, Author at Ann Henry Editor and Author

He Said, She Said

It has been suggested that said is the most beautiful word in the English language, and that is certainly true for writers. Said is short, simple, straight forward and, best of all, unobtrusive. This is what you want when you are writing a section of dialogue since, most of the time, what’s important to the story is what is being said as opposed to how it’s being said.

Take a look at the following bit of dialogue:

“Kyle, is that cat dead?” asked Serena.

“I doubt it. He’s probably just sleeping,” replied Kyle.

“Should I try to wake him?” inquired Serena.

“That might be a bad idea,” commented Kyle.

“Why?” responded Serena.

“Because that would startle him, and then he might scratch you,” explained Kyle.

“My dad always did say to let sleeping cats lie,” remembered Serena.

“A wise man, no doubt, but I think you mean dogs,” laughed Kyle.

There are several aspects of this passage that are likely not only to annoy the reader but, worse yet, to jolt zerm out of the story altogether:

1 – “More exotic” verbs are used in place of the usual said.

2 – These verbs, which denote that someone is speaking, precede rather than follow the name of the speaker.

3 – The name of the person speaking is used in every single line of dialogue.

4 – Every line of dialogue includes such a dialogue tag.

5 – The verb laughed is used inappropriately in its dialogue tag.

6 – All the dialogue tags are at the end of each line of dialogue.

Readers gloss over the words “she said” and “he said,” their brains pausing for only that fraction of a second needed to note which character is speaking before moving on to the next line in order to get on with the story. Using other words to stand in for said on a regular basis is jarring to the reader.

It can also be annoying to the reader when the word said or one of its stand-ins precedes the noun or pronoun that indicates who is speaking. Note that the title of this article is “He Said, She Said,” not “Said He, Said She.” There is a reason for this. The usual convention in the English language is to put the noun/pronoun before, not after, the verb in a declarative sentence. It is generally considered advisable to break that convention rarely if ever and then only if you wish to emphasize the verb – and how often do you really want to emphasize the word said? – or to improve the flow of the prose.

In the above dialogue example, there are only two people involved in the conversation, Serena and Kyle. Therefore, it is unnecessary (think serious overkill here) to make note of the speaker for each separate line of the conversation. Quote marks at the end of one paragraph and the beginning of the next indicate that the speaker has changed, and since there are only two speakers in this passage, we can easily keep track of who is responding to whom – at least for half a dozen lines or so – once it has been established as to exactly who the speakers are, that there are only two of them, and which one of them is speaking first. If, on the other hand, this type of conversation goes on for very long, you should indicate who is speaking from time to time so that the reader won’t become confused, especially when picking up the dialogue again following a short narrative break.

And remember that you can use those nifty little pronouns, he and she, to denote speakers rather than incessantly repeating their names. Again, the reader will gloss over those little pronouns but still pick up on the needed information without being stopped in zirsh tracks by a looming capital letter signaling a character’s name.

As for laughed, that verb should be reserved for when a character is actually laughing, not talking. Have you ever tried to laugh and talk at the same time? It’s not easy, is it? In fact, it’s nearly impossible. So unless your character is some kind of super hero or alien who can easily perform this feat, I recommend that you let your characters say their words rather than laugh them.

Breaking up the monotony of writing all the dialogue tags at the absolute end of each “line” of dialogue can improve the reading experience. If your character is speaking more than one sentence before the next character speaks, consider using a dialogue tag (if desired or needed) between two of those sentences rather than saving it for the end of that section of speech.

I’d like to add one more note regarding the verb asked used in the dialogue example. To say that someone asked rather than said indicates a question has been raised rather than a statement made. On the other hand, a question mark used at the end of the portion of the sentence in quotation marks also indicates a question, so technically it would be redundant to use the word asked in the dialogue tag. However, this dual notation is quite common and generally accepted or even preferred, allowing us writers to feel free to use it.

And so we can improve our dialogue passage by revising it like so:

“Kyle, is that cat dead?” Serena asked.

“I doubt it,” he said. “He’s probably just sleeping.”

“Should I try to wake him?”

“That might be a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because that would startle him,” Kyle said, “and then he might scratch you.”

“My dad always did say to let sleeping cats lie.”

