So You Want To Be a Writer

So You Want to Be a Writer

By Michael Newton

Copyright 2012 Michael Newton

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Preface

1. Writing in Plain English

2. Manuscript Mechanics

3. How'd You Think of That?

4. Bringing Characters to Life

5. Say What?

6. It Seemed So Real!

7. Hold Everything!

8. Breaking In

9. Edit This!

10. Shameless Self-Promotion

Conclusion: Writing for Fun and Profit

Learning More: Suggested Further Reading

Preface

In Leon Uris's best-selling 1970 novel QB VII, fictional author Abraham Cady addresses a local writer's group. He opens by asking the audience how many of them hope to be writers. With every hand raised, he than asks, Why the hell aren't you home writing? And with that, he leaves the podium.

That short scene cuts to the heart of every would-be writer's dilemma. In order to get published you must first write, then share your work. It's easy to be sidetracked with discussions of the craft, debates on style, soul-searching over writer's block, and book club read-alongs. The only way to write, however, is by sitting down to face the empty page.

Writing is similar in some respects to prospecting for precious ore and stones. Some greenhorns strike it rich their first time out, but they are rare exceptions to the rule.

And they should also serve as inspiration for the folks who haven't made it yet to persevere.

I yearned to be a writer from the time I was in first or second grade, producing books that grew in length over the years and always wound up in the trash. My few submissions to assorted magazines were universally rejected. Prior to 1976 I had published nothing other than some letters to the editor in my local newspaper. Then, by a fluke that I'll describe more fully in Chapter 8, I got the break that changed my life, when I was hired to work as a ghost-writer for best-selling action-adventure writer Don Pendleton, on his Executioner series.

Since then, I've published 187 novels and 73 nonfiction books, along with 135 articles, short stories, and other miscellaneous items. I've been self-supporting as a full-time freelance author since 1986. As I write this preface, in October 2011, I have fourteen more books slated for release from various publishers through 2013.

And if I can do it, why can't you?

Success in the writing game—or business, for such it must be if you intend to earn a living from your work—requires self-discipline, a thick skin, perseverance, dedication, and at least a modicum of talent. I'll assume you're literate, if you've already read this far, but that's the only thing I take for granted. Many would-be authors (and a few best-sellers) struggle with their native language, borrow themes and renamed characters from writers they admire (or envy), and are thereby doomed to mediocrity, assuming they ever get published at all.

So You Want to Be a Writer tackles those issues head-on in ten chapters, arranged as follows:

Chapter 1 provides a quick refresher course on basic English and its punctuation for writers who've forgotten—or never really learned—the rules of play. (And yes, it matters!)

Chapter 2 covers the nuts and bolts of constructing a professional-quality manuscript that won't send your work to an editor's slush pile at first glance.

Chapter 3 addresses the perennial question of where ideas come from and how a simple headline or a turn of phrase can grow into a novel.

Chapter 4 describes the process of creating lifelike, believable characters in fiction.

Chapter 5 surveys the mechanics of writing exceptional dialogue.

Chapter 6 explores the wide world of factual research that lies behind fiction, and why you should embrace it eagerly.

Chapter 7 takes you through the process of cleaning up a manuscript before submission to a publisher.

Chapter 8 maps various routes to commercial acceptance and publication, along with self-publishing options and pitfalls.

Chapter 9 prepares you for dealing with editors whose opinions—unlike those of your family and friends—will decide whether or not your work gets published.

Chapter 10 suggests strategies for self-promotion once you've made it into print (or cyberspace), with an eye toward maximizing sales.

Finally, an aid toward learning more provides specific sources offering more detail on research and writing in various genres.

The writing trade can be exhilarating and exasperating, taxing and liberating, therapeutic and intimidating, highly profitable or an utter waste of time. You may experience all of those phases in turn, again and again, but you'll never know for sure until you try.

Let's get started!

1. Writing in Plain English

Playwright George Bernard Shaw once said that England and America are two countries divided by a common language. Part of that division is apparent if you read a novel published in America, then compare it to one published in Britain. Various common words are spelled differently in the British Commonwealth (including Canada) than in the United States, and punctuation may also differ. Meanwhile, in the States, we've made a hash of proper English during recent decades, thanks in equal parts to advertising practices, the Internet, cell phone texting, and plain old ignorance.

During eight years teaching English at a junior high school in Nevada, I was constantly appalled by sixth-grade students who had never learned to end a sentence with a period. Many could barely read; some literally couldn't spell their names. I picture them now, in their thirties, slumped on a sofa, absorbing a stream of nonsense from Fox News and wondering what it all means.

