Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader
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The Editing Blog: for Editors, Proofreaders and Writers

FOR EDITORS, PROOFREADERS AND WRITERS

Editorial humility: Who’s the boss of the book?

7/12/2022

1 Comment

 
​We discuss editorial humility and the question we should ask ourselves at the start of every project: Who’s the boss of the book?
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Summary of Episode 105

Listen to find out more about:
  • Why the author is the boss of their book
  • The kinds of changes we make
  • Explaining the why of our edits
  • Working with anxious authors
  • Discovering the root of the author's worries
  • Sample editing to reassure both parties
  • Establishing the terms of service
  • How editors provide services, not products
  • When editors do get to be the boss
  • 'Humbly, your copyeditor' (Liz Jones, Responsive Editing)


​Related resources

  • How to Line Edit for Suspense (multimedia course)​
  • Narrative Distance (multimedia course)
  • Other courses and books
  • ​Writing resources


Join our Patreon community

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Music credit

'Vivacity’ by Kevin MacLeod
  • Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4593-vivacity
  • Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
​

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
  • Get in touch: Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader​
  • Connect: Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Learn: Books and courses
  • Discover: Resources for authors and editors
1 Comment

Can I place a dialogue tag before the character’s speech?

21/10/2022

2 Comments

 
Writers can place dialogue tags before, between and after speech – there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Tag-first speech does have a different feel to it though, particularly when the construction is used frequently. This post explores the impact on your novel.
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In this post ...

Read on to find out more about the following:
​
  • What a dialogue tag is
  • Back-loaded tags
  • Mid-loaded tags
  • Front-loaded tags
  • Impact level, psychic distancing and lyricism in front-loaded tags


​What a dialogue tag is

A dialogue tag is the short piece of text that tells a reader that a character is speaking, and which character is speaking. For example:
​
  • Are you enjoying reading that blog post?’ Louise said.
  • ‘Are you enjoying reading that blog post?’ she asked.

In the above examples, the tags are shown in bold and comprise the subject (someone’s name or their pronoun) doing the speaking, and the verb from which the reader can infer that the action of speech is taking place.

Commonly used effective verbs include ‘said’, ‘asked’, ‘replied’, ‘whispered’, ‘muttered’, ‘yelled’, ‘continued’ and ‘added’.
​
Ineffective dialogue tags use verbs that bring to mind action that’s not related precisely to speech but to some other behaviour. Examples include ‘sneered’, ‘grimaced’, ‘laughed’, ‘harrumphed’, ‘huffed’, ‘sighed’, ‘snarled’ and ‘urged’.


​Positioning tags in fiction:
​Back-loading, mid-loading and front-loading

There is no right or wrong position for a dialogue tag. Authors can mix them up as they choose. Tags can even be omitted when it’s clear who’s speaking.
​
So where might they go?

Dialogue tags can be front-loaded, mid-loaded and back-loaded.

Back-loaded dialogue tags
Back-loaded tags come after the speech and are used commonly. Consider using them in the following circumstances:

  • ​Length of dialogue: Your character’s dialogue is a short burst and you want to ensure the reader’s attention is focused on what’s being said straightaway, rather than who’s saying it.
  • Impact level: The dialogue is relevant but low key. There’s no punchline that might be flattened by a tag.

EXAMPLES
     ‘I won’t be long,’ Bond said, opening the door.
(Boyd: Solo)
​
     ​“Me and Jaymie will call it. You want your boy to go too?” he said.
(Crosby: Blacktop Wasteland)
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Mid-loaded dialogue tags
Mid-loaded tags come between the speech. They, too, are a popular choice for writers. Consider this option in the following circumstances:
​
  • Length: The dialogue stream is longer and you want to ensure your readers don’t wait too long to discover who’s speaking.
  • Rhythm and context: You want to introduce a natural pause so that the speech doesn’t turn into a monologue. You can also supplement the tag with descriptive action that grounds the dialogue in the environment and helps the reader picture the scene.
  • Impact level: You’ve written a witty, suspenseful or impactful punchline into the dialogue and don’t want it interrupted or flattened by a tag.
  • Interrupted speech: You’ve written speech that’s interrupted abruptly and don’t want the tag interfering with the interrupter’s speech.

EXAMPLE 1
This first example is from David Rosenfeld's Collared.
     “Andy,” Laurie says, draping her arm around me. "We love you deeply. As far as Ricky and I are concerned, the sun rises and sets on you. And it is from that place of love and that place of the rising and setting sun that we say this to you: 'Sign the damn form and send it in.'"
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Notice how in the above example of single-character dialogue, which comprises a total of 51 words, the impact point is with the closing sentence: ‘Sign the damn form and send it in’. Because the tag’s located earlier, that dialogue gets to shine.

​Compare the original with this version, which I’ve given a back-loaded tag:
     “Andy, we love you deeply. As far as Ricky and I are concerned, the sun rises and sets on you. And it is from that place of love and that place of the rising and setting sun that we say this to you: 'Sign the damn form and send it in,'" Laurie says, draping her arm around me.

​Back-loading the tag strips ‘Sign the damn form and send it in’ of its oomph.

EXAMPLE 2
Here’s an example from Linwood Barclay’s Parting Shot that shows how mid-loaded tags can protect the flow of interrupted dialogue.
     “Ms. Plimpton,” Duckworth said. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Detective Barry—”
​     “I know exactly who you are,” she said, and reached out and took his hand in hers.
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Notice how by mid-loading the dialogue tag, Ms. Plimpton’s interruption – indicated by the closed-up em dash at the end of Duckworth’s speech – feels more authentic because it’s given the space to flow.
​
Front-loaded dialogue tags
Front-loaded tags come before the dialogue. This position is the one least used in most commercial fiction, and there’s a good reason for that: reader focus.

Those familiar with advice on writing for the web will know that web copy needs to be front-loaded with relevant keywords. This means that the important stuff comes first. That’s because visitors to websites are busy and scanning for solutions to their problems. When they don’t get them fast, they become frustrated and are more likely to jump to another site.

If the novelist’s done their job well, readers will invest way more time in soaking up their prose than if they were shopping for a new duvet cover. Even so, every word in a piece of fiction needs to count, and readers should still be focusing on the most important stuff.

And so if you’ve written great dialogue, most of the time you’ll want to ensure your readers are focusing on it as soon as possible. Front-loading the speech, rather than the tag, helps achieve that.

That’s not to say that front-loaded dialogue tags don’t have their place. They do, and they can be extremely effective when used purposefully.


​When front-loaded tags work:
Impact level, psychic distancing and lyricism

Let’s have a look at how a front-loaded dialogue tag can be used to superb effect when used purposefully.

Impact level
A front-loaded dialogue tag can function in the same way as a mid-loaded one when it comes to speech containing impact points. Again, we’re talking about dialogue that’s witty, suspenseful, or closes with an impactful line that you don’t want to flatten with a tag.

EXAMPLE
Let’s return to the excerpt from Collared. Although Rosenfelt uses a mid-loaded tag, he could have opted for a front-loaded one and preserved the oomph in his closing sentence. Here’s how it might look:
     ​Laurie drapes her arm around me and says, “Andy, we love you deeply. As far as Ricky and I are concerned, the sun rises and sets on you. And it is from that place of love and that place of the rising and setting sun that we say this to you: 'Sign the damn form and send it in.'"
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Psychic distancing
If you want the prose to feel more expository so that the reader is less closely connected to the character, front-loading the tag might be just the ticket. Doing this widens the psychic (or narrative) distance.

A tag tells of speaking whereas dialogue shows what’s being said. By placing the tag first, you draw the reader away from the character’s voice and give the prose a more objective feel.

EXAMPLE
This excerpt is from Jens Lapidus’s Life Deluxe.
     They veered onto a side street off Storgatan. 
     Jorge's phone rang. 
     Paola: "It's me. Que haces, hermano?" 
     Jorge thought: Should I tell her the truth? 
     "I'm in Södertälje." 
     "At a bakery?" 
     Paola: J-boy loved her. Still, he couldn't take it. 
     He said, "Yeah, yeah, ‘course I'm at a bakery. But we gotta talk later—I got my hands full of muffins here." 
     They hung up.
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Lapidus has front-loaded dialogue tags and thoughts in this excerpt, and it’s an excellent example of psychic distancing in action. The centring of the characters rather than the speech gives the prose a detached, clinical feel that shows rather than tells mood.

Jorge is a drug-dealer operating in Stockholm’s shady underworld. He’s only just out of jail but already he’s frustrated with a life of honesty. In fact, he’s got only one thing on his mind: easy money.

The wider psychic distance means we get to see the world through Jorge’s eyes but without getting too close to him. Perhaps Lapidus doesn’t want us to empathize with him too much. Instead, he widens the psychic distance just enough that we can make up our own minds about whether Jorge deserves the trouble coming his way.

Lyricism
Repeated use of front-loaded tags with short bursts of dialogue can introduce a lyricism into prose whereby the tags function as more than just indications of who’s speaking. They become part of the poetry.
​
This approach can work particularly well with parody, satire and comedic prose.

EXAMPLE
     I posed my conundrum to the class and waited for their insights on what I considered to be my finest theoretical work to date.
     ​Mari said, ‘No.’
     Ahmed said, ‘Yes.’
     Sol said, ‘Maybe.’
     Dave said, ‘I couldn’t give a shit. Is that the best you’ve got?’
     Arthur said nothing, just yawned.
     The bell rang. Suitably insulted, I raised the SIG, shot each student in the head, and retired to the staff room. 

​Notice how the multiple front-loaded dialogue tags are performing anaphorically. Anaphora is the purposeful repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive clauses.

It’s often used in poetry and speeches. When it’s used in novels, that repetition draws the reader's eye and can show rather than tell mood – boredom, monotony or, as in this case, disinterest. The tags are therefore key to the lyricism, and as important as the speech. 


​Summing up

Front-loading dialogue tags is something most authors tend to avoid. However, as is usually the case when it comes to line craft in fiction, there are no rules.

​The key is to consider what purpose your tag is serving and how it can best amplify the speech, evoke mood, and improve rhythm.

