I’ve been pondering the use of contractions in how I write a conversation. I recently spent five weeks editing my five completed novels, adding quite a few contractions to make how my characters talk sound more natural.
We all run words together in conversation—you’ve, she’s, hadn’t, I’ve—and not doing so, by pronouncing each word separately can make what’s said sound formal and the speaker stiff and pedantic. In formal business writing, scientific papers and for legal matters, contractions are not used.
In reading, some contractions are easily processed by the brain, but writing them down can look clumsy. People commonly saythere’re,but to my eyes, in print, it looks a bit odd and pronouncing it (even mentally in my reading voice) sounds like a small dog growling!
Contractions have altered through the centuries, and I commonly use an archaic example—’tis—which isitandis combined, as Cornish people regularly say it. When I lived in Atlanta, most people said y’all instead ofyou all.
Expressing colloquialisms too closely can look clumsy, words such as she’d’ve, shouldn’t’ve and mightn’t’ve. Such contractions might ease the flow of conversation, but in writing they become obstructive.
How do you handle contractions? I wonder how tightly edited they are, by editors at a literary agency or publisher—being added or taken away….
I recently received my 40th rejection from the batch of 88 queries I made this February—yet again, it was from someone, presumably an assistant, whose name doesn’t appear on the literary agency website.
I’m bulletproof, so it didn’t bother me, but all the same I was heartened to read advice from a couple of publishing industry professionals in these two articles:
Although I’ve self-published 45 titles online, I’ve yet to be offered a traditional publishing contract. I’m still chasing literary agents and publishers who open a submissions window, but this is starting to feel like buying a lottery ticket…it’s always some other lucky blighter who wins!
I’m not downhearted, being stubborn/tenacious/determined/downright stupid, and it recently occurred to me that there is much to be thankful about in not having to kowtow to the demands of an agent, editor and publisher. At the moment, I can do what I like with the novels, novellas, short stories, poetry and song lyrics I’ve written, including those uploaded to Smashwords and Amazon, which are readily editable.
The five crime novels I’ve written are so highly polished that they’re visible from outer space, but all the same, there’s still room for improvement. My brain works in weird ways (God was drunk when he made me), coughing out ideas even when I’m asleep. My grey cells recently offered a suggestion of how to improve a sentence that I’ve reworked several times since it was written three years ago. This wouldn’t be possible had the book been gathering dust on some shelf.
Several famous authors have confessed that they never re-read their earlier work, embarrassed by the mistakes they made. Not being in the public eye, and held to account, has its charms.
‘There’s a marvellous peace in not publishing… When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don’t publish, they don’t know what you’re doing. You can keep it for yourself.’
I could apply it to my five Cornish Detective novels, and my personal favourite from classical literature is to amend the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. And then the murders began.”
I returned to creative writing in 2013. The last few years have been joyful, as a direct result of producing short stories, novellas, novels, poetry and song lyrics.
All the same, there are a few things that I wish I’d known before I put fingers to keyboard.
1) No one wants to read my writing. Steven Pressfield crudely summed this up as No one wants to read your shit!
I smile wryly when I think back to my naive optimism in uploading a dozen short stories and novellas to Smashwords, hoping to make a little money in time for Christmas, 2013.
Whatever the worth of my stories, it wasn’t financial, and they disappeared like snowflakes in a blizzard of other writers doing the same thing.
I quickly learned, that half of the battle to get anywhere as a writer was gaining attention through self-promotion. Nobody knows who I am, so why should they want to read my work? Writers are part of a branding process these days. Reclusive authors are virtually extinct. It sometimes feels to me, that reading novels is a form of nosiness for some people. They want to find out more about the author through their work.
In this way, the book world has become more like the music industry and Hollywood.
2) Writing a book is actually the easiest part of the whole process. I love the planning, background research, specific fact checking and seeing a new story take shape.
For me, editing is quite the most tedious task I’ve ever done, confirming what Garcia Gabriel Marquez observed:
I had no idea how time-consuming and soul-destroying it would be.