Writing is a form of communication. You may have the greatest idea for a novel since The Silence of the Lambs, but potential publishers won't know that unless you present it in clear, comprehensible form. With thousands of would-be authors lined up behind you, waiting to become the next James Patterson or J. K. Rowling, editors won't waste time trying to translate garbled, semi-literate manuscripts. Those go in the trash.

If you got straight As in English during high school—or better still, in college—skip this chapter.

If you didn't, stick around.

Spelling

Proper spelling matters. Granted, you wouldn't know it from a casual observation of modern society, where print and television ads play fast and loose with proper English, where the crawl on CNN sometimes appears to have been typed out by a functional illiterate, and where cyber-speak has truncated words into single letters. The first thing you must do is screen out all that crap. Go back to basics.

Poor spelling is the death knell of a manuscript. It screams out, Amateur!—but even some established pros have trouble, now and then. Best-selling author Robert Crais, in his tremendous novel Hostage (2001), has a character chewing Gaviscom for his upset stomach. It sounds right, even looks right at a glance, and it fooled his editor—but there's no such medicine, as anyone who's ever purchased Gaviscon should know. Another great writer, Gerald Seymour, referred to the Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle as a Klashnikov in his premiere novel, Harry's Game (1975). Again, it slipped past the editor, but knowledgeable readers cringed from London to L.A. and Luxembourg.

Too trivial? Try this. An ex-writer of my personal acquaintance, with twenty-odd published novels under his belt, sat down to write a screenplay. Its title included the word macabre—except that he spelled it macarbe. Hollywood readers looked no farther than the title page. One even penned a nasty note suggesting that he learn to spell. Today, my old friend drives a forklift in a warehouse.

So take the nasty editor's advice before he writes to you. If you're a shaky speller, check and double-check your work before submitting it to anyone who matters. Any decent word processing program has a spell-checker built in, but mine still misses the occasional misspelling. Don't just run the software: go back and proofread your work, line by line. If anything looks odd, dust off a dictionary.

Now, I grant you, English is a tricky language, but that's no excuse for sloppy work. If you can't take the time to get it right, don't count on editors to do it for you. They're paid to revise and improve manuscripts, not teach a lazy writer English 101.

Many writers—and sadly, some editors—stumble over homonyms, technically subdivided into homographs (words spelled identically, regardless of pronunciation or meaning) and homophones (words sharing the same pronunciation regardless of spelling). Common examples of homographs include bear (the animal, or a verb meaning to carry), sow (a female pig, or the act of planting seeds), and tear (liquid coming from the eyes, or a verb meaning to rip). There are many others: absent, can, compact, finance, invalid, pervert, upset, yard, and so on.

Homophones present their own special pitfalls, particularly if you're in a hurry—and a spell-checking program won't catch them if you've picked the wrong word but spelled it correctly. A few of the many examples from English include: I, eye, and aye; there, their, and they're; rose, rows, and roes; wail, wale, and whale; and your, you're, and yore. Several times in recent years, I've seen lead misused in print, as here: She lead him to the bedroom. In those cases, author and editors alike scrambled the homophones led (past tense of the verb lead," pronounced leed) and lead (the metal), failing to catch it because they sound alike on a quick read-through.

One recent homophone hiccup is found on the second page of Chelsea Cain's best-selling novel, The Night Season (2011), where she refers to a town's eastern boarder. Sounds fine, but a boarder is a person (renting a room or boarding a vehicle); the word that eluded Cain and her editors at St. Martin's Press was border (a geographical boundary).

Other stumbling blocks for many writers include pluralization, contractions, and compound words. Plurals—words representing more than one of any particular thing—are never formed by using an apostrophe. Your hero doesn't carry two gun's, have three girlfriend's, and so on. English plurals are commonly formed by adding an s (cars, dogs) or es (boxes, bushes). Nouns ending in f or fe often add ves (hooves, knives). Nouns ending in y are normally pluralized by replacing the y with ies (cherries, ladies). Nouns ending in x are commonly pluralized by replacing the x with ices (as when matrix becomes matrices). Nouns ending in us are often pluralized by replacement of the us with i (fungus to fungi, etc.). Nouns ending in um or on may be pluralized by replacing their last two letters with a (forum becomes fora; criterion becomes criteria). To further complicate matters, some nouns change more radically when pluralized: mouse into mice, goose into geese, and so on. Finally, a few nouns are spelled the same whether singular or plural, like aircraft and sheep.