​
​Cited sources

  • ​Barclay, l., Parting Shot, Orion; 2017 (p. 380)
  • Boyd, W., Solo: A James Bond Novel, Vintage, 2014 (p. 260)
  • Crosby, SA, Blacktop Wasteland, Headline, 2021 (Chapter 1, Kindle edition)
  • Lapidus, J, Life Deluxe, Pan, 2015 (Chapter 1, Kindle edition)
  • Rosenfelt, D, Collared, Minotaur Books, 2017 (Kindle edition)​


​Fiction editing training: Books and courses

  • Editing Fiction at Sentence Level (book)
  • Fiction editing and writing resources (online library)
  • How to Line Edit for Suspense (multimedia course)
  • How to Write the Perfect Fiction Editorial Report (multimedia course)
  • Narrative Distance: A Toolbox for Writers and Editors (multimedia course)
  • Preparing Your Book for Submission (multimedia course)
  • Switching to Fiction (multimedia course)
  • What is anaphora and how can you use it in fiction writing? (blog post)
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.


  • Get in touch: Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader
  • Connect: Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Learn: Books and courses
  • Discover: Resources for authors and editors
2 Comments

Creative writing tips: With thriller writer Andy Maslen

23/11/2020

0 Comments

 
In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle talk to thriller writer Andy Maslen about the creative-writing process.
Creative writing tips: With thriller writer Andy Maslen
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​Listen to find out more about
  • Writing a series vs standalone novels
  • Tips on developing a coherent series
  • Starting afresh with a new set of characters in a new environment
  • Top creative-writing tips for beginner author
  • Recommended writing-craft resources
  • Back-cover blurb and Amazon blurbs
  • Cover design

Here's where you can find out more about Andy Maslen's thrillers.

Dig into these related resources
  • Author resources
  • Book: Editing Fiction at Sentence Level
  • Blog post: 3 reasons to use free indirect speech in your crime fiction
  • Blog post: Crime fiction subgenres: Where does your novel fit?
  • Blog post: How to write dialogue that pops
  • Blog post: Playing with sentence length in crime fiction. Is it time to trim the fat?
  • Blog post: Writing a crime novel – should you plan or go with the flow?​
  • Podcast episodes: The indie author collection​

​Music Credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
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The Editing Podcast: Story creation and revision. With mystery writer David Unger

9/11/2020

0 Comments

 
In this episode of The Editing Podcast, ​Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle talk to mystery writer David Unger about story creation and revision.
Story creation and revision: With author David Unger

​Listen to find out more about
  • What made David want to start writing and who inspired him
  • Writing an alter ego
  • The revision process
  • On being edited

Here's where you can find out more about David Unger's books.

Dig into these related resources
  • Author resources
  • Book: Editing Fiction at Sentence Level
  • Blog post: 3 reasons to use free indirect speech in your crime fiction
  • Blog post: Crime fiction subgenres: Where does your novel fit?
  • Blog post: How to write dialogue that pops
  • Blog post: Playing with sentence length in crime fiction. Is it time to trim the fat?
  • Blog post: Writing a crime novel – should you plan or go with the flow?​
  • Podcast episodes: The indie author collection

Music Credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/​
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
0 Comments

The Editing Podcast: Zombie rules we can do without, part 1

2/11/2020

0 Comments

 
In this episode of The Editing Podcast, ​Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle talk about zombie rules, and why they have no place in a professional editor's toolbox.
Zombie rules we can do without, part 1
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Listen to find out more about
  • What a zombie rule is
  • Why split infinitives are not grammatically problematic
  • Why it's okay to start a sentence with a conjunction

Dig into these related resources
  • Blog post: Fiction grammar: Is it okay to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’?
  • Blog post: What are expletives in the grammar of fiction?
  • Blog post: Should I use a comma before coordinating conjunctions and independent clauses in fiction?
  • Podcast: How to manage the grammar police
  • Resources for proofreading your own writing
  • Podcast: Linguist Rob Drummond on grammar pedantry, peevery and youth language
  • Blog post: What's the difference between a rule and a preference? Advice for new writers

Music Credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/​
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
0 Comments

Fiction grammar: Is it okay to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’?

5/10/2020

2 Comments

 
Good news! It is perfectly okay to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’ in fiction writing. Doing so can enrich narration and dialogue, and inflect the prose with voice, mood and intention. The key is to make sure those conjunctions are being used purposefully and logically. This post shows you how.
Fiction grammar: Is it okay to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’?
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What the style guides say
Here's what two industry-recognized style guides have to say on the matter.

New Hart’s Rules (Oxford University Press): ‘You might have been taught that it’s not good English to start a sentence with a conjunction such as and or but. It’s not grammatically incorrect to do so, however, and many respected writers use conjunctions at the start of a sentence to create a dramatic or forceful effect.’

Chicago Manual of Style Online, 5.203 (Chicago University Press): ‘There is a widespread belief—one with no historical or grammatical foundation—that it is an error to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and, but, or so. In fact, a substantial percentage (often as many as 10 percent) of the sentences in first-rate writing begin with conjunctions. It has been so for centuries, and even the most conservative grammarians have followed this practice.'

6 good reasons to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’
Great! We have the go-ahead from a couple of big hitters to use our two conjunctions at the beginning of a sentence. Now let’s dig a little deeper into why doing so can make fiction more effective. Here are my top six reasons:

  • To serve natural speech
  • To shorten narrative distance
  • To introduce tension and suspense
  • To add drama
  • To emphasize the unexpected
  • To make contrast explicit

Serving natural speech
When we speak in real life, conjunctions are often the first things out of our mouths. So it should be in novels that want to render speech authentically.

Fictional dialogue doesn’t replicate real-life speech completely – that would mean including a lot of boring stuff that one might hear at the bus stop. Rather, it’s a sort of hybrid that has the essence of reality but with the mundanity judiciously removed. It might sound like a cheat but readers thank authors who don’t bore them!

Small nudges towards reality help with the authenticity goal, which is where our conjunctions come in handy. Here are a few examples for you:
     ‘And you will have no hesitation in doing what has to be done? You have no doubts?’ (At Risk, Stella Rimington, p. 187)
 
     ‘And where’s he getting the money from? You know the situation as well as I do. He isn’t on leave of absence from a university.’ (The Dream Archipelago, Christopher Priest, p. 227)
 
     ​“But your way makes more sense. So you think Maura was working with Rex?”
     “I do.”
     “Doesn’t mean she didn’t set Rex up.”
     “Right.”
     “But if she wasn’t involved in the murder, where is she now?” (Don’t Let Go, Harlan Coben, p. 76)
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Shortening narrative distance
Dialogue gives us the character’s speech; narrative gives us the character’s experience. When that’s a first-person narrative, it’s easy to feel close to the narrator. With a third-person narration, the reader can feel separated from the character, as if they’re on the outside looking in.

Authors who want to reduce that space between the reader and the character – called narrative distance or psychic distance – can experiment with a narration style that sounds like natural speech even though it’s not dialogue.
​
Here’s a lovely example from Blake Crouch’s Recursion (p. 182). 
     There's a part of him that wants to run down there, charge through, and shoot every fucking person he sees inside that hotel, ending with the man who put him in the chair. Meghan’s brain broke because of him. She is dead because of him. Hotel Memory needs to end.
     But that would most likely only get him killed.
     ​No, he'll call Gwen instead, propose an off-the-books, under-the-radar op with a handful of SWAT colleagues. If she insists, he'll take an affidavit to a judge.
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Notice how the narration style is third person, though it doesn’t feel like it. Instead, we’re right inside the viewpoint character’s head.
​
The position of the conjunction in this example isn’t the sole reason why the narrative distance feels short – the free indirect speech above and beneath plays a huge part – but it certainly helps to give us a sense of the character’s mentally working out a problem.

Introducing tension and suspense
Take a look at this excerpt from p. 21 of The Matlock Paper by Robert Ludlum.
     Matlock walked to the small, rectangular window with the wire-enclosed glass. The police station was at the south end of the town of Carlyle, about a half a mile from the campus, the section of town considered industrialized. Still, there were trees along the streets. Carlyle was a very clean town, a neat town. The trees by the station house were pruned and shaped.
     And Carlyle was also something else. 
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With that one word – the conjunction – Ludlum stops us in our tracks. Yes, we’re thinking, the town’s neat, it’s clean. All well and good. But then we realize that there’s more to it, for beneath the pruned trees lies a dark underbelly.

The ‘And’, positioned right up front, forces us to pay attention to it. It’s not any old conjunction. Rather, it’s loaded with suspense that drives the reader to ask a question that isn’t explicitly answered: What else is that ‘something’?

Adding drama and modifying rhythm
In this excerpt from Parting Shot (p. 433), the author uses the conjunction at the beginning of the sentence to inject drama into a scene.

The new line makes the rhythm of the prose more staccato, but the ‘And’ at the beginning of the final line is what really packs a punch.

The viewpoint character, Cory, is a killer. He ponders almost matter-of-factly who the threats are, and reaches his conclusion as he closes in on the cabin.
     Dolly Guntner certainly wasn't in a position to say anything bad about him.
     Which left Carol Beakman. Carol had seen him. And while she didn't actually see him kill Dolly, if the police ever spoke with her, she'd be able to tell them it couldn't have been anyone else but him.
     As far as Cory could figure, the only living witness to his crimes was Carol Beakman.
     He was nearly back to the cabin.
     It seemed clear what he had to do.
     ​And he'd have to do it fast. 
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If Linwood Barclay had omitted the conjunction, he’d have introduced a separation between two ideas: realizing what needs to be done, and when the killer is going to do it. Yet these two ideas are very much connected. The ‘And’ therefore fulfils its purpose as a conjunction – a joining word.

But there’s more. If he’d run the two ideas together with a conjunction between (‘It seemed clear what he had to do, and he'd have to do it fast.’), the line would have lost its wallop. The staccato rhythm (one that mirrors the cold calculation taking place in Cory’s head) is gone. Instead, the prose has flatlined; it seems almost mundane, like a stroll in the park rather than the planning of a murder.

However, the ‘And’ reinforces this extra information – the deed must be done fast. The emphasis adds drama to the line. The final line is still connected to the clause it’s related to, but the mood-rich rhythm, and the drama that comes with it, is intact.

Emphasizing the unexpected
An up-front ‘But’ is perfect for the author who want to emphasize the unexpected, surprise or absurdity. Take a look at this excerpt from Terry Pratchett’s Dodger (p. 170).
    The boy said, 'I don't quite know exactly where Mister Charlie will be right now, but you could always ask the peelers.' He smiled. 'You can be sure that there will be a lot of them about.'
     Ask a peeler! Dodger? But surely that was the old Dodger saying that, he thought.
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It’s true that omitting the ‘But’ would leave the meaning intact. However, adding the conjunction reinforces the Dodger’s emotional response to the boy’s suggestion – he’s taken by surprise because in times past, asking a peeler was exactly what he’d have done, without question, without fear.

