The Elements of Active Prose

by Tahlia Newland

  Contents

  Cover

  Foreword

  1 Introduction

  What Makes Good Prose?

  Rules or Guidelines?

  Follow Your Gut, But ...

  Passive Writing is Not the Same as Passive Voice

  Good Writing is More Than Good Grammar

  Attitude is Important

  Voice

  Editing Necessity and Process

  2 The Broad Sweep

  Plot

  Point of View

  Tense

  Tension

  Transitions

  Showing and Telling

  Descriptions

  World Building

  Characters

  Dialogue

  3 Cut the Clutter

  4 Activate Your Prose

  5 Clarifying Common Confusions

  UK & US Differences

  6 Choosing an Editor

  7 Giving & Receiving Feedback

  A Review Structure

  Recognising Personal Preferences

  A Beta Readers Checklist

  How to Handle Negative Feedback

  The Good News

  8 Appendices

  Keep in Touch.

  My Fiction

  About the Author

  What the Awesome Indies Offers Authors.

  The Elements of Active Prose

  Writing Tips to Make Your Prose Shine

  Tahlia Newland

  The Elements of Active Prose: Writing Tips to Make Your Prose Shine

  Copyright © 2014 Tahlia Newland. All rights reserved

  Published by AIA Publishing

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9942192-2-0

  This book or any potion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher or author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Please purchase only authorised electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Cover design by Velvet Wings Design.

  Edited by Kevin Berry.

  Foreword

  This book is the result of my search for an answer to the question: what makes good prose? I gleaned the information in this book from various places: workshops I attended, courses I undertook, books and blogs I read, and mainstream publishers, authors and editors whom I worked with and talked to. I searched for the answer over a period of five years while I wrote and refined my Diamond Peak Series. Even when the manuscript of the first book, Lethal Inheritance, was doing the query rounds of the big publishers with my agent, Debbie Golvan, I continued my study and line edited my book again. I found pearls in a variety of places, but never did I find all the vital information in one place.

  When I began writing reviews of both mainstream and indie published books, I discovered that many indie books lacked the quality of prose I saw in mainstream fiction. Though the level of copy editing was adequate in some—and not so adequate in others—few of them had been line edited, hence the problem. When I began doing manuscript appraisals and, after gaining an editing qualification, offering editing services, I shared the tips I’d learnt with my clients. Since the same issues repeated themselves, I wrote notes to save me rewriting the information every time I needed to explain something. Those notes, written to address the common issues I found in authors’ works, became more comprehensive over time, and now form the basis of this book.

  I will only touch lightly on the big picture aspects of fiction writing, and apart from clarifying a few confusions that I see often, I won’t be dealing with grammar and punctuation—plenty of books cover those topics. This book focuses primarily on line editing skills

  I am grateful to the many teachers I’ve had and would, in particular, like to thank Australian editor Selena Hannet Hutchins for her excellent tuition. Thank you also to the many on-line sources written by a variety of tutors more knowledgeable than I, in particular, Kirsten Lamb, Roz Morris, Jacqui Murray and Jamie Gould for their informative blogs on a variety of writing topics. To Mary Maddox, Brent Meske, and Angela M. Blount who read this book before publication and gave valuable suggestions, thank you. And a special thanks to Angela for her concise summary of the elements of a professional book review. I would also like to thank the Awesome Indies reviewers—too numerous to mention individually, but you know who you are—for their support in my writing journey and in particular for helping me to help authors to improve their writing.

  Also a thank you to Kevin Berry for his excellent editing job and his encouragement to extend the book beyond my initial ideas.

  I hope you find this book helpful, for that is my intention in writing it.

  1

  Introduction

  Before we get down to details, I’d like to set the background against which I wrote this book. Some authors can get quite emotional about anything that looks remotely like a rule, and I’d like to reassure these authors that dictating a set way of writing is not my aim here. These points are purely for authors’ education, something for them to understand so that they can apply these tips where and when appropriate.

  What Makes Good Prose?

  “Beautiful writing is when every word is the right word, in its right place and there for a reason. There is nothing extraneous. The words flow so smoothly that the reader is transported beyond the words. They even forget they are reading.” Elizabeth Weiss, publisher at Allen and Unwin, Australia.

  “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader — not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” E.L. Doctorow, author of Billy Bathgate.

  “Writers we in time call ‘great’ tend to follow all the rules of good writing. Spare, interesting, easy to read, easy to understand to the point we forget that we are reading.” G J Berger, award-winning author of South of Burnt Rocks, West of the Moon.

