Writer Confession: Things I Always Forget

Hello! Long time, no read! As you may have noticed, I unfortunately had to skip my last blog week due to illness, but I’m feeling better now and am back for this week’s blog. So, as you may have seen from this week’s title, even as someone who’s been writing basically since their teens, there are always things I forget to do when it comes to writing. Or, just as frequently, there are rules or considerations I didn’t know about until I started trying to write on a more professional level.

            In truth, there are things that I forget about so consistently that I’ve joked I just want to make a big list of them and put them right in front of my desk as a quick guide. So, I figured I’d use this blog as an admission and general list of things that I suspect are common writing problems or that I struggle with myself, and hopefully they’ll help some of you out there in the writing world that might be in the same boat.

Grammar Rules

            First off, let’s start with grammar. Though we have things like autocorrect and review programs easily at our disposal, I’m of the belief your life as a writer will be a whole lot easier if you have a firm grasp of basic grammar. It’s okay if you don’t- knowledge of grammar really might depend on how well you were taught it in the first place and it is tricky as grammar rules tend to change a lot. I was fortunate enough to have a really good English teacher, which I think has been invaluable to me as I’ve been on my writing journey. If grammar is something you struggle with, I think it’d be worth your time to look into learning more about it as this will definitely make writing easier.

·       Their vs. They’re: 

I feel like one of the most notorious issues when it comes to writing is the use of the wrong their/they’re. Their, spelled this way, is used to show possession, like “This is their car.” They’re, in this form, is a conjunction of They and Are, and would be used as “They are going to the car.”

·       Blond vs. Blonde:

Alright, here’s one I’m bad about. So, unlike the first case, these words are both adjectives that have the same meaning. The tricky part with these words is blond is masculine, whereas blonde is feminine. Why we do this, I don’t know, but essentially if you’re describing a male, use blond. If you’re describing a female, blonde.

·       Commas, Hyphens, and Dashes:

This is another area I really struggle with or, more specifically, I tend to slap dashes in all over the place and that’s probably not the best way to go about things. All three of these punctation marks are used to help break things up, but it’ll save you a lot of time later if you try to use them correctly in the first place.

Commas have a lot of uses as punctuation marks, but I’m specifically referring to them in the context of phrases. Use your commas for clarity when you have a sentence with a lot of information in it. For example, if you were writing something like, “The queen looked over the hill, surveying what remained of her kingdom.” The comma helps break this sentence up, making it clearer than when everything’s squished in together like “The queen looked over the hill surveying what remained of her kingdom.”

Dashes signal a break in thought. For example, if you’re including a phrase or list in the middle of a sentence. This would be something like “He didn’t like this plan- James’s plans usually went horribly wrong.” That example has two different thoughts that need to be separated to show the shift in thinking.

Hyphens are used to connect words that need to be put together. For example, you might connect “boy-king” or “she-wolf”, where you might have adjectives with two parts to them.

·       Number Rules

Okay, this is one I actually didn’t know until Kristin and I got a professional edit done on our manuscript. My initial thinking was when it came to whether or not you needed to write out a number (For example, writing “two hundred” versus “200”), you were allowed to use the number form if the value you were writing was greater than one hundred. Hopefully that makes sense as this is a little hard to describe, but essentially if you were writing anything less than 100, you needed to spell it out. Anything bigger was okay to write with the actual number form. That is a correct rule.

What I didn’t know concerning writing out numbers is there’s actually a grammar rule that goes a step further in regard to numbers in dialogue. Apparently, if a number is mentioned in dialogue, it needs to be written out. So, if you wrote a something like:

“We need one hundred soldiers posted here,” the queen said.

Then you’d write one hundred out as I did in the example.

Formatting Rules

            So, I’m going to admit that of the two of us, Kristin is the one who tends to actually know about and pay attention to formatting when writing. Some of this is because I’m not as well versed in formatting rules as she is, but also, I tend to just start writing and not stop to put things in correctly while I’m just trying to get it down. Poor Kristin had to do a lot of fixing in regard to format on our manuscript. Oops.

            Anyway, here’s some handy rules I’m slowly realizing are important on that subject.

·       Tab Over, Not 5 Spaces

This one caused us some trouble as I guess there is conflicting information out there on exactly how much space needs to be at the beginning of each paragraph. In our initial draft, we tabbed over (Using the Tab button at the upper left of your keyboard) for spacing. Then we ran into some information that said the tab actually spaced over too far and that you needed to space over five times using the space bar for it to be correct.

As you can imagine, this was quite a pain in the butt to redo all our spacing and purposefully count over five times with the space bar. Not to mention, we thought we’d ended up with the incorrect formatting only hours before we needed to submit The Visionary for review in a contest, so we had to undo all that under the clock. It literally took the entire day to get through it all since it was such a tedious job. My eyeballs were fried. Still, we got it done!

Unfortunately though, we then realized that tabbing over seems to be the more standard format, so after all that work, we actually had to put everything back the way we’d had it the first time, which was mildly excruciating.

My advice is to save yourself some time and research exactly what sort of spacing you need for your book or if you’re submitting to a company, see what format they want. There genuinely might be different rules on how to format spacing, so see which one you need first to save yourself a lot of time undoing (or un-undoing) things later.

·       Put Page Breaks at the End of Each Chapter

Yeah, this is one I definitely didn’t know about either. When writing, if I finished a chapter, I’d just go on to the next page and continue on with the next chapter. It works, but it does tend to not stay very uniform as you add in or rearrange. Ever notice one of your chapters has suddenly moved halfway down another page when you’ve gone back through?