And so that ‘But’ does more than act as a conjunction. With just three letters, we’re shown character mood.

Making contrast explicit and suspenseful
David Rosenfelt’s New Tricks (p. 92) includes a smashing example how the conjunction at the beginning of the sentence reinforces a contrast with what’s gone before.
      I won't be able to place this in any kind of context until I go through everything Sam has brought, though he says he didn't see a reply to Jacoby's questions. Certainly the fact that a man who was soon to be a murder victim experimenting in any way with his own DNA is at least curious, and something for me to look into carefully if I stay on the case.
     But a nurse comes in and asks me to quickly come to Laurie's room, so right now everything else is going to have to wait. 
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That contrast is explicit because the ‘But’ acts as an interrupter. We’re deep in the POV character’s head regarding the murder victim, ruminating with our protagonist. The conjunction then shoves us out of that rumination. It’s not gentle; the ‘But’ is a big one – something’s up with Laurie.

Not that we know what. Rosenfelt doesn’t tell us yet. Instead, he makes us ask the question: Why? And with that question, just as with the Ludlum example above, we have suspense.

Summing up
Feel free to pepper your prose with sentences that begin with ‘And’ and ‘But’. Anyone who tells you you’re on shaky ground grammatically knows less about grammar than you do!

It’s likely that the myth around positioning these conjunctions came about in a bid to nudge people away from stringing together clauses and sentences with no thought to creativity. And while such an intention makes sense, we have to recognize that imposing this zombie rule on writing can actually destroy the magic of prose.

And on that note, I will sign off! (See what I did there?)

More fiction editing guidance
  • 3 reasons to use free indirect speech
  • Author resources library: Booklets, videos, podcasts and articles for authors
  • Commas, conjunctions and rhythm
  • Coordinating conjunctions
  • Editing Fiction at Sentence Level: My flagship line-editing book
  • How to write suspenseful chapter endings
  • Rules versus preferences
  • Sentence length, pace and tension
  • Switching to Fiction: Course for new fiction editors
  • Transform Your Fiction guides: My fiction editing series for editors and authors

Cited sources
  • At Risk, Stella Rimington, Arrow Books, 2004
  • Don’t Let Go, Harlan Coben, Arrow Books, 2017
  • Dodger, Terry Pratchett, Corgi, 2012
  • Recursion, Blake Crouch, Pan Macmillan, 2019
  • The Matlock Paper, Robert Ludlum, Orion, 2010
  • The Dream Archipelago, Christopher Priest, Gollancz, 2009
  • Parting Shot, Linwood Barclay, Orion, 2017
  • New Tricks, David Rosenfelt, Grand Central Publishing, 2009
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
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What are expletives in the grammar of fiction?

21/9/2020

2 Comments

 
Want to use grammatical expletives in your fiction? These words serve as place holders or fillers in a sentence. They shift emphasis and can affect rhythm. Used injudiciously, however, they can be cluttering tension-wreckers. Here's how to strike a balance.
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Because expletives shift emphasis, they have a syntactic function. However, they don’t in themselves contribute anything to our understanding of the sentence. In other words, they don't have a semantic role. You might also see them called syntactic expletives.

Common examples are:

  • there are/is/was/were
  • it is/was

Take a look at the following pair. The first sentence is introduced by an expletive.
​
  • There was a car parked outside the house.
  • A car was parked outside the house.

When used well, expletives are enrichment tools that allow an author to play with a narrative voice’s register and the rhythm of sentences. 

When prose is overloaded with them, it can feel cluttered with filler words that add nothing but ink on the page. At best, they widen the narrative distance between the reader and the POV character; at worst, they flatten a sentence and destroy suspense and tension.
When to fix expletives
Flat expletives that merit fixing
Too much telling of what there is or was can rip the immediacy from a scene and encourage skimming. That’s a problem – it means the reader isn’t engaged and risks missing something.

Furthermore, if they’re not performing their rhythmic or emphasis role, expletives make sentence navigation more difficult because all they're doing is cluttering the prose.

Here's an example. Think I've overworked it? There are published books from mainstream presses with passages just like this made-up one.
FLAT EXPLETIVE
​     It was a tiny room. There was a light switch with rust-coloured smudged fingermarks on the melamine surface. Was that blood? There was a noise coming from beyond on the back wall. It was a high-pitched whimper. Then there was silence. She held her breath and tiptoed forward.
     Suddenly there was a scream.

The problem with the expletives in the passage above is that readers are bogged down in what there was rather than the viewpoint character's experience of discovery. Let's revise it to fix the problem.
 THE FIX
     The room was tiny. Rust-coloured fingermarks smudged the melamine surface of the light switch. Blood maybe. A noise came from beyond a door on the back wall. A high-pitched whimper. Then nothing. She held her breath and tiptoed forward.
   A scream shattered the silence.

Notice how the narrative distance has been reduced in the revised passage. Now it's as if we're in the viewpoint character's head, moving with her second by second. We can focus on the room, the dried-blood fingermarks, the whimper, and the scream rather than the being of those things – their was-ness. 

Removing the expletives and swapping in stronger verbs (smudged, shattered) enables us to tighten up the prose and introduce immediacy. And now there's no need for the told 'suddenly' – we experience the suddenness through the in-the-moment shattering. 
When to leave expletives alone
Expletives that pack a punch
As is always the case, obliterating expletives from a novel would be inappropriate because sometimes they're the perfect tool to help out with rhythm and emphasis.

The opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (p. 1) uses expletives galore, and masterfully at that. The repetition (anaphora) brings a steady rhythm to the passage that ensures the reader gives equal weight to the contrasting extremes – from best and worst to hope and despair. 

​The expletives introduce a detached sense of reportage that forces us forward rather than allowing us to dwell on any of the heavens or hells on offer. It’s simultaneously mundane and monstrous, and that's why it's magical.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair [...]

​And here’s an example from Dog Tags (p. 1) where omission of the expletive would rip the energy from the opening first line of the chapter and interfere with our understanding of which words we’re supposed to emphasize.
“Andy Carpenter, Lawyer to the Dogs.”
     That was the USA Today headline on a piece that ran about me a couple of months ago.

​Summing up
​
Grammatical expletives are a normal part of language and have every right to be in a novel. Overloading can destroy tension and make for a laboured narrative, but a purposeful peppering can amplify character emotion, moderate rhythm, and make space for the introduction of big themes in small spaces without sensory clutter.

Cited works and further reading
  • Author resource library (includes links to free webinars)
  • A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, W. W. Norton & Company; Critical edition, 2020
  • Dog Tags, David Rosenfelt, Grand Central Publishing, Reprint edition, 2011 ​
  • Editing Fiction at Sentence Level: A Guide for Beginner and Developing Writers
  • Making Sense of Punctuation: Transform Your Fiction 2
  • ‘Playing with sentence length in crime fiction. Is it time to trim the fat?’
  • ‘Playing with the rhythm of fiction: commas and conjunctions’
  • 'Should I use a comma before coordinating conjunctions and independent clauses in fiction?'
  • ‘What is anaphora and how can you use it in fiction writing?’
  • 'Why "suddenly" can spoil your crime fiction'
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
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What is an omniscient narrative point of view?

17/8/2020

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This post helps less experienced fiction writers and editors make sense of omniscient point of view, and work with this narrative style effectively.
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What is narrative point of view?
Point of view (POV) describes whose head we’re in when we read a book ... from whose perspective we discover what’s going on – and the smells, sounds, sights and emotions involved.

Third-person omniscient POV
This viewpoint is probably the trickiest to master. Omniscient means all-knowing. It’s the most flexible because it gives the reader potential access to every character’s external and internal experiences. It also has the potential to be the least intimate if not handled well.
​
Imagine a futuristic news helicopter. Inside, our roving reporter shifts her camera from one person to another, and one setting to another. She’s also got some serious kit, stuff that enables her to tap everyone’s phones, TVs and computers. But that’s not all; the characters’ brains are bugged too; our reporter knows what they’re thinking. She can see, hear and smell it all! Says Sophie Playle:
The narrator knows everything, and isn’t limited to the viewpoint of any single character. An omniscient narrator could be a character in the story (like a god or an enlightened person), or they could be an observing nonentity. Completely omniscient viewpoints are difficult to pull off well because the narrator needs to have reasons for imparting the knowledge they choose to impart in the order they choose to do so, otherwise the story will feel contrived [...] Omniscient narration and third person objective narration have similarities, but the key is looking for when the narrator knows more than it could objectively observe.

Examples: Deeper knowledge than third-person narration
If you’ve read anything by Neil Gaiman, you’ll see a blatant external narrator in evidence with a depth of knowledge that defies the rules of a third-person viewpoint. Here’s an example from Neverwhere (p. 10). 
     He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more informative), to comprehend the city, a process which accelerated when he realized that the actual City of London itself was no bigger than a square mile [...]
     Two thousand years before, London had been a little Celtic village on the north shore of the Thames which the Romans had encountered and settled in. London had grown, slowly, until, roughly a thousand years later, it met the tiny Royal City of Westminster [...]
      London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.
      ​After a while, Richard found himself taking London for granted.
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The first ten words might appear to be a third-person viewpoint (‘He’ refers to Richard, the protagonist), but that’s not the case. What follows is a distinct narrative other, a voice that explains ‘white knowledge’.

In the second and third paragraphs, the all-knowing narrator offers historical information. Then in the final paragraph, we’re told more about Richard. The viewpoint was never third-person objective. It was omniscient all along.

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, ‘the man’ takes centre stage in most of the sections such that we see what he sees and feel what he feels. It’s almost as if he’s the narrator, and once more we could be forgiven for thinking the viewpoint third person. But there’s more going on here.

​
In the following extracts, notice the shift beyond what it’s possible for the man to see, think or know.
     He woke in the morning and turned over in the blanket and looked down the road through the trees the way they’d come in time to see the marchers four abreast. Dressed in clothing of every description, all wearing red scarves at their necks. Red or orange, as close to red as they could find. He put his hand on the boy’s head. Shh, he said. (pp. 95–6)
​
     He wallowed into the ground and lay watching across his forearm. An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. [...] The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasselled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry. The boy lay with his face in his arms, terrified. (p. 96)
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In the first extract, only an all-knowing alternative narrator could be privy to the intent behind the marchers’ colour choice of scarves. In the second, the man watches the army, but it’s only an omniscient narrator who can know where their blades were forged and how the boy is feeling. Maybe that narrator is McCarthy; maybe it’s someone else. But it’s not the man.

