornography as 'printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement.'

Erotica, what

The OED defines erotica as 'erotic literature or art', and 'erotic' as 'relating to or tending to arouse sexual desire or excitement'.

Provided that we accept the OED as authority, and I cannot see why we should not, we may, then, conclude that the difference lies principally in the artist's intention.

The Artist's Intention

In a novel, the author's intention when writing sex scenes can be to develop the plot, to develop a character, or simply to arouse the reader. The latter intention fulfills the criterion for pornography. Here we may see the difference between, on the one hand, novels like Lolita and Portnoy's Complaint, and in more recent years McGiveron's Student Body and Halloff's Roadblocks to Nirvana, and on the other hand the typical offering of the modern 'romance' writer.

In all of the books named above, sex is used to advance the plot and to draw out one or more characters. It is never gratuitous, and the narrative moves smoothly in and out of the bedroom or other venue.

Much of the so-called 'romance' genre today, however, is very different. Graphic descriptions of sexual activity are inserted seemingly at random, and the less competent writers do not even segue smoothly into it; you're reading about a conversation and all at once you've got a dick staring you in the face. This is what I call 'a dick too far'.

Be that as it may, of course a writer's level of skill does not tell us anything about his intentions. What does tell us something about his intentions, though, is the blurb. The blurb lets you know what the author wants you to know; it is the author's 'mission statement', if you will.

I do not know what Nabokov and Roth had to say about their books, but they are both generally accepted as serious authors. Of the two recent works I've cited, Halloff describes Roadblocks to Nirvana  as 'a novel about mysticism, mob psychology, love and lust, the miraculous and the mundane.' McGiveron says of his book 'Student Body is a frank and intimate character study of hubris, desire and yet also devotion... the novel explores life and death and guilt and redemption.' We can clearly see the authors' intentions here; they are both writing about big issues, and very successfully, I may add, not that the success of the work is any indication of the author's intention. Sex scenes in such work may be classified as erotica, if that.

Look, on the other hand, at a sampling of what today's 'romance' writers have to say about their books.

'A steamy standalone contemporary romance with a hot bad boy billionaire alpha'.

'...hot and hilarious...'

'...hot and sexy...'

'...hot steamy romance...'

'...steamy romance... billionaire romance... alpha male romance...'

I don't think I need to go on, do I? The constant repetition of the words 'hot' and 'steamy' says it all. None of these authors, to whom I'm certainly not going to give a free plug, had much to say about anything that could remotely be described as literary. No, it's all passion and shit. Just a look at the covers tells you a lot. Mostly they have shirtless men with ripped abs. Sometimes they don't even bother to show a face. Just the body.

What we have here, people, is your basic wank material. It's no different, in essentials, from a men's magazine with a centrefold. And that, Virginia, is pornography.

The Amateur Author's Hat Trick - How Not To Sell Your Work

Today I'm going to talk about how money affects our perceptions. I can hear the protests already. "Nonsense," you cry. "The tawdry values of the commercial world are as mere dross to me, a civilised and educated person."

A civilised and educated person

It's not so. Granted, we're not sycophants. Granted, we don't imagine that some mindless chattering humanoid is a finer and better person than the good man who owns the corner shop, just because he owns a string of oil wells or department stores. But consider for a moment what happens when money changes hands.

When we pay money for goods or services, we place ourselves in an intrinsically different relationship to the seller than would otherwise be the case. We are now in a commercial relationship, and there are certain ground rules with commercial relationships. They are relationships of trade, and the fundamental requirement of trade is value received: to wit, that for a trade to be successful, the value of what is received must, in the estimation of the trader, be equal to or greater than the value of what is given. When I buy a litre of milk from Mr Patel, we are both happy because the milk is worth more to me than the money I pay for it, and the money is worth more to him than the milk. This is the basic rule that makes the whole, vast edifice of the commercial world function.

Therefore, as a writer, if you want people to buy your books, it is up to you to induce them to think it is going to be worth parting with $10, or $3.99, or whatever. It is no use, as I frequently see, blagging your book about in Facebook saying that you need money to pay for your mother's operation, or because you and your five children are facing homelessness, or any other sob story. This is not because your fellow writers, and other people on the internet, are stony-hearted, clutch-fisted misers. It is because that is begging. Begging is based on a whole different set of premises than trade, and different rules apply. And when you try to do it in the context of a commercial transaction, you meet with no success because you've stepped outside the accepted conventions for that. 