Confused yet? No problem. Grab the nearest copy of The Chicago Manual of Style, now in its sixteenth edition, available either in bookstores or via online subscription. This standard reference work, revered by most U.S. publishers, presents exhaustive explanations of all problems related to English usage.

Contractions are formed by inserting an apostrophe (') in place of certain letters when a word is shortened (contracted) or two words are combined as one. Common examples include can't for cannot and let's for let us. Contractions are also used to represent an idiosyncratic form of speech in dialogue, as when a character from the southern United States says y'all in place of you all. The most common error in using contractions is misplacement of the apostrophe, producing nonwords such as was'nt and do'nt. Any spell-checking program should catch those errors, but again, there's no substitute for thorough proofreading.

Another word about contractions before we move on: while they're always acceptable in dialogue, some publishers dislike using them in narrative text. They prefer the formal sound and look of using full words whenever possible. Since you can't read an unknown editor's mind in advance of submission, your best bet is to read—or at least skim—several books from a prospective publisher before you put the final polish on your manuscript.

Three different kinds of compound words exist, to further complicate your writing life. Open compounds are combinations of separate words so closely linked in concept that we recognize them as distinct terms in themselves: stool pigeon, pocket knife, etc. Hyphenated compounds use one or more hyphens (-) to link words: mass-produced, mother-in-law, etc. Closed compounds merge two whole words without punctuation: makeup, textbook, etc. In this area, the distinction between American English and its parent language may be more apparent. For example, many British authors use for ever in place of forever.

Another trap lying in wait for the unwary involves pluralization of compound words. Some, like makeup, remain unchanged. Others follow the rule of their second word, as with stool pigeons or pocket knives. Finally, some pluralize to their first words: mothers-in-law, attorneys general, courts-martial, and so on. When in doubt, consult a dictionary or The Chicago Manual of Style.

Capital Crimes

Some writers struggle with use of capital (upper case) letters. Most word processing programs will help you with caps to some extent, generally catching it if you fail to capitalize the first word of a sentence, perhaps even alerting you if you've failed to capitalize a proper noun in mid-sentence, but you should be conversant with the basic rules in any case, for purposes of proofreading.

In broad strokes, capital letters are normally used for the first word of each sentence, all proper nouns (names of persons, countries or states, specific business enterprises, etc.), initials (J. Edgar Hoover), titles denoting rank when affixed to a name (General Robert E. Lee, Count Dracula), abbreviations of academic or professional degrees (B.A., M.D.), and in acronyms (CIA, FBI, NFL).

Needless to say, there are quirky exceptions to every rule. Author Edward Estlin Cummings signed some of his poems e. e. cummings, prompting fans and critics to adopt the same style. Our own planet provides another curious example. Although we normally capitalize the names of celestial bodies, most sources state that earth should not be capitalized unless used in a sentence with other planets: The rocket flew from Earth to Saturn. I've never seen this strange rule satisfactorily explained, and frankly don't understand it myself. One editor may permit you to write, I enjoy living on Earth, while another may reduce the E to lower case.

Another dicey area involves proper names with particles: Eddie O'Brien, Martin Van Buren, Wernher von Braun, and so on. As a rule, when used in the middle of a sentence without the first name, these names retain their upper or lower case letters: I saw Van Buren at lunch, or There goes von Braun. Standard rules of capitalization apply if the truncated name starts a sentence: Von Braun was angry yesterday.

One final rule: when presenting titles (whether your own or another mentioned in passing), capitalize the first word and all other words except artiles (a, an, the, etc.), prepositions (to, from, etc.), and coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, etc.). Thus, the title of a travel article might read: The Story of My Summer Vacation in New York and New Jersey. It also goes without saying (I hope!) that titles should not appear all in caps: ROCKY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, etc. That's not considered shouting on paper, as in emails; it's just plain wrong.

Parts of Speech

Traditional English grammar recognizes eight parts of speech: verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. An editor won't quiz you on the difference, but may reject your manuscript as hopeless if you don't use the various parts of speech properly when constructing sentences and paragraphs.

Verbs are action words. In present tense they relate a current or ongoing action: Vampires bite their victims. Past tense describes an action now concluded: "Mary ran a marathon last year; Mr. Carson was my teacher in fifth grade. Two words may also be involved in past-tense verbs: The city was destroyed by fire. Future tense predicts some upcoming action: I will wash the car tomorrow; The laundry will be done on Saturday."

Nouns name a person, animal, place, thing, or abstract idea (anger, philosophy, foolishness, etc.). They may be proper nouns (always capitalized) or common nouns (capitalized only at the start of a sentence, in titles, or in headlines). It is normal to