“A wise man, no doubt, but I think you mean dogs,” Kyle said with a laugh.

Enough said.

Creative Writing

Don’t Ruin It

When you have a good thing going in your fiction – especially in a series – don’t ruin it by suddenly changing or deleting that special element. Readers like it and have come to expect it. They feel disappointed (and possibly even betrayed) if you suddenly change your tactics.

If you ever watched the TV series Home Improvement, you may remember that one component of each episode was that the audience was never allowed to see the full face of Tim’s next-door neighbor as it was inevitably partially hidden by a fence, a ski mask, or a Santa Claus beard. This was an element that dawned on the audience slowly and built up over a period of time. Now one waited anxiously in anticipation through each episode in hopes of getting a glimpse of the neighbor’s full face. And then, one night… there it was! With no fanfare whatsoever, we saw the full face of Tim’s neighbor over that same fence that usually hid it, and instead of feeling triumph and satisfaction, we felt only let down and deflated.

Why? Because that anticipation of expected near-success but ultimate denial of satisfaction had become part of the charm of the show for us. It worked. So why did the writers abandon that ploy? I have no idea. The next week they were right back to covering part of the neighbor’s face again, but it was too late for those of us who had seen the previous week’s episode. The magic was gone.

This is true for books, too, especially in the case of series novels where the same characters continue to play a part in the ongoing story. I really got a kick out of the character Ranger in the Stephanie Plum series written by Janet Evanovich, but after many books in which Ranger hardly ever said anything to Stephanie except, “Babe” (which could mean anything from how can you be such an idiot to you sure look sexy tonight to you got my car blown up again?), Ranger suddenly became much more talkative and, in my opinion, much less charming as a result. I also began to look forward to the inevitable destruction of Stephanie’s car in each succeeding book—how will it happen this time? fire? bomb? bullets?—and would again be disappointed if Stephanie’s vehicle were to survive an entire novel without suffering some sort of bizarre demise. (Couldn’t it at least drown?)

Think of it this way: What if Columbo showed up to solve a murder wearing a new trench coat instead of his battered old raincoat and never once turned back on his way out of the room to say, “Just one more thing”? The murderer would no doubt feel great relief, but the viewers, I think, would not. They would most likely feel cheated instead.

Once you have established that your private detective never gets paid, never gets the girl, and never gets the credit he deserves, think twice about suddenly granting him great success: it may just lessen your own.

Creative Writing

Don’t Just Tell It Like It Is

When you are writing a memoir, blog, or other autobiographical material, treat it like a work of fiction inasmuch as the prose matters. Don’t equate basic honesty with detailed accuracy. While the former is admirable and even desirable, the latter could cause you to lose your readers.

Consider, for example, that you wish to relate the story of a pet pig that follows his human companion around the house, calling her Maa-maa. Does the reader really need to know that this vocal little pig belongs to your uncle’s ex-wife’s sister-in-law’s niece Rhonda, a person you met briefly only once and who will never again be mentioned in your memoir? Probably not. So why bore your readers by beginning your charming little story with “My uncle’s ex-wife’s sister-in-law’s niece Rhonda once had a little pig…”?

Since the point of the story is the unusual behavior of this pig, that is what you need to be honest about. (Don’t claim this story is true in an autobiographical account if it is not.) Your relationship to the human involved, however, is of no real significance, so here you may take literary license for the sake of brevity, smoother prose, and preservation of the reader’s sanity. Simply begin your story with “A friend of mine once had a little pig….”

Was Rhonda truly your friend? Maybe, or maybe not. Does it really matter? In relation to the telling of this story, not a bit.

Likewise, if you have always used your parking brake when parking your car on a hill except for one time when you forgot, must you include that snippet of accurately factual information when making the point that you “always” use your parking brake in such situations? Only if your story involves the one time that you forgot and what comic or tragic occurrences resulted from that momentary lapse of memory. Otherwise, it is of no significance.