Example: World-building backstory in a flash

Some genres – science fiction and fantasy for example – lend themselves well to omniscient narrators because they can provide critical world-building backstory quickly. Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters provides a fine example (pp. 1–2).
Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past.
​     Exactly why this should be may never be known. Possibly, the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a bit of fun for once.
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What omniscient is not
An omniscient viewpoint can be powerful but it needs to be controlled and used with purpose. If we’re accessing one character’s thoughts and experiences, and we jump to another character’s viewpoint, it can jar the reader. That's called head-hopping.

Imagine you’re listening to your best friend tell you about a difficult experience. Even though it didn’t happen to you, her description of the event helps you to imagine the challenges she faced, the emotions she grappled with. You’re thoroughly immersed and emotionally connected.

Then someone else barges up to you both and tells you what it was like for them. Your friend butts back in to wrestle the telling back to her.
​
Would the interruption annoy and frustrate you? Would you feel like your efforts to invest in your friend’s story were being thwarted?

The impact is the same when it occurs in a book’s narrative (though not the dialogue, of course). That viewpoint ping pong is not omniscient POV. It’s third-person limited gone awry.


Recommendation
I recommend caution. The beauty of fiction often lies in the unveiling, in the immersion. Overuse of an omniscient narrator can block this. 

The all-seeing eye can be a powerful tool – as demonstrated by the examples above – but less experienced authors, particularly those writing commercial fiction such as thrillers and mysteries, risk accidental head-hopping, which will destroy the tension and distance the reader from the characters.


Cited sources and related reading​​
  • Editing Fiction at Sentence Level, Louise Harnby, Panx Press, 2020
  • Making Sense of Point of View (Transform Your Fiction series: 1), Louise Harnby, Panx Press, 2020
  • Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman, William Morrow Paperbacks, reprint edition, 2016
  • Resources for authors: Library of articles, podcasts, videos and booklets for independent writers
  • The Road, Cormac McCarthy, Picador, 2009
  • 'What’s the Difference Between Omniscient and Third Person Narration?' Sophie Playle, Liminal Pages​
  • 'What is head-hopping?'
  • Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett, Harper, reprint edition, 2013
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
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Where to place dialogue tags in fiction

10/8/2020

7 Comments

 
​Not sure where to place your speech tags? This guide shows you how to tell readers who’s speaking, not based on a set of rules but in respect of clarity, suspense, invisibility, and rhythm.
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​What is a dialogue tag?
Dialogue tags, or speech tags, are complementary short phrases that tell the reader who’s talking. They’re not always necessary, particularly if there are only two speakers in a scene, but when they are used, this is what they look like:

  • ‘Dump that corpse and don’t ever mention it again,’ the hooded guy whispered.
  • “Thanks for holding the gun,” Tom said. “Now pull the trigger.”
  • Marg turned. Smirked. Said, ‘Tomorrow. If you’re late, he’s late. Geddit?’

Said is often best because readers are so used to seeing it that it’s pretty much invisible and therefore less interruptive.

What’s the rule about where tags go?
Dialogue tags can be placed after, between or before dialogue. Authors sometimes ask which position is best or whether there’s a rule.

There is no rule. All three positions have advantages and disadvantages, depending on what you want to achieve.

Position: After dialogue
Readers are so used to seeing speech tags like said at the end of dialogue that they’re almost invisible. That allows the dialogue, rather than the speaking of the dialogue, to be the focus.

Below is a wee example from Recursion (p. 292). The speech takes centre stage; the doing of speech (screaming, in this case) comes afterwards.
​​
Furthermore, when the tag comes after the dialogue, it can roll seamlessly into any supporting narrative, as shown in the example from The Ghost Fields (p. 194).
     “Come on!” he screams.

​     ‘It’s very … evocative,’ says Ruth. This is true. The brushwork may be crude, the planes out of perspective and the figures barely more than stick men, but there’s something about the work of the unknown airman that brings back the past more effectively than any documentary or reconstruction.
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There are a couple of potential disadvantages:
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  • In longer chunks of dialogue in scenes with more than two speakers, the reader will have to wait until the end of the speech to find out who’s saying what.
  • Placement at the end of speech can flatten a one-liner or suspense point in dialogue.

Position: Between dialogue
Placing speech tags between dialogue is also common and unlikely to jar the reader. Here are three reasons why it works:

  • The tag breaks up longer streams of dialogue, which is especially handy if a monologue’s rearing its head.
  • We’re given an early indication who’s speaking. If there are more than two speakers in a scene, and the reader’s likely to be confused, placement between the speech is an effective solution.
  • One-liners, suspense points and shocks get to take centre stage. Adding the speech tag at the end could flatten the tension.

Here are two examples in which the mid placement of the tag means the suspense isn't interfered with. The first is taken from The Ghost Fields (p. 194); the second is something I made up.
     ‘It’s not signed,’ says Frank, ‘but there’s something that may be a clue.’

     ​“Thanks for holding the gun,” Tom said. “Now pull the trigger.”
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In the first example, not having the speech tag at the end of the dialogue focuses the reader on one question: what’s the clue? Not: Frank’s the speaker.

In the second example, rejig the sentence so that Tom said comes after all the speech, and notice how this makes the wallop vanish from the line about pulling the trigger.

Position: Before dialogue
Placement of the tag before the dialogue isn’t a no-no but it is a less common option and more noticeable.

A tag tells of speaking; dialogue shows character voice, mood and intention. When the speaker’s announced first, it’s a tap on the shoulder that draws attention to speaking being done. It expands what author and creative-writing expert Emma Darwin calls the ‘psychic distance’ between the reader and the speaker, which can flatten the mood.

And, yet, this can also be its advantage. That tap introduces a more staccato rhythm that can stop a reader in their tracks.
​
In this extract from Recursion (p. 292), the placement of the tag before the dialogue induces an acute sense of resignation – that dull thump in the pit of one’s stomach when the proverbial’s hit the fan.
     “That’s a Black Hawk,” he says. “Wonder what’s going on in town.”
     The chopper banks hard to the left and slows its groundspeed, now drifting back in their direction as it lowers from five hundred feet toward the ground.
     ​Helena says, “They’re here for us.”
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Not placing tags: Omission
There’s no need to include a speech tag if it’s adding nothing but clutter. In the following example from Recursion (p. 125), the author has omitted them because there are only two speakers. He lets the dialogue, and its punctuation, inject the voice, mood and intention into the scene rather than telling us who’s speaking and how they’re saying it.
     Slade lifts his Champagne glass and polishes off the rest.
     “You stole that other life from me.”
     “Helena—”
     “Was I married? Did I have kids?”
     “Do you really want to know? It doesn’t matter now. It never happened.”
     ​“You’re a monster.”
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Summing up
​
Placement of dialogue tags isn’t about rules. It’s about purpose:
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  • Varying rhythm
  • Respecting mood and suspense
  • Clarifying who’s speaking
  • Avoiding unnecessary clutter

For that reason, mixing up the position of speech tags can be effective.

​Let’s end with an extract from Out of Sight (pp. 135–7), which demonstrates the varied ways in which author Elmore Leonard handles his tagging: beginning, between, end, and omission.
     ‘But you think they’re coming back,’ Karen said.
     ​‘Yes, indeed, and we gonna have a surprise party. I want you to take a radio, go down to the lobby and hang out with the folks. You see Foley and this guy Bragg, what do you do?’
     ‘Call and tell you.’
     ‘And you let them come up. You understand? You don’t try to make the bust yourself.’
     Burdon slipping back into his official mode.
     ​Karen said, ‘What if they see me?’
     ‘You don’t let that happen,’ Burdon said. ‘I want them upstairs.’
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Cited sources and further reading
  • Editing Fiction at Sentence Level, Louise Harnby, Panx Press, 2020
  • How to Punctuate Dialogue (free webinar)
  • Out of Sight, Elmore Leonard, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017
  • Recursion, Blake Crouch, Pan, 2020
  • The Ghost Fields, Elly Griffiths, Quercus, 2015
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
7 Comments

What is a second-person narrative point of view?

3/8/2020

2 Comments

 
Not sure what a second-person narrative point of view is, or how to use it effectively in your fiction writing? This post shows you how it works in a novel.
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What is narrative point of view?
Point of view (POV) describes whose head we’re in when we read a book ... from whose perspective we discover what’s going on – and the smells, sounds, sights and emotions involved.

There can be multiple viewpoints in a book, not all of which have to belong to a single character. Plus, editors’ and authors’ opinions differ as to which approach works best, and what jars and why.

My aim is to keep the guidance as straightforward as possible, not because I think you should only do it this way or that way, but because most people (myself included) handle complexity best when they start with the foundations.

Second-person narrative viewpoint
In second-person narrative POVs, the pronoun is ‘you’. This narration is intimate, but strangely so, as if the author is talking directly to the reader as a character.

That intrusive element is both its strength and its weakness. It’s powerful because it places readers at the heart of the story, and yet we – the ‘you’ – know less than the narrator.

That can create a sense of immediacy, but almost amnesiac dislocation. We have to discover what we think, see, know and do. And if we don’t identify with the ‘you’ – if we feel implicated rather than attached – we can be pulled out of the story rather than brought deeper into it.

Still, this controlling aspect of second person can have an advantage. Whereas first-person narrators tell you what they thought and did, second-person narrators tell us what we thought and did.

This witnessing adds a level of reliability (even if we don’t like it). And readers aren’t daft. They know they’re not really the you-character, which means authors could use it as a tool to create surprise when the ‘you’ is unveiled later in the book.

If you want your readers to feel connected but controlled, second-person POV might be just the ticket, but it’s difficult to pull off and rare that authors of contemporary commercial fiction write an entire novel in it (though check out Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins if you want to see a good example in action). 

More likely, you’ll see shorter-form use: dedicated chapters or other narrative forms such as diary entries, letters or other missives.
Example: Curiosity, reliability and the complicit reader
In this example from Complicity (p. 9), Iain Banks uses the second-person viewpoint in which a narrator reports on the actions and thoughts of an unnamed serial killer addressed as ‘you’.
​There is another faint crunching noise as the body spasms once and then goes limp. Blood spreads blackly from his mouth over the collar of his white shirt and starts to drip onto the pale marble of the steps. [...]
     You go downstairs and walk through the kitchen, where the two women sit tied to their chairs; you leave via the same window you entered by, walking calmly through the small back garden into the mews where the motorbiked is parked.
     You hear the first faint, distant screams just as you take the bike’s key from your pocket. You feel suddenly elated.
​     You’re glad you didn’t have to hurt the women.
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Think about how you feel as you read this. It’s as if you’re being addressed, as if you’re complicit. At the very least, the prose arouses curiosity – who is this ‘you’, and how is it that the narrator knows so much about them?