  Everyone has a different answer to the question of what makes good writing, but all point to the same elements: a smooth read with nothing that pulls you out of the story or makes you aware that you’re reading, well-chosen words and no extraneous ones, and a variety of sentence structures with a clear meaning and interesting rhythm.

  What isn’t good writing is anything that makes you go ‘eh?’ or ‘huh?’ or that seems clumsy. Anything that makes you aware of the words is not good writing, and that includes anything that comes across as pretentious. That’s why writing coaches advise not to try to impress and not to use big words when simple ones will do.

  The next question is: How do you write good prose? But answering this question raises a few issues, because as soon as you start to lay out guidelines, people will turn them into rules and stick by them even when they aren’t appropriate, so we need to address this first.

  Rules or Guidelines?

  The human mind has a tendency to see things dualistically. We assume that if this thing is good, then its opposite must be bad, and if this thing is bad, it must always be bad. We also have a tendency to solidify ideas so that a general suggestion, in our mind, becomes a hard and fast rule. If we are to avoid these traps, we need to examine our assumptions.

  Writing is an area where we can see this at work. Don't consider these principles as prescriptive rules to be followed slavishly. They are guidelines to help us make our prose better, and they can be ignored when character voice dictates that it would sound wrong.

  If you think of these tips as rules, you may find them restrictive. You may feel that if you pay them too much attention your creativity will be compromised, but the restriction is in your mind, not in the guidelines themselves. The idea is to use these guidelines in a way that will hel
p, not hinder, you. Don’t concern yourself with them on your first draft when you’re just trying to get the story out while the inspiration is flowing. Use them at the self-editing stage to turn your telling into showing, to tighten up your prose and make it more interesting, and use them as a diagnostic tool to help you work out why a scene isn’t as powerful as it should be.

  What I’m sharing here are guidelines, not rules; though how you apply them is important. However, there are rules for grammar and punctuation, and if you break them, you run the risk of being misunderstood; for example, when your adjectival clause doesn’t relate to the right verb. You’ll also look like an amateur and have your book rejected in disgust by anyone who recognises your mistakes.

  At the same time, some aspects of punctuation are flexible, and it is important to know where those areas are. You must know the difference between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’, ‘their’ and ‘there’, ‘reign’ and ‘rein’ and so on, but in some respects, UK English usage differs from US English usage, and publishers’ style guides vary in some areas. For example, UK/Australian English style guides allow fewer commas than the more prescriptive Chicago Manual of Style, and leave out many of the periods that Americans use in abbreviations—I’m using Australian conventions here. The important thing is to be consistent with your usage throughout, and the overriding factor in ‘correctness’ is whether the usage makes the meaning clear or obscures it, and whether it adds or detracts from the flow and rhythm of the reading experience.

  Em dashes and semi colons have clear rules that you should not ignore, but they do have various uses, and where one editor may use an em dash, another may use a semi colon and neither may be wrong. Also, grammar usage does change with the times; for example, split infinitives are acceptable these days where the unsplit version sounds weird, but the correct form should still be used where it sounds okay—why not? Fragments are seen as a valid way to add rhythmical emphasis to prose and maintain naturalness in dialogue. In dialogue the authenticity of the characters’ speech patterns always has precedence over grammar rules. Modern people speak in contractions, so use them.

  If you’re already a well-known author, you might be able to get away with flaunting writing rules; for example, Tim Winton, a popular Australian author, didn’t use any speech marks in his book Breath. I found it made the book difficult to read, and it made me very aware of the writing, but his publisher accepted it and, therefore, so did the reading public. But he isn’t a self-published author fighting the stigma of poor writing. Even if you can get away with it, why ignore convention unless you have a very good reason? Perhaps I missed something, but the lack of quotation marks in Mr Winton’s book detracted from the story, at least for me, and the only reason one should flaunt convention is if it improves the book. Perhaps he simply wanted to make a statement. Clearly, he has the status to do so, but most of us don’t.

  Guidelines, such as those in this book, steer us away from overusing certain things and help us to see options that may be more interesting and more evocative than what we might write in our first draft. I don’t see the points I outline here as rules, more as warnings. I’m not saying that you should never use the constructions I suggest you avoid; I’m saying your writing will be better if you don’t use them too often. Frankly, though, ignoring this kind of advice risks quick rejection from publishers, possibly even before they finish the first chapter.

  There are fashions in style too. Active rather than passive writing is a modern style—more about that later. You can ignore modern trends, but unless you write your old style extremely well, be prepared to not rate so well against books that do follow the trends, because trends are a response to reader preferences. After studying this book, you should understand how to make your action sequences come alive. Ignore active writing in such scenes and your writing is likely to appear lacklustre.