There is no need to clutter your prose with extremely detailed accounts of events merely for the sake of “honesty” in autobiographical works. My high school chemistry teacher told the class that if we ever saw the words always or never on a true/false question on a chemistry test, just mark it “false” because there was no such thing as “always” or “never” when it came to chemistry. Your readers probably never knew my chemistry teacher, and your memoir is most likely not about chemistry, but I think it is reasonable to assume that our readers realize that “always” and “never” statements are most likely exaggerations that fall under the umbrella of literary license and therefore should be considered “acceptable” even if they do skirt the truth just a bit.

Sure, we read for facts and insights, but we also read for pleasure and entertainment. Try not to let strict adherence to the former spoil the latter for your readers. Go for the romance.

Creative Writing

Write What You Know

I must be a born rebel. (Well, I am a Mississippian and I did graduate from Ole Miss…) When it comes to fiction-writing rules, I just can’t seem to help but break them—at least some of them, at least some of the time.

“Write about what you know about,” the old saying goes. Every writer has heard it at least a hundred times. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean, how can you argue with such obviously sage advice?

You can’t. Because it’s good advice and we all know it. What we don’t always know is exactly what it means to “write about what you know about.” Does it mean that if you are a man you can never write about a female protagonist? That if you live in the 21^st Century you can’t write about ancient Rome? That if you are forty years old you can’t write about someone who is eighty?

Obviously not. These excursions into the unknown have been accomplished quite successfully time after time, by many different authors at many different times. But can a southern American novelist write convincingly about a male Australian architect when said novelist is a woman, has never studied architecture, and has hardly ever even met any Aussies, much less been to Australia?

Well, one doesn’t know until one tries, right? And in my defense as the author of such a novel, I can only say that it was a great relief when Alan, an Aussie architect I became friends with soon after I had finished the first draft of A Bit of Sun, read it and told me no one would think I hadn’t at least lived in Australia for several years. But the real kicker was when Tess, my British agent who had been married to an Aussie and had lived in Sydney for three years, assumed upon reading the manuscript that I, too, was an Australian.

Still, one of the most emotionally scary times of my life was when Alan, who was now helping me vet the book from a male Aussie architect’s point of view, told me he didn’t like one of the early scenes in the first chapter. My main character, Britt, was not well-defined, Alan said, and didn’t “feel right” to him. He suggested I rewrite a portion of the scene, which involved getting directly inside Britt’s head. While I, with more than a little trepidation, set about doing so, Alan remained in the adjacent room, waiting for me to finish.

Talk about pressure! Here I was, a mere woman, trying to think the most intimate thoughts of a young Aussie male. What hubris! Whatever had I been thinking to write such a book in the first place? And now I was going to have to show these intimate thoughts to this man I barely knew in person. Oh, please, never mind that we are on the second floor. Just let the floor open up and drop me down now.

But of course the floor held firm, and there seemed nothing else for me to do but get on with it. And so I did.

Thirty minutes later I presented my handiwork to Alan and held my breath while he read it. And then—wait for it—miracle of miracles, he looked up at me with a big smile on his face and said, “Yes. That’s it. You got it.”

Sometime during those years when I was writing this novel that I supposedly shouldn’t have been writing, I heard a radio interview with a famous author whom I had read and admired say, “To write about what you know is to write what’s in your heart.”

Yes, of course, I did a lot of research before writing A Bit of Sun, but I don’t think that is what made it seem authentic to Alan and Tess. What made it seem honest and real was not that I was writing about “my own backyard” but that I was writing what was in my heart. And if you do that, you can’t go wrong—no matter what anybody else says.

Creative Writing

Z-Nouns: A Modest Proposal

The solution I propose below is not meant to fly in the face of convention, with which I have no problem, but to ease a path to brevity and clarity in prose without offending either the male or female individual of our species.

Personally, I have no objection to using all masculine pronouns when denoting persons of mixed or unknown gender. In such cases, my mind simply glosses over that he, his, or him, realizing that it is all inclusive, and moves right on to the meat of the matter. But apparently some people think it misrepresentative, and this has led to quite a conundrum for us writers.

Over the past twenty years or so I have seen any number of possible alternatives in print—everything from using he or she, he/she or s/he to alternating the gender of the all-inclusive pronoun from masculine to feminine every other sentence/paragraph/chapter to simply switching exclusively to all feminine pronouns, never mind the common misuse of the plural pronoun their to indicate singular possession by a person of unknown gender.