Banks doesn’t present the novel fully in second person; these sections fall between those of a first-person viewpoint character, journalist Cameron Colley. As such, readers are confronted by a juxtaposition of Cameron’s version of events and what was witnessed by the narrator.


Recommendation
By all means, experiment with second-person point of view but understand its implications. If you want to draw your reader into the heart of your story, it’s a good choice. However, that connection can come at a price – a lack of control that could alienate your audience.

For that reason, consider the purpose of this narrative style and the extent to which you employ it. It might be better constrained – limited to chapters inhabited by specific viewpoint characters.

If in doubt, rewrite your scene in an alternative narrative viewpoint so you can evaluate how this affects your perception of the story as a reader.


Cited sources and related reading
  • Complicity, Iain Banks, Abacus, 1994
  • Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Tom Robbins, Random House, 2002​
  • Making Sense of Point of View (Transform Your Fiction series: 1)
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Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
2 Comments

When to indent text: Laying out narrative and dialogue in fiction

27/7/2020

21 Comments

 
This post explains when and how to indent your narrative and dialogue according to publishing-industry convention.
To indent or not to indent: A quick guide to laying out narrative and dialogue in fiction
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The purpose of first-line indents
Each new paragraph signifies a change or shift of some sort ... perhaps a new idea, piece of action, thought or speaker, even a moderation or acceleration of pace. Still, the prose in all those paragraphs within a section is connected.

Paragraph indents have two purposes in fiction:

  • Readability: They help the reader identify the shifts visually.
  • Connectivity: They indicate a journey. Indented paragraphs are related to what's come before ... part of the same scene.

First lines in chapters and new sections
Chapters and sections are bigger shifts: perhaps the viewpoint character changes, or there's a shift in timeline or location.

To mark this bigger shift in a novel, it’s conventional not to indent the first line of text in a new chapter or a new section. You might hear editorial folks refer to this non-indented text as full out.

  • This is standard with narrative and dialogue.
  • The convention applies regardless of your line spacing.

NARRATIVE LAYOUT
The following example is taken from Part 5, Chapter 2, of Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (p. 287, 2010):
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  • Paragraph 1 is the first in the chapter.
  • The first line is not indented.
  • The first lines of the paragraphs that follow it (2) are indented.
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And here's an example from Part 2, Chapter 6, p. 147, which shows how the layout works the same after a section break:
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  • Paragraph 1 is the first in the section.
  • The first line is not indented.
  • The first lines of the paragraphs that follow it (2) are indented.
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Even if an author chooses to include a design feature such as a dropped capital (sometimes called a drop cap), it's standard for that letter to be full out, as shown in the following example from To Kill a Devil (John A. Connell, p. 6, Nailhead Publishing, 2020):

  • Paragraph 1 is the first in the chapter.
  • The capital letter on the first and second lines is not indented.
  • The first line of the paragraph that follows it (2) is indented.
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DIALOGUE LAYOUT
​The same applies even if the chapter or section starts with dialogue, as in this excerpt from David Rosenfelt's Dog Tags (p. 192, Grand Central, 2010):

  • Paragraph 1 is the first in the chapter.
  • The first line is not indented.
  • The first lines of the paragraphs that follow it (2) are indented.
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Body text: dialogue and narrative
The example below from Blake Crouch's Recursion (p. 4, Macmillan, 2019) shows how the indentation works in the body text when there's a mixture of dialogue and narrative.

  • Regardless of whether the prose is narrative or reported speech, the text is indented.
  • The convention applies regardless of line spacing.
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IMPACT OF LINE SPACING
Even if you've elected to set your book file with double line spacing (perhaps at the request of a publisher, agent or editor), the indentation convention applies. Here's the Recursion example again, tweaked to show what it would look like: 
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Indenting text that follows special elements
Your novel might include special elements such as letters, texts, reports, lists or newspaper articles. Authors can choose to set off these elements with wider line spacing, but how do we handle the text that comes after?

Again, it's conventional to indent text that follows this content, regardless of whether it's narrative or dialogue. That's because of the connective function; the text is part of the same scene.

​Here are some examples from commercial fiction pulled from my bookshelves.

  1. REPORT: The Outsider, Stephen King, Hodder, 2018, p. 252
  2. LIST: Life of Pi, Yann Martel, Canongate, 2002, p. 146
  3. TRANSCRIPT: Snap, Belinda Bauer, Black Swan, 2018, p. 36
  4. RECORD: Ready Player One, Ernest Cline, Arrow, 2012, p. 300
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It's not the case that full-out text is never used, or can't be used, but fiction readers are used to conventions. When a paragraph isn't indented, they assume it's a new section, which creates a tiny disconnect.

That's what I think's happened in the example below from Kate Hamer's The Girl in the Red Coat (p. 325, Faber & Faber, 2015). Of course, it took me only a split second to work out that the narrator is referring to the preceding letter, but it's a split second that took me away from the story because I'd assumed I was looking at a section break.

​My preference would be to indent 'I touch my finger [...]' because that text is part of the scene, not a new section.
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How to create a first-line indent in Word
Let's finish with some quick guidance on creating first-line indents. 

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Avoid using spaces and tabs to create indents in Word. Instead, create proper indents. There are several ways to do this.

  • Open the Home tab (1).
  • Select your text.
  • Move your cursor to the ruler and select the top marker (2).
  • Drag it to the position of your preferred indent.
  • Right-click on the style in the ribbon (3).
  • Select 'Update Normal to Match Selection'.​
OR​
  • Open the Home tab (1).
  • Open the Styles pane via the arrow icon (4).
  • Select your text.
  • Move your cursor to the ruler and select the top marker (2).
  • Drag it to the position of your preferred indent.
  • Go to the Styles pane (5) and right-click on the style (6).
  • Select 'Update Normal to Match Selection'.​ ​
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OR
  • Open the Home tab (1).
  • Open the Styles pane via the arrow icon (4).
  • Go to the Styles pane (5) and right-click on the style (6).
  • Select 'Modify' to open the Modify Styles pane (A).
  • Click on the Format button in the bottom left-hand corner (B).
  • Select Paragraph to open the Paragraph pane (C).
  • Make sure you're in the Indents and Spacing tab.
  • Look at the Indentations section in the middle. Make sure 'First line' is selected under 'Special:' (D).
  • Adjust the first-line indent according to your preference (E).
  • Click OK (F).
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Create a new style for your full-out paragraphs using the same tools.
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  • If using the ruler, ensure the markers (2) are aligned, one on top of the other.
  • If using the styles pane, adjust the indent spacing (E) to zero.

If you need more assistance with creating styles, watch this free webinar. There's no sign-up; just click on the button and dig in.
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ACCESS WEBINAR
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
21 Comments

How to use reflexive pronouns in fiction

13/7/2020

4 Comments

 
Himself, herself, myself, themself ... check the usage of pronouns in your fiction. You might just be overworking them, such that you’re stating the obvious, modifying the pace, and reducing tension.
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Questionable usage
Reflexive pronouns can act as double tells by stating the obvious, and mar pace and tension.

Stating the obvious
  • Max grabbed a fistful of dandelion leaves and shoved them into his mouth. Needs garlic, he thought to himself.
  • Jenny wondered to herself about the dream – it had been so real, as if she’d had full control. And yet …

When it comes to internal musings, authors can ditch the reflexive pronouns. Thoughts take place inside a person’s head and, by definition, are offered only for the thinker – unless there’s telepathy going on in the novel!

Moderating pace and reducing tension
  • Max ducked, rolled himself over the floor and grabbed the Browning. Fired out two shots. Both hit home.
  • Ali sprinted down the street and swung herself into the shadows.

These are high-tension scenes. Max is in a shoot-out; Ali’s escaping danger. Every word stretches out the sentence. And as the sentence length loosens, so does the tension.

Look what happens when we remove the pronouns:

  • Max ducked, rolled over the floor and grabbed the Browning. Fired out two shots. Both hit home.
  • Ali sprinted down the street and swung into the shadows.

​The sentences shorten, the pace increases – and so does the tension.
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Usage that works
We shouldn’t omit all -self pronouns. There are occasions when a sentence works better with them. Sometimes they’re essential.

Clarity
In some cases, the pronoun is necessary for clarity. The reader can’t be sure of what the verb’s object is without it. In the examples below, removing the pronouns could leave the reader with questions: Ashamed of what? A promise to whom? Stop what? Consider whom an expert?

  • Ordinarily, she’d have been ashamed of herself, but there was no guilt – not this time.
  • I made a promise to myself never again to lose my rag over something so inconsequential.
  • He couldn’t stop himself; it took five minutes to demolish the chocolate egg.
  • I consider myself an expert, and no one will convince me otherwise.

Emphasis
The pronoun can be used to emphasize the person being discussed. Omission would leave the sentence grammatically intact but change the mood and pacing. In this case, it’s a judgement call on the author’s part.

  • Sarah told me so herself.
  • The queen herself told me.
  • John hadn’t been the only one having a hard time. I myself had been suffering from anxiety at the time.

Sense
Some sentences don’t make grammatical sense without a reflexive pronoun. Remove them and the writing leaves more than questions: it’s unreadable.

  • She had to defend herself from that monster – no two ways about it.
  • Cass doused themself in perfume.
  • Why shouldn’t he call himself the King of Hearts? Who cares if it sounds daft? Daft is good.
  • He dragged himself to the top of the stairs.
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Reflexive pronouns: mood versus clutter
At the top of this post, I offered examples of how -self pronouns can reduce tension. There will be occasions when an author wants to do exactly that.

  • I was trying to make a new life for myself. That’s all there was to it.
  • I was trying to make a new life. That’s all there was to it.

There’s a more staccato feel to the second version above that might jar if the author’s seeking a contemplative mood.

Still, too much self-ing can make even a stress-free scene overly wordy so it’s always worth thinking about whether a leaner version would be more immersive and get the reader from A to B faster.

In the first version of the triplets that follow, the pronouns introduce a chilled-out sense of laissez-faire to the movement. In the second I’ve omitted them. And in the third, I’ve ditched the mundane movement and focused on the essential beat.

