After reading a multitude of books on how to write a novel, and more on how to write a mystery, I can give other aspiring authors a heads up that might save them some time and irritation. Here are a few of my learned rules:
1. Never use numbers in your writing; separating ideas is all about paragraphs
2. The poor industry professionals who may one day be forced to read your work might be impressed by variety in your use of adjectives, but are certain to be irritated by the same approach to punctuation. Consistently wrong is better than half right.
3. Ignore all the instructions from authors who have sold millions of books, except one. It doesn’t matter which instruction, but pick one and then review your writing against it. If you try to bear in mind all the new wisdom sucked out of a how to write book, you will fail.
4. Be patient with yourself. Yes, your writing does suck, and all the poor friends and relatives you coerce into reading it think so. It will only improve, though, if you keep working at it and you keep forcing them to read new drafts.
5. Accept that your first draft is full of lazy linguistic crap, and that your twelfth draft will still harbour examples of all the learner writer’s sins. After about a thousand drafts of the book I’m working on, I searched the word ‘big’ and subsequently eliminated more than a hundred occurrences where it added exactly nothing to what I was describing. We use words like big, nice, and good often without thought, and usually because we couldn’t be stuffed thinking of a better word. Is a big handful more than a handful, and does it have a quality that makes it lesser than a good handful? Could you have a bad handful? No, please stop thinking that thought, this is a family blog.
6. Make a point once, preferably by showing what your characters are doing. Don’t make the point again by telling your readers what those characters are thinking while they’re doing those things, and when you’ve made the point, stop making it See how irritating it is when some other fool does it? Delete everything except the first sentence of this rule and everyone will be happier.
7. Pay attention to what Word is telling you about green underlined grammar novelties and red underlined spelling queries, but don’t always accept its corrections. The American dolts who bring Word to us allow us to set UK or American English as the language for our computers, but that makes no difference to the always American spelling recommended. Americans were frightened in infancy by the letter ‘u’ and many wear chains of u-shaped macarroni around their necks to ward off sudden attacks of correct English spelling. So your computer will always tell you that armour is not what a knight wears, he wears armor. Idiots.
8. All adverbs are bad. Anything ending in the letters ‘ly’ is lazily thought out. Search your work for those letters followed by a space. Then go have a cup of tea and calm down. Yes, it will be a …large job, but your writing will be the better for it
9. More adjectives are not necessarily better, unless you’re channeling Thomas Hardy, in which case off you go into the wind-stirred, fragrant, sun-drenched, daisy-strewn meadow with the rest of your lost Hippie friends. Think of Hemingway. He wrote a famous book that goes:
An old man wanted to show his village he was still useful so he went out and caught a big fish. A shark ate it and he went home.
Now that’s writing! And he even got away with using ‘big!’