Unfortunately, none of these “solutions” works for me. And so, as a writer who wishes to shun klutzy prose while still remaining both grammatically and politically correct, I have felt compelled to come up with a new set of all-inclusive pronouns. Here is my proposal:

zee for the nominative (he/she)

zerm for the objective (him/her)

zir for the possessive (his/her)

zermself for the reflexive (himself/herself)

If you consider this to be a totally silly or even repugnant idea, I understand. No hard feelings. But if this strikes you as a reasonable solution to the current chaos in the literary world when it comes to nebulous pronouns, then please join me in this bloodless revolution.

Remember: WORDS SHALL SET YOU FREE!

I believe that every writer should have the license to use whatever words zee thinks will best express zir thoughts, opinions, and stories and that zee should never feel ashamed of zermself for using the words zee thinks will best achieve that goal. I hope you agree.

Creative Writing

When Less Is Not More

When I finished the first draft of A Bit of Sun, my first novel, it comprised 234,000 words.

Oh, Ann, you are thinking, haven’t you ever heard of ‘less is more’?

Well, yes, I have, and I knew I had to revise and reduce my manuscript, which I did. When London literary agent Tessa Sayle agreed to take it on and send it out to publishers in England, I had already reduced it to a mere 215,000 words.

Groan. (You.)

Well, Tess was unable to place the book with a publisher, and when she came to visit me, she advised me to cut it “by half.”

Groan. (Me.)

I did try, honestly I did, but it seemed that whenever I decided I could toss out a particular chapter or scene that was not integral to the plot, one of my readers (or Tess herself) would say, “Oh, no, you can’t get rid of that chapter!” or (in the case of Tess), “Oh, dear. That was my favorite scene.” I did manage to tighten the work to a slightly more manageable 168,000 words, but needless to say, that chapter (also one of my favorites) and that scene (not really one of my favorites) were still both included at printing time.

What is a writer to do? Yank out all the best parts of the work, leaving only the bare plot line, as they do on late-night movie channels to leave more room for advertising? Would you really want The Prince of Tides to be reduced by half? I still remember how indignant one of my friends was that the grandfather’s water-skiing adventure, which had nothing to do with the main plot, had been removed from the movie version of that most wonderful book. That particular adventure was not even one of my favorite stories in the novel, but there were others equally unnecessary to the plot that I would have hated to miss.

Of course, Pat Conroy was already a well-established author by the time The Prince of Tides was released. If you are an unpublished author trying to get published by a traditional publisher, it would be in your favor for the length of your novel to fall within book publishers’ word-length parameters, which are getting shorter all the time. But unless you can write like Gregory McDonald, whose novel Fletch provides an excellent example of lean writing that still gives great characterization while never straying from moving the plot forward, you may want to think twice about cutting the very scenes that build characterization, reveal motivation, and evoke emotion in your reader. These scenes are often the ones that make a novel “work.” Without them, you may be left with too shallow a story to hold your readers’ interest.

Creative Writing

Evoking Emotion

for Ann Henry dot com-21 — Happiness Is a Warm Bath

Years ago, while I was living in the Islands, my husband, Jim, made the careless comment that it shouldn’t take more than six weeks for someone to write a novel. (For the sake of background, let me confess that it took me no less than eleven-and-a-half years to complete the first draft of my first novel.) Feeling feisty, I suggested he do so. “Oh, no,” he said. “You’re the writer.” And so I took him up on the challenge.

Thus began my regimen of writing every single day (except one day when I was too sick to get out of bed), mostly in the evenings after I had worked at our business most of the day, picked up our daughter from school, prepared dinner, and cleaned up the kitchen afterwards.

At the end of five-and-a-half weeks, I handed Jim the polished first draft of a novel, the original version of Sailing Away from the Moon. Okay, it was not a long novel, but it was long enough to fill the bill, and after all, this time around I had wanted to write something “simple and elegant” (my words), not overly long and complex or requiring tons of research. I felt I had succeeded.

And so, when I saw an opportunity to send my new manuscript off to a reputable New York literary agency where one of its book editors would review it and send me feedback—with the possibility of representation, of course—I jumped at the chance. And then I got the results and burst into tears.

