(AND OTHER TIPS FOR AUTHORS)
1-- Yes. German.
Only German capitalizes common nouns. English does not. Capitalize the noun only when it is part of
an official title, as in “CBS News interviewed President Barack Obama.” But
“Hillary Clinton is running for president.” As the letters editor at a major
metropolitan daily newspaper, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people
write sentences such as this: “I think our City Council is wasting the
Taxpayer’s money on building a new Bus Lane.” As they say in German, “Nein!”
Lower-case those nouns. And check that apostrophe while you’re at it. I’m sure
the money isn’t coming from just one taxpayer. Correct sentence? “I think our
city council is wasting the taxpayers’ money on building a new bus lane.”
2--
De-clutter. Think about eliminating those unnecessary explanatory phrases that
mire your poor protagonist in syntactical quicksand: “I saw that there was a
beautiful bouquet of roses in a vase on the table.” Better: “There was a
beautiful bouquet of roses in a vase on the table.” There’s really no need to
say that your protagonist saw something as a preamble to describing what he or
she saw. The reader will know intuitively that the “I” in your novel is the one
who saw the roses. You can do this for third-person protagonists, too. Opt for:
“He’d never heard such nonsense in his life,” instead of “He felt that he had
never heard such nonsense in his life.” Say “The thunderstorm scared him,”
rather than “He felt scared by the thunderstorm.”
3--
The least said, the better. The fewer words you use, the more evocative the
scene will be in your reader’s imagination. Don’t bog your prose down in
“whiches” and “thats.” That kind of language is for lawyers, not authors: “The
dog that my neighbor used to have, which was a cocker spaniel that died years
ago, liked to lie on the porch.” Yikes! Talk about a convoluted chasing of the
authorial tail! Try this instead: “My neighbor’s cocker spaniel, dead these
many years, liked to lie on the porch.”
4--
Choose active over passive. Make the subject of your sentence take the action,
rather than focusing on the object that received it. Example: “The boy was hit
in the eye by the hockey puck.” For something shorter, sweeter and to the
point, give the action to the puck: “The hockey puck hit the boy in the eye.”
5--
Trust your reader to fill in the blanks. I once read a manuscript that
described a woman’s trip to a grocery store in San Antonio. She left her house,
pressed her key fob to unlock her car door, opened the door, got into the
driver’s seat, closed the car door, turned the key in the ignition, backed out
of the driveway, drove to the store (and on the way, the author named every
street she drove on), pulled into the parking lot, turned off the engine, got
out of the car, locked the door and went into the store. Whew. But the author
wasn’t done quite yet. Once inside the store, the woman went to the produce
department and the author proceeded to describe every fruit and vegetable on
display, as well as all the customers shopping in that aisle. He could have
written instead: “Cathy went to the store and bought a bag of oranges,” and the
reader would have instinctively known that Cathy did all the minutiae involving
her car, without needing the details written out. The other customers should
have been described only if they were going to play some role in the plot;
otherwise, the reader will understand, without all the gory details, that other
people were shopping at the same time as Cathy.
6--
Chuck the chuckles. Use “said.” It’s simple and unobtrusive. “I remember when
you slipped on the banana peel,” he chuckled. Actually, he couldn’t have.
Listen to real people talk. If they’re chuckling, they stop to say something.
They can’t chuckle and talk at the same time without snorting and choking.
7--
What’s in a name? Give your characters names appropriate for the time period
they’re living in, or you’ll shoot down your story’s credibility. I read a
novel once whose heroine lived during the Civil War. The author had named her
Jennifer. Sorry, but Jennifer is a 20th century name which came into
popular usage after George Bernard Shaw used it in his 1906 play, The Doctor’s
Dilemma. Before that, it was known only in Cornwall. Is your protagonist a 14th
century mystic sighing away her days in a crumbling and drafty convent? Great,
but don’t call her Kailey or Alyssa.
8--
Listen to that gut feeling. If something isn’t working in your novel, whether
it’s a paragraph, a single sentence or a whole subplot, let it go and try a
different approach. When you try to force something that doesn’t work, it reads
to editors, literary agents and publishers like you forced it. You can’t fool
them.
9--
If you’re writing an article for a magazine or newspaper, all the above rules
apply, except of course, the one about names. Show respect for the submission
guidelines, especially on word counts. At the newspaper where I work, we have a
policy that letters must be no more than 150 words long. Yet, people keep
sending in 500-word missives and are miffed when they’re not published. When I
was a reporter, I quickly learned to write my stories to length because I found
that if I didn’t, the first thing the copy editors would cut was always the
paragraph I loved best. Spare yourself that grief and stick to the assigned
word count.
10--
To learn from the technique and style of a genius, read The Lonely Passion of
Judith Hearne or The Luck of Ginger Coffey, two novels by Brian Moore. He can
deliver a devastating one-two punch to your emotions with just three words. Not
one word is wasted. That’s what you’re aiming for.
Naomi Lakritz has been writing and editing at daily newspapers for
37 years. She is a columnist, editorial writer and the letters editor at the
Calgary Herald. She owns Naomi Lakritz Editing Services, based in Calgary,
Canada, and edits manuscripts, website content, academic papers and a variety
of other documents. She also translates from French and Italian into English.
Her website is www.quantumorange.net and
she can be reached at njlakritz@shaw.ca