So, when you finish a chapter, to help prevent this unwanted migration of words, adding in a page break will help your chapters space out better. I’m not sure about all writing software, but if you’re not sure about how to put in a page break, look under your “Insert” tab. On Word, it’s one of the first options you’ll see.

General Considerations

            This section is not made up of any kind of must do rules or anything, but here are some things Kristin and I have learned from various professional edits, sensitivity reads, research, or just experience that I think are good things all writers should keep in mind.

Descriptions

·       Including Facial Expressions/Body Language:

This was literally one of the biggest considerations Kristin and I had to fix when we got our manuscript back from its professional edit, so much so that we joked we just needed to write a big note to ourselves to include facial expression/body language anytime we wrote. I think this is something that maybe gets easier once someone’s taken the time to point out to you where it’d be good to see more reaction or when it feels like your characters aren’t moving a lot. Movement and reaction make your characters seem more real, so don’t rob your readers of expression.

·       Show Vs. Tell:

Heard this one before in the writing community? It’s a hard one. In case you’re not sure exactly what this means, it essentially deals with how you’re phrasing things. As a writer, you want to show your reader what’s happening within your world, rather than telling them what to feel about it. It is very, very easy to accidentally slip into Tell Mode.

For example, take two sentences like this. (Note: this is something I’m personally notorious for doing.) You could say “Josh looked sad.”, which is an easy sentence to write, especially if you’ve got another character interpreting someone else’s feelings. Or you could say something like “Josh’s face fell into a frown.” See the difference?

It can be hard to identify when you start slipping into the Show instead of Tell zone, but my general rule now- and I don’t mean for this to sound sarcastic, it’s literally how I gauge myself- is if you’re starting to use words like looked/seemed/etc. then you’re telling.

·       Inclusion of Senses:

It’s a general rule that writers want to try to utilize a character’s 5 Senses as much as possible, but this can be a tricky area. For one thing, you don’t want to use too many of them at once to where you’re taking up a ton of time with it or just bombarding your reader with description, but you want to use enough that the world feels real. Sight, touch, sound, smell, and taste can be used in tandem to really make your world feel full and alive. They’re also good to use for mood if, say, your character is in a very stressful or hectic place that overwhelms their senses or backstory if maybe a taste or smell triggers an important memory.

Our manuscript, The Visionary, revolves around a character that has visions, so our editor really encouraged us to utilize those senses not only in the regular story, but especially in the visions where they could really help build the scene.

·       Giving Characters the Same Level of Description:

This was something I’d never really thought about before too much, but recently a lot of the writing community has become very focused on the right and wrong ways to portray certain characters, particularly if they’re of different backgrounds than the person writing them. One thing to do when writing to aid portrayal is to ensure that your characters have the same level of description. Obviously, primary characters might get more description that someone that’s more in the background due to importance, but it’s very easy- especially if you’re concerned about accidentally describing or portraying someone wrong- to purposefully or inadvertently give some characters more description than others, particularly in regard to race.

The best thing to do is research, learn what wording is accurate and appropriate to describe a character, and go through and make sure you’ve not giving one character a ton of description and saying very little about another.

·       Accents/Dialect:

This one’s a bit similar as I think you’ve really got to use your better judgement on whether or not to attempt to write an accent. In some ways, including variety in your dialogue can really help bring your world to life, but it is a bit of a fine line. When it comes to accents, I think you really have to make sure you’re not playing into stereotypes or what you think other people talk like- Kristin and I tend to go with the idea that if a character needs an accent (meaning, weigh whether or not someone really needs one), then it might be best to make it clear they have an accent, but not attempt to write it into their dialogue.

Dialect is a slightly different issue, though similar. Dialect tends to deal more with how people talk regionally and might include specific phrasing or slang. This always cracks me up, but I’m from Kentucky and one time I read a book set there as well and literally got halfway through it before I realized it was purposefully written in dialect. Now could I have done that with a book set somewhere else? Probably not, but either my brain just really autocorrected or it was so familiar, I didn’t even notice. In that case, I’d say it’s written well, but I still think using dialect is something that needs to be thought out and weighed against whether writing it that way will aid in the story. Also, if it’s dialect you’re not familiar with and well-versed in, probably not a good idea.

·       Using Accurate Dialogue Tags

This is another one that I never really realized I did until it was pointed out during our edit. A dialogue tag is what comes after a quote to identify who’s speaking and how.

“What do you mean by that?” Amy asked.

The “Amy asked” part of the sentence is the dialogue tag. The example above is very obviously a question, but I think there were a few times where we had written “asked” when the quote used wasn’t really a question. Basically, make sure the descriptor you’re using in your tag actually matches what’s being said. If it’s a question, it’s maybe better to use asked then said or vice versa.

            Anyway, that’s some common writing problems that have come to my attention or things I’ve personally struggled with as a writer. If these are things you’ve struggled with too, let us know! Remember, having a good grasp of grammar is always helpful as a writer, but there are resources out there if that’s a problem area for you. There’s always the internet, but one thing I’d wished I’d known about sooner is the Associated Press puts out The Associated Press Stylebook which is a compendium for writers featuring punctuation rules and terminology and when and how they should be used. I had to get one for a college class a few years ago and I find it very helpful as a quick guide to look up things if I’m a little murky on how to use something. It’s also probably helpful to have a dictionary or thesaurus (if you’re an old soul like me who forgets the internet also has answers) on hand as well.

Thanks for reading! Write on.

-Kamryn