  • He found himself a chair and sat down.
  • He found a chair and sat down.
  • He sat down.

  • Maxie busied themself with the coffee machine and settled down to read the letter.
  • Maxie made a coffee and settled down to read the letter.
  • Maxie read the letter.

  • She got herself up and called Mel.
  • She got up and called Mel.
  • She called Mel.

It’s always worth an author spending a little time on thinking about how much micromanagement of a scene is necessary.

Will the reader care about the chair discovery, or that Maxie had a hot drink while they were reading the letter, or that the protagonist was no longer on the sofa when she called Mel?

Perhaps. If that stuff’s central to driving the novel forward, to reflecting mood, to grounding the character in the environment, the pronoun and the stage direction might be necessary. If it’s clutter that can be removed without damaging reader engagement, lean up the scene!

Summing up
Use reflexive pronouns when they’re necessary for clarity, sense and emphasis. Otherwise, consider leaner prose that focuses on what the reader needs to know to move forward in the story.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
4 Comments

How to use PDF proofreading stamps on colour and greyscale pages

6/7/2020

6 Comments

 
Want to mark up greyscale and colour PDFs digitally? My upgraded BSI-compliant stamps now have fully transparent backgrounds and are completely free to download.
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Many of my colleagues have been using these PDF proofreading stamps for years. And they worked fine as long as the markup area was white.

However, when it came to annotating tinted elements, the markup looked messy. That's because when I created the stamps back in 2012 – all 113 of them – I took design shortcuts that meant some stamps didn’t have transparent backgrounds.

​I knew some of the stamps weren’t perfect but creating three sets had been backbreaking work and, if I'm honest, I couldn’t face returning to the project and redrawing them.

Eight years on, I decided to review the position. And, in fact, amending the problem stamps turned out to be not nearly as onerous a task as I’d expected.

What the new stamps look like
Below is a mock-up to show you the improvements. All the stamps now have transparent backgrounds, which means you can place them anywhere on the PDF page regardless of whether you’re marking up on white space, tinted boxes or photographs.
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Advantages of using stamps
If you're happy with your PDF editor's onboard annotation tools, great; carry on using them.

However, some proofreaders choose to add these stamps to their editing toolbox for the following reasons:

  • Their clients want them to use standard marks. The standard in the UK is BS 5261C:2005: 'Marks for copy preparation and proof correction'.
  • The symbols facilitate efficient and clear markup when space is limited, or writing an instruction in a comment box would be more time-consuming, or the onboard  markup tool isn't sufficiently precise. 
  • Some national editorial societies include digital markup in their core-skills training, e.g. the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP).
  • The proofreader wants a hybrid tool that facilitates the use of traditional markup language in a digital environment.

​Click on the button below to access the updated stamps. They come in red, blue and black, and can be with with Windows and Mac OS.
FREE PDF PROOFREADING STAMPS
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
6 Comments

Fiction copyediting for indie authors: Are you fit for purpose?

29/6/2020

0 Comments

 
Want to copyedit fiction for indie authors? Even if you have extensive experience of working for publishers, there are skills and knowledge you might need to acquire before making the shift.
Copyediting for indie authors
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Publishing has its own language
Fiction copyediting means something specific in a publishing company. It’s usually (there are always exceptions to the rule) the corrective work that focuses on spelling, punctuation, grammar, consistency and logic.

It’s important work – meticulous and detailed. It stops a character giving birth two months before she got pregnant; it spots when your protagonist’s eyes have changed colour; it flags up the trigger safety that doesn’t exist on the model of gun being described.

In the wider world, ‘copyediting’ can mean all sorts of things. It will include all of the above but might include a deeper level of stylistic work.

Some editors will use different terminology to describe their services, such that this middle-level editing – further down the chain than developmental or structural work but higher up than the prepublication proofread – is more intense.

Some editors even include developmental/structural work in their ‘copyediting’ service because their target clients fall into one or both of the following categories:
​
  • aren’t familiar with all the levels of editing
  • are more likely to search for terms such as ‘copyediting’ and ‘proofreading’ even though the big-picture elements of their story might also need some work
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The mismatch between language and need
Some editors work only for publishers. Some work only for indie authors. Some work for both.

That messy publishing language becomes problematic when everyone’s using one term – ‘copyediting’ – to mean different things.

Plus, none of us knows what we don’t know.

If an editor has copyedited fiction only for publishers, and then moves into the indie-author market, there’s a risk that their knowledge and skills match the needs and expectations of mainstream publishers, but not those of indie authors.

Many indie authors are self-publishing for the first time. They’ll expect a professional editor to know what they don’t. But a fiction copyeditor, just by virtue of having done something called ‘fiction copyediting’ as defined by publishers, might not know how to handle the stylistic issues in a book.

That doesn’t mean they’re a bad editor. It means they have a specific skill set that might not be what the indie author needs or asks for.

Case study

GOOD EDITOR; BAD FIT
The author
Jo Pennedanovel is navigating the independent publishing world for the first time. She’s never gone it alone so she’s working from scratch – writing, finding editorial support and a cover designer, building a promotion strategy, and learning about sales and distribution platforms.

The brief 
Jo knows that more than a proofread is required, but she’s happy with the big-picture aspects of her novel. She needs something in the middle: ‘copyediting’, she’s heard it called. So that’s what she looks for.

Jo goes online and searches for a copyeditor, finds someone who has over a decade’s worth of experience of copyediting fiction for some of the big-name publishing houses.

​If that editor’s good enough for them, they’re good enough for Jo! Jo hires the copyeditor for her book.

The outcome
Jo’s a professional and takes her writing seriously. She knows there will be outstanding glitches that were missed at copyediting stage, so she hires another editor to proofread her book. All well and good so far.

The editor fixes the outstanding proofreading glitches but notices the following:
​
  • There are over 300 viewpoint drops – most are small but still glaring to him because, well, he’s studied line craft.
  • The prose is sometimes laboured and repetitive – not because Jo’s a poor writer but because she’s immersed in the storytelling rather than the minutiae.
  • A plethora of speech tags tell of mood that’s already been adequately conveyed in the excellent dialogue.

The fix
The proofreader could ignore all the line-craft issues. After all, he’s not been commissioned to do this work and it will cut into his hourly rate. And anyway, shouldn’t the previous editor have fixed this stuff?

Still, he’s committed to editorial excellence, wants a cracking book in his portfolio, and would like to work with that author again, so he decides that ignoring these problems isn’t an option.

He could do one of the following:
​
  • Flag up the issues in a report but elect not to solve each individual problem.
  • Go the whole hog, offer suggested recasts so Jo can fix the problems easily, and write off the extra time as a marketing expense. Maybe he can persuade Jo to hire him for the copyediting stage next time.
  • Halt the proofread, go back to Jo, explain the problem and try to renegotiate the project brief.
I’ve done all three in my time. My choice was based on the author, my schedule, and the connection I felt with the project. There’s no wrong or right, just informed decision-making.

What’s gone wrong in the editing process?
So what went wrong in that case study? This problem arises because of flawed assumptions about language and responsibility.
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Language
The author and the editor are using the same language to describe different outcomes.

  • The author thinks of ‘copyediting’ as a middle-ground service between developmental/structural editing and proofreading.
  • The editor, who works mainly for publishers, considers ‘copyediting’ a non-stylistic type of work that comes after line editing.

What Jo needed was an editor who recognizes that ‘copyediting’ could mean something different in the author’s head – something like: Do what’s required to make my prose sing! I don’t know what those things are, but that’s why I’m hiring you.

​What she got was a traditional high-quality copyedit as defined by a different client type. It’s work that she needed, but not all the work she needed.
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Responsibility
A frequent fallback position on the editor’s part is this: it’s the author’s fault because they didn’t hire the right service. Jo shouldn’t have commissioned a copyedit when stylistic work was required.

That’s flawed. She hired a professional editor precisely because they’re a professional editor. She wanted them to show her what she didn’t know.

The situation is complicated further by the fact that editors define their services differently. I offer ‘line-/copyediting’. Some of my colleagues offer the same level of intervention but call it just ‘copyediting’. Others offer two distinct services: ‘line editing’ and ‘copyediting’.

Yet others don’t even call line editing ‘line editing’. It might be called ‘substantive editing’ or ‘stylistic editing’.

It is any wonder that an indie author chooses to ignore the tangled terminology and focus on collating a shortlist of editors who have extensive experience of working for traditional industry gatekeepers – publishers?
​
That works splendidly when the editors have the skills and knowledge to go beyond what a publisher might expect from a fiction copyedit. But it can fall of a cliff when the rigidity of the terminology restricts the depth of editing required.

How can editors help fix the problem?
Editors must take responsibility for the language they use and the skills they have so that they’re fit for a diverse indie-author market. That means learning and educating.
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Learn line craft
Fiction editors serving indie authors should learn line craft – the stylistic sentence-level editing that might be required.

If we don’t understand the likes of show and tell, narrative viewpoint, tense, holding suspense, dialogue craft, and so on, we should question whether we’re ready for this market.

And if we do still want to serve this market with publisher-defined copyediting, we must be explicit about the fact that we don’t offer solutions to stylistic problems in prose.

Still, being able to say we don’t offer those solutions means understanding what they are in the first place. Not recognizing them is not an option.
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Educate authors
We must go the extra mile to ensure that our online and direct communications with authors explain the different levels of editing and how we define them.

A website that boasts of our achievements but doesn’t show our understanding of the craft of fiction editing doesn’t help a beginner author make informed decisions. It serves only us, not them.

That can lead to disappointment on the author’s part. And disappointment leads to mistrust, not just with the editor who did the work but with the global editorial community in general.

Editors frequently report that editing is ‘undervalued’ and ‘underpaid’. But value and worth have to be earned. So does trust.
​
When an editor works with an indie author, but doesn’t have the skills to offer what’s required, or is ignorant of the fact that they don’t have those skills, it’s they – not the author – who is bringing down value and worth in the editing industry.

