People talk about rules of good writing. I’ve used the term myself. But really, there are no rules, just tips. See? I broke a rule there – I started a sentence with a conjunction, ‘but’. Did it bother you? It avoided the comma and the run-on sentence if I’d made it a clause. You can break the rules if it makes sense. Following the rules blindly just leads to weak writing. Follow the tips when they make sense.

The so-called rules are there for a good reason – they distil a lot of experience. The show-don’t-tell rule, for example, is a pretty good tip. Writing is a collaboration between the author and the reader. Constant telling, constant narration, distances the reader. Showing involves the reader in deciding for herself what is going on.

If I write ‘Peter was old and sickly’ I’m telling you how to see Peter.
If I write ‘Peter shuffled towards me, supported by a stick. The effort of every step was etched in pain on his furrowed face’ I’ve invited you to picture Peter and draw your own conclusions.

Does that mean a writer must always show rather than tell? No, of course not. If the detail is unimportant to the story, tell it. If Jane walks down the stairs, it’s much better to say this, rather than tiring the reader with a long description of the stairs and the walking. Use the show-don’t-tell tip when there’s a good reason to do so.

Closely related to show-don’t-tell is the adverb rule. All writing manuals tell you to use adverbs sparingly. Stephen King goes further and would have us eliminate all adverbs. He argues that adverbs make for sloppy writing, signs the author is fearful that she isn’t getting her point across clearly.

I, like many amateurs, am guilty of breaking the adverb rule. Of 1,000 words in the story I described in the last post, 18 were adverbs. After editing, I reduced this to 14, but that’s still 14 that Stephen King would say shouldn’t be there. Maybe he’s right. He’s a successful author and I’m not.

Let’s look at this though. Why this particular hatred for one part of speech? In case you forgot your school grammar lessons, adverbs are words that modify verbs, and usually end in –ly (though not all do – ‘up’, for example is also an adverb). We don’t have the same rules about nouns, or verbs, or adjectives. Is this just textism? What’s the reason?

Reason one. It makes sense to eliminate adverbs when they’re making the writing weaker. Sometimes they just cover up failure to find better words. For example ‘he spoke quietly’ is unnecessary – it would be stronger to say ‘he whispered’ or ‘he murmured’. Many times, we can eliminate adverbs by using a stronger verb. In this sense, adverbs can be good pointers at the editing stage to where we need to polish the writing.

Reason two. When the adverb is doing no work at all, purge it. For example, in the phrase ‘he shouted loudly’ the adverb loudly is doing nothing – a shout is loud. Or, to take another example, ‘he said interestingly’. If what he says is interesting, maybe that he’s discovered the secret of time travel, then the reader doesn’t need the adverb, and if it’s dull, maybe that he’s tired, the adverb doesn’t change the dullness. Though, even there, if the character to whom he’s speaking has good reason to be interested, the adverb may still justify its place.

Reason three. Adverbs may distance the reader by telling, rather than showing. They can narrate details the reader should be filling in for themselves. For example ‘she looked suspiciously at the box’ could be better written ‘she examined the box, checking for booby traps.’

There may be other good reasons for eliminated adverbs. I couldn’t think of them while writing this. The point is that if there’s a reason not to use an adverb, don’t use it. By the same token, if there is a reason to use an adverb, then use it. Adverbs are pretty much like adjectives. Adverbs can add description to verbs, bringing a picture to life, in the same way as adjectives can bring nouns to life.

For example, take this phrase from the story I’ve just edited, ‘trees perched crazily like sure goats on precipitous falls.’ I spent some time considering whether to remove or change the ‘crazily.’ It’s doing some pretty important descriptive work, showing the random arrangement of the vegetation. It can’t be turned into the adjective ‘crazy’ since neither the trees nor the goats are crazy. The only thing that’s crazy is the perching. So, I retained the adverb. I think I had good reason to do so.