So, bottom line - if you want to beg, you need to do it in the appropriate forum. If you want to sell, you are expected to offer value for money. There are no exceptions to this.

Now, in order to make people think your book is going to be value for money, you must consider several things. I'm not even talking about the actual writing yet. There is all the 'outside' stuff. Your cover. Your promotional materials. Your blurb. A good blurb is vital. It needs to tell the potential reader what kind of book it is, what it's about, and it needs to hook him enough that he will pick up the book (if he's in a traditional bookstore) or look at the 'look inside' (if he's in an e-store).

The Moment of Truth

Now I'm talking about writing. The 'moment of truth' in the sale of a book occurs when the potential customer opens the book. When he reads your opening lines, or perhaps, if he's in a traditional bookshop, a random passage out of the middle. 

It is this moment that will determine whether or not he will buy. 

Now, we all have our personal preferences, and things that will 'hook' one reader, or turn him off your work completely, vary as much as the individual readers vary. At this point I must leave the general and take up the specific. I cannot tell you what will appeal to all readers - in fact, there is no such thing, for even taken on the average, readers' expectations vary with the genre. 

What I can tell you is what will put me off buying your book.

1. Boring subject matter

2. Poor quality - in the literary world, we call this 'bad writing'.

Now, as far as the subject matter is concerned, this is not something I'll be discovering in the 'look inside'. The blurb will have told me what the book is about. If you've got me past that point, to where I am actually dipping into your book, your cover designer and whoever wrote your blurb have done their jobs - you have a potential sale.

The only thing that is now going to stop me from buying your book - the only thing, because at this point I'm already aware of its price - is bad writing.

There are some forms of bad writing, of course, perhaps most, that will not be immediately apparent from the first few pages. If the writer cannot control his plot, if he cannot sustain interest, if he cannot produce sufficient dramatic tension, if his characters are internally inconsistent, these things will probably be overlooked at the 'look inside' stage. That's not to say they aren't important, but they will probably not cost you that initial sale.

What Will Cost You The Sale

Again, I cannot speak for anyone but myself. But I can share with you my own selection process.

Because I look at so many books, over time I've come to look for certain key indicators that a book is probably not going to be worth my time or money. This is what I think of as the Amateur Author's Hat Trick. 

1. First person

2. Present tense

3. Bad grammar.

Now before you start citing all manner of popular authors, hear me out. The term I used was Key Indicators. Of course first person is not a bad thing in itself. Many great writers have used it. Dickens used it on occasion, as did Lovecraft, Poe and Stevenson, to name just a few. 

Similarly, present tense, when used appropriately, is not always a bad thing, although those occasions when its use is truly appropriate are few and far between. Generally, it's not all that suitable for main narrative.

When these two things appear together, though, the result at first glance is cringeworthy, and in my experience usually indicates a writer who does not know what the hell he is doing and doesn't read enough.

Whenever I encounter this unholy combination, I expect to see a generally incompetent use of language evidenced by grammatical errors, and frequently spelling mistakes as well. I am seldom surprised, and it is this deadly trio that I have come to refer to as the amateur author's hat trick. If I see it, I am positively guaranteed not to download the book, even if it is free.

It's Not a Gift

One often sees amateur writers protesting vehemently the criticism and bad reviews they have received. How dare you, they cry. I'm 'a autism author'. A double amputee. A veteran. Whatever. All this is irrelevant. It is WHINING.

Now, before you go off on a rant about how cold and uncaring I am, let's consider again the essential difference between a gift and a commercial transaction. Say your four-year-old child comes home from Kindergarten and proudly presents you with a wonderful necklace he has made from acorns. You exclaim delightedly, you put it round your neck immediately, and if you're a really loving mother, you wear it to the office the next day and treasure it forever. But you do not rush off to Tiffany's and plonk down $5000 for the matching earrings. You don't, do you? Even if they sold crap like that.

And that, Virginia, is the difference between a commercial product and one that isn't. A matter of value, which in the literary world is solely defined by quality.

Three Common Faults, and How You Can Make Them Work For You

Today I'm going to look at three common faults - sentence fragments, monotonous structure and comma splices. Yes, you need to know about these things, and most of the time you need to avoid them. Most of the time.