How can authors help fix the problem?
Writers can help themselves too. If you’re an indie author, and you’re not one hundred per cent sure about what you need, do the following:

Author checklist

FINDING A GOOD-FIT EDITOR
  • Learn about the various levels of editing (there's a booklet below that will help you with that).
  • Be aware that publishing language is messy. Focus on the what rather than the what-it’s-called. One person’s ‘copyedit’ might look very different from another’s. One person’s ‘line edit’ might be another’s ‘stylistic edit’.
  • Check more than the editor’s career history. Where they worked is interesting; what they did is critical. Yes, they’ve copyedited a hundred novels for Hodder & Stoughton but what did that ‘copyediting’ include? Is that what you require, or might you need something deeper, more stylistic?
  • Get more than one sample edit if not-knowing-what-you-don’t-know is in play. That will give you a glimpse of how each editor would tackle your novel; how deep they’d go, and what the problems might be.
  • Consider their training. Have they learned about, or are they teaching sentence-level fiction editing? It’s only part of the story, but it’s yet another light you can shine to see what lies beneath the glossy portfolio.
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CLICK IMAGE TO ACCESS BOOKLET AND FREE WEBINAR
Summing up
What publishers expect from a fiction copyeditor is often very different to what indie authors will want or need.

If you’re an editor who wants to offer sentence-level work for indie authors, think about the following:

  • The language you use to describe your service.
  • The indie author’s expectations.

Even if you have an extensive fiction copyediting background by virtue of having worked for a ton of mainstream publishers, there might still be a mismatch between what’s required or what’s asked for and your own definitions and experience.

​Be prepared to learn, and to show what you’ve learned when you communicate with indie authors. That’s how we build trust, value and worth.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
0 Comments

The Editing Podcast: Moving from traditional to indie publishing, with John A. Connell

22/6/2020

0 Comments

 
In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Louise and Denise talk to Barry Award-nominated thriller writer John A. Connell about moving from Berkley (Penguin USA) to independent publishing.
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Click to listen to Season 4, Episode 12
  • RATE AND REVIEW

Listen to find out more about:
  • Being a Hollywood camera operator ... Jurassic Park, Thelma and Louise, and NYPD Blue
  • Getting a publishing contract with a major press
  • The Mason Collins series
  • When publishers are no longer invested
  • Moving to independent publishing
  • Clawing back book rights
  • Using movie experience to craft a novel's scene
  • Beyond writing: what indie publishers need to do
  • Challenges and benefits of indie publishing
  • Being edited
  • Useful organizations
  • Writing a series versus standalone novels
  • Future projects

Top tips From John
  • Build a mailing list
  • Offer a free short story or novella
  • Develop a series
  • Use Facebook ads
  • Craft a great website
  • Engage with your audience
  • Get your business head on
  • Invest in appropriate editing

Contact John A. Connell
Subscribe to John's newsletter and get a free book:
  • Website: John A Connell: Gripping Thrillers With a Historical Twist
  • Email: john@johnaconnell.com
  • Facebook author page
  • John's books on Amazon US and UK

Editing bites
  • Stephen King (video): Masterclass, University of Massachusetts Lowell, 2012
  • Joanna Penn: Video marketing for authors
  • Mark Dawson's Self-Publishing Formula
  • International Thriller Writers
  • Mystery Writers of America
  • Mark Dawson's Self-Publishing Formula
​​
Ask us a question
The easiest way to ping us a question is via Facebook Messenger: Visit the podcast's Facebook page and click on the SEND MESSAGE button.

Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
0 Comments

The Editing Podcast: Editing erotica and adult fiction, S4E10

8/6/2020

0 Comments

 
In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Louise and Denise talk to fellow editor Maya Berger about working on erotica and adult fiction.
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Click to listen to Season 4, Episode 10
  • RATE AND REVIEW

Listen to find out more about:
  • Does adult fiction need editing?
  • Sorting out the language: pornography versus erotica
  • Editing in your comfort zone
  • Common problems authors struggle with
  • Sub-genres and good-fit editing
  • Evaluating an author's work

Contact Maya
  • Email: maya.berger@gmail.com
  • Website: What I Mean To Say

Editing bites
  • The Book Designer
  • The Hot Copy Podcast
​
Ask us a question
The easiest way to ping us a question is via Facebook Messenger: Visit the podcast's Facebook page and click on the SEND MESSAGE button.

Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
0 Comments

The Editing Podcast: Do you need a specialist editor?

25/5/2020

1 Comment

 
In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Louise and Denise discuss whether working with a specialist editor is necessary for all books and every type of editing.
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Click to listen to Season 4, Episode 8

Listen to find out more about:
  • Fiction versus non-fiction
  • The type of editing
  • Subject/genre

Editing bites and other resources
  • Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing), Jack Hart
  • ‘The Secrets of Story Structure’, KM Weiland
  • The Editing Podcast, S1E1: The different levels of editing
  • Switching to Fiction (online course for aspiring fiction editors)
  • Research tools for crime and thriller writers (blog post)
  • Consulting Cops

​Music credit

‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
1 Comment

The Editing Podcast: 18 writing-craft blogs for editors and authors, S4E7

18/5/2020

0 Comments

 
In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Louise and Denise chat about 18 blogs for authors and editors that offer guidance on various aspects of writing craft.
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Click to listen to Season 4, Episode 7

Listen to find out more about:
  • ALLi blog: Alliance of Independent Authors
  • Ann Handley blog
  • Articles: The Writer’s Digest
  • Articles: Tim Storm, Storm Writing School
  • Bacon Editing blog: Claire Bacon
  • Bookbaby blog
  • Clarity: Lisa Poisso, Editor and Book Coach
  • Denise Cowle Editorial Services blog: Denise Cowle
  • Helping Writers become Authors: KM Weiland
  • Jane Friedman blog
  • LibroEditing blog: Liz Dexter
  • Liminal Pages blog: Sophie Playle, Fiction Editor
  • The Creative Penn blog: Joanna Penn
  • The Editor’s Blog: Beth Hill
  • The Itch of Writing: Emma Darwin
  • The Editing Blog: Louise Harnby, Fiction Editor
  • The Radical Copyeditor blog: Alex Kapitan
  • The Subversive Copyeditor blog: Carol Saller

Editing bites and other resources
  • ​Cult Pens
  • Stein on Writing, by Sol Stein, Non Basic Stock Line, 2007
​
Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
0 Comments

How to run and grow an editing and proofreading business. Q&A, Part 2: The Editing Podcast, S4E6

12/5/2020

0 Comments

 
In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Denise and Louise answer more questions about how to run and grow an editing and proofreading business.
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Click to listen to Season 4, Episode 6

Listen to find out more about:
  • Increasing organic lead generation
  • Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) and the impact on freelancers in California
  • The benefits of working with publishers, packagers and project-management agencies
  • Content marketing: Solving clients problems
  • Facebook marketing: Ads, chatbots and website pixels
  • Google ads and sourcing professional expertise
  • Managing impostor syndrome
  • Attracting indie genre-fiction authors: content marketing and branding
  • Getting work with publishers
  • Ethical promotion to a primed audience
  • Technical writing and copy-writing
  • Choosing a business name
  • Building an editorial business on a tight budget
  • Using career expertise as a foundation for an editing specialism
  • Choosing the right training course
  • Building a marketing strategy
  • Starting an editing business when we care for young children
  • Scaling a business: Passive income streams, price increases, training, and premium services
  • Researching markets and audiences
  • Making a website visible

Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.​​
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
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How to run and grow an editing and proofreading business. Q&A, Part 1: The Editing Podcast, S4E5

11/5/2020

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In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Denise and Louise answer questions about how to run and grow an editing and proofreading business.
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Click to listen to Season 4, Episode 5

Listen to find out more about:
  • When editorial projects don't arrive on time ... how to manage it and how to prevent it
  • Dealing with burnout and procrastination
  • How to get fiction work with indie authors
  • Making time for marketing
  • Increasing efficiency
  • Contracts, and whether email is sufficient
  • What to tell publishers when we're asking to be placed on their freelance lists
  • How to link up with other editors
  • Billing in different currencies
  • What to include on an invoice
  • Starting an editing business, and the best order for tackling branding, website creation, social media networking, marketing, and investing in productivity tools

Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
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How to save money and time with book coaching: The Editing Podcast, S4E4

11/5/2020

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In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Denise and Louise chat with book coach and editor Lisa Poisso about honing story craft before embarking on expensive structural and line editing.
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Click to listen to Season 4, Episode 4

Listen to find out more about:
  • Story basics: the Plot Accelerator 
  • Why developmental/structural editing comes after book coaching
  • Genre, viewpoint, tense, character motivation and conflict, plot and subplot, and character arc
  • Book mapping, and avoiding drinking and thinking!
  • Super critiques on steroids: making a story solid
  • The dynamics of book coaching
  • Most common problems authors face
  • Super-critiques

Contacting Lisa Poisso
  • Email: lisa@lisapoisso.com
  • Website
  • Blog
  • Facebook
  • Twitter: @lisapoisso
  • Instagram: lisapoisso
  • Clarity newsletter
​
Editing bites and other resources
  • Moniack Mhor, Creative Writing Centre, Scotland
  • Start writing fiction: Free Open University course

Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
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Writing a content-marketing book. With John Espirian: The Editing Podcast, S4E3

2/5/2020

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In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Louise and Denise talk to technical writer and editor John Espirian about content marketing, editing and bringing a book to market.
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​Click to listen to Season 4, Episode 3

Listen to find out more about:
  • Content DNA - the book
  • Developing the book's concept: The shape of you
  • Writing the book
  • Tackling the editing process
  • Cover design and branding
  • The benefits of a foreword
  • Content marketing, and why it works
  • Social media focus and email-list building
  • Pricing, marketing and sales
  • Creating an audio book
  • Finding an audience to use as a springboard for business books
  • Building a personal brand that acts as a buffer
  • Targeting clients' problems and offering solutions
  • What is technical writing?
  • Who uses technical writers?

Contacting John Espirian
  • Website
  • Content DNA
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Blog

Editing bites and other resources
  • AgentQuery.com
  • The Tao of Twitter, by Mark Schaefer
  • KNOWN, by Mark Schaefer
  • Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP)
  • Col Gray, graphic design and brand design: pixels ink; YouTube​

Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
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How to manage the grammar police: The Editing Podcast

20/4/2020

2 Comments

 
In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Louise and Denise discuss the grammar police, how to manage them, and why they're nothing to do with professional editing.
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​Click to listen to Season 4, Episode 1

Listen to find out more about:
  • Who are the grammar police?
  • Social media and the grammar police
  • Pedantry versus professional editing for style, preference and flow
  • Writing style: Business, academia, web copy, creative non-fiction, fiction
  • Conventions and standards versus rules and errors
  • How and when to tell a writer about an error
  • Dealing with the grammar police

Editing bites
  • Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation, by Jane Straus
  • TextExpander

Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
2 Comments

Writing natural dialogue – using contractions

13/4/2020

3 Comments

 
Not sure if contractions are a good fit for your fiction’s dialogue? Here’s why they (nearly always) work.
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Next time you’re in the pub with friends, at the dinner table with your family, or travelling on the bus, do a bit of people-listening. They’ll speak with contractions: you’re, they’re, I’m, don’t, hadn’t, can’t and so on.