Technically, I suppose you could argue that the ‘crazy’ and the ‘sure’ contradict each other and one of them should go. I would disagree – crazy paving isn’t less secure as paving for being crazy. You might also argue that the description is overdone, with two adjectives and one adverb in the phrase. Overusing descriptive words in the belief this makes the writing more literary is a classic error of amateurs. You might be right, but there are some good reasons in the context to be highly descriptive.

So, here’s my conclusion. We give adverbs too hard a time. It’s a good tip to think long and hard about why an adverb is there, and what work it’s doing. But, should we eliminate every adverb? No. As with every other part of our writing, we should make it as crisp and effective as we can. I’m all for better verbs, adjectives, gerunds and nouns, as well as better adverbs. The prejudice against adverbs is simply textism.

There is a big however to the defence of adverbs. Agents, editors and publishers often believe in the ‘no adverbs’ tip as an iron-clad rule. If you submit a work full of adverbs, however well-chosen and hard-working, they may just put a red pencil through it and decide you’re an amateur. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

There are many tools for writers out there. Goodness! How on earth did Shakespeare and Dickens managed without them?

Plot, structure and character

I’ve already talked about te tools for plot and character that I use for keeping track of the storyline, scenes, and characters. You can buy software that does this, but I make my own in spreadsheets. Obviously, you also need something to write on. Like most people, I use a word processor, but you can also get dedicated author software.

Depending on how you write, such software may help you. I tend to write in a fairly linear way from the beginning to the end. I know that some people write scenes just as they occur to them, starting in the middle of the book. Shuffling and re-ordering scenes can be very frustrating on a word processor. I can’t review any of the dedicated tools that make this easy, because I don’t use them. The most popular, however, seems to be Scrivener, which combines a word processor and a project management tool.

Here, I want to talk about tools that can help with the third essential element – the writing itself. Good writing is about sentences that are easy to read, dialogue that sings, evocative description, and scenes that make the reader want to keep turning the page. The most important thing here is, of course, practice. Write lots, get friends and colleagues to criticize it, and you’ll improve. Reading your work aloud to yourself can also help you spot the bits that don’t work. But there are some tools that can help.

Spelling grammar and words

A good word processor will have inbuilt spell-check and grammar-check, as well as a minimal thesaurus. A thesaurus is invaluable for authors. You read your sentence, like “John stared in fright at the apparition.” You can see the sentence should pack more punch. The problem is “in fright”. The word should be working harder. You consult your Thesaurus and find alternatives – panic, terror, dread, for example. You can buy a Roget’s Thesaurus or use the online version (http://www.thesaurus.com).

If you write, as I do, historical fiction, you have another word problem. There’s nothing worse than a Tudor character saying something like “you’re messing with my mind”. It transports the reader straight back into the twenty-first century and the spell is broken. So how do you check when a particular word first came into use? Enter the Etymological Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com). I used this a lot in writing A Prize of Sovereigns. The archer, Reuven, for example addresses his comrades in arms as “mate”. But when did this first come into use with this meaning? Is it modern? The dictionary reassured me that it goes back to the mid-fourteenth century.

Stringing the words together

Sounds obvious, but this is where most of the trouble comes in. There are so many mistakes you can inadvertently make. We all have favourite words that we tend to over-use. We can inadvertently repeat the same word too close together. We overuse adverbs. We write sentences that are too long, or that make the reader stumble. We use the passive instead of the active. We allow the pace to drop.

There is editing software that can help you detect and correct these and other problems. There’s quite a neat little fee website at http://www.thedreamside.com/machine.html, which gives you word-counts for frequently used words and which flags up “hot-spots” where the same word is used repeatedly close together. You can find more sophisticated editing help from Pro Writing Aid (https://prowritingaid.com). The free version will give you reports on 17 different aspects of your writing. It will check for things like over-used words and repeated phrases, pacing, clichés, writing style, over-long sentences, and sentences that don’t flow well. The image, for example, shows the check for pacing on two of the chapters from The Wheel Turns, the sequel to Prize of Sovereigns, which I’m working on now.