  There are tips to help us lay out our novels. For example, those that help us see if our first page has the elements needed to hook the readers. I wouldn’t set out to write a first page according to the tips; I’d write the story and then check that it did grab the readers; if it didn’t, then I’d look at the tips.

  Tips for structuring plots, developing characters, writing realistic dialogue and so on abound in writing books and on the internet, and tips on writing good prose follows. I see all of these as tools, not rules, to be used where they are relevant and discarded where they aren’t. The skill of the author and editor is in knowing where they are relevant. The understanding comes from reading widely and recognising what works and what doesn’t. My advice is to use these tips when self-editing your work and discover what they do to your writing; after a while, you will naturally use them where necessary and ignore them when there is a reason for an alternative.

  Perhaps some people naturally write excellent prose from the beginning. I wasn’t one of those people, but through applying the principles in this book, my writing improved enormously. After self-editing five novels and editing numerous novels for others, I no longer need to consciously apply these elements when I write. Their use is natural to me now, as is the intuitive understanding of where they do not apply. It’s the same as dancing; everyone can dance, but studying and practising the technique of dancing transforms your dancing from that of an amateur to that of a professional. Once internalised, the technique enhances the dancer’s creativity.

  Follow Your Gut, But ...

  If these are not rules, how do you know when to apply them and when not to?

  Follow your gut feeling … but … make sure you’re listening to the right feeling.

  The gut feeling you need to follow is the part of you that knows. Often it’s the part we don’t want to hear, so we don’t really listen. We pretend to listen, but what we hear is laziness or defensiveness in disguise. Perhaps we don’t want to do the work required to go through our manuscript one more time, or we’re impatient to say it’s finished, or we don’t want to do what someone else tells us to do, so we ignore the shimmer of unease in the pit of our stomach. We push it away and pretend it isn’t there, but that’s the feeling we need to listen to, the one that tells us whether what we’ve written sounds right or not.

  Passive Writing is Not the Same as Passive Voice

  Though I do sometimes appear to use them as such, the terms passive writing and passive prose are not synonymous with ‘telling’. However, they do contribute to it, so in some cases, what applies to one also applies to the other. Active prose is less likely to have a ‘told’ feel even when you are telling. The important distinction to make is that the terms passive writing and passive prose do not refer to passive voice. Passive voice is only one example of passive prose.

  According to Wikipedia, passive voice is where:

  ‘The grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb—that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role.

  ‘For example, in the passive sentence “The tree was pulled down”, the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences “Someone pulled down the tree” and “The tree is down” are active sentences.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice

  Another way of identifying passive voice is where the subject that does the action is not specified or is placed before the action. Note the passive voice in italics in the previous sentence. It’s stronger to have a specific subject up front. E.g. Prose is particularly passive where the author does not specify the subject that does the action, or they place it after the action. Passive voice is not grammatically incorrect and is useful where you wish to remove ownership of an action or make something sound remote and authoritative, but when used generally in fiction, it is simply not very exciting, and prose peppered with it soon becomes dull.

  But passive writing is more than just the use of passive voice. Your writing can be free of passive voice as defined above an
d still be passive writing. The trouble with passive writing is that it isn’t as engaging as active writing. It isn’t immediate, meaning that it doesn’t seem to be happening now, and it doesn’t draw the reader into the action. The scene itself may be dramatic, but the writing leaves the reader outside the characters and the events. Such writing is uninviting, or rather cold, like a blind date with nothing to say. If you’re ever reading something that, despite feeling as if it should, just isn’t holding you, it may be because the writing is passive.

  Passive writing is common from beginning writers and in self-published books that haven’t had a line editor. It was how I wrote before I knew better, and my early drafts of the Diamond Peak series were full of it. I don’t write like that anymore, and I’m very glad that I learned not to before I published my books. The rest of this section will give you the information you need to write active prose—albeit expressed only briefly.

  Good Writing is More Than Good Grammar

  Good grammar does not always equal good writing.

  What? With all the fuss that people make over editing these days, it’s easy to lose sight of the writing because we’re too busy looking at the grammar and punctuation. The old saying that expresses this is: you can’t see the forest for the trees.

  This is why a copy edit is not enough to ensure that writing is of a professional standard. A copy edit focuses only on the trees. It will check that each tree is straight and well pruned, but there is more to a beautiful forest than straight trees. The occasional bent, cracked or fallen one adds interest and variety, but if most of them are broken, the forest is a mess we can’t negotiate, or it is so ugly that we don’t want to go there. Vines, ferns, epiphytes and shrubs add colour and texture, but too many of them obscure the trees, make the forest impenetrable and, at the very least, throw us into sensory overload. Clumped together, they prevent us from seeing any one of them to its best advantage.