There are, however, situations in which each of these things can be made to work for you. Let's take them one by one.

Sentence Fragments

Look back at the end of my opening paragraph. Do you see what I did there? It's a sentence fragment, and it is bad grammar. A well-formed English sentence must have at the very minimum a subject and a verb.

When people are actually talking, however, they use sentence fragments all the time. The average conversation between ordinary people is full of them. If you listen to educated people discussing some intellectual topic, there will be fewer fragments - but there will still be some. That's just how we humans roll.

In written English, sentence fragments have traditionally been seen as a grave fault. However, written English was traditionally far more formal than is always the case today. A hundred years ago, there was no email, no Facebook, no IMS. A good case can be made for shifting the distinction away from whether the English in question is written or spoken, towards the nature of the writing. Chat sessions, for example, have far more in common with a telephone conversation than with an exchange of letters. There is the synchronicity, the short length of information packets, the immediacy of the whole thing. 

A blog post arguably falls between the stools of formal prose and conversation. It is more like giving a talk, and therefore a greater degree of laxity is allowable. I'm quite sure that if you go through a number of my blog posts, you'll see many more sentence fragments than the one I deliberately inserted above, and I don't feel there is anything wrong with that; it gives a casual, conversational tone to what, after all, should be an easy read. Of course, given my usual subject matter, I do hold myself to a higher grammatical standard than I would expect from someone writing about, say, dogs, or fashion, but it doesn't have to be perfect English grammar all the time.

Monotonous Sentence Structure

This is a terrible flaw indeed. Consider the following passage:

Rover was on the hill. The hill was covered with grass. The weather was cold and wet. The wind was chilly. Rover was hungry.

It's like a litany, isn't it? You can almost hear the droning tones of someone reading it out, lifeless, completely without expression. 

It's truly awful, yes. But what if you wanted to evoke that feeling in your reader? That sense of unrelieved monotony? That complete lack of interest? Consider:

We went up the hill. We went down the hill. We carried empty buckets up. We carried full buckets down. We had lunch. We carried more buckets. By the time the day finally ended, I was ready to shoot myself. Was this going to be my life from now on?

The first six sentences in the above passage are about as monotonous as they can be. When you read the last two sentences, you can see why. The speaker is ready to shoot himself from the monotony of the day, the very monotony that I have conveyed in the mere repetitive structure of the foregoing sentences. The ability to manipulate your style like this gives you a whole new set of tools to get more meaning across to the reader, without using extra words. 

Comma Splices

I received severe criticism from one reviewer for using comma splices in two of my books. He was right, too. There are many, many comma splices in Dance of Chaos and Gift of Continence, and there will be plenty in the third book in the trilogy, too, when I get it finished. 

Plenty of comma
splices in this book

You do know what a comma splice is, right? Just in case you don't, it is when you use a comma where a semicolon would normally be called for. Here is an example from Gift of Continence:

I wished the whole business was over, it had been nothing but dramas ever since we'd decided to get married. No, actually, that wasn't fair, the hassles started when we told my mother.

And in this one, too.
They enhance
rather than detract.

In perfect English, the comma after 'over' would be a semicolon, and so would that after 'fair', because in each case the two parts that are joined are both capable of being well-formed sentences. When a comma is used instead, it is called a 'comma splice', because we have used a comma to 'splice' two sentences together.

Now, why did I, the person who blocks people on Facebook for using 'lay' intransitively, and has a generally low tolerance for mangling our language, deliberately do this, you ask. I did it to underscore the nature of my protagonist.

You'll have noticed in the passage quoted, even if you haven't read Gift of Continence, that it is first person, and it is that fact that allowed me to use the comma splices the way I did. My intention was to underscore in the narrative, which of course in first person doubles as the protagonist's internal thought stream, the nature of my protagonist. She's flighty and a complete dimwit. She rambles on, and daydreams a lot, and I used the comma splices to mimic the rambling monologue of a self-centred person. How successful I was, my readers may judge. There's a happy medium with this sort of thing; as with any gimmick, if you overdo it the reader will start to notice, and it won't be long after that before he will become irritated, then intensely irritated. But, as with other little writers' tricks, if you use it sparingly it can be extremely powerful.

There - three faults, but also three opportunities. Go and do good with them.