Contractions are a normal part of speech. They help us communicate faster and improve the flow of a sentence.

Watch the following videos and listen to the spoken words. They feature people with very different backgrounds, sharing different stories, and in situations that demand varying levels of formality.
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  • A philosopher presenting a TED Talk about why the universe exists
  • A fictional lawyer questioning a witness
  • A child reading a poem
  • A drug dealer describing his criminal activity
  • A reporter’s voiceover on a news programme
  • A vicar giving a sermon in a UK church
  • A queen broadcasting a message to the nation

The people talking have one thing in common: they use contractions when they speak ... most (though not all) of the time.

That’s why when we want to write natural dialogue – dialogue that flows with the ease of real-life speech – contractions work.

How contractions affect the flow of dialogue
Take a look at this excerpt from No Dominion by Louise Welsh (Kindle edition, John Murray, 2017).
     ​He settled himself on the chair. ‘I don’t know where you’ve just come from, but round here nothing’s odd.’ He emphasised the word, making it sound absurd. ‘People come, people go. Sometimes they need something. Sometimes they’ve got something I need. We trade and they go on their way.’
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Here’s the contraction-free recast. It reads awkwardly, and leaves us unconvinced that what’s in our mind’s ear bears any relation to what we would have heard had this been real speech. And that means we’re questioning the authenticity of the story rather than immersing ourselves in it.
     ​He settled himself on the chair. ‘I do not know where you have just come from, but round here nothing is odd.’ He emphasised the word, making it sound absurd. ‘People come, people go. Sometimes they need something. Sometimes they have got something I need. We trade and they go on their way.’

Contractions and genre
Some authors avoid contractions because of the genre they’re writing in. You’re more likely to see this in historical fiction than contemporary commercial fiction but it’s not strictly genre-specific and is more an issue of authorial style.
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Here’s an excerpt from a contemporary psychological mystery, The Wych Elm (Penguin, 2019, p. 71). Tana French uses contractions in the narrative and dialogue. The speech sounds natural; the narrative that frames it is informal.

     ​‘Oh, yeah. Now’s when you’ll notice anything out of place. And you’ll want to get the gaff back in order, and you can’t do that till you’ve done the look-round.’ Back in order-- It hadn’t even occurred to me to think about what shape my apartment might be in.
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Compare this with Our Mutual Friend (Wordsworth Editions, 1997, p. 235). Dickens, writing literary fiction in the 1860s, still uses contractions in dialogue, although he avoids them in his more formal but wickedly tart narrative.
     ‘We’ll bring him in,’ says Lady Tippins, sportively waving her green fan. ‘Veneering for ever!’
     ‘We’ll bring him in!’ says Twemlow.
     ‘We’ll bring him in!’ say Boots and Brewer.
     ​Strictly speaking, it would be hard to show cause why they should not bring him in, Pocket-Breaches having closed its little bargain, and there being no opposition. However, it is agreed that they must ‘work’ to the last, and that, if they did not work, something indefinite would happen. It is likewise agreed they are all so exhausted with the work behind them, and need to be so fortified for the work before them, as to require peculiar strengthening from Veneering’s cellar.
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Now look at Ambrose Parry’s The Way of All Flesh (Canongate Books, 2018). The authors (Parry is the pseudonym used by Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman) don’t avoid contractions completely but the sparing usage does give the dialogue a more archaic feel. Here’s an excerpt from p. 259.
     ​‘I know only that it is a private matter, and I know not to ask further detail. You would be wise to follow suit, unless you would rather Dr Simpson was made aware of your curiosity.’
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I doubt anyone would be surprised when I say that the setting is 1847. And so it works. However, if the novel were set in 2019, there’d be a problem. We’d consider those characters unrealistically pompous and the dialogue overblown.

​Contractions, pace and voice
The decision to use or avoid contractions is a tool that authors can use to deepen character voice.

Specific contracted forms might enable readers to imagine regional accents, social status and personality traits such as pomposity.

P.G. Wodehouse is a master of dialogue. Bertie Wooster is a wealthy young idler from the 1920s. Jeeves is his savvy valet. The dialogue between the two pops off the page and Wodehouse uses or avoids contractions to make the characters’ voices distinct.
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  • Jeeves’s speech is often uncontracted. This moderates the pace of the dialogue and helps to render his voice as serious, formal, patient and long-suffering.
  • Bertie’s speech is often contracted. This accelerates the dialogue and helps to render his voice as flighty, foolish and careless.

You can see it in action in The Inimitable Jeeves (Kindle version, Aegitus, 2019).
     ‘Mr Little tells me that when he came to the big scene in Only a Factory Girl, his uncle gulped like a stricken bull-pup.’
     ‘Indeed, sir?’
     ‘Where Lord Claude takes the girl in his arms, you know, and says—’
     ‘I am familiar with the passage, sir. It is distinctly moving. It was a great favourite of my aunt’s.’
     ‘I think we’re on the right track.’
     ‘It would seem so, sir.’
     ‘In fact, this looks like being another of your successes. I’ve always said, and I always shall say, that for sheer brains, Jeeves, you stand alone. All the other great thinkers of the age are simply in the crowd, watching you go by.’
     ​‘Thank you very much, sir. I endeavour to give satisfaction.’
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In Oliver Twist (Wordsworth Classics, 1992, p. 8), Dickens contracts is not (ain’t) and them (’em) to indicate the low social standing of Mrs Mann, who runs a workhouse into which orphaned children are farmed.
     ‘Why, it’s what I’m obliged to keep a little of in the house, to put into the blessed infants’ Daffy, when they ain’t well, Mr Bumble,’ replied Mrs Mann as she opened a corner cupboard, and took down a bottle and glass. ‘I’ll not deceive you, Mr B. It’s gin.’
     ‘Do you give the children Daffy, Mrs Mann?’ inquired Bumble, following with his eyes the interesting process of mixing.
     ‘Ah, bless ’em, that I do, dear as it is,’ replied the nurse. ​‘I couldn’t see ’em suffer before my very eyes, you know, sir.’
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Contractions and their impact on stress and tone
You can use or omit contractions in order to force where the stress falls in a sentence.

Compare the following:
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  • ‘I can’t believe you said that,’ Louise said.
  • ‘I cannot believe you said that,’ Louise said.

By not using a contraction in the second example, the stress on ‘cannot’ is harder. The change is subtle but evident. With can’t the mood is one of disbelief tempered with a whining tone; with cannot the disbelief remains but the tone is angry.

Here’s another excerpt from The Way of All Flesh (p. 140). The speaker is a surgeon, Dr Ziegler.
     ​‘I believe it is important to provide the best possible care for the patients regardless of the manner in which they got themselves into their present predicament,’ Ziegler continued. ‘Desperate people are often driven to do desperate things. I have known young women to take their own lives because they could not face the consequences of being with child; and some because they could not face their families discovering it.’
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Parry’s dialogue doesn’t just evoke a historical setting. The style of the speech affects the tone too. The voice is compassionate, the mood stoic. However, the lack of contractions renders the tone precise and careful.

On p. 142, Raven – a medical student turned sleuth – talks with the matron about medical charlatanry:

  • ‘Aye, though there is worse,’ said Mrs Stevenson.

Using there is forces the stress on is, and in consequence the tone is resigned. With there’s the stress would have fallen on worse, and we might have assumed a more conspiratorial tone, as if she were about to divulge a secret.

Contractions and narration style
If you’re wondering whether to reserve your contractions for dialogue only, consider who the narrator is.

Let’s revisit Tana French (p. 1). The viewpoint character is a privileged man called Toby, the setting contemporary Dublin. What’s key here is that the narration viewpoint style is first person.

It is Toby who reports the events of the mystery; the narrative voice belongs to him. His narration register is therefore the same as his dialogue register – relaxed, colloquial – and the author, accordingly, retains the contractions in the narrative.
     I wasn’t abused as a kid, or bullied in school; my parents didn’t split up or die or have addiction problems or even get into any but the most trivial arguments [...] I know it wasn’t that simple.
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For sections written in third-person limited, the narrative voice would likely mirror the viewpoint character’s style of speaking. However, if you shift to a third-person objective viewpoint, where the distance between the characters and the readers is greater, the narrative might handle contractions differently to dialogue. It's a style choice you'll have to make.

Guidance from Chicago
Still a little nervous? Here’s some sensible advice from The Chicago Manual of Style, section 5.105:
‘Most types of writing benefit from the use of contractions. If used thoughtfully, contractions in prose sound natural and relaxed and make reading more enjoyable. Be-verbs and most of the auxiliary verbs are contracted when followed by not: are not–aren’t, was not–wasn’t, cannot–can’t, could not–couldn’t, do not–don’t, and so on. A few, such as ought not–oughtn’t, look or sound awkward and are best avoided. Pronouns can be contracted with auxiliaries, with forms of have, and with some be-verbs. Think before using one of the less common contractions, which often don’t work well in prose, except perhaps in dialogue or quotations.’

Evaluate the sound
Here are three ways to help you evaluate the effectiveness of contracted or contracted-free dialogue:

1. Read the dialogue aloud: Is it difficult or awkward to say it? Does it sound unnatural to your ear? Do you stumble? Does it feel laboured, like you’re forcing the flow? If so, recast it with contractions. If the revised version is smoother, and the integrity of the setting is retained, go with the contracted forms.

2. Ask someone else to read the dialogue: Objectivity is almost impossible when it comes to our own writing. If the plan is that no one but you will ever read your book, write your dialogue the way you want to write it and leave it at that. If, however, you’re writing for readers too, and want to give them the best experience possible, fresh eyes (and ears) will serve you well.

You could even give your readers two versions of the dialogue sample – one with contractions and one without – and ask them which flows better and reads most naturally.

3. Head for YouTube: Dig out examples of speech by people whose backgrounds, environments and historical settings are similar to those of your characters. Watching characters in action will give you confidence to place on the page what can be heard from the mouths of those on the screen.

Summing up
Whether to use contractions or not in dialogue is a style choice. There are no rules. However, a style choice that renders dialogue stilted and unrealistic is not good dialogue.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books