The blue bars show areas of action or dialogue, while the white spaces are areas of background or introspection. Areas of white should be sprinkled through the text, rather than all dumped in one place. I was reasonably happy with the pacing, though there is a warning sign in the first chapter, with a slower area coming very close to the beginning.

I’m fairly impressed with Pro Writing Aid. With 17 reports, the amount of information you get back can seem a little daunting, but, as you work through them, you can decide which suggestions to respond to, and which to ignore. If you’re not employing a real copy editor, software like this can help sharpen up your prose

I was leafing through the summer issue of The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors. It has some interesting statistics in it.

The UK book market is the fourth largest in the world by turnover. But researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, found that the median annual income among writers in 2013 was £4,000. The bottom half the 2,500 writers they surveyed earned less than £10,500 a year, and took home only 7% of all authors’ earnings. The top 1% of writers made more than £450,000 a year, and took home 22.7% of the pot.

Statistical analysis is based on the idea that a variable (like height for example) is arranged uniformly in what’s called a “normal distribution” – a bell-shaped curve with most people in the middle and small tails at each extreme. Success, however, doesn’t follow a bell-curve. The odds are stacked in favour of a lucky few. Ask any actor, or musician, or any author.

This graph shows the distribution of wealth in the United States in 2013 – a classic non-normal distribution.

The same issue of The Author also has this instructive statistic from a publisher: Of every 10 books sold in bookshops, five fail, three break even, and two make profit. Little wonder then that publishers like to reduce their risk by publishing works by people who’re already famous. However, the statistic does also mean that publishers are dependent on continually finding new authors in the search for that elusive two. And of course, two out of every three books sold in the UK now, are not bought at the till of a bookshop. The online market coalesces even more around winners than does the bookshop market.

So what can an aspiring author do about these grim facts? Above and beyond being talented, writing the best work you possibly can, and editing it diligently.

1. Be independently wealthy
If you’re not already rich, go to step 2.

2. Don’t give up the day job.
It goes without saying that if you’re unlikely to make a living out of writing, you should have another source of income.

3. Make yourself luckier.
If you know some leprechauns or genies, now is a good time to ask their help. If you’re an ordinary mortal like me, there are still some things you can do.

• They say, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. If you have a large and loyal fan base, publishers and readers are more likely to pay attention to you. The classic example of this is E L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. She started off writing fan fiction, which got her the base from which she became an international publishing sensation. You can publish work on story-sharing sites like Wattpad and Smashwords, and wait for the adulation to roll in. Goodreads is another important site where you can connect with your readers. I talked about these sites in post 10.
• E L James is also a good example of another way you can boost your luck. She tapped into a trend, particularly among women, for raunchier women’s fiction. If you catch a trend at its peak like she did, you may coast to literary stardom. Keeping your eye on new releases in your bookshop and reading trade magazines like The Bookseller can help you keep your finger on the pulse. Dark thrillers are pretty hot right now, for example. As one of the speakers at the Winchester Writers’ Conference said, a fortnight ago, readers want to be traumatised by their books. The other big trend at the moment, believe it or not, is colouring books for adults.
• I’m not suggesting that you should write the book the market wants. Of course not. We should all write the books we want to write. But, if it makes sense to give your work a tweak towards what’s trending, it may help.
• Work hard at getting your friends and readers to review and promote your book (assuming you already have a published book). Most of the 184,000 books published in the UK each year appear without any promotion and vanish without trace. Don’t let yours be one of them.

A word of caution. I’m just passing on advice I’ve received and that I’m following. In post 10, I told you how slowly this is going for me. Since that post, my number of Goodreads friends has increased to 7, and on Wattpad, I’ve had 76 reads and have attracted one new follower to add to the four I already had. To be fair, I haven’t posted anything new on Wattpad for months, so this isn’t too surprising. I just posted a new story there, so I’ll let you know how that works out.

