So You Want to Be a Writer
By Michael Newton
Copyright 2012 Michael Newton
Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
4. Bringing Characters to Life
Conclusion: Writing for Fun and Profit
Learning More: Suggested Further Reading
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!
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").