Querying is like crawling on broken glass to the tradesman’s entrance of a fortified castle full of carousing gatekeepers, the literary agents who know what’s what…and they sure as hell don’t want to know me!
That leaves selling the book, the self-promotion, the flogging of my precious story as a commercial product—see point 1).
Learning that publishing, more than anything, is a BUSINESSwas tough. It’s not an arena for gently showing off how clever I am as an author, it’s more becoming the manufacturer of a commercial product. My book may as well be a new flavour of baked beans.
3) What sells best isn’t necessarily the finest writing by the most talented authors. We’re advised by writing gurus to labour carefully to produce a brilliant manuscript, an intriguing story that’s correctly punctuated and free of flab. I take a lot of care in creating my novels, devoting thousands of hours to each title.
It’s galling to realise that someone who’s already got a public persona (and piles of cash) can throw a story together and instantly get a publishing contract. Invisible ghostwriters will knock things straight. Had some nitwit celebrity submitted my novel it would have been published to acclaim.
Readers buy books by people they already know. They also buy stories that are so basically worded, that the language wouldn’t trouble a 10-year-old child. Bestsellers are often not highfalutin literature. Instead, simple yarns sell in their millions.
It makes me question why I’m trying to produce high-quality crime novels, when, if I want to make money, I should simply scribble off a piece of crudity that appeals to mouth-breathing, knuckle-draggers who move their lips while reading to themselves.
Dumbing down has won. That’s something that I didn’t fully comprehend before entering a new era as a writer.
4) Competition writing is an art. Another thing that I wish I’d known, in my early stages of creative writing, is a greater awareness of the rules of writing competitions.
In a burst of enthusiasm and naïvety, I uploaded 44 titles to Smashwords and Amazon in a short period of time. This was the best of my work, including short stories and poetry. Self-publishing in this way, making an ebook available for sale, means that it disqualifies the work from eligibility for most writing competitions.
A few competitions allow entry by stories that have previously appeared online, but not many.
In retrospect, I wish that I’d held onto them, and tried my luck by submitting to competitions. Even if I hadn’t won, being short or long-listed is a better way of raising a writer’s profile, not just to readers but literary agents who keep an eye open for potential talent.
Wise words from the first writer to become a billionaire from her work:
Character names often outshine the titles of novels, lodging in readers’ minds and entering popular culture as nouns, a shorthand way of describing an acquaintance, such as Tarzan, Sherlock, Gandalf, Hermione or The Wicked Witch.
I’m currently reading James Lee Burke’s novel The Jealous Kind, whose protagonist is distinctly named Aaron Holland Broussard. He’s the grandson of Hackberry Holland who featured in four of Burke’s thirty-six novels.
I try to make my fictional character’s names memorable and am blessed that Cornwall, where my detective stories are set, has a rich array of unusual family names from its Celtic roots.
Thus, I called the owner of a chain of massage parlours Caradoc Honeycombe, which suited his gelatinous nature. Gordon Honeycombe was a popular British newsreader in the 1970s and 1980s, who organised a get-together of 160 members of the Honeycombe clan in 1984. There are 350 Honeycombes worldwide, all descended from one man called Matthew Honeycombe, who lived in the Cornish moorland village of Saint Cleer 350 years ago. Caradoc was a Knight of the Round Table during Uther Pendragon’s time.
Other of my character names include:
*Cleaver— for a heavily-scarred bodyguard who favours blades.
*Noah and Nina Shrike—ex-secret agents, who turn out to be cannibals. A shrike is also known as a butcher bird, as it stores dead prey on spiked vegetation.
*Luna Moth—a massage therapist from Vietnam, who has a large tattoo of this green-winged insect on her back.
*The Watcher—the title given to a sniper by his comrades in the Croatian War of Independence. He was turned into a killing machine by his traumatic experiences as a boy soldier, sating his bloodlust in peacetime by playing a real-life murderous role-play game. I didn’t mention his original family name; he’d dissociated from his origins.