The moral is, remember the odds are stacked against you, work at it, and don’t expect instant miracles.
actor, or musician, or any author.

Who knew that the collective noun for a group of writers was a worship? I just looked it up. I might have hoped the noun to be “an eloquence of writers”, but that is reserved for lawyers, and lions have already bagged “a pride”.

So there we were on Saturday, a worship of writers at the Winchester Writers’ Festival. Under an overcast sky, the campus of Winchester University was thronged with writers, eager, hopeful, or stoic, each according to their own experience and temperament. Interestingly, there was a preponderance of women, including one striking blonde Amazon with rippling biceps. I’ll come back to an interesting gender issue later on. Old friends met up with cries of “who are you with now”, making me acutely aware I hadn’t yet been signed by anybody. Perhaps my two one-to-one meetings with an agent and a publisher would rectify that.

We streamed from building to building and from room to room, assessing each other with cautious insouciance, wary of encountering a “shrivel of critics”. Three of us from my writing group had a chance encounter, before the event even started, with one of the “shrivel”. She was a volunteer with the event, who, uninvited, joined our table in the coffee room and demanded to hear our elevator pitches and quizzed us about whether we were truly writing from our own experience. She showed no interest at all in what we’d actually written, in her desire to impress us with her own wisdom. “It’s just my opinion”, she wailed as we extricated ourselves. ‘”I’m just an amateur.” Indeed. Her ruthless and undeviating advocacy of the rules of writing spoke eloquently to this point.

Undaunted, my first stop was a dash to the noticeboard in the main conference centre, to see if either of my two entries to the short story competition had been short-listed. They hadn’t, though in act of nominative determinism, I was ticked to note that one D S Writer had made it through.

During the day I went to four workshops. I’ll just give you one take-away point from each of them. An agent said that she took on only two or three new clients a year. A publisher said that, though they won’t admit it, agents and publishers are looking for a reason to instantly bin the submissions they receive, because they can’t possibly read all of them. A novelist said that to find your own “voice”, you have to unlearn the rules of written English you learned at school (I don’t agree with this one). A maker of historical docudramas said that you can get away with imposing a story structure on the known facts, by exploring the drama of well-chosen characters.

I also had one-to-one meetings with an agent and publisher. The good news for me was that they both liked my writing. The publisher really liked it. And that was validating. From my slough of despond about A Prize of Sovereigns at the beginning of the year, I really believe in my book again. But neither of them offered to sign me, though both made really useful suggestions about other agents I should approach. The really interesting thing, though, was the gender issue I referred to at the beginning.

The agent was a man, the second male agent I’ve talked to about the book. And both of them said the same thing. They said it was neither history, because it’s not a true historical record, nor fantasy because there are no fantasy elements. I pitch the book as historical fantasy, because, though It draws on a lot of historical research, I’ve made what George R R Martin calls a “historical mash-up”. I’ve shortened time scales, and, in some cases, put events into a different order or into different places. Many of the major characters are real as well, though I’ve picked and mixed elements of different historical figures to create my characters. History for me, is a rich toolbox of fascinating events, great stories and strong characters. But I do this in the service of fiction, and use what I find in the box to drive the story. Because of this, I’ve set the book in a fictional location, though readers of history quickly recognize it as England and France during the Hundred Years War. I’m not so much interested in writing about the Hundred Years War as I am in exploring why rulers make the decisions they do, and what effect those decisions have on those they rule. So both guys have said this choice is a commercial problem and have urged me to make it straighter history or straighter fantasy.

The publisher was a woman, and had no such problem. For her, it would sell across both the historical fiction and the fantasy genres. Three female agents and a female literary consultant have also been of the same opinion.

Now, you can’t draw any meaningful conclusions about gender differences from a sample of two men and five women, but it’s intriguing nonetheless. My wife says it’s because men can’t multi-task.

Take a look at the book by clicking the link to it on this page (the first seven chapters are published now) and tell me what you think?