Tag: punctuation

So how do you know if your book isn’t finished?

I’m doing the agency rounds for book number 3 at the moment. As you’d expect, the submission criteria don’t vary that much between them:

  • Covering letter
  • Synopsis
  • First fifty pages or the first three chapters.

A lot of the agencies also post some helpful hints about presentation, and increasingly, recommendations for literary consultants – which I’ve talked about before.

Anyway, I came across the  Caroline Davidson Literary Agency who, according to their entry on LitRejections, were not interested in any of the following:

Chick Lit, Romance, Erotica, Crime, Thrillers, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Poetry, Children’s Books, YA, Or Non-Fiction in these areas: Autobiographies, Memoirs, Conspiracy Theories, Educational Textbooks, Local History, Occult, PhD Theses, Self-Help, Unfortunate Personal Experiences, True Crime, or War Stories.

Bloody hell, I thought, what are they interested in?  I was intrigued enough to head over to their website to take a look, and under submissions guidelines, I found this:

What we are looking for in a novel »

A good title; an engaging story with a beginning, middle and end; vivid, memorable characters whom one cares about; superb dialogue; a trans­porting sense of time and place; accuracy of detailing; psycho­logical plaus­ibility; an intriguing beginning and memorable ending.

In addition, what fills us with joy is the writer who has a palpable love of language; who always chooses precisely the right words; eschews cliché; handles pacing with the grace of a dancer or musician; conjures up moods and atmospheres with precision and panache. His or her spelling, punctuation and grammar will be immaculate.

First novels are welcomed at CDLA, but only if they fit all the requirements above.

And there you have it:  all they’re looking for is a bloody good book. At the very least this is what every writer should be aiming for.

A bit further down, we have a few more gems that tell you whether or not your book is in a fit state to be published:

The classic signs of an ‘unpolished’ novel are as follows:

  • you haven’t actually finished it
  • you haven’t revised it
  • you’re still at the first or second draft stage
  • you haven’t read it out aloud and improved it in the light of that experience
  • you haven’t given the novel to test readers (i.e both men and women of different ages and from varying backgrounds) and acted on their detailed feedback.

Points 1–3 should be obvious, and I will keep banging on about point number 4: read every page in a loud clear voice to hear how it sounds. There’s no better way to catch awkward sentences and an overabundance of dialogue tags. After you’ve read your work for the ninth time, missing/misplaced words will just wash over you because you’re not actually reading at this stage; you’re remembering. Read it out loud, and watch the mistakes fly out at you.

The Petulant Poetess Punctuation Guide.

Punctuation has become something of an obsession of mine over the past few years. I think this is because I spent the majority of my working life not really worrying about it. (As a computer programmer, the only punctuation I ever had to deal with was the semi-colon.)
When I learned you couldn’t just throw down a comma when you felt like taking a breath; that you don’t just drop in a semi-colon when you’re bored of using full stops; that two exclamations marks is always one too many. . . . Well, I’m afraid to say I became a bit of a punctuation Nazi. I read book after book, studied at various schools of religion and criticized others who had yet to see the light.

There’s nothing as irritating as the suddenly converted.

Anyway, I’m over that now. As many have said, punctuation are road signs to the reader, and when you know what you’re doing then there’s no reason why you drop in the occasional diversion. There are lots of rules, and lots of them conflict, so in the end you just have to settle with what you’re comfortable with.

Here’s my favourite example: the em-dash is used as a pause or sudden interruption.

She was cheap—or so he said—and would make a terrible mother.

Nothing wrong with that, except I’ve never been happy with the way such an interruption looks on the page. Something about it always struck me as rather heavy-handed, so I use the less common, and often frowned-upon, en-dash variation.

She was cheap – or so he said – and would make a terrible mother.

To me, that looks much better even if it’s not strictly correct. On the other hand, the em-dash looks fine if the interruption occurs at the end of a line:

‘What did you just call me, Douglas?’
‘I called you a—’
She slapped him – hard.

So I like to mix and match.

I tend to dip into quite a few punctuation guides when I’m stuck for a particular rule, or looking for some way to give a piece of writing more clarity and/or impact. While I’ve been working on The Quisling Orchid I’ve discovered that my favourite reference comes (once again) from a rather unlikely source.

The Petulant Poetess is a site dedicated to Harry Potter fan-fiction, but it also hosts a very good punctuation guide. The guide itself follows the Chicago Manual of Style pretty much, but it’s very compact and has adapted to publishing on the web (where it can be quite difficult to indent a paragraph, for example).

If you’re stuck for the comma rules, or your not sure if it’s safe to use a semi-colon, then it’s definitely worth a look.