“What?” Jim asked, as I sank into his arms and sobbed.

I was too distraught to speak. I just handed him the letter, and that’s when he started laughing.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” I wailed.

“Sweetheart,” he said, when he could stop laughing long enough to speak coherently, “this editor criticizes your book for not evoking emotion in the reader, and yet she obviously hates your male character. She rants and raves for two whole pages about whatever little thing she can find wrong with your book. I’d say you’ve received a most unprofessional response from this editor. And she says your book doesn’t evoke emotion?”

So I stopped crying and thought about it for a minute and realized that he was right. Needless to say, it was not the emotional response I’d been hoping for, but nonetheless, it was an extremely emotional response. To make matters worse, I really did take her specific criticisms to heart, and I was frustrated by her comment that my writing didn’t evoke an emotional response in the reader (never mind her own emotional response) since the only example she gave to support that criticism was this one sentence from my manuscript: “The following year she accepted a job at a much larger paper in Fort Lauderdale.”

I agree. One would not expect that particular sentence to evoke emotion in the reader. Nor was it intended to do so. It is obviously one of those necessary evils in the novelist’s world called a bridge sentence, which alerts the reader to the fact that time has passed and Maggie, our heroine, now finds herself in a new setting. So while my editor/critic was not helpful to me in this particular aspect of her criticism, some of my readers have been.

When my friend Sally read the portion of the story where Ashley, Maggie’s true love, is being released from a foreign prison on a stretcher and the small photo of Maggie that he had worn around his neck is returned to him, Sally said with great vehemence: “He would not ‘place it on his chest,’ he would clutch it to his heart!”

That is the kind of emotion I was hoping to evoke.

The New York editor’s criticisms were not all wrong, and I did pay attention and make corrections where I thought they were warranted. In so doing, I expanded and revised the plot, which resulted in a much better story. So I say “thank you” to said editor/critic. I’m sorry she took such a dislike to my male romantic interest, but at least you might say that makes him a memorable character, and most of my readers seem to manage to forgive him his misdeeds.

So do not judge your fiction solely based on what some literary editor/agent/critic has to say about it. Judge it more by your readers’ reactions. When my readers tell me with tears in their eyes that “this is one of the best books I’ve ever read” or “Maggie and Ashley are just like [my recently deceased fiancé] and me,” or say, “now I can’t help but compare all literary romantic relationships to that of Maggie and Ashley, but unfortunately, none of the others has measured up,” then I know that I have indeed succeeded in evoking an emotional response in my readers. And whom are you writing your book for if not your readers?

Creative Writing

Like Driving on I-95

“What’s it like to write fiction?” one of my East Coast friends once asked me.

“It’s kind of like driving on I-95,” I told him.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

And so I told him about the time my husband and I, who for ten years had been living on an island where the top speed limit was 40 miles per hour, flew on business to Miami. As our driver there charged up the ramp onto Interstate 95, Jim and I desperately clung to each other and anything else we could find to hold onto.

“I love I-95,” our driver told us with a grin.

“Why?” I managed to gasp as he wove in and out of traffic at 90 miles an hour.

“NO RULES!” he replied.

Now we all know that the English language has rules: Complete thoughts are supposed to be expressed in complete sentences, not in sentence fragments, and sentences should not run on and on. There are places, such as here, where commas belong and places where they don’t. You should not split an infinitive, dangle a participle, or use the word ain’t in formal writing. And of course, we all know that direct dialogue should be encased in quotation marks.

So have you ever read Hemingway? Faulkner? Cormac McCarthy? Didn’t they ever learn these rules? Maybe they did, or maybe they didn’t. I suspect the former, but it really doesn’t matter. When it comes to fiction, there are no rules.

However, if you want to be a good writer, it will serve you well to know and understand the rules of grammar and punctuation before you go about breaking them. Break them for good effect, and you may become a great writer; break them out of ignorance or hubris, and you shall surely fall by the wayside.

Fiction writing is a craft as well as an art. Rules have been established over the centuries to help writers learn their craft more quickly and thus sooner get on with the business of making art. Thus the rules have relevant meaning and should be ignored at your peril. But always keep in mind that when it comes to fiction, there really are no rules.