*Esau Tregenza—a reclusive farmer whose mummified body is found in the kitchen of his remote farm, where it has been sitting for five years. A staunch Methodist, all of his ancestors were named after characters from the Bible.
*Tabitha Anstock-Struthers—Devon & Cornwall Police Authority’s press officer. More of a spin doctor, she has the soul of a cyborg.
Some of the names I use hint at the personalities of my heroes and villains, and there’s research evidence that how we’re named affects out entire lives:
In 2017, Ben Blatt published Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve. It uses statistical data to analyse such things as how often an author mentions the weather, what is their favourite colour and how often they use exclamation points. Elmore Leonard hated them but ignored his own advice about how often to use them.
I’ve been mindful of his dislike, ever since reading his 10 rules of writing.I don’t often resort to exclamation points, but in closing my last novel I used them twice in consecutive sentences. I tried removing one, but it insisted on being there! (see…!)
One of the joys for me, as a young reader, was learning new words. I loved looking up meanings in dictionaries, gradually learning how modern English words came from ancient languages.
As an author, I try to make my use of words appropriate for the character who’s speaking. For instance, a regular presence in my series of Cornish detective novels is a 65-year-old forensic pathologist. She was raised as an army brat, in India during the closing days of the British Empire, and has a formal way of speaking that’s quaintly Victorian and militaristic.
As the omnipotent narrator of my stories, I’ll use long and unusual words if they suit the description. Thus, a specialist auditor would scrutinise a dodgy businessman’s account books. I’m not showing off by doing this, more honouring my readers’ intelligence.
I have a large vocabulary, but even so, I was challenged by a novel that I read recently. My eye was caught by Kim Zupan’s debut novel The Ploughmen, as it was the last book in the fiction section of my local library. It’s a brilliant crime thriller, with a highly unusual plot. Zupan looks to be in his sixties, (which gives me hope!) and is an admirable stylist in his descriptions of landscape, wildlife and weather.
He used at least twenty words that were new to me, including albedo, canzonet,arcatureand bindlestiff. I guessed the meaning of the last one from the context, and it may be familiar to American readers of this post.
Zupan’s use of such words demonstrated his love of language, and it made me think about whether I was providing enough linguistic gems for my readers.
As a writer soon learns, it’s not the quality of one’s writing that counts, more how you’re going to sell it.
These days, that means selling yourself too, as your image is as vital as the plot of your book. Any aura you can generate, along with the concept created by your stories can live on, long after you’re dead. Cynics have long said that ‘dying is a great career move’. It’s especially true of musicians: just look at Michael Jackson’s sales, and Jimi Hendrix has had more albums released bearing his name since he died than he made in his lifetime.
I first became aware of this marketing phenomenon in publishing back in 1995, when I saw a sequel to Philip K Dick’sDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, on which the Bladerunner film was based. Dick, himself, refused to write a novelization of the movie, though a writer-for-hire later did so. Since he died, there have been three sequels. I tried one, and it was as horrid as I anticipated.
There have been many continuations of long-established fictional protagonists’ adventures, written by contemporary writers. James Bond has been given new life by Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz.
Scores of writershave written Sherlock Holmes stories. Contemporary authors have had their protagonists kidnapped after they die, as with Robert B Parker‘s private detective Spenser and several other of his creations, who’ve thrived in at least fifteen novels. Sold by the owners of his estate, his relatives are coining it in! Such authors were undoubtedly glad that their family would have financial security, but I bet they’d deplore how their fictional characters have been altered.
As a purist, I object to this, as it comes across as misrepresentation to me, a pastiche put together to capitalise on the gullibility of readers. That some people are so hooked on a character, that they don’t care who writes about them, is another matter. It leads to things like fan fiction—from which writers of the quality of E.L. James pulled themselves out of the swamp—proving my point that nothing good can come of it.
And yet, well-respected authors write their versions of literary heroes. The financial inducement must be attractive, and their hubris helps propel them through people asking, “Why the hell are you writing that, can’t you think up your own characters anymore?”
What do you think of this form of literary grave robbing?
How would you feel if your lovingly created characters